Opinion: The Development Team should revert to Q&A for Livestreams

[RiotSiren]

As someone who has played many MMOs in my day, I would say lack of direct communication is one of the biggest weaknesses of this dev team, and it kinda bugs me how alot of people seem to think they are good at it. Back in the day, I played City of Heroes and not only did the devs have a constant presence on the forums, but I actually had direct conversations with them several times. I used to help out on their test server (Most MMOs have this, FF14 notably lacks one) and it wasn't uncommon to get a direct response from a developer when giving feedback, not only did I know the devs, a few of them directly knew me, and I was not a famous player or anything. Now SE is a much bigger company then cryptic/Paragon used to be, but even games of comparable size like WoW or GW2 often has developers responding on the forums.

SE's current approach of "Ignore responding to criticism until we have something for it in a live letter" is extremely flawed due to simple human nature. When you're trying to get someones attention, and they aren't responding, what do you do? You try again but louder, and louder, until you come to the conclusion that they do not care and they are ignoring you. Weather or not the devs are ignoring us is irrelevant, as they offer no direct feedback and give no indication that they are listening other then when a issue is so apparent they can't ignore it anymore. When players think they are being ignored, any good will you brought will quickly fade, people will start to think getting through to the devs is a lost cause and leave, and when players lose faith in the developers, they don't come back.

For the record I'm not saying they should change how they are developing the game, or be entirely bound to the will of the masses here, just a little communication can go a long way. If alot people are asking for a thing and it can't be done, explain why, hell even just a "Thank you for the suggestion" from like a GM would go a long way to make players at least feel like their voices are heard. At the moment the devs don't feel like they are a team responding and reacting to your feedback, they feel like they do whatever they want and then just tack on "in response to feedback" somewhere at the end, but because we never SEE them responding or reacting to feedback, it simply feels like a lie.

Seriously I don't understand how developers only communicating like twice every 4 months in highly curated streams that also double as adverts is "good communication"