A lot of game devs meet player feedback with the preconception that their personal thoughts on game systems override those of players, because "they aren't making the game, so their feedback is worth less than those who do", and as a result many feel justifying their changes is unnecessary. This is, for obvious reasons, entirely missing the point of player feedback and a very unhealthy stance to take with your community (it practically guarantees an increase in hostile player feedback because cordial feedback is ignored, for one).
This often manifests in a general unwillingness to communicate,
That's an awful lot of generalisation and assumptions, right there.
Originally Posted by InkTide
which is compounded by unwillingness that is artificially created by things like employee NDAs/non-compete contracts. There are a lot of unfortunate pressures within a corporation working against actually responding to and considering feedback.
NDAs an corporate bureaucracy is probably closer to the truth - for many businesses anyway. My workplace is also all very secret-squirrel for absolutely no reason, which doesn't make for a good working environment when you're not even allowed to talk to members of a different team serving the same end customer, you have to go through Management to get your message through and then answered. I really hope Larian is not like this.
Originally Posted by InkTide
Larian's obsession with telemetry suggests to me that those pressures have won out in their internal corporate culture, and they resort to anonymous data gathering as the primary/solitary source of 'feedback' they actually consider, but the early access model requires at least a veneer of accepting feedback because part of what you're selling is player involvement in the development process (whether you officially admit it or not). Protip, Larian: telemetry alone is not feedback - collecting all the stats in the game tells you almost nothing useful if the game those stats were collected from is incomplete. Collecting stats from your existing incomplete product is, however, an extremely effective way to create the delusion that simply regurgitating statistically meaningless stats from a deeply unfinished project counts as 'listening to players', and anyone who verbally disagrees with your decisions is 'just a troll' or 'doesn't understand the game'.
Well, I am very much looking forward to that community update they promised, which is supposed to go more in depth about exactly this. I'd very much like to know more details so will withhold judgment. However, we can't just dismiss telemetry and data out of hand - as someone else on the forums also recently pointed out, it is largely the same crowd of people who come to the forums every day to participate in discussions. The opinions of the most active/vocal forum members may not represent the opinions of the rest of the thousands of players of this game who might never come to the forums to make a comment... they play the game, enjoy it, and that's it. And I am glad they do have telemetry and data feeding back to them from the game as we all play it, as this is pretty amazing technology really. The main thing that I'd like to know is how do they interpret that data. And that's why I'm looking forward to the update... soon(TM). sigh.
Originally Posted by InkTide
in order to have an effective Early Access phase, you need to be able to communicate well.
