[Figment]

I understand where they came from though, to them, when they first met "us" as a playerbase, we were random unknown, opionated people, with a huge touch of conservatism that could have been considered a strong bias. And who says bias is right? I personally think our argumentation had less to do with conservatism than functionality, (player) pragmatism and practical implementation, but then there were our forum opponents who accused us otherwise. (See driver-gunner debate et all).

They were relatively fresh and less "constrained" in their thinking. So why listen to people who "might just want a copy of a game with updated graphics", as some of the more fanboyish white knighting forum members suggested at times?

They had a huge question of trust and blind faith on who to listen to. And I will keep saying, they did listen to forum members on a lot of things. But they had to in some ways due to a lack of insight, experience and having a broad, vagueish vision of what the game should be, without much of the details filled in, which can't really be helped since they had little to fall back on and they themselves had not done something similar or so ambitious to learn from before. All in all they did a reasonable job given the circumstances and I'm sure if they would do it again, they would do many things differently from the start.

I don't really fault the devs in that respect.

The only thing I would have liked to have seen is have them come to me, Hayoo and Hamma when we were together in the Community Council (as was Raijinn's intention) as a soundboard for ideas, concepts and general design guidelines. In the three years I've been on board that community council, not once had we been asked to provide early pre-alpha feedback. Raijinn got us in that council for one reason and one reason only: to be there for the devs of PS2 (PS1 was to be considered dead at that point, even if we did transfer some feedback about it, it was never really used).

The only thing I think they might have picked up on was the marketing and monetization concepts I proposed for PS2, which was tremendously better than that of PS1 and I think in general a major success and turning point for SOE. Because Smedley pretty much echoed my words on that. All in all, I think SOE has improved itself and learned a lot these past few years. Maybe not as fast and as well as we would have liked them to and more often from own mistakes than past mistakes/successes of others, but it's a company. We're clients, but also outsiders. Changing our vision and creating our ideas is much easier than convincing a company's management and transfering specific knowledge (especially hard to attain experience based knowledge) to all its employees.

I do fault specific devs at times for "common sense" mistakes, like the teleporter == firing squad designs.