As a first piece of feedback, I really urge you and CCP as a whole to invest in a professional approach to managing change with your customers. We have for years been consistently treated with disdain when it comes to communications and the constant wave of threadnoughts is not always a sign of healthy debate but more so anger and frustration from your customers.

Can I request that any time you introduce any change which impacts us, can you:
a) articulate the change in detail
b) explain your reasoning for the change (we do not have to agree but an opportunity to voice our feedback is fine)
c) articulate how this is going to impact the player
d) explain how you will measure the impact of this change and what you see as a successful outcome

In most examples (and herein) you only address point a) which is never enough. It may sound like a lot of additional work to provide the remaining detail I am suggesting and asking for but it pays dividends. All the ranting and supposition on why these changes are being made (you're a terrible game designer, mad, in the pocket of XL alliance, etc ...) go away and ppl can only debate the point.

We accept that there will be change especially after new features, but I think a little more consideration to your customer base is warranted especially when these changes can impact us significantly.

Let's look at an example:



^
Why are you making this change? You have not explained any rational reason for this significant change. It's not surprising people are jumping to conclusions about your reason for doing so.

What is the impact on players? I have not personally seen any evidence or suggestion that shield capitals are overly tanked (if you provide the detail and rationale we can understand).Many players, corps, alliances may have invested in shield capitals which is not only a significant amount of ISK but also significant effort. With this change there is a risk that all their effort is completely wasted and they have lost their investments if it turns out that shield caps are going to be garbage compared to armor caps (*if). There are hypothesis that this is going to be offset by implants etc but why do we have to guess and hedge our bets?

How will you measure the impact of this change? Impossible to answer this one unless you hope players will refrain from flying shield capitals because of whatever reason we are not party to.

Now apply the above to the other change statements (triage and siege immunity to preserve the whining upper classes, the desire to needlessly nerf the Naglf into the ground or inability to perform basic arithmetic) in the patch notes please and give us the level of detail we should hopefully have in the first instance.

I can guarantee your customer satisfaction will increase and the time you need to spend on managing these threads will decrease if you invested more in some change management best practice.

Off topic but can you investigate and balance:

1. Armor T3 (quite why they have been left in such a dominating position for years despite the stated design goal is a mystery to me).
2. Svipuls
3. Titan HAW