Trebor Daehdoow wrote:
This is why it is so important for the devs to engage directly with the community, and the change in tone over the last 6 months has been very encouraging. I have been pushing, and will continue to push, for more engagement, and for the devs to go direct to the relevant communities and gather feedback.
It's just good business.
Thank you Trebor. It is encouraging to know at least one of the current council members feels this way. I can't speak for other sub-communities, but at least with Faction Warfare the general wishes / desires of those who have paid to engage in that feature all these years should be pretty clear by now. That was the point of consolidating feedback into the threadnought, encouraging the community to keep their comments into the one thread for convenience purposes, and directly contacting the council with our wishes for the future. That, combined with the strong, almost unanimous opposition to the proposed plan discussed in the summit minutes, means that there is now officially no excuse for CCP or the CSM, for that matter, to say "we didn't know".
All is laid out on the table for the developers to see. We will no doubt keep the debates going (not all of us agree on the details, even if we all agree that FW is about small-scale, frequent PvP and not about Alliance emulation.) but part of that is that the discussions continue to generate some really solid solutions and ideas. The Dev's don't have to pull ideas out of a vacuum - players have already generated many excellent solutions worthy of discussion.
CCP Developers have all the tools in front of them they need to fully restore FW to its original vision and glory - a haven for casual, easy to get into, frequent PvP skirmishes, without the hassle and resource management needed to operate at the Alliance level. Whether they listen to us at this point is on them.
You are absolutely right, this is all about good business in the end - there are a couple thousand subscriptions that are dedicated FW players, and many more that are biding their time to see if CCP makes the right move and develops the feature with respect to what is important to the community. Countless more have quit the game waiting for this to come around, and might come back if FW gets fixed properly.
I hope CCP thinks about the isk, in the end - and realizes they just can't afford NOT to listen to their paying customers and propose plans for the future that ultimately will alienate the devoted pilots who have put the time into making FW fun all these years.
CCP probably feels they ARE listening to the community by hearing out the CSM. I just hope that they understand that like you said, sometimes even the CSM doesn't have the answers and that there's other experts they can rely on for advice within the community.