From the Dev Blog: Crafting

I disagree on this point.  I feel the dev's chat interviews were a major success.  As a whole they each helped revitalize my passion of illy.  Especially the Q/A GM SC was subjected to.  That was brilliant.  I dont know what the prep time for each of the vids were, but informing and reassuring their userbase paid off exponentially I think.

EDIT:

invictusa wrote: Q/A GM SC

I would love the opportunity to pick GM TC's Brain.

EDIT: I agree.  Anything that keeps our devs form progressing the game into its next phase should not be considered.  As stated in earlier posts however, I feel that more communication with the user-base is beneficial, if not critical; as opposed to being detrimental to a more advanced gameplay experience.

Some things mentioned in the dev blog happen fairly quickly; other things mentioned (3-D buildings? sound effects?) take more time.  Please note I'm not saying that I care when 3-D buildings or sound effects are released, just pointing them out as examples of things featured in dev blogs that have not come to pass for a significant period of time.

The way things are now, it's a bit like getting everyone excited about Santa Claus, except that it's March, and when we wake up tomorrow he won't have come ... or the next day after that either.  Yes, I know we're grownups and should have the psychological maturity to be able to deal with it, but sometimes it does feel like y'all are playing mind games.

My guess is that nothing is further from the truth, that you tell us about these things you're working on far in advance because you are excited and enthusiastic and want to share them with us -- which is great.  But remember, we don't know what else is going on in your heads, we don't know the development path or the other factors, so to us it might appear like you randomly release information about things that are going to happen in the far distant future to get us all het up, and when something actually does happen like the double experience weekend you announce it 10 minutes ahead of time and some people miss it.

Luna, I appreciate you, I appreciate the game, I am not unhappy with the game, and I acknowledge it is possible that you are doing this in the best possible way.  I do hope you will listen to the user experience I have described and if there is any way you guys can think of to address these concerns, it would be great if you did.

We aren't going to tell you when anything is coming out until we are 100% certain it won't change. That is how it is going to work. It would be a disservice to everyone if we did otherwise. It's not a mind game. We are not trying to hurt you. We are just trying to work and get things done while keeping our players in the loop as much as we reasonably can. 

@Rill, there is literally no video game in the history of all video games that I have ever in my life seen that has shared with players every detail of their development. It just doesn't happen. We share what we can, when we can, in the best way we can. No more. No less. 

@Rorgash, I'm short. ;)

Luna

Please do not set up a straw man to minimize what I was saying.  I was providing sincere feedback about my experience.  The negative aspects of this experience may be out of your control, but they are part of my experience.

I do still contend that it would reduce frustration to identify which things you are TRYING to release fairly soon and which are much further off; at least this would reduce frustration among those who are expecting the much further off things to happen imminently.  (Some people seem to have this delusion about pathfinding, for example.)

If you hope to release something soon and don't, that is moderately disappointing.  If you're not even trying to release something fairly soon, then it seems like it would reduce disappointment if you were clear about that.

The distinction between those two things might be utterly clear to you; we have no idea.  I suppose it's also possible that y'all just have a lot of stuff brewing at the same time and also have no idea about when various things might mature; some statement to that effect would be quite refreshing.