The simple fact is that not everyone involved in reading, triaging, answering (and hopefully resolving) petitions / bugs is in the same team as those who are involved in new game feature development.  And before anyone suggests "why not move some of them from the future dev team to the petition team", there are very different skillsets and abilities involved and it's not an option. A simple example would be that (eg) the guy trying to implement Chatv3 in websockets technology may actually never have played illy (and doesn't need to have played it to do his job well) and probably has literally no conception of what sovereignty is... and so won't be able to help with a petition about  sov.  This doesn't (and shouldn't) stop his work on something of future benefit to all.

SC

And we aren't talking about small bugs but huge gameplay bugs.  But I understand greatly how someone sees 'hey everyone were paying to generate all these new shiny things'and  'no we haven't fixed or even addressed your issue regarding current game play which heavily impacts you, and nor do we intend to do to so 'soon.''    But all thats doing is affecting whether or not paying customers continue to pay.   

On the other hand, it might be a useful strategy to have the developers post something that says "we know people are frustrated about the petition backlog.  You can help us by doing the following things when posting petitions.  We are taking the following steps to address this issue" (or "we think the entire issue is overblown and that the vast majority of Illy players are just fine with how the petition system works").  That would give us all something new to pick apart and complain about for a couple of weeks.

And your response didn't address the problem at all.  You stated this 

Which maybe I misread but I read that as if your petition isn't being looked at its because it isn't important enough.  And telling players that they are formally being ignored isn't a great response.  

And the inability to receive volunteer work for petitions which was actually a great point, but no mention that there was even recognition of a problem let alone an eventual solution.  

(1) There's a long-term gain in 'ignoring' bugs in code that is likely to be replaced soon. Polishing legacy stuff means that new stuff takes forever.

(2) The vocal minority can skew the perception of the general state of all players. If a petition is placed, then it's a triage job, to understand the bug, then work with the team to prioritise it (by querying the data to see how many are affected and how badly). My point is that one petition does not reflect the needs of all players. Petitions are there to flag problems to the dev team, and *they* assess it for importance.

There's a very, very simple solution to this. If you want more people hired to deal with petitions, buy more prestige. The devs can only work so many hours per day and your annoying little bug which is not affecting anyone else probably isn't top priority. It may upset you but it simply can't be helped. In my experience, when multiple people are experiencing a problem then it is fixed pretty quickly - as are very dramatic bugs which seriously affect a person's gameplay. 

I had a bug when sieging a city, meaning time was of the essence. I got multiple responses from the devs trying to help fix it before the city hit 0 pop. When I had a suggestion which I believed would only take 5 minutes to improve the game, it was implemented with the next update. 

My experience of the customer service here is much better than any other game I've played. It may not be perfect but I think many people take the devs for granted and then get annoyed because they are not the gods people expect them to be. 

Currently, I have four (4) open petitions. NONE are affecting my game play.  In fact, some were entered during my first few weeks of Illyriad and I wish I could close them. Actually, I would like to close all 4 of them.

Could we at least get that functionality? The ability to close/delete our own petitions? This may reduce the number of petitions so the important ones affecting a person's game play don't get lost in all the clutter?

Or is there a method the devs would like us to follow to communicate to them that a Petition can be closed?

Those that have bought prestige pay the Devs wages (unless we all want to be bombarded with banner adverts). Those that haven't bought any (not even a couple of £'s worth of prestige) are just freeloaders that should be grateful for what is a great and free game to them.

But that is just me, and a lot of you should be grateful I'm not running the game 

If I had some of the sov problems other people had I would never buy prestige until the problem itself was fixed.  Otherwise I would just be wasting money.

Also its not very satisfying to win when you know your opponent has a handicap.  

I love the idea of factions.  I don't love the idea of TBL but I wouldn't be worried about either of these if I had a big bug that affects my gameplay such that others are at a huge advantage.  I've already seen huge bugs that did that to several players.  And the response was 'woops.'  

My point that some of you couldn't/wouldn't grasp is that we cannot expect the dev's to work on this game for free. Now we can all bury our heads in the sand and pretend that money falls off trees, but someone, somehow needs to finance this game.

That is only going to be done by players funding the game or we get inundated with adverts.

So if you want a large team of dedicated staff to maintain the game to fix the glitches and continue to develop the game, either put your hands in your pocket, offer your tech services or do not moan when a petition about a glitch doesn't get answered.

Perhaps, Broken Lands needs to be delayed until the current bugs are resolved.    Carrying them over into the new lands makes absolutely no sense.