Hi Mike,
Thank you for taking the time to post in the forums, it means a lot.
I’m afraid you did not elaborate on Anet’s position, this information has been stated before and nobody doubts you guys wanting to create great content.
The past has shown that many decision were made that seemed like obvious mistakes, such as temporary content, the atlas, short stories/lore outside of the game or most recent the commander tags.
What happened after the announcement that a legendary scavenger hunt is being looked at, is unfortunate. The resulting policy of not giving speculative information because you don’t want anybody to suffer only makes sense to me if it is in the context of individual features. I don’t think that you can equate the scavenger hunt with the commander tags for instance. Doing so feels like overreacting to me.
If you don’t talk about small features before adding them, some of those will receive a large amount of negative feedback which then will cause you to allocate precious time to fixing those things, that could have been prevented in the first place.
Arenanet has a lot of very intelligent people, based on the product I can play. But it sometimes feels like you work under too much regulation created by yourselves. Also, dev testing doesn’t show flaws in the system as well as some sort of public testing. No Dev could ever play nearly as much as some users.
Which is great, as this means there is more work put into the game. It also means that there might be unnecessary work put into the game.
Everybody wants a different better game but if you can find the common interests of the enthusiast player base, that has improve your workflow somehow.
There have been changes made in how the teams work on the Living Story, maybe it is worth revisiting your policies once a year and reevaluate them as one year is a lot of time online.
What people here also want to tell you is that they believe it would help you create a better game for everybody. The CDI threads have shown that constructive feedback is readily available.
Unrelated to most but, I’d just like to add that the treatment the mac community has been getting regarding a mac native client is downright offending. It is not ok. We are paying customers and we are being completely and utterly ignored for the longest time. Please have somebody look into this. I’m not exaggerating if I say the strongest feeling towards this kind of treatment is disgust and disbelieve at the fact that this kind of treatment still exists. The negative impact seems to be way bigger than the benefit you are getting from falsely advertising the game for more than windows. There are users from other language forums trying to reach somebody because their situation is even worse.
Thanks again for taking your time.