Communication to me mean transparency, and well noted patch notes. In transparency, I mean they should give us a better understanding of the systems in the game and when they are changed. Changes are noticeable in game by players, and when there is no communication of the fact it makes people edgy, and they complain about stealth nerfs and what have you. Case in point, drop rates on farming areas, and adjustments to the diminishing returns code. They’ve mentioned it a couple of times, but there have been noticeable changes in these areas of late after patches yet no comment from them, or we see “routine maintenance” after several complaints come on the forums of nerfing or whatever.
Patch notes go along with this, it’s happen on a few occasions where changes have been made, they are apparent to many players, yet they say nothing, or the patch notes come out maybe 30 minutes to an hour after the patch is released, and then only on the forums. Honestly, I’m a 15 yet vet in the industry, and I can’t imagine a developer publishing a patch (no matter how small) without an attached patch list accessible from the launcher. This should be common practice. I shouldn’t have to come to the forums to see what changed, and if I do, then hope they actually made a comment about it. It should be, you log in “oh look it’s downloading something. Oh goody! here’s the patch notes, lets see what this is for…”. Or if you’re in-game when the restart message comes up, I should see what is changing as soon as I restart.
I think this is where they could use some improvement, and yes, there should be a balance, you can’t divulge all systems and plans to players, it’s your game (as a developer) after all and you have the bigger picture in mind. But you need to tell people at least that you are making changes to these systems, because one way or another, someone will notice it. Why not be up front and keep speculation from going rampant? Or I should say “AS” rampant, there will always be conspiracies theorists abound.