Lost GMs

Announcing a major new release seems to indicate strong engagement, not insufficient interest. Perhaps the devs felt their appearances in GC were distracting, or drew too much negativity. Free Internet games can sometimes generate a background drone of low-grade antagonism towards company representatives (often for attention purposes) that can quickly swamp an otherwise productive community interaction.

the petition system is effectively a list made by the community.  some items on the list are actual game-breaking bugs, others are exploits that might not distort things too badly if they are not widely known, others are informational issues (misspellings, mislabelled terrain), and many are misunderstandings questions that might be answered in a tutorial, etc.  many petitions even of the "game-breaking bug" variety will not give enough information to reproduce the problem, leaving the devs with insufficient information to address the problem.  competing with that list is another list of priorities, now including Broken Lands, the long-awaited pathfinding, new magic, faction AI, etc...any of which the devs would rather work on, any of which will draw, as individual items of work, more players into the game than addressing a petition.  so i propose that it is as unreasonable to expect the devs to address every petition as it would be counterproductive as a business strategy.  indeed, i would go so far as to say that GM TC spending time addressing a list of misspellings rather than implementing new content would be mismanaging his time in a way that most players would not support.

so the challenge to the devs is not to deplete the petition list, but to identify the 10% of petitions that actually need to be addressed.  part of that strategy may include ignoring some particularly odd-sounding petitions because "something that broken is bound to happen again," and if it does happen again someone will put it into the petition system.  updating the petition puts it back on top of the proverbial inbox, and also establishes that that very strange thing that happened to you once in December is in fact still happening in May and may have been happening all in the interim.  the devs must budget their time, and doing so is to the benefit of the game and the community at large, if not to any individual player.

now i do have one suggestion that might not be too invasive and i doubt would lead to a pay-to-win environment, though it may upset some players:  if a player is fussed about something that doesn't seem to be making it onto the devs' to-do list, would it be helpful to allow the player to attach a prestige value to the petition to give it priority in the queue?

Angrim wrote: competing with that list is another list of priorities, now including Broken Lands, the long-awaited pathfinding, new magic, faction AI, etc...any of which the devs would rather work on, any of which will draw, as individual items of work, more players into the game than addressing a petition.  so i propose that it is as unreasonable to expect the devs to address every petition as it would be counterproductive as a business strategy.  indeed, i would go so far as to say that GM TC spending time addressing a list of misspellings rather than implementing new content would be mismanaging his time in a way that most players would not support.

i think something that needs to be addressed is how lack of gm involvement in the current game is enabling the game to become crazy full of resources, gold, and armies. with current game mechanics of slow builds and the destructive nature of warfare the game needs to provide ways of using these massive amounts of resources being produced. instead of addressing that issue we are seeing our aging mature game becoming very rich and nothing to really spend them on but dated mechanics that are tedious to perform. with current sitting and deletion rules and lack of threats players have billions just sitting there...hubs can store unlimited resources and there is little need for military....there must be over 2000 to 3000 accounts with 6 or more castles and this amount is increasing...the gms must address this issue and really take a look at their mission statement of non involvement and their direction of  adding more land.

@twilights: Well, there won't be any huge stockpiles or perma-sat accounts in Broken Lands.