I think I’m officially tired of beating this dead horse but a final thought on this, which still bothers me the most. Patch 0.35 was issued and there was tremendous emphasis in the developers’ language how they are listening to player feedback and that the changes were based on challenges players were facing. Additionally we were told this:
No one is lauding their transparency here. No one is confident about the direction of their development intent. This is why we all have to sit around and make guesses about what’s next and try to read the tea leaves about the developers’ direction because it certainly is not going to communicated to us. There is no doubt that the bulk of the implementations in 0.35 were about curbing game play progression, putting in place hard walls on player progress, and essentially buying time to continue to develop solutions to players “circumventing” the game’s core systems (which of course implies that the game’s core systems were and to a great degree still are fundamentally flawed since the players’ means by which they “circumvented” the system were to simply play the game).
There’s clearly a community effort here to provide feedback, identify bugs, address game play changes, and when necessary provide detailed responses to requests for more detail to assist the developers’ as they work towards bringing the game to launch. There has been tremendous goodwill demonstrated by players who genuinely wish success for the release of this game. And many of these players have plenty of experience with other games, including free-to-play (F2P) games and understand the necessity of balancing game play development for both the company and the players. I just hope that going forward the developers’ can recognize that and do a better job communicating their changes, for whomever it benefits, so that we as players can continue to play and interface with the game and provide feedback, instead of sitting around for weeks asking each other if we have gone insane because we don’t have a reliable way to judge what information has been communicated.