Copied and archived ‘as is’ from Terra Nova.
Instead of quoting my broken english I can quote directly her the next time I need to go against someone on this topic. So the industry isn’t completely lost in idiocy.

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Sometimes, it seems like we have to go through this discussion every time a major MMO is launched. Aside from the discussions of what is and isn’t an exploit and how to handle them (and I tend to agree with Dave: Fix the game, not the player):

As a developer, you really have no choice but to be intimately involved in your own forums. They are a huge opportunity to find out what the most motivated of your players are thinking. You can’t just read, though; you have dig a little and interact to make sure you know what the true motivations are in the case at hand.

Yes, there are special interests and extremely vocal minorities among the players and many who think that their idea or opinion is *the* one that will save the game/fix the game/make the game perfect/what have you. There are also players for whom your forums are the ‘game outside the game,’ where torturing the developers is part of the daily ritual. Any reasonable and responsible community relations person or developer can figure out the differences and weed out the wheat from the chaff. For that matter, most of your players know the difference, too, though some developers tend to treat them that way. They players aren’t dumb; they know you aren’t going to change the entire direction of your game based solely on forum posts, because they know less than 15% of your players will ever post. However, the collective intelligence of the player base is far greater than yours and they have a lot more time to play your game than you do; they may well know before you do – and generally *do* – where the bodies are buried. They will also be mistaken or misinterpret issues or your intentions, but they won’t know that unless you engage in a dialogue with them.

This is treasure beyond price. Some developers fail to see this because their own players scare them or tick them off: “How dare they say that? Don’t they know how hard we work and how much we care???” Well, no, they don’t, not unless someone is out there in the trenches relating to them. What more often happens is a withdrawl from communicating with the players (“Those guys just refuse to pleased, so f*** ’em.”) and so begins the spiral downward.

The key here is this: The forums and your web site as a whole are your best tools for properly managing the expectations of the players. If you don’t respond at all or with enough content to give them an idea of what you are thinking or where you plan to go ahead of time, they will develop unreasonable expectations. Simple as that. You don’t have to turn over your development process to them. You would be wise, however, to discuss your thoughts out loud to give these subject matter experts a chance to point out the weaknesses and strengths, because you’ve probably missed something.

As I tell my own people from time to time:

Your interactions with a community are a karma bank. Build up enough good karma and the community will stick it out with you during the bad times, such as when you make a boneheaded blunder or have to take some unpopular action. Don’t build up that karma and you can expect wild speculation, unreasonable expectations and to have your good intentions questioned at every turn.

Jessica Mulligan