Hi!

My name is subsriber, being a former long time CoX player both beta and years of live as well as both a closed and open beta player of CO I feel I have like a good deal many other of your target base a broad understanding of the type of game we are looking at here. CoX was fun but flawed, CO's premise and promise to a lot of us was a freeform round of put on the supersuit.

Yes MMOs need change, change is good, but you also need to understand that human beings of which we all are are fundamentally bad at accepting this. This is compounded when the change is both unexpected and mysterious. What happens then is two of the biggest oldest human phobias in our collective psyche play havoc with common sense. Sure some issues are unforseen and won't be able to give us every bit of data from every change. Thats not what we as a community are asking for.

What we want, and what would foremost ease a lot of pressure on your guys CSMs is both feedback and being kept in the loop with whats being looked at, what you guys feel needs addressing. Probably the biggest factor in why you have the forums rioting and people either threatening or actually cancelling lifetime subs and other things is the fact that it was unexpected. Through both betas and headstart we built a reasonable assumption of how the game would play. This is because at no time was it mentioned that certain powers or more importantly defense across the board was being considered for across the board serious changes.

This has created a lot of animosity because it leaves people feeling cheated, the product we tried through extensive testing isn't quite the product we ended up taking home with us after dropping our hard earned money. We realize its a work in progress and you have taken some steps to prevent the sort of backlash that the launch day patch has generated. An actual test server is one such good step.

The next is to help foster and maintain a culture and community of openess and rational disscussion. Create a sub forum with offical posts for each set of changes and give us your numbers and reasonings behind it when you can. You lose nothing by doing so and gain a large amount of goodwill and PR fromt he gaming community at large. For an example of how not to handle things look at apples iphone app store. Its a mysterious veil as to what goes on that we can only really guess at.

Second you'll find that amount your gaming community there are those of us who both enjoy and are quite good at crunching your numbers again both from unbiased and biased points of view. Both of which are helpfull and really....why would you turn down the offers of people willing to doublecheck and QA for you not for free, but PAYING you 15 bucks a month to do so.

In short you have made a great game, the current build of it not so much as to what we all expected. That however isn't the end through actively engaging with your cummunity we can reach a happy balance between how we want to play and what is unbalanced without the hyperbole and outrage.

Well written.

I will contradict something, and this is something most people believe to be true.. but I don't really see any massive benefit for the developers disclosing too much in advance.

For one it takes all the mystery out of things, which can be part of the fun. Secondly, it just gives people more time to get amped up and bash something into the ground before they actually use it.

There were people who apparently bashed the cash store for months and months and months and never set an eye on it.

I think with the test server coming up, that is the time when issues and changes will be brought to light and if people are interested in involving themselves in the process then they can.

I am not against general announcements like they did with the upcoming event and new powerset, if they are going to be doing passives on certain things... But I don't think a line-by-line advance agenda really does anything to improve anyone's ability to play the game.

To be quite frank, from what I have seen from some people here, I don't think they have earned the right to have advanced disclosure because too many people over-react to everything.

If people would respond more civilly and rationale when things were announced, I might feel differently. But I have 3 massive episodes of people completely and wholly unnecessarily flipping out, in a single week. They do this even though the changes are there to see and use. Imagine what happens when you give some of these people 2 more weeks to scream about things before any of their arguments can be relieved. They won't believe what the developers tell them.

I guess I will wait and see how things shake out around here after the sixth, but I think the patch server process will help with this from the standpoint of what you want in terms of disclosure.

Although this is what will happen. Changes will roll out to the patch server. Very few people will test them, they will be moved to the live, a bug will be found and then some people will scream they were not tested. Yet they did not spend one minute testing them.

Me personally? I would rather they just roll to live. I don't mind things being changed. they are going to be changed again in the future, and again after that.