What I think needs to change in the future
There's a lot of discord in the community over the recent halloween event, owing to the change in the halloween event, unpopular charm distribution decisions and comparatively minor things such as the discordence change. These thing I feel all suffer from the same root cause.
A failure to communicate. A breakdown in communication between the devs and the playerbase in advance of these changes. A denial of critical need to know information. Things that could have been said in advance weren't and people got angry that things they expected to happen, didn't and without adequate warning.
Prior to the halloween event there was a stream where the blight event was discussed. During this stream, you could have pre-emptively stated there would be no putrid serum and discuss why you made this change. Get ahead of the public's reaction and the knee-jerk arguments.
Also during that stream, charms were stated to be earned by login rewards and social media, with examples of facebook and instagram. This implied, at least for me and i assume other people, that the charms were all going to be through codes easily gained by playing and interacting with the community during the event. There was no implication that anything close to the current dwightcrow distribution system would be in place.
The 4.3 patch went through the ptb with no discordance change, but had it added after the ptb when no one could test it or react to it before changes were finalized. This undermined the ptb system whereas placing discordance in the ptb, or saving it until the next ptb would be better received.
What i would propose for the future is better and more clear communication. Post news to your website in advance of changes so people can be aware sooner. This means people feel less surprised and caught unawares and that you can react to very unpopular decisions before it goes to live. Help make players feel they have a voice that matters.
I hope this helps. This is just my opinion of course but I really feel this is a change that should happen.
As a sidenote, what i think could help the current community reaction, is making every blight cosmetic (except blightface ofc) available for shards, and reducing the cost of blight skins from the purple rarity 21600 to green's 13500 or yellow's 5400. Alternatively, you could give everyone 1080 auric cells, so people can get a free skin, but i don't expect that to be the route you take.
Comments
Thank you for your well thought out feedback.