merz, on 12 September 2013 - 11:13 AM, said:
For what it's worth, Bioware makes singleplayer games, and Valve is actually pretty vocal about balancing CS:GO and DOTA2; it's just totally silent about its solo properties like Portal, Left4Dead and Half-life. When you make a free-to-play game, you as a developer are obligated to keep creating content for the players, at least for a while, and you're obligated to balance the content as it comes out, make changes as necessary, etc. So sure, while the player's input matters very little to the developers of the next Mass Effect game because they're telling a story and the game balance doesn't really matter that much, at some point PGI decided to make MWO instead of Mechwarrior 5, and at that point they had to be committed to continuous support of their game, and supporting the game means figuring out what is broken with the old content and what new content needs to be added. It's hard to do either of those unless you interact with the community- therefore, there exists a burden for PGI to communicate with the game instead of facing the forums with a wall of silence.