The good ones will tell you things, which are probably good for you, because they love your game and they want it to be good. SWG devs were listening too (at least they said) but to the wrong people, because they didn’t know jack about their fanbase. At the end “the vocal minority” who they ignored wasn’t as minor as they thought.

I barely see developers on forums to interact. They are busy to play gods, so they don’t know what’s going on and which people to listen, so they rather don’t listen at all. CMs are no good for that, because mostly they don’t care for the game itself, they just do their moderator job.

I have a forum too and i know the peole there and many people say many things, but I know, who is good and who just shoots the sh***t

Now you have the big advantage, that you CAN make decisions and changes while development, based on real time customer feedback.

The question is of course: do you make a game to make money or just to make YOUR game. If you want to make money with it, it may be very arrogant not to listen to your fanbase. In the other case it doesn’t matter.

Of course you must also know, to whom do you listen, but developers should be thankful for the internet and for the possibility in general to be able to communicate with your fanbase. Other “artists”, like a writer doesn’t have this plus.

And to be honest, I don’t think that people, who don’t care for the game, take any actions, like signing a petition. So yes: it’s their game, because they will pay you, therefore they have the right to say: I don’t like this and that also if they can’t do anything about it. They will say it anyways, at latest when it’s released.

George Lucas for example pissed off all SW fans. Such things are common goods and not a private IP anymore and you must handle it with such respect. If a dev can’t understand it, will end up like SWG after the NGE.

You can say, what you want, the user always has the last word. Period.

Blizzard is right with the ignoring of the retarded petition. I mean really 50k is not very much compared to how many are going to play that game. Its going to sell millions opening week. even if all 50k of those people never bought the game purely for that reason, no big deal honestly.

As far as Warhammer Online goes, who cares if they dropped the cities, Honestly I prefer to have a single capital city (like Ironforge/Orgrimmar) and not have the ghost towns like the NElf capital. Less classes, well yeah, its less content, but i think the still remaining 20 classes will be more than enough. It also means that the first expansion will likely have then, giving the expansion some real new content rather than ONLY a pair of new races.