That’s true.
It’s also true that discerning those bad choices from the data takes time. Data isn’t magic – you need lots of it before you can even start analyzing it, and the analysis is never trivial. Then you have to figure out how to fix it. Then you often have to convince someone higher up the food chain to approve that.
It’s also especially true that the development effort and time of correcting those bad choices is rarely what the players expect it to be. The players’ expectations and the way they communicate them to the devs often remind me of that Billy Connolly skit:
Look around the forums. Of course it’s a waste of time trying to have a conversation with everyone here at once. Even if you set aside all the vitriol and the name-calling and the entitlement and the lack of basic civility, there’s still the fact that 9 times out of 10 the people who yell the most stridently about a supposed problem can’t even agree on what the problem is.
Every single discussion I’ve ever seen about alleged PVP imbalances has had a bunch of people furiously agreeing that there’s a problem. And every single time people persisted in asking the PVP players to describe what the problem was, the discussion ended up in serious disagreement between those same PVP players. Dodge rolls, lances, daggers, unraidable bases – you name it, it’s “killing PVP” when the discussion starts and yet nobody can agree what the problem is by the time the thread winds down.
The community managers aren’t really here to have a conversation with us. They’re here to collect feedback and keep both sides (i.e. the players and the devs) informed. When there’s information to communicate, they do so. When there isn’t, they don’t.
When they can, they engage with us. And yes, sometimes it will be on a trivial, fun thread like the “abomination thread”. If you think that is a sign of disrespect, you need to chill.
For a pretty good recap of what Funcom staff is supposed to do on these forums, take a look at @Rollotomozi’s thread here: