For my opinion, I’d say it’s both. Companies should communicate if they value their customers - and Funcom has been historically bad at that. But also I can’t imagine anyone from Funcom feeling particularly enthusiastic at being the punching bag for decisions they probably had no hand in. Obviously, to at least some extent it is the job they are paid for (and we know that Andy does go above and beyond at times), but it would still be disheartening (unless you’re Deacon, lol).
The ideal would be some sort of regular communication - be it a dev blog, weekly puff piece, whatever - just something. I keep thinking back to another game (much larger company, terrible reputation - have gone as far as sending Pinkerton detectives to the home of a player for a mistake the company made!), but they do put out a weekly ‘announcement’ piece - linked directly from the game - that covers stuff they are working on (without details, of course), issues they are aware of, upcoming events scheduled etc. They are predatory b*stards, Funcom is by far the ‘better’ company, but that simple communication buys them a lot of goodwill, or at least patience, from the player base. I think Funcom could gain a lot more if they were to do something similar. (At the simplest level - if they were to just say something like ‘we are aware there is a problem on official servers with cheats using third-party software - we have people working on it, but it’s proving really difficult to deal with and may take some time’ - I would imagine that you would be considerably happier - even though the actual situation would be the same…)
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