Jables thoughts on communication.

Just remember we're out here too, if you think you might be getting stuck maybe we can help, we might not have the same level of experience as you do but frankly I doubt anyone is better tuned into what we'd like to see or the which of two evils would be better in our eyes or whatever.

We're a resource, don't let us go to waste! ;p

That's not the case from my perspective, the root problem has never been able to be boiled down to just "It changed and we don't like it" and I could go on, but I've done a fair bit of posting on this particular topic already but think of it like this; the Root cause of an avalanche isn't the skiier that started it, but the snowfall and weather conditions that were just right to created the circumstances to create the possibility of an avalanche. With different weather conditions that same skiier on the same hill won't always cause an avalanche.

Mike

I think I pretty much said the same thing in the rest of my post. If the community has something that we can speak to, then the community doesn't start to fall apart when what we want just ... keeps ... not ... ... happening ... OMGWTFBBQIH8UBER!!!

I would cite the developers of Starbound here as having arrived on a very cheap and cheerful way of dealing with the issue of keeping people informed (or at least feeling as such) and being inexpensive for the developers to do so (no large scale development forecasts or blog postings).

They went through trying to make vlogs and large blog posts on a timely manner and just ended up with a riled up community that felt it wasn't frequent enough. Or if they felt there wasn't really anything to merit a large blog post and skipped one, then the community would go into full meltdown.

After all of that heart ache and them trying all kinds of methods, all they do now is this: Five days a week, monday-friday, any one of the team makes a quick "here is what I've been working on today/this week post" ... It isn't some gigantic blog, it's frequently just 1-2 short paragraphs. Just a quick informal update from the point of view of just one developer on the team that can be as simple as an effect being added/refined or something on the UI being tweaked and you're done. It's taken the Dev 5 minutes to do and the community is satisfied the developers don't go 'dark' for weeks at a time.

Best of luck Jables!

A road map is a good idea, I think it would be good for the community to see where everything is headed, cut back on the speculation.