Three Suggestions to Make Christmas Unforgettable

[Fusionstrike]

The community has some influence over the devs decisions. The community can also help devs out? People whine for a level cap, but they never offer any suggestions/information on what that cap should be. There are a few suggestions, but they are not reasonable. Atlantis? Heck, sts doesnt have to fo dat.

Constructive Critism is important. Devs need it. Whining/complaining, never ends well.

While I don't think there's anything wrong with offering suggestions, your statement implies that the main barrier to PL getting new content is the lack of constructive suggestions provided by the community. Firstly, I think the community has provided quite a lot of meaningful feedback and suggestions and has demonstrated a clear interest in seeing PL continue to be developed. But more importantly, it's clearly not the lack of ideas but the lack of resources that has held PL back this last year. Multiple PL reps have just flat said it straight out that they have decided not to allocate manpower to work on PL. I don't see how encouraging players to post suggestions will have any effect on the basic truth that there's simply nobody assigned to work on new PL content.

About whining/complaining, it's true in some sense that it's not productive. However, if everyone just silently accepted the current state even when dissatisfied, then the PL staff would get no indication that there's even any more interest from the community. Eventually they'd notice the play hours diminish as people simply gave up and left, but that's a lagging indicator from which it's hard to recover if some focus returns to the game. Once too many people leave, it's extremely hard to rebuild a player base. People coming right out and saying they're disappointed at least gives STS a chance to revise their strategy if they so choose. That doesn't mean that people should just wantonly slag the staff, but pointed discussions are appropriate and warranted from a company's customer base.

I think one of the undercurrents driving the complaints is the rapidity with which PL went down. There is a general expectation that MMOs last for a pretty long time just because most of them historically have. That is, those that have had success with a decent player base are usually around for 5+ years at a minimum. PL ran off the cliff development-wise at the end of 2012 (the last major content update) which is just under 3 years. The fact that the dev staff was just suddenly gone without warning from such a still-young MMO really caught the community by surprise, magnifying the discontent due to the implicit assumption that, well, PL was too young to die. To contemplate that it could be over so quickly really shocked the community.