How do you feel about devs who don't communicate with the playerbase? You were always talking to people when you were working on WoW, no one else wants to though. Important questions go unanswered, they claim they're listening, but they need to communicate. Communication is incredibly important.
I am pretty sympathetic to those devs actually.
It is really hard to communicate with players. Players can be cruel, sometimes intentionally, sometimes no, and you need excessively thick skin not to get worn down but it. It can take a lot of time, and players might feel abandoned if you only communicate in short bursts and then have to go tend to other things. Your bosses or coworkers might get ticked if your messaging was bad, because say you hinted about an upcoming feature too strongly or showed the company in a bad light.
There are solutions to these problems, but none are perfect. For example, you can have community managers collate feedback from the developers and present it second-hand. That tactic risks not feeling authentic, not portraying the devs as human, and has the usual "game of telephone" risks when communication gets handed from person to person.
Riot encourages, and nearly requires, Rioters to go out and talk to players. Even then a lot of people here are reluctant or scared to do so.
It is really hard to communicate with players. Players can be cruel, sometimes intentionally, sometimes no, and you need excessively thick skin not to get worn down but it. It can take a lot of time, and players might feel abandoned if you only communicate in short bursts and then have to go tend to other things. Your bosses or coworkers might get ticked if your messaging was bad, because say you hinted about an upcoming feature too strongly or showed the company in a bad light.
There are solutions to these problems, but none are perfect. For example, you can have community managers collate feedback from the developers and present it second-hand. That tactic risks not feeling authentic, not portraying the devs as human, and has the usual "game of telephone" risks when communication gets handed from person to person.
Riot encourages, and nearly requires, Rioters to go out and talk to players. Even then a lot of people here are reluctant or scared to do so.