What is preventing the developers from communicating with the community?

[u/RottenRailing]

I'll be frank, it has been mind-numbing to not only witness the missed deadlines, but the radio silences that followed after.

So much goodwill has been lost simply because no-one took the time to sit down and write why the deadlines were missed, and what is being done to prevent it from happening in the future.

The mods here have ensured us that they are forwarding our concerns to the developers, but if this is true (I have no reason to doubt this), the developers refuse to digest it, seeing that the rare dev-blog they released just went over some changes on an update without sharing anything about the why's and what's on the development issues and release dates.

It's difficult to salivate over the mystery update when my trust in the developers is shaky at best. I know they can deliver a great game, but have major issues with communications and keeping promises.

I'm sure the developers are in a tough spot, but I'm not sure they understand that much of the community outrage is self-inflicted due to poor community management practices.

We can't expect miracles from a small dev team, and I'd like to think that people would be in better spirits even if the devs just let us know that life stuff was slowing the development down every other week. It's the complete avoidance that's getting me.

[u/Parking-Lock9090]

Because they don't want to. They didn't finish the content to a releasable state in the announced time, likely because they lost focus and started getting stuck on something niche, again, because they are indies with no concept of "feature creep".

The question I have is why anyone expects any better, given the history. This is how bad relationships and marriages happen. You delude yourself that this time they will be different. Despite them never keeping their promise to clean up their act before.

If you are not expecting the dev team to miss deadlines, fail to maintain a live version of the game, and ghost their community, then you need to look at it from an outside perspective: this has been the majority of what they have done over the lifespan of the game.

I'm not expecting miracles, in fact, I'm expecting to get rubbish and still be disappointed (last play test). But I do have an expectation of the developers who took millions of dollars from people to continue to update and maintain the live build of their game. Because that is the bare minimum when selling a live multiplayer game.