Actually only one; Hi-Fi is the community manager, for D3, so he’s covering MtGPQ and ATPQ as well, and probably Twitter, Facebook, Google+ (that’s still a thing, right?), Youtube (do they have a youtube account?), MySpace, Tumblr, LiveJournal, alt.arts.sf.marvel.games.mpq Usenet group, and tend to the carrier pigeons used for offline messaging. So I think he actually manages to stay quite busy.
IceIX’s role was, if I’m not mistaken, Product Manager. That might involve overseeing customer interaction or at least reviewing and reporting feedback, but it doesn’t generally require direct, day-to-day interaction. IceIX definitely went above and beyond in that regard. It would see that Cthulhu is sticking to that role a little more traditionally.
That said, Hi-Fi and Cthulhu represent the publisher, D3, and not the developer, Demiurge. For the most part, I think the developers keep their interaction limited to the almost-monthly dev video. There have been one or two times where Will, Casey and Anthony have all answered questions directly on the forums, but that was a long time ago.
Now that’s out of the way, I also voted for disappointment in the lack of communication. It’s verging on amateur. I think what makes it worse is that is used to be decent. Obviously, somewhere along the line, someone said too much once, and once was enough to shut it down. Of course, there was the time that they asked the forums to ask questions and then they got metaphorically crucified when they didn’t answer those questions. Possibly we overreacted, but possibly they could have just answered the damn questions. Uh, anyway, I’m starting to get sidetracked.
This sort of SNAFU absolutely requires an official post acknowledging the situation and some insight into what the next steps are going to be.
If it was a mistake and the plan is to resolve it, say so. You don’t need to commit to a definite end date but “Hey, super sorry about that. Totally a mistake. We’re going to work on it. Can’t say which release it’ll be in, but we’ll let you know” would be great.
If it was on purpose there might have been a few reasons. Maybe it was only half of a set of updates - we’ve seen a few features rolled out incrementally recently where the first didn’t really make sense until the last was finally added. That could have been addressed like “Yep, it was on purpose. Sorry we didn’t mention it, that’s on us. This was actually only part of a set of updates that we’re rolling out and the second part just wasn’t ready at the same time. It all makes much more sense when it’s all working together, but we don’t want to discuss the missing components just yet. We’ll keep an eye on things like your scaling and placement as per normal. If it looks like this debuff is hindering too much then we can roll it back until part 2 is ready.”
I honestly get the impression that the lapses in communication here on the forums are indicative of a breakdown of communication either between Demiurge and D3, or internally at Demiurge, or both. If it is a scenario as I outlined above, but the developers don’t ever mention that to Hi-Fi then he can’t actually lay it all out for us. That’s bad.
