I dont think thats the case, but it takes a lot of time to interact with the community. Remember, we aren't paid to interact with the community, we have lots of work to do (regardless of popular opinion). I got stuff to check out, meetings to attend, risks to assess, France to conquer, all the things any other worker has to do. It would be kinda like if a janitor at a burger joint would be asked by a customer to make a burger, sure the janitor can probably do it but its not his job, and he might make a decent burger but he isn't hired as a chef.
We are just normal dudes and dudettes which suddenly has to straddle the line between not sounding like dry wood but also represent the company. Some people find that extremely hard, I find that extremely hard actually. When I write something I have to consider the tone, the language, "can this me misrepresented", "is this something I wanna talk about", "What are the chances of this being misrepresented or misinterpreted?", "can I spend my time on something else".
A lot of those things are things which normal users do not need to care about. If they post something stupid, at worst they have to delete their account and start anew if they care that much about, say reddit karma. If we post something stupid theres more permanence to it. Fragile also has a bad connotation, its totally ok to think that interaction publicly is a hard thing to do.
You also have to think about the fear of when we post something, there's always we fear of someone going like "why did you do this. I hate this", and all I can personally answer is "I have no idea, a lot of things happen during development", but we cannot offer that as an answer.
Some people handle stress differently, just as well as some people think its incredibly hard to speak in public, while others do not. What X person might perceive as toxic might not be true for person Y. Also as a developer you put yourself into the firing line, even if no one fires at you it might still put a strain on the potential of someone reacting in bad faith. There will always be, and has always been toxic people, but even if someone is just passively aggressive on the forum, or has a bad tone it might impact you just as much.
You only really need a couple bad interactions before someone might start to feel anxious about posting stuff. Even if a moderator sorts it out it doesn't take away that feeling. As for other sites such as reddit and stuff, we just dont have time, again. We do this mostly on our spare time.
It really has nothing to do with not being able to take public criticism, hell its basically my job to critique the game. You kind of have to pick and choose who to listen to as well, and a community ambassador might help filter out broad strokes of player sentiment to give a general direction of what you think. If I read one thread that say that fighter 2 sucks, we buff fighter 2's and now everything is going madbananas because I read one thread on reddit, its a super simple example but you get the gist. Community ambassadors does a lot of other stuff as well thats not as easily categorized.
Theres a gazillion reasons why we don't answer stuff like that (and sometimes we do answer). It takes quite a lot of time to explain why X is not feasible, or why Y is a bad idea. But once again it puts you in the firing line. Maybe our arguments are based on insider data that you dont have, but then we can't say "oh just take my word for it", well we can but its not a solid argument.
Maybe I just do not know, and the person who knows hasn't seen the thread, but I am not going to go and interrupt that persons work and ask him/her because it might interrupt that persons work. Sometimes we cannot talk about stuff because we are in the middle of development, sometimes we agree that something is not working as intended, or could work better, but its not just gonna fix itself by one person going
"Ah right, we really need to stop doing this spy stuff and rework naval combat because everyone is complaining about it". It requires a bit more planning than that, a project the size of PDS games isn't a motor boat that can turn around on a dime, think more of a man o war slowly turning.
Technical aspects are also hard to write in a way that is "dumbed down" enough to make sense to most people, but also explain the problem. Sometimes interrupting a discourse isn't good either, sometimes its more interesting to have a forum thats ongoing rather than us interrupting in every thread and explain why X isn't going to happen, or vice versa.
At the end of the day we are just normal peeps who suddenly has to either choose to put quite a lot of stress on themselves to interact with the community, and while you might see us as "the company", and we do represent Paradox, but we are mainly just people who had the good fortune of making games. It is just a lot of potential stress, takes time and most of all, deliberation and patience.
It is just not something for everyone. I hope that explained, at least my personal thoughts about the matter. I did take the time on how long it took to write this, and its about 25 minutes. It means that its 25 minutes im not using to respond to something else, or playing games, or working out, but I feel like this was one of the threads where its worth taking some time to explain how a devs mindset might go, at least my mindset
peace
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