[Syd Thrift]

There's also the fact that there is and there will always be a gulf between what we as non-members of the development team think is easy or at least feasible and what the development team thinks they can do. They have access to the codebase, not us, after all.

That doesn't mean suggestions don't get heard, it means that some suggestions can be implemented, some have to be put on the backburner, and some just can't be done. Like... the development lab thing for instance. I have zero idea if I was conscious source of credit for this at all but waaaay back in the day, I think before my original account got banned, I created a bunch of charts you could roll from that had the basic effect of what the development lab is doing. I don't think very many people ever used them - the feedback I got back was that they could make too big of a change in just one offseason - but it was there, and maybe, just maybe, it was enough in the zeitgeist that a future dev said "man, that thing that was floating around back in 2007? I think I'll try and put it into play".

Or they just came up with it completely on their own after seeing report after report of guys learning new pitches, going to Driveline, and so on. I don't know. Whatever it was, it wasn't small and yet it was a thing they could add in on top of the existing codebase without having to do too much to make everything else work around it.

My point here is that a lot of these suggestions are just the art of the possible. Maybe OOTP could lay out money for a full-time project manager / BA, although the team is still kind of small for that. People talking about "marketing" I don't think are quite getting it right: right now I think a lot of players are expecting the devs to interact directly at a time when they are heads-down in actual development. What would work better for them is someone standing in that non-technical BA/product role (like don't get me wrong, I'm pretty sure that's part of Matt's actual duties, but then Matt has to sit down and do dev work too). Failing that, perhaps us nonpaid beta people can act as standins for that (not in a "no, only beta testers can request features" sense, but in a "hey, we have a slightly more direct line into the dev team so if there's a particular feature ask we can request it, and maybe we can be the people to help communicate why some features are out of reach for now").