The facts speak for themselves: they claim that they ‘don’t let people work for free, for a variety of reasons. Some legal, some moral.’ ( Devs Why so Lazy? - #53 by Saltypatra ), whereas both ‘reasons’ could be easily resolved if they so wished, seeing how players who care(d) about improving the game offered to assist. No go.
They’ve also mentioned in the past how there’s a process to produce translations/localizations: as evidenced by the results of this ‘process’, it delays/prohibits prompt modifications while producing substandard translations (in the case of the French translation, that go beyond mere oversights and instead demonstrate a lack of understanding of the game and even of the language’s grammar/spelling basics) that would take seconds to rectify if the Will existed on the company’s part. Nope.
Which brings us to the statement by a dev above, suggesting that quick fixes/workarounds are seen as a ‘waste’ of development time: this is in line with the pattern of postponing/delaying indefinitely things that do not affect the bottom-line.
But it wasn’t always like that:
It is well-documented that the company’s philosophy at some point became ‘pay to reduce grind’ instead of ‘pay because you’re having fun’: maybe some of the most senior forum members can shed some light over whether the shift happened around the time Fawkner took a step back from the forums? Has any specific incident been identified as the start of the shift in philosophy?
