Relationship between community and FM

I've been reading an interview with a former Fallout developer, and I came across this quoted paragraph which he wrote. It rings true not only for the FM community, but every big game community. However with every release of FM comes a whole new set of complaints and it seems relevant to the general mood on the forums lately

It echoes what I'm already well aware of; SI can never please everyone. I think it is also true that many of us do have a vision for FM that likely cannot be put in to reality, and because of this we overreact when things aren't "just so", would you agree? When we form an attachment with something and it is so close to "perfect", but it is still lacking in a few areas, it generates anger and frustration inside us, because we are powerless to do anything about it. I suppose you could say it's like meeting the perfect girl; intelligent, cute, funny, slim, but she has a beard that she refuses to shave off

It's always struck me that as a game gets better, the fans expectations become higher. I could now go in to a long rant about how people have double standards with regards to the old CM games which are put on such a high pedestal, yet there is so much disappointment to a superior version (FM), but I won't.

So what do you think? Are SI heading in the wrong direction? Or are the fans simply expecting too much?

How does the fan base hinder/help the projects that you've worked on?

Man, that's a loaded question for me. Mage: The Ascension was a project where the fan base pretty much ruined my enthusiasm for the property. The prior developer had made several major story elements that came to a head right before I took over, and then the management at White Wolf wanted some new directions established. I also took a look at the property and thought about stuff that seemed inconsistent to me and how I wanted to fix it. When the revised edition of the game came out, though, it caused such a furor from a small but vocal element of the 'net that I actually got death threats and I even had someone posting crap on my webspace about what a horrible person I am as recently as just a few months ago, all with regards to M:tA. In a sense, fan expectations can be the worst killer for a property. The fans get this notion of the "perfect vision" of what the property should be like or about, and they have this idealized notion, and the reality can never compare to it. They get themselves in love with something that is not the "real" property but just their imaginary wishes, and they of course are angry when they are inevitably let down because reality can never match some nebulous imaginary concept. Plus, of course, one man's hash is another man's trash, so even if you please one person you **** off another.

On the flip side, some fans are really enthusiastic, and they just like to take the stuff that you give them and run with it and have a good time and thank you for that. People who make community stuff are the best - folks who love the material so much that they want to spread the love, so they make mods, or stories, or wikis, or any sort of content. It's really heartening when people build communities so that they can enrich this material that they all enjoy.

i guess expectations get higher each year...and of course we and SI want a perfect footie simulation but that's never going to happen.

i must say i'm quite positive about 09 at the moment, more than i thought i will be. there are still annoying things in the game but plenty of them will be fixed with next patch(es). i'd like to add that plenty of problems people experience are workable and are not bugs. i sound like a fanboy

Fans (customers) are the only reason the game gets made and is successful. So any developer would be stupid not to listen to the fans as their customer base would shrivel and die if they didn't. People have high expectations because computer gaming is now a multi billion pound/dollar business and if our expectations aren't met we can spend our leisure budget elsewhere.

Following the activation debacle and the major glaring bugs in the game which seem to ruin it for many people (not for me, I'm loving FM09 bugs and all) I don't think its unreasonable that people expect a product with less bugs, not completely bug free but just less of the major ones, to be fair though SI normally do well with patches.

In terms of gameplay evolution is better than revolution, so in this regard FM is doing fine. People put earlier CM's on a pedestal as it represents a time in their life when things were simpler (no job, wife or kids perhaps) and they could spend ridiculous hours playing a video game.