Developers involved with communities

I read in an article recently that stated that these are the best years for gaming because developers for many well known franchises are much more involved with their communities. Releases of betas are more frequent and complaints and error reports are heeded and often addressed and corrected in new updates.

I recently spoke with my brother on Labor Day. He is a pretty active multiplayer shooter player involved in games like quake live, team fortress 2, overwatch, dirty bomb, counterstrike go, and many others. Between playing some games, he takes breaks with others. To my surprise he told hes been seriously considering switching to single player games. On his breaks with some games, which can be as long as a couple months at a time, he will return to a game to find that the stats of the weapons, player classes or the rules of certain game modes have changed, sometimes pretty significantly. And for some of these games, the updates are pretty frequent, teetering back and forth making some weapons stronger, then making them weak again, and other things making the game difficult to adjust to when not playing it constantly.

I personally find frequent updates to games to do more of a nuisance than any good, and was surprised to see someone so active with gaming share the same opinion. I too find it kind of strange that games are rarely released in their final form and to change so often in response to feedback that I'm sure not all players would agree with. Not to mention I doubt most video game players really know anything about game development or can even clearly articulate what they want.

Seems kinda weird but a lot of people here seem to be actively playing new games as they come out so I may be in the minority with this opinion.

I used to play Eve, starting and stopping periodically, and one of the things that kept me stopped was constantly having to relearn what strategies are now viable for PvP. Some of the big changes were due to updates, and others just to trends and player habits. The core audience kind of loves the turmoil and theorizing created but the newer or returning player is slipping back down the learning curve.

I follow dwarf fortress, which is kinda the opposite. No PVP meta to keep on top of, but watching the community trying to ride an ever-evolving game without falling off, whist simultaneously using minecarts to try to launch a dwarf into space (complete with homemade spacesuits, natch), is probably the most fun part of the game.