I think the common consensus and reason for frustration is that the entire community of TEC sort of feels “Ghosted” by the staff. Promises are made, lip service is given to "attempts" to be more transparent / present / proactive / etc., but then time passes and nothing is really changed. It seems as if the carrot always gets further away, they keep taking your money, but the return on that investment is just empty promises. I find it hard to keep justifying it when there is basically just silence from the administration side for long stretches of time. It seems the staff is extremely against any type of “Patch Notes” communication where recent adjustments/changes/work logs are given along with short term future projections. ANY communication is better than nothing, but it should be consistent. Weekly, monthly, whatever. What have Siddhe, Pranzor, and Analog been working on lately? What have the SG’s been working on? What have the GMs and SGs accomplished this week? This month? I am not calling them out and saying they do not do anything, but without any word from the administration that is exactly what it looks like and what people start to think. When you do not see work, you tend to assume it does not transpire.

If Analog spend 80% of his time working on character makeovers this week, let us know that. We at least then know what the staff members efforts were given to. Maybe Pranzor was working on a bug in the Rock Valley area. Now we know to be careful in RV because something may be amiss. I am not looking for a line by line hourly accounting of time spent in game on the work side. But SOME form of notes pushed out (bi-weekly is probably best) would at least give the players insight as to what is being done because at times it does feel the game is being abandoned.

Now how does a person voice displeasure? Forums posts do not seem to have an effect, nor does Discord discussions. I am not sure if @feedback is being used as well, but I find it hard to believe that the staff does not see the complaints in some fashion. OOC has become a tad more volatile in the past months with growing player displeasure. But the commonality of all the anger seems to be “lack of communication.” And the staff is not taking steps to rectify it.

The player is left with a sense of recourse being limited to payment for services. Nothing else they are doing is having an effect. But now the catch-22 becomes, without enough payment due to a smaller community, the risk is the game goes away. So really, folks are left with a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” situation. This isn’t like a large scale MMORPG where the loss of a revenue stream is noticed, but not game breaking. There is a very real worry from the trends lately that the doors will close on the game.

So I am begging the administration for something, anything in the way of a reliable, standard communication. Something to reassure the player base that:

1) The game is actively being worked on.

2) The game is not shutting down.

3) There are concrete, obtainable goals actively being pursued by the staff

4) There are active Storylines being pursued by the SGs.

The lack of communication and silence from the other side of the gameworld is causing friction and animosity among the players. Is there a reason for it? Truth and honesty will go a long way. If you are sick of running TEC and on a break, then say that. If you have no idea how to fix a problem in the game, say that. Just be 100% honest with the community. We are small enough and are mostly adults, we can understand and empathize with a lot of things. Excuses may not be limitless in their use and eventually people are expected to make good on their promises but having NOTHING to go off of is even more frustrating. Because it’s the unknown that is the problem. In in the absence of information, people assume the worst and start to become resentful.