Dan E Gray Designer & Community Manager

This I will agree with, but I think it needs expanding upon.

It’s not about trying to release with huge amounts of content intending keep every player busy. That approach is going to drain your budgets and strain your team to breaking point. It is about developing enough FUN content with a decent replayability value, so people wont mind coming back to the same thing again and again. A smaller amount of polished and fun content beats larger amounts of mediocre content every time.

Take Left4Dead, for example. No, it’s not an MMO, but I think the comparison still applies. Left4Dead released with, and still has, only four campaigns. Four campaigns that can be played through in 30 minutes to an hour each. That really doesn’t sound like much, does it? Yet people are still loving the game having played through each one dozens of times. Why? Because it’s fun. I don’t want to get picky with details about how this doesn’t apply to MMO design theory, it’s a simple principle that I am illustrating.

9) Don’t listen to the players. Make a community of your best beta players, and then create some kind of hidden karma system for constructive feedback submitted, and then select a few of your more literate high-end players. Create a private feedback forum. Then ignore most of what they say anyway. Stick to The Vision, assuming your Vision is good; if your Vision isn’t good, listening to your whiny players won’t help it anyway.

This is a very jaded view, and strongly disagree.

If a design decision is relating to the overall vision of your game then it generally isn’t something you should be presenting to your community anyway, unless your current vision is a miserable failure. However, that definitely does not translate to “you only raise unimportant issues with your community.”

Isolating the intelligent discussion away from the rest of your community may help with signal to noise ratio in the short term, but it is going to be damaging in the long term. Players who spend a lot of time thinking about a game will eventually create their own vision of how they feel it should develop. This distorts their feedback, and will lead to conflicts with others who were previously on the same page. The only way to help prevent that is keeping it public, so decisions aren’t being made in such an isolated environment. You also stunt the development of your community by not encouraging the experienced and well spoken members of your community to fraternize with the rest.

In the past I have both personally managed and been a member of small core feedback groups on private forums, for two different MMOs. In neither case did I see it help a great deal, and in both I felt that in the long term it was quite detrimental for the reasons I listed above.