FIELD NOTE #1: FEEDBACK IS NOT A DESIGN BRIEF

Some notes aren’t meant for Slack. They sit in the back of your throat after a call. Here’s one of them.

You know what your game is about. You know how you want it to play, how it should feel, what it means, and what kind of experience you're offering. The community can enjoy it, react, respond, and enrich the experience, but they cannot define it for you.

Feedback is valuable. Absolutely. There are pain points you might not have considered. There are feature improvements that align with your goals. And a vocal community is a gift: when players care enough to offer their thoughts, it means they are still invested.

But post-2015, feedback culture has shifted. Social media thrives on outrage, attention, and virality. Most feedback offered in public platforms is not an even signal. It's a pressure wave: complaints get attention, and the algorithm rewards heat. And many voices in those threads? They're not players. They're tourists, commentators, or click chasers. That isn't to say criticism is invalid, but it must be filtered.

A few principles:

• Feedback is not democratic. It's not about who shouts loudest.
• Feedback is not a design brief. It shouldn't rewrite your vision.
• Feedback must be sourced with context. Discord? Forum superusers? In-game telemetry? Good. Twitter hashtags and Twitch chat raids? Questionable.
• Feedback must be filtered through your intention. Is this aligned with what you want your game to be?

You are allowed - obligated, even - to say: "That is not what this game is." If someone asks you to add tanks to your game about magical girls, you do not compromise your vision to please a louder market.
(Unless, of course, Girls & Panzer is what you're going for =D)

Worse still: when studios try to please everyone by giving quiet, indirect nods to requests they never intend to fulfill. This builds false hope. And false hope turns into bitterness. Bitterness poisons your community. In the long run, being direct saves more players than it loses.
Every update is an act of communication. Every silence is, too.

If you're keeping players in the ecosystem just to extract short-term revenue, but never plan to honor their expectations, you will pay for that later.
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Decide early:

• Is this feedback coming from someone we want to build with?
• Is this a conversation we want to have?
• Does this shape the future of the game?

And if the answer is no? Say so. Respectfully. Clearly.

Feedback is data. It's not a compass. You are.