How do game developers, admins, or manufacturers of the game take suggestions/feedback? Do they actually take them or are they systematically there to make it look like there's testimonials or proof that the developers and admins of the game are considerate about them?
How can the community build a word of honor (dependable) or trustworthy relationship with both creators and fan-base of Spiral Knights?
My guess is that there is simply no-one here who makes decisions regarding the game. Even if they are reading this, there is no team behind SK that sits down and discusses new ideas or problems.
With a playerbase that consists of a few thousand players I get why, even tho it makes me sad.
What SK needs most right now is exposure.
Money rules this world and if the numbers are too low, the studio won't put work in it. Similar to how I don't want to put money into it anymore, because it could be shut down anytime.
So if somehow we could get a few big youtubers to review this game, double or triple the playerbase and use that momentum to show GH that SK can be saved, they might put some people back on it.
Of course this is just me dreaming but I think this is where we should put our focus if we want to save this game. Make new players want to stay and get more people to try it out.
SK is pretty old and doesn't always run smoothly but it has a lot going for it and it still looks gorgeous imo.
Most of the suggestions people make are excruciatingly poor. I probably wouldn't read it either.
Idea + Explanation + Reason + Benefit = guaranteed considered suggestion?
I think there are just too many suggestions.
At this point the things we get in updates could just coincidentally have been suggested previously. You know, Infinite Monkey Theorem: People suggest random stuff and some unknowingly suggest what a dev will unknowingly implement in the future.
For example, there are dozens of suggestions for Scythe weapons and a few years later we get Scythe Levi reskins. Maybe a dev remembered one of the posts when they made Late Harvest stuff; or maybe they didn't even know the posts and it was just coincidence. This is just one of many examples.
I don't think there's too many suggestions. One responsibility a good dev team has is to actively read suggestions and consider them regardless of the quantity. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that they're required to read each and every post, but they should definitely have at least someone going through the suggestions every couple weeks and acknowledging some of the suggestions. It's understandable for a wave of suggestions to make it difficult for a team to consider them all but that doesn't mean the solution is to completely give up on reading them. Many dev teams don't respond to suggestions, but when prompted to respond by many people, they generally at least give some sort of statement even if not directly related to said suggestion. GH doesn't do that. They completely ignore people when asked about basically anything. I think the issue is that GH either just doesn't care enough to actually develop a healthy relationship with their playerbase, or there isn't anyone left that is capable of creating new content regularly and the GMs are too afraid to tell us.
It was kinda silent in late OOO (and SEGA) times, too.
I don't know what you mean by "capable of creating new content regularly", but during all that silent time we got some new content, for example: new arcade rooms, the sleep update, costume shield slot + costume shields, style kit, equipment/accessories that respond to player actions (chaff pack, airbreakers, pop'tennas, etc.), a preview view for that, raider buckler special bash animation, more accessory slots, revamped jaws of megalodon, special sealed pauldrons, tons of nice reskins+cosmetics, etc..
So obviously there is someone left creating new content, but I don't know whether its regularly or not ... and honestly I don't care how it works behind the scenes. I can see it works and that's fine.
The GMs have said in the past that they read suggestions in this forum, but we have no real way of knowing whether or not they actually do.
Building a relationship with a playerbase relies on talking to the playerbase and letting them know what is going on, and talking with them about changes that they would like in the game. GH has had a problem since takeover of being relatively radio-silent when it comes to talking with the playerbase. People have been trying hard over the past couple of months to get some kind of communication going with them, but so far it has been unsuccessful to my knowledge. The only time this year that we have had some communication was during a recent AH update, where a person during bids would get mailed the money instead of the money being deposited back into your inventory. From what I understand, they said that a bug had been showing up where players were not getting their money back during bids, and they were trying to fix it that way. The community literally blew up about this change, and so many people complained about it that within a few hours the GMs responded and the AH was soon put back to normal. Other than that, every attempt to contact GH has been met with a wall of silence, and no one really knows why. It would be incredible if they would start talking to the playerbase more often, and on more casual notes instead of continuous businesslike talk that distances them from us as players.
But, even with their silence being typical, they have been unusually quiet this year, which can be a good or a bad thing. I like to think of the whole situation as the way that the devs of No Man's Sky handled all the negativity and bugs, just going quiet and fixing them, along with large content updates in large sweeping updates to the players. In this way they were able to rebuild the game to a much better state that it was on release. GH does a similar thing, but every player would love to have just a little more transparency and sharing from the devs, but that is something yet to be seen. I remain optimistic that they will do good things for the game, but, as I always like to say, only time will tell.