Because let's face it it's always easy to criticise other people's work and tell them how to do it right. Especially when you are not doing what they are doing. That's why I try to refrain from telling people how to do things better unless they ask for advice. If I don't know about the subject, I start with ''I am not experienced in this field but these are my thoughts'' kind of sentence.
AC has several priorities. One of them being multiplayer which is just because SC is going to be a big multiplayer universe and the earlier they start working on the multiplayer the better. The other one is balancing and bug fixing. Which had several passes. A lot of the stability issues are gone there are still quiet a few remaining which will hopefully disappear soon.
But while a lot of people say keybindings and map sizes should be the priority I think they just think about themselves and not about the project as a whole. The SC production team looks at whats good for the project as a whole and decides the priorities according to that. Tackling MP issues head on being one of the significant ones as an example.
Leaderboards is another one which is not just about tracking how good you are between thousands of people but is going to be used as a metric tool for Star Citizen on the CIG side. To determine balancing issues, Kill death ratios and many many other statistics to observe data that is coming out from AC Single and Multiplayer.
More things will come soon which will satisfy other parts of the community.
This is very true, a project is always developed according to the goals the developers have for it. To give an example for ED too, the reason that FDEV put thousands of players in 5 star systems with a fast moving market when the first premium beta got out was to acquire data and test both the networking and the volatility rate of the economy under heavy pressure.
Moreover, the development process itself is a testing bed for different mechanics that can and do change according to the feedback acquired from the community.
For example, take a look at the way weapon targeting works in AC. When 0.8 came out, CIG clearly communicated to us that
all weapon mounts would be converted to class 2 (gimbaled) status, and class 1 mounts would be reserved in the future for a couple of rare and special weapon types (like capital anti-ship weapons or very high DP weapons like the Scythes' cannon). After almost a month of feedback from the playerbase, CIG changed their design on the subject (communicated via Travis Day), so now we know that future iterations will have fixed mount weapons with leading indicators.
The same can be argued for ED too, concerning the way gimbaled weapons track and hit. We have gone through a couple of iterations at least on this mechanic, and more are coming too in the future fueled by player feedback from
here and other sources.
Having said that though, I really don't understand why CIG has not put a bigger priority on key bindings in the first place (before even the MP AC rolled out). It seems like a very,
very big priority to me..especially since we are talking about a space sim here.
