So given that we have a focus on bugs and not new features is it a good time to reintroduce focussed feedback like they did for some of beyond?
Fleet carriers would be a good starting point for fdev to outline their designs and get feedback and it may give us a little something to keep us going til summer next year?
The big problem Focused Feedback had was that people are not necessarily very good at going from the text of an idea to how that will actually work out in-game, or understanding the full implications of ideas.
For example with C&P - lots of talk in Focused Feedback about how the plans were great and taunting player-killers with "you're doomed now" - compared with the actual fairly faithful implementation of those plans mainly not affecting player-killers that much beyond a couple of weeks initial adjustment and a few loopholes closed, but impacting the "casual/accidental" criminal in ways most players contributing to the FF discussion didn't even consider.
Similarly with the Engineering rewrite discussion - a lot of things which hardly anyone considers a problem now were being blown up into major issues, with spreadsheets, because people were considering each proposal in isolation rather than the overall effect.
I think Frontier probably
did get some useful information out of them, but not necessarily the information the players thought they were getting, and it's probably easier for them to set expectations if they get that information some other way. A read through the various FC threads already on the forums probably gives them the same sort of "hopes and concerns" information just as well.
