Everyone: "Developers these days are incentivized to cash in on trends and release horrible untested shit."
You: "Playtesting ruins games!"

No. No it fucking doesn't. The only cases of this apparently happening is when playtesting was a PR scam from the beginning (developers stalling for time, or cultivating a sycophantic hugbox and banning people for problem reports).

Broken Age would be a good example as far as I'm concerned. I don't know if it ruined the game, because that's a very subjective opinion, but the game was released in two parts. And the first part was critically well received by most of the gaming the press. And then a huge backlash by a very vocal group complaining that was not what they signed for. You know, the classic lucasarts adventure. It was a children game, too easy, too short and what not. Well, they listened, and at least tried to address the easy part. Trying to ease those guys was not a clever move. They already hated your game, and everyone know noone changes their mind. They hated the game already and that was it. What they acomplished was to also alienate the gaming press by making it harder.

Sometimes, players criticize a game for being exactly the kind of game the creators decided to create, instead of being something entirely different. For instance, a roguelike gets critized for having permadeath, or a singleplayer game gets criticized for not having multiplayer.

Films outside the normal genre labels are often marketed as if they were pure genre films. For instance, THE VILLAGE (2004) and THE HOST (South Korea, 2006) were marketed as straight horror movies. In the case of THE VILLAGE, it caused a lot of complains that the movie lacked scares. Which of course it did, as it wasn't a straight horror fare.

Likewise, if games are advertized based on some simple genre labels, and the actual game strive to much away from this - a RPG with no multiplayer, oh my! - the players will get upset.

...This isn't about playtesting or QA. This is about games that swing wildly from version to version because of community complaints. Like Diablo II to III.

Or Brawl to Smash IV.

Moebius My sincere condolences to Jane Jensen for having to put up with the imbecilic bullshit she got from some of her autistic higher-tier Kickstarter backers. Those were also responsible for some of the more pea-brained design choices in the finished game´, but considering the amount of negativity on the backers-only forums, I was positively surprised that the end result still turned out to be fairly enjoyable. I'm sure glad I held onto the early beta builds, though. One day I'd love to piece together Jensen's "director's cut", with all the original puzzles and dialogue (which was watered down considerably, due to backers objecting to the protagonist's dickish antics) intact.

Go on, do describe these.
I'm not saying it is bad, but rather that the original vision has been shipwrecked as it were. Not to mention, from what I understand, the feedback on the platforming stages was along the lines of, "This is bland/bad".

As for Starbound, what I understood is that they kept flipflopping on community feedback, ranging from the depth of the story to survival mechanics, to how the unlocks should work and it all became a bit of a mess where the artist to programmer ratio was deeply in the artist majority and then they let go a writer and purged their works from the game, erasing the darker undertones that everyone liked so they could appeal to a broader audience and...just a mess.

Least, that's what I came to understand from peeking at the forums, reddit, my own play of the game, and such.

Starbound bashing by Darvond, episode #263.

Dude, it's getting old.

or "Community ruined by too many games feedback?"

or "Feedback ruined by too many games community?"

or "Too many feedback ruined by community games?"

or "Too many ruined by games feedback community?"

He's also quite enthusiastic about bashing the Nintendo Switch.

So much anger and negative feelings. Feels bad man.

Just a quick question; from what I could tell the US localization was...very silly in certain ways, reducing certain characters to a single trait from a single line, but were you playing the US English or another version?
Or...yeah, it was late when I made the thread title.

The Battlezone games got ditched back in the early 2000's when the devs got according to their own words, too much negative feedback from the community on Battlezone II: Combat Commander.
But their were probably other considerations too which we don't know, so.

A shame really as I did like those games a lot. :^(

I have not played it but Mass Effect 3 ending changes for the community made enough noise to reach under my rock.

US English, but I don't blame the localization for the story woes.

The characters are all very trope-y. I expect in games like these, like Fire Emblem, Persona, even Danganronpa, that after going through a character's questline, or social link, or affinity, or however the game wants to call it, for the tropes to be deconstructed and the characters to gain depth along the way. In Fates it felt like they never went past the surface trope that defined their characters.

The story itself was billed as "choose your side in the coming war" and "there are heroes and villains on both sides". But in reality fictional Japan are the unequivocal good guys, who never start a fight and were only defending themselves the poor little fellas; while fictional Europe is led by a cackling maniac that will take every single opportunity he can to be evil just for the sake of being evil, even if that is the stupidest choice available to him. The Main Character and their siblings are portrayed as good, at worst edgelords, but to continue obeying your father after the fifth or so time he actually tried to murder you is unforgivably idiotic.

The former could possibly be a perversion of the localization, but the latter is definitely a structural problem that dates back to the game's development.

"Sometimes"?

Huh, I had no idea that's how it went down, but it explains a lot. I mean, I still like the game as a whole, but yeah, the fits part was much better than the second. Some of the puzzles in the second one make no sense, and didn't seem to fit the way the "logic" of the game wordek in the first part.