skeletonbow: I think the issue here is that they are trying to do something new in which games being bundled causes a problem, so splitting them solves that problem. It may also then create a new problem, but then they can think about ideas on how to solve that problem also. I can think of a few ways to solve duplicate extras or other things like that, but it wont all necessarily happen over night. I think if people are a little patient and let them work out what they're working on and just give constructive feedback of likes/dislikes, that they will have information from with they can plan the rest of the changes over time that they will need to make. It's not that they don't listen to people, it's that they can't hear what we say one day and make it happen over night, or perhaps not even in a week or a month, it takes time to change things. In addition to that, some people will like changes and others dislike changes and both groups of people can say "GOG doesn't ever listen", however GOG can't do what both groups of people want 100% of the time because the nature of some things are mutually exclusive.
There are many things I dislike about the website, the way games are packaged and other things too, but GOG does listen to us so long as we do not individually define "listen to US" as meaning "listen only to me personally and do everything I personally want at the exclusion of everyone else" for example. Make 30 suggestions to GOG for various things over time and just about anyone is likely to find that 10 or 20 or so of those things may actually happen over time. One could then focus on the 10 that didn't and say that GOG doesn't listen, but it ignores the 20 things that they did do that we might want individually or as a group.
They have the difficulty of pleasing a large group of people, almost always people who fit into hard knit groups that want the exact opposite, so they can /always/ be painted as never listening by someone out there even if all they do is listen. :)
In my own prior job I would get bug reports from people of the nature "Make feature xyz enabled by default." and other people who very strongly wanted "Make feature xyz disabled by default", roughly broken into two camps of a roughly 50/50 split. That's an awesome position to be in as a developer let me tell you. You choose "enabled" as the default and face the nastiest vitriol from your users for not listening to them and not caring about what they have to say. Choose "disabled" and you get the exact same result, just the email addresses/nicknames change. It's pretty much a lose:lose situation much like politics whenever you have to make decisions for a massive number of people. The bigger the group, the closer pleasing even half of them edges to zero. You end up realizing in the end not to get tied up in all of the negativity and you just have to weigh the various pros and cons of the options available and look at the big picture you're faced with that no one individual may even have the information and perspective to understand the resulting decisions you end up making, and then you move on.
I also learned that after doing so and receiving the almost inevitable flak you'll get back from whichever dissenting group doesn't like it, that one of the worst things you can try to do is be extremely open and detailed and explain why you decided A over B to people. It just gives them fuel for the fire, fuel to argue with you and tear you apart, to counter every piece of logic you present civilly with manipulation, guilt trips, and other negative things - no matter how positive your intentions were, or how logical your decisions were. There's always someone out there angry enough to kick someone's dog and set it on fire about it. So you learn to be very very careful about what you say and to whom, and what level of detail you ever express, and to choose your words very carefully because people who dislike what you've done very much will try to rip your words apart in every way imaginable and use them against you, interpret what you've said in a way that works in their favour etc.
People who have never worked in software development or any other field where you face an angry mob of massive number of people with very opposing viewpoints, likes and dislikes, personal preferences etc. and have to make decisions and changes that will affect all of them and some of them wont be happy about it, have no idea what it's like. :) As William Adama (Battlestar Galactica) said in one episode...
Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six.
So GOG have their own goals, and they want our feedback as well or they wouldn't even ask us for it like most companies. They will listen to everything that we have to say including people who have mutually opposing opinions about things, they'll take all of that data and data we have no idea about and they'll make short/medium/long term decisions about it and work towards achieving those goals. There's always a risk that something may not work out too, nobody is perfect no matter how good their intentions are. So if they do something that does not work out, they'll hear our feedback about it and that will help them in their next stage of planning and changes.
If there's one thing GOG does do, it is listen to us. If they didn't, then we'd almost never see a comment here from a blue, and almost never see any one of our suggestions end up happening on the site unless it coincided randomly with something they wanted to do anyway.
We all can vent from time to time about something we aren't fond of of course, and I do that occasionally too, but at the end of the day, GOG is a great company that is probably more customer oriented and listens to their customers to help them shape their future products and services more than any other company in the entire gaming industry. I just think people sometimes get tied up in one or another of their own personal desires/demands that they don't take 10000 steps back to admire the GOG forest so to speak and see all of the good things that they do.
Another long post from the bow man here, but it's from the heart and I felt like sharing my thoughts as I know how difficult and challenging it can be as a developer to be on the receiving end when putting in hard hours day after day trying to please 100% of everyone and ending up feeling like 90% are never happy about anything. I hope my thoughts can give others a little more perspective and think about things a little deeper whether it helps anyone to lighten up or to have even stronger resolve. I know with certainty from experience that there will be both, and that's ok. :)
But my other secret plan was that by the time it took anyone who dared to read all of this to finish it off, that it would buy GOG developers enough time to fix some more bugs/glitches and roll the fixes out before anyone got a chance to notice. :)
Peace fellow GOGlings! :)
