This means they need a good game that people like playing firstly, but then secondly they need ways of making money from it. (BTW, it hopefully goes without saying that if people like playing GW2 (which I do!) then it's actually in our medium term interests for Arena Net to be profitable). This is understandable but Arena Net are running a business and they need to make a profit. The last problem is that many people (again, not all), are looking at it from their own short term interests. People don't seem to realise how much work it would take to do even 10% of the wide ranging requests Arena Net get. It isn't wrong or bad, it is just the nature of having a large number of users who all have their own likes/dislikes and hence request different things. What the players (users) will be requesting will be hundred or thousands of times more work than there is actually available dev time to do. The reality is that development time is incredibly precious and in short supply once you have a software project with a large number of disparate users. I presume most haven't tried to run a big project or develop software before, and sometimes even those who are don't seem to be applying what they've learnt from that to GW2 or maybe they have only worked on short term one off projects (which have different challenges). The second problem is that many people have no idea of the development challenges.

Not from everyone by any means, in fact I suspect it's a small minority of the forum readers (and a bigger minority of the forum posters) but it must be incredibly draining and frustrating for those at Arena Net tasked with communicating with the community. This includes a lot of re-hashing what was said in previous communications and any deviation from previous communication is treated like a crime (as tho things don't change and forward facing statements should be forever future binding.). One is that when Arena Net do communicate (eg I'm talking over the last 6 months when I've been most active on the forums) I see an awful lot people picking apart what they said, including a lot of over-analysis and speculation on what they didn't say, why did they word things that way, and often taking the absolute worse case interpretation.

Big farm by goodgame studios