I'm not one to overly harp on Valve, but I wish they would be more vocal with us.

Many of you have seen the video where Robin Walker makes a case for minimal external communication with the community. His arguement is that injecting developer commentary into the community alters the discussion and sets the developer up for undeliverable expectations.

However plenty of developers are extremely open with their communities, and most of the time the communities are better off for it. People bring up Blizzard as an often cited example, but I wanted to offer another exemplary developer.

Harebrained Schemes is the developer for Necropolis, the Dark Soul style Rouge-Lite that was released recently. And the game did not get stellar reviews. In fact, it was panned.

And in response, Harebrained Schemes comes out with a list of things that they are attempting to do in order to improve their game, broken down by priority and time scale.

You can check out their post here.

Maybe these devs won't be able to make Necropolis into a product that more people enjoy. I do not own that game, nor have I played it. But if I had bought the game, I would at least feel assured that the developers have a thought-out action plan to fix it.

That's more than I can say for Valve now.