13 hours ago, Falcon197 said:Anecdotal. Lots of the announcements and dev stream discussions around roadmap for the game included mention by Joel and others about meeting backer goals and executing "long planned changes," but there's little mention of player feedback - especially if there's a lot of criticism and pushback on recent changes.
That means they promised certain things as kickstarter goals and need to fulfill those things. It isn't at all related to backers asking for stuff and them adding those things or anything even remotely like that.
As far as building stuff goes, you might have liked the extra levels of building materials or resources - rebar, wet cement, etc. - but not everyone did, including people who like to build. Building is one of the main things I like about the game. But I am not interested in a bunch of steps to get what I want. I am interested in building interesting things without spending a ton of time just going through meaningless steps to do it. And I have a strong feeling that I'm not the only one who feels that way. More than likely, they've received enough feedback and gameplay data prior to removing those things that showed more people wanted a simplified building route so building was easier and faster. Of course, I don't have actual data on that and it's just my guess. But it makes sense. They might remove things they think unbalance the game or provide bad gameplay or just don't work well with how they want the game to play, but AFAIK those things worked fine when they were in the game, so removing them if most players wanted them seems unlikely. It's far more likely that they saw more people not liking it than those who did. Again, just a guess. All I can say for sure is my own preference, which is how they have it now.
When it comes down to it, most gamers aren't interested in a lot of steps to complete something in a game. There are those who enjoy all those details and steps, but they are definitely a minority of all gamers. That unfortunately means that most games aren't going to give you all those details and steps because it pushes away more people than it attracts. You're usually limited to sims or games with at least a strong sim mechanic to the game.