Balance tweaks are coming, and sound like they’re going to be prioritized in some way, according to Kitefin’s post when they gave us an early look on the balance changes before the last quarterly update. And it happened with U&L, as you’ve mentioned. And we got a preview for Nightmares & Visions, as well as balance update info for that. And they did similar preview dev blogs for Grim Protocols too (although no balance preview I don’t think).
Stability/performance is an ongoing issue, but they’re working on it. It’s pretty impactful for a range of players, so it makes sense for them to prioritize that. But I don’t know what process, or hangup(s), causes some issues to take a while to get fixed.
I too wish communication about this stuff came earlier and more regularly, so I could get hyped. But they do post this stuff, and they do seem to take feedback (which may just take a while to arrive). Have they integrated the players more closely into their process? Even through things I think would be easy, like player polls? They haven’t, and I wish they did. But that’d just be a bonus to me.
I don’t need updates about what’s coming months in advance, especially if there’s a chance they won’t deliver. I’d rather a clockwork company of happy people saying a thing then doing that thing. It feels like they have multiple teams working concurrently on different upcoming updates, and some of those get juggled around as needed. If that’s what’s been happening for 2+ years, I think it’s working pretty well.
But who knows! I just want that tick tick tick.