eh… to be honest, I think there’s a fair bit of miscommunication feeding some of this tension. I’ve been following along with those conversations, trying to keep out of them unless I have something crystal clear to add because the last thing I want to do is muddy the waters with my own analysis on top of analysis or my version of psychoanalysis (as you so aptly put it, because it’s true) trying to figure out why you feel the way you do… because ultimately, it doesn’t matter what’s driving the feeling; the complaint is coming from a genuine flaw in the game design and it’s something that all of us want to address.
The tension comes in when we’re all trying to address it in slightly different ways, and not all seeing eye-to-eye. An example of that: you’ve claimed that the small-town gameplay where hearthlings matter as individuals is in direct contradiction to the early goal of empire-building. I’d say, on the other hand, that the small-town gameplay is essential if we’re going to get to the empire building stage – without functional personalities and a reason to get invested in our characters, the enemy and allied leaders we’d have to deal with as an empire would be boring… in fact, they’d literally just be Yes Men and No Men, arbitrarily assigned as allies and antagonists. Now that the hearthlings have a modicum of personality, though, it paves the way for more advanced systems like diplomacy and PR/relationship building.
Take a classic game in the empire-building niche, such as Crusader Kings, and then imagine if you removed personality traits, conversations between entities/NPCs, or the quirks which made you attached to any of your particular citizens. The game would become very boring, and very math-based with pretty much no story. The smaller, simpler social systems are the foundations of the larger ones – so if you’re making war on a faction of aggressive, hot-headed and proud people you can predict their actions based upon those traits, and then you can use your own actions (e.g. you might start a rumour/whispering campaign, or you might present a challenge to them, or undermine their alliance with their neighbours) to defeat them using an up-scaled version of the same systems that operate within your town. The only difference is that you get to take part in the conversation and steer its content, rather than watching it unfold in the background. If the system isn’t there, the hearthlings can’t interact with it and react to your inputs; so you wouldn’t have the way to goad the enemy into attacking your main castle in a poorly-planned campaign…
That’s the end-goal here – not just that specific scenario, but to enable the complex and rich scenarios which can only work when multiple layers of systems interact. You talk to the governors/rulers of other settlements, they talk to each other, and there’s a ripple effect which changes the geopolitical makeup of the world of Hearth. Or perhaps you create an alliance, and as part of that committment you help an ally fend off a titan… in the wake of that, your enemies gain new respect for your martial prowess so they’re less likely to raid you. We know that’s where the dev team want to go, because they’ve told us that multiple times. What they don’t know yet is the lay of the land between where we are now and point B; so we can’t even pick a road yet because we’ve yet to see what’s waiting on each of the possible/hypothetical roads.
That’s merely one example of how abstract and complex some of these questions and concerns become. There aren’t a lot of specific answers to the questions you raise, we only have the general plan to refer to. But the team are taking small immediate steps towards that plan’s goal, so they’re already working on solidifying those nebulous questions into some underlying/foundational mechanics. Once those are proven to work, they can build the next layer outwards of complexity and abstraction, and then the next layer again.
At the same time, there are multiple paths in progress. That makes it look like there isn’t much progress happening at all; when in reality the progress is happening over a very wide area. It’s just like how a narrow river looks like it’s flowing faster than a wide river, when the two are really flowing at the same speed – the progress seems relatively quicker when you can see it more closely, but from further back (and with a larger scale that’s necessarily how you have to view things) the progress is more difficult to track and there are less reference points to show it.
With so much up in the air, the dev team often don’t have time to give detailed answers to questions and concerns like they used to do. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to, or that they’re ignoring the concern; it generally just means that the person who is busy working on the solution is too busy doing so to stop and explain what they’re up to. Or, in the case of more conceptual concerns, there’s the factor that what they’re working on now is only the bottom layer of what will become a much larger interaction between systems; so they have to be careful not to promise results that they’re not ready to deliver.
Going back to the journey metaphor, wherein we’re still stopped in Rivendell loading up the carts for the next leg, we’ve reached the point in the chapter where some of the characters want to race off and let the baggage train catch up (that would be the group of players who want to see more stuff pushed to unstable branches), there’s another group who want to get all the info they can about what’s next and where the challenges will be, and make plans to tackle them (that’s your group), and there’s a third group which wants to focus on the tasks at hand and on loading up with a diverse range of supplies and skills to tackle whatever is coming. I’d say I’m in that third group; although I’m very interested to know the same things that the second group want to know I also know from experience that no plan will turn out exactly as expected. So, I’d rather focus energy on the task immediately in front of us, take the opportunity of a break while we have it (hence my recent suggestions to put the focus on the community’s creations rather than the features currently in progress) and let the scouts/vanguard do their thing. Then, we can have those answers the second group seeks, and get moving ASAP and by the most direct route which will keep the first group as happy as we reasonably can keep them. We’re on an epic journey here, it’s the march to Mordor not the race to reach Gondor – actually, we’ve just done the race to reach Rivendell (i.e. that period of rapid content creation which led to the Engineer and so on), hence the need for rest and recovery.
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For those of us who are here for the “action scenes” (i.e. getting hands-on with the game), now might be a good time to take a break and come back when the action picks up again – don’t worry, there’s very little chance you’ll miss when it does pick up again! But those of us who want to stick around for this chapter should be aware that there’s a lot of dialogue and exposition coming up, with not much in the way of plot progress… it’s only once everyone is caught up on where the story is going that we can get back to the action.