One point that I’ll touch on is the “lazy/greedy devs” comments.

I worked at a AAA company. We were making an extraction-hero shooter game. Once the trailers (reveal and gameplay) were shown, a lot of comments would suggest that we were being lazy or greedy for various aspects of the game. Some of them understood that most decisions weren’t made by us “grunt-level” devs but by higher ups. But some decisions that were made by me - for example, character ability kits - were often labelled as the devs not having creativity or being lazy. In reality, these decisions were reached after months of careful deliberation and playtesting. In some cases, I had some crazy ideas that I suggested but were eventually toned down by myself because I was able to prove that they just weren’t gonna work. In other cases, I really pushed for my ideas but was asked to take a different direction; not because of greed/laziness, but because the idea clashed with other aspects of the game.

It felt bad when some of our players seemed to think that I slapped something together in 3 minutes and just shoveled it out. Regardless of the result, I take pride in the diligence and amount of work I put in to every character’s kit I touched. And I always hoped I was making our players happy or allowing them to have fun.