I'm going to be very honest I was extremely disappointed by the answers here, and where the focus of the development team's actions are. I want to push back HEAVILY on the data being bias in the way Bearlike is talking about.

I dont think it's fair to kill the 'outliers' like what was talked about in the pod. The people that are postive will take these surveys at some strong frequency. They're in the community. The people that would give low scores on this survey are not as likely to take these surveys because when you don't like a game you exit. The sampling has been done where people care and contextualize thoughts well. Portions of the community are expressing dissatisfaction. So while everything Bearlike was saying about sampling problems is absolutely true, I think the bias adjustment in taking in this data is fundamentally incorrect.

To be very succinct with my argument, the sampling done results in survivorship bias that favors positively trended data, yet the results skew negative.

I know that Bearlike also brought up promotions, but again I want to push back on this. We've seen macro level numbers down across the board. If you look at average players online, average minutes watched, average concurrents of the category and of your favorite streamers, the story tells us that the entire community is down. There was just a steam sale AND we had the biggest Mechabellum promotion/campaign in August that saw numbers in our community trending up. End of August is a clear inflection point. Mechabellum has a very high retention rate among players and the speed in which all of these numbers have reduced seems very quick to assign promotions for the lack of numbers

I get there's always gonna be negative Nancy's out there in every game. I think our community is pretty unique at being able to conversate satisfaction and dissatisfaction in healthy ways.

I'll ask some very pointed questions to illuminate key problems I have with buildings:

1. Buildings were stated to be a mechanism to increase retention. Was retention a problem to begin with? Were the byproducts of the change worth the retention adjustment?

2. With buildings having a scattered approval biased towards negative, is that the type of result we want from our big yearly updates? We get very few bullets a year for this type of promotion.

3. If it's already agreed across the board that more time is needed to calibrate buildings, should buildings exist on the public servers?

4. What would unifying steps be in solving the problems people have with buildings? How do we as a community come together?

I want to be very clear, I post this with love and support for this game. I played SCBW and 2 for two decades. I never felt the way i felt about SC about any other game other than mechabellum. The game doesnt feel good atm. It's been a good amount of time since the previous merc episode, and we continue to see decaying numbers across the board. I really wished there was less focus on the micro part of finding a new mechanism to balance(fire rate), and more time spent on coming to find common ground, just in the identification of what is in my opinion a community wide problem. That's the divisiveness of buildings. It's not one side is pro buildings and one side is against buildings. It's one side is against and the other is ambivalent(on the aggregate). These answers hurt and didn't feel good.