OMG - I played that so much, while playing hookie from school. Hadn't thought about it in years.

By the time you started looking at WOM, there was very little of the original design left.  The nice thing about the Internet is that stuff lives on forever.  The early discussions and forums posts (including the early concept drawings, one of which I posted here) are still out there somewhere.  You can easily look at the image I pasted and the final game and see how different they were. 

It has often been the case that forum users overstate their role in the development process.  You don't use forum beta testers as your primary QA. Even in terms of forums, we have forums within forums that most users don't see where interim builds are released under NDA. And beyond that you have the external QA group and then the internal QA group and so on.  This particular forum is just one layer of a larger process.

The problem with WOM was that it lacked any sort of project management process. That led to everything such as poor internal QA, haphazard inclusion of fan requests, scattershot implementation of content, etc.  It had over 3 years of development. It wasn't rushed. It was just managed more like a hobbyist effort and it was far too ambitious to be run that way.

Not "listening" to the public forum posters was not even remotely a significant issue.  You can, on any game, always find someone who wrote a forum post demanding X or Y be done.  That is, after all, the nature of forums.

Now, bear in mind, I am not in charge of Fallen Enchantress. I didn't design it and I don't run the project.  It's Kael's baby.  My role is to help ensure his vision is realized.  So my agreeing or disagreeing with someone's idea is just my own 2 cents.

You still seem to rather flippantly dismiss what was rather large. When you announced your plans to go gold it wasn't "someone who wrote a forum post". I remember reading the forums that week and skimming the titles of threads and just going "oh my". It should have been a red flag moment, and why can't it happen again?

Clearly you had ears to the forums for things you liked. But it seemed like putting blinders on when you already asked before hand how the economy should be and got responses after the fact as well.

If you had seriously been "listening" to the beta testing forums here, you would have rethought a lot of things such as going gold in the condition you did. You didn't "Filter out the noise", you basically filtered it in. As I said before it isn't about incorporating ideas which you seem to be hung up on as all you use these forums for, it was that you didn't have the good tester communication. I hope you are not taking it personally, but it was a massive failure of War of Magic that you should fix. Otherwise there is no point to even having the FE public beta test forums at all and they only add detrimental off the wall ideas and aren't used as a source of mass feedback & reactions.

Aye, the basic foundation of the Dynasty system was fine.