And this is why there's no possible way we can win: Because no matter how public we make the decisions, no matter how obviously open and random we make it, there will still be people who make bull!@#$ passive-aggressive non-accusations like this:
If you do not believe that the decisions on which regions to glaciate were made entirely without reference to political affiliation or where our characters were located, despite dozens of assurances of this from the dev team, you may as well leave the game now, because you'll never, ever be able to trust anything we do.
Furthermore, this isn't even paranoia, it's just plain wrong:
The Ice has been moving, on average, something like 1-2 regions per week. I know, because I've been the one moving it. Every character in the game can move faster than that.
Finally, to address this:
This was the more considerate plan. Or have you forgotten already that we were talking about simply closing down an island—boom, done, no chance of any survival or reprieve? And anything that runs slower than what we're doing now would still have all the negative effects of losing the regions, but just drag it out over so much longer that it would piss off more people in the end.
All that said, once I can get a couple of current things out of the way (one being the Titan overhaul, the other being a project I'm keeping secret so it can be a pleasant surprise for everyone), I do plan to publicize more of the stuff I'll be working on. That doesn't mean that I'll be sharing everything, or that I'll take everyone's suggestions. As always, while it's good to hear the players' desires, doing everything they want is one of the easiest ways to destroy any game.
One of the most important—and most difficult—jobs the dev team has is deciding which possible courses of action to take in terms of improving the game. That includes everything from minor feature requests to events like the Ice Age. Just because it seems obvious to you that one way of doing things is Teh Bestest doesn't mean that it actually is. (And this part isn't just aimed at bofeng, but rather at pretty much everyone who's ever made or thought of a feature request.)
I feel that the more considerate plan would have been just closing an island. We all were expecting that, as it had been talked over before. This glacier/monster event was never talked about beforehand. We didn't have time to prepare for it, and it affects one set of people on a continent more than another, creating OOC tensions that need not be there.
