“Though the ‘right moment’ for that communication (today) has already come and gone, what I would like to see now is for Kate Paiz to address the player communities.”
I want to echo this, because I too was really disappointed to hear nothing but silence from Turbine yesterday on this. I’ve teased Paiz before for only coming out of her hidey-hole once a year to do a producer’s letter and then being invisible for the rest of it, but egads that needs to end. Players need to see strong and communicative leadership from their MMO studios, especially during times of crisis.
Bio Break 
There are likely dire times when the player bleed rate would be higher with communication.
This sadly has always been the issue over at Turbine. Maybe they will take the player council out to dinner or phone them all personally and maybe we will get the good fortune of some second hand news about it.
The problem with no communication, even if the news is bad, is that players will come up with their own “information” anyway. You will have the doomsayers who declare they know the company is going down, you will have people arguing back and forth over “evidence” like items added to a cash shop, how many people were in chat, or how many times their cat walked away from the computer.
At least with communication, the speculation spam is reduced (never eliminated, since the tinfoil hat crowd will always suspect the company is lying anyway). I think I’d rather have bad news than dead silence.
This just makes the timing of Paiz’s earlier letter and the “Ask the Dev Team” stuff even worse. I think most of my kin looked at the list of no’s and never’s in the 42 questions as a really huge waste of our time. Now, we get a round of layoffs immediately afterwards, and how can you NOT sit and think.. Wait a second. No expansion. No to basically everything group content related we asked about. Now layoffs. So what exactly is going on? Will be hugely shocked to see anything from Paiz or Sapience about it. Well, Sapience criticizing people for not being sad at the loss of jobs? Of course he scolded folks on the forums for it. Here’s the thing though- what else are they supposed to talk about? Gotta take control of the narrative, and that’s something the LOTRO team has always been bad about.
Sapience didn’t criticise people for not being sad, he criticised people for making stuff up in the wake of the layoffs, which ironically is exactly what you just did. One person even crafted a fake ‘I lost my job’ message by Sapience himself, which is about as despicable as you can get.
As for the 42QnAs, I can quite easily NOT sit and think that because for me group content isn’t the be all, end all of LOTRO. There were plenty of interesting things noted in those responses, perhaps you and your kinmates simply didn’t care about them because you were entirely focused on the group stuff.
But yes, I don’t expect a statement by Kate and definitely not by Sapience. Frankly at this stage I don’t see the situation improving at all no matter what they could say.
Thanks for the pingback. I’m glad we can agree to agree.