johanrayne said:
this is my suggestion: that the head of development personally read the forums and gather feedback personally. so that when players say that the update that money, time and effort was spent on, is not to their liking and that they want you to fix the spacing problems created by the update resulting in scroll bar issues and that the information display is cluttered ugly and distracting and we want that display removed, the man in charge can decide the best way to do his job, (that he gets money to do). then players with feedback on the update won't be told to make suggestions that will be denied on the account that it does not fit the vision and direction of the company spending time, money and effort putting out the product.
maybe have a secondary development crew to put out fires created by the main development crew.
you could call them ninjas.
EDIT:
In our company each employee has his own tasks. We all work as a big team and rely on each other's help and experience. Most of the working processes in our company require cooperation of several departments.
When it comes to gathering player feedback or suggestions CMs do their part of job (interacting with players and passing the info through the right channels). Game analytics, project managers, developers, game designers - they also have their parts of the job. They rely on CMs help in getting the direct info from players, and on other departments that get the numbers, graphs, and other kinds of information.
They don't interact with players, they don't visit our Communities. But not because they aren't interested, but because they rely on CMs. They know we'll give them the whole info right in time, so they can concentrate on their part.
The teams I've mentioned work directly on the new games, big features and small improvements. It takes a lot of time and effort to calculate the feature balance, create huge documents with specification and balance, tasks that will be assigned to devs, and to code all that, fix bugs found by QA, etc.
It's totally understandable that you want to be closer to the game development process. And from our side, we started making some steps to give you some info directly from development teams. Like our live streams about the new features. And there will be even more of them. That's what we can do. However, we can't ask any of the teams engaged in game development to communicate with players on Forums.
I hope this information was helpful :)