I'm not saying it's specifically the case here, but people can do things for biased reasons while claiming - and even telling themselves - they're for noble or loftier reasons. I mean, come on, no one would seriously expect any member of TFP to get a hostile question like "You hate us! Why do you keep fighting us?" and answer "Oh yeah, that's right, hahah eat it loser!". Yeah, no. That's not a serious discussion.
Sticking to facts, we know there was a major change to in A17, with several tweaks in subsequent Alphas. We can look at very specific changes to the code, like TheFlu talking about the slight changes to when and how rage mode is triggered.
The motivations behind that are harder to nail down; players proceed by inference, much as historians look at laws passed to infer past behaviours. For example, this sign
probably didn't go up for nothing - there was almost certainly A Guy.
To go back to the OP, that's why the video triggered such a strong response, because here was actual footage of an actual dev articulating a viewpoint which clearly condemned specific player behaviours, which clearly a lot of players felt strongly about as an overreach.
This isn't so much about whether Rich's specific views were right or wrong (I myself agreed with him on various points), but whether or not those opinions reflect a more general pattern of overly specific concerns about player behaviour, obsessing over details of gameplay while missing larger context, or worrying that players are having fun in the "wrong" way, or even that there is a wrong way to have fun in an open-ended sandbox video game.
I'm not trying to get all on their case, it's very difficult to strike a balance between "we want players to have a very specific experience" and "we want players to be free to do what they like" - that's a tough task to set yourself. Some players, judging by the replies, feel strongly that the game has moved over time from "freedom" to "specific experience", and there is some arguably-objective evidence that this is indeed the case, such as the development of dungeonified POIs (more on this below) changing the way we engage with most of the world. When you attract an audience for X and slowly replace that over time with Y, there will naturally be some people who will wish to stay with X, so you're obviously going to run into some conflicts.
The real question then becomes whether or not the experience can be meaningfully quantified as a net gain overall, something which is very difficult to pin down - some complaints will be disproportionate or unreasonable, players change over time, some drop the game, new ones pick it up. The metric I try to look at myself is player agency: does a given change remove or add player options?
So, for one example, zeds digging downward through dirt neither removed nor added options, no harm, no foul. Dungeonified POIs would theoretically be a net gain in agency, where players gained the
choice to follow the dungeon path, or just ignore it and bash through, except the specific addition of triggered zombies offers players less agency as it is
strictly mandatory to set those triggers off in order to clear the POI and they can only ever be triggered in one way, so a larger change which added some agency contained a seed which removed some. Or everyone's
favourite topic, jars (lol), where the ability to just get water anywhere was removed, which felt to a lot of players like an overall removal in agency because the freedom they gained from the reduction in pointless inventory and time management is less obvious (and the consistency in "no containers" helps newer players too). I myself made a mod to restore the ability to collect water from world sources, but I didn't feel like jar removal was a gain or a loss, it was neutral, even good, and being able to add a little agency back in was a nice opportunity which that change enabled - I could NOT have made a mod to remove jars! So in this case I saw it as a gain.
Zombie AI is a very interesting and complicated part of the game to look at in this way. Has agency been removed or added over time? That's tough, especially when you have to ask if players agreeing to use or refusing to use certain optimizations is granting or denying agency. I think in this case, agency alone isn't enough to evaluate the changes, that you have to look at the challenge, since fighting zombies is at the very heart of the challenge the game offers, but again, the question becomes whether expecting players to self-restrict from "optimal" strategies (i.e. "cheese" bases) is reasonable or a valid design goal, if it increases or decreases challenge, or what.
This is where streamers (or in the old days, forums) come in, in that they are looking at the game in a much more serious way than an ordinary player, so now designers have to contend with the fact that challenges will be solved much quicker than they would independently. They're also prominent individuals - loud voices representing a small number of very skilled players. In trying to design your challenges, do you design around the most talented players, or do you design for the "average" player who may or may not watch streams? Especially when you often have little or no data on how many players watch certain streams or use certain strategies? Players who do not can end up surprised and frustrated by changes to address a strategy which never even occurred to them, or which they already were deliberately avoiding using! It can and does often feel like an arms race in games design where ordinary players kind of get left behind - and believe me, it's a real problem. I have seen games die to this more than once, even when the devs were well-intentioned (and I've seen ones far less well-intentioned in games which heavily feature monetization, but thank god 7D does not have this, and even if they do the expectation is just some cosmetic stuff which is perfectly fine).
On top of all that, dev resources are not unlimited and few video games are perfect (especially ones receiving regular content updates), so of course you hear from players who ask "Why are we focusing on A, when B needs to be fixed?" (often without understanding that different staff work on A and B in many cases - but misallocations do happen sometimes).
So, on the whole, I do think
most devs in
most games genuinely believe they're trying to create the best experience they can, but at the same time dev teams can be small and can't always talk about what they're doing, while players are many and some can be loud. That doesn't always mean the loud mob is necessarily always
wrong however - sometimes a gameplay element feels bad to large numbers of players because, well, it feels bad! - and it takes objectivity and real data to try and figure out whether complaints are valid and what dev decisions in fact generate the most fun for the most players.
I will also say, the most fun games I've played are ones where the devs themselves are having fun. 7D is full of all kinds of silly nonsense I appreciate, the goofball ads, the jokes in POIs you roll your eyes at, the zombie names, the parodies, the terrible puns, the details in a million places (Saddam's shelter as Rekt's hiding place LMAO), or even the hype moments when releasing new systems and experiences which add content and agency; it reminds me that TFP ARE capable of having fun at work, and I hope that spirit is still strong with TFP. Certainly Laz Man always looks like he's having loads of fun making POIs, which is encouraging. I sincerely believe that no one who makes games for a living should be doing so if it makes them miserable all the time - at that point you need to reevaluate your goals, your relationship to your players, and what resources you have at your disposal, whatever you can do to get back to a frame of mind where you're able to have at least
some fun in creating a game for others who also just want to play and have fun.
)
They had some vision early on as they wrote their kickstarter goals.. I don't know how close we're ever going to get to that original vision, or if TFP think they got close, but that feature list defined the game when we bought it. They've obviously been making a game they want the whole time, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
