But do we know how long those players have been playing? We know that there are a lot of downloads. How do we know that these aren’t new players that are continually coming in but not being retained?
It feels weird to me that the influx of players would be 1) constant 2) consistent in terms of version representation and especially that new players would enable feedback while it's apparently a hidden feature.
I mean sure people can be convinced to work on specific stuff but most of the time you just end up draining their energy faster. I'll agree that my experience here might be different than elsewhere.
I don't think the document does that per se. For me that specific line is not from the document itself, which I cannot say I know by heart. It's mostly how devs feel or are made to feel about the game.
If we followed the design doc the game would be much more different than it is now. @Wijitmaker told me it's completely off with regards to what they had in mind at the time.