You must be on day 6 of work experience then?
Been in the IT field for almost 10 years. Started out as help desk, then desktop support, then as a lower level engineer (windows admin) and now I'm a senior level windows admin/system engineer. Being in the IT field is a thankless job (I get a paycheck, that's all I care about, I don't need praise). But I'm not naive. If people aren't complaining it's usually because things are working properly. People don't come up to me and rave about how great our email system is, or how great the network is, or how it was really sweet when they tried to do something and it worked as intended.
The only time you hear any feedback is if you are fixing a problem for someone and you do a good job (or are friendly or exceed their expectations), or when something is not working and they are bitching that it's not working properly .
The gaming community are people, just like the ones I work with (OMG people play games AND work?!). I imagine most people are like me, they never went to a gaming forum to praise the game and developers, even if some people do that, it's a tiny percentage of people (only reason I've ever been on a gaming forum is because I work with computers and have down time while I'm getting paid...I wouldn't be here if I wasn't getting paid to). If people are unhappy with a certain aspect of a game they like, they'll be sure to let the forums and developers know. For every person bitching on the forums about how the mod is broken, there are 10 people in game who love it who don't realize there are people on the forums who are complaining about the things they think work very well.
I've seen so many games fall into the trap of hearing an overwhelming majority of forum posters complaining about a part of their game, they feel obligated to appease these people. When in reality these people are just a drop in the bucket, they represent maybe 1 or 2% of the people playing the game. So many games have been nerfed and fucked with so much that they lose what made them great in the first place.
Basically, the forums/community don't give you a good representation of the sentiments of the people playing the game. They are a very small percent of the people who actually play the game.
