The way some of the SMITE community acts in this critical time of transition is concerning, and ultimately damaging to the reputation and chances of SMITE 2's success.

For what it's worth, I think it's absolutely ok to nitpick and it's totally fine to have criticisms of minor things.

Even if you think something might be WIP, I think the team would rather hear what you don't like about something than to have people ignore it under the assumption it just will be changed. Game dev happens in iteration, and the current alpha is showing a lot of iterative steps.

Saying something 'looks bad' is still valid criticism. It's not detailed criticism, which can always be more helpful for sure. For an example of what I mean by that:

"This god looks bad" - Criticism
"This god looks bad, to me it looks a little flat color-wise." or "This looks bad, the ability visuals are way too flashy and I can't see anything" - More detailed criticism

Hearing 'This god looks bad' doesn't give any specific action points, but it does clue us in. If a huge number of people are saying a specific thing looks bad, then it becomes a question of 'Is this something that was a WIP? Is this something we already have plans to iterate on? Do we need to change direction here?' etc.

But I don't think anyone's beholden to giving super detailed criticisms, and I don't think it's right to hold them accountable to it. A lot of game dev is putting something out there and being able to take some negative criticism on the chin and fix up what you can. If people never tell you what they don't like because they don't want to post at-length about it, then you run the risk of an alternative that is far worse. If nobody ever really complains about something, and just assumes it's being worked on quietly in the background, for example. They may totally be right and that thing gets a big change in a couple weeks. Or that might be a reason for it to go overlooked, since nobody has ever said they didn't like it, and there's a ton of other things that need doing.

Sure, I would encourage detailed feedback when you can give it! But I wouldn't just immediately dismiss people saying they hate how a thing looks or that something is boring, etc. The only kind of negative feedback that is truly useless are the super vague things like "game bad" or statements that are just borderline harassment.

We want feedback! I've been poring over a lot of posts in our discord, in stream VODs and our survey data all day looking for bugs and organizing feedback. So please keep leaving it!

Don't get me wrong - Ideally people would give feedback as detailed as they can. I'd absolutely encourage people to try and voice exactly why they don't like these things.

However, I would discourage telling people to not leave feedback that isn't detailed - or to characterize it as nitpicking or bad. Because it's far more likely to just stop them from giving feedback at all than it is to improve anything. Some of those players might not even know how to describe what it is that is making them feel that way, too!

As far as that second question, things are very subjective. 100 people saying "this looks bad" COULD mean 100 different things, but at the same time, if it did actually mean 100 different things then we'd likely never address those 100 different things separately, since some would inevitably be at odds with one another.

But the vast majority of the time, when we've got a huge contingent of people saying something looks bad, we can gather that something is wrong, and that we need to look into why. Maybe that thing wasn't finished and is truly a WIP. Maybe that means we need to solicit more feedback on that specific thing. We've added questions to our surveys geared specifically towards things like this (it helped us nail down the feeling of movement/controls specifically). Maybe we need to look a bit deeper and find someone who did leave some very detailed feedback that a bunch of people are agreeing with, etc, etc.

Yup, that's a good summary!

If you've got a something you see as a problem, it's always helpful to know what your view of that problem is exactly. But pointing out the problem even if you can't fully explain why you think that way is still useful! After a long time in game dev, I think any dev would tell you that giving feedback is unironically a skill - and I wouldn't expect anyone to be perfect at it.