There is a major gap between what Inno Says and what Inno does regarding feedback and players. Something simple like moving a "heal all" button that was obviously an issue took months of complaining to get fixed. Or the GBG matchmaking issue which took months of complaining and being told lies by support (i.e. nothing is wrong, matchmaking is random) before finally fixing it. But when there's the rare something that benefits players, it gets "fixed" practically overnight.
Forge/inno could easily get a small group of players to vet ideas before wasting valuable development resources on them. Instead, arrogant game designers force-feed players their lousy ideas (while having an extremely restrictive DNSL which basically limits suggestions to UI updates only - preventing any real discussion about good, balanced features and ideas).
Reference: PVP Arena, Perks, Event Hub (seriously?! lol), flying n00b trap, Virgo project, 4 copy/paste space ages, heal all, fighting RQs/RQ about limit, multiple Recalcs per day (but no changes to landing zones), lack of in-game rule enforcement, no mobile gvg, no gvg rewards, no gbg balancing, suppressive/oppressive communication restrictions, etc.
A core group of truly top endgame players could help to vet a lot of these ideas as either bad or what could be done to improve them. Instead, inno just re-uses code and mechanics across all their games, and while there's nothing specifically wrong with that, failing to provide a unique experience is a failure.
Juber is lightyears ahead of any other mod or CM that we've seen on the forums but is still forced to withhold the majority of details that players want. We have no timelines, no reasoning, and no sign of improvement moving forward.
In many ways, The players of Forge have become hostages of innogames in this sense - We have invested countless hours (and in some cases huge sums of money) into this game and it is a major social ecosystem for many players - to leave this game would be leaving behind a huge part of what players have built accomplished (and having to start over somewhere else.). On one hand, there is a sense of appreciation for making a fun/great game for many years, but on the other hand, there is a feeling a betrayal that things have gone so far off course from where it was when we started.
There used to be great anticipation about new ages, new GBs, new events, etc. Now, all we have to look forward to are copy/paste ages, time consuming monthlong events every 2 weeks, and garbage features that add no excitement, adventure, or challenge to the game.
Player surveys would help. A less restrictive DNSL would help (at least let players discuss why bad ideas are bad rather than killing them before the discussion starts). A Trello board with status updates about what inno is working on would be huge (many other games have this type of thing). At least we could see if inno was even hearing our feedback in a tangible way.