I agree that BGA offers a good value for money deal. It's one of the reasons I still have premium, in spite of some of the issues I have with decisions that have been made. Others have revoked their premium membership on the basis that those decisions make the value proposition no longer good enough.
Honestly, I make most of my decisions on the basis of the value proposition and often ignore less than ideal customer service. I've had plenty of instances where a company has delivered less than ideal service. I complain, and I tell them what I would expect instead (which is often better communication) but I honestly doubt many of my complaints are actually acted on in any way, and the frustrations I experience are still happening to others, and may impact me again at some point. If I get tired enough of the customer service issues, I will look into other providers (where a service is necessary and alternatives exist) or discontinue my association. Value for money and a good customer experience are two different elements that both inform my decisions to continue with particular services. The former has a bit more weight with me, but if the latter is bad enough, then a company doesn't get my money.
I've seen some evidence that BGA cares about what it's customers want, with some long-requested changes to tournaments being among recent positive changes. But I've seen a lot of things that people either don't want or actively dislike. In both cases, I've seen minimal explanation around either. Release notes exist, but sometimes don't address things that have been added or removed from the site. Many changes are just randomly "discovered" by a user and commented on in the forums, often with wonderings about how things actually work. That's not good communication. That's not wanting your customers to feel heard - it's nice that they put some features in, but it'd be nicer if they were clear about what they'd done (and conversely, what they may not have done as part of a change) so we don't have to guess.
I've seen some amazing volunteer developers in this community, and some less so. I mean, some have moved on, as is their right, but that tends to leave unaddressed bugs in a game, which doesn't make the players feel very good, even though a volunteer has no responsibility to maintain a game forever (but such is the nature of volunteers). The volunteers here are great, but they're not the ones making decisions beyond for their particular games (and even quite limited decisions there).
So while I don't wholly agree with this thread, I do think there's a lot of room for improvement on the part of admin to communicate clearly what they're doing and why, and acknowledge some of the wider concerns. But communicating is work and takes a good amount of effort. They could choose to just stop engaging altogether if they feel it's too hard to have a discussion with their users. Lots of companies do this, possibly because they feel the effort to communicate isn't worth their time. In some ways I get that - many users just want what they want, and aren't very open to discussion either. But personally, I'd rather have the discussion, or at least know why decisions are being made (where possible).
