I imagine the bigger difference you're dealing with is scale. Scale, and professionalism.
You and the guys you work with work there. The vast majority of people involved with making Shadowrun products for CGL? This is a side job for us. We're professors, or Amish cab drivers, or college students, or programmers, or who knows what else. We don't get to work on Shadowrun forty hours a week. We squeeze Shadowrun in around the edges of our real lives, between being husbands and fathers and teachers.
Also, we don't have a single, unified, mental image. Shadowrun's got a lot of canon, and a look at any gaming forum, anywhere, will show you just how many different ways people can interpret that canon. I mean, hell, how many threads here or on Dumpshock have flamed out over someone interpreting a line of text one way, and someone else interpreting that same line of text another? Disagreements happen. There's no Bible for this that we've got secret access to. We're all different people, working part time, trying to hammer out the details of a world that we've all got our own ideas about.
But, most importantly? We don't really work together when we do work. I live in Texas, Bull lives in Ohio, our nominal boss, Jason Hardy, lives in Chicago (I think?). Hell, Patrick and I live in the same state, but that state is Texas, so we're actually about four hundred miles away from each other. We all see each other maybe two or three times a year, at GenCon or Origins or something. So in addition to our SR writing not being what most of us do full time, in addition to all of us having our own ideas of what the game and the game world look like (versus what they SHOULD look like), all of us do so in our own little bubbles, sharing ideas as much as we can (via text); we have an email group and a bunch of other stuff, sure, but we're not all sitting in cubicles next to each other, having face-to-face meetings once a week to talk things over.
Now -- here's the important part -- I don't say all this to make excuses for us. I'm explaining part of why I think the mistakes get made, and how they can slip through the process, but please believe me, I'm not making excuses. I'm not saying those mistakes are okay. I'm saying how I believe the problems arise, but I'm not saying these problems are okay. Believe me, no one is more aware than we are that fans pay money for these books. We have all paid money for books. We're all gamers. We all love Shadowrun. We all bought Shadowrun books before we started writing for them, and we all still buy Shadowrun books now (I just placed an order at my FLGS this afternoon, in fact). We know that we're making a product people pay money for, and we know mistakes get through, and no one kicks us -- no one -- as hard as we kick ourselves.
I joked with CanRay over on DS when he first smacked his forehead, realizing he'd forgotten something for Shadowrun 2050, and as he scrambled to try and write some errata for it. "Now you're in the club," I said. No one is as hard on us as we are, on ourselves. Writing his own e-book that sold pretty well on drivethrurpg.com didn't make him a veteran, was my implication. Fucking up and trying to fix it? That's when I felt like an industry professional. Not when I got lucky and did well, but when I screwed up and did everything I could to fix it. My name is on the books I write, and I take that very seriously.
And that's what makes a comment like yours suck so bad, Sichr. Not the body of the post, no. I was in this very thread with everyone else, just chatting, bullshitting, sharing my (very critical) thoughts on the game, same as everyone else. And then I read your post, and I thought there were some cool ideas there. The reason I think most of those things (the higher-tech stuff) aren't in the game, to be honest? Because they make it too sci-fi, and not cyberpunk enough. They move the tech level up a little too far, maybe, so lots of us have shied away from it.
But then you closed your post like you did. You said no one from CGL cares what you're saying (despite the fact that you know full well this forum, and plenty of other gaming forums, are crawling with us). You said as long as we get our money we don't care (which is even funnier when one considers how very little most of us get paid). You said none of us want to correct the flaws or glitches, or innovate (when several of us have gone out of our way to write up our own errata, to frantically try and correct mistakes that have made it through). You put words in our mouths, and said that we called our fans nerds instead of ever listening to them. And, frankly, fuck that.
When you say things about everyone at CGL, you're talking about a whole lot of people. People from all over the world, from all sorts of economic backgrounds, with all different levels of education and training and professionalism and experience. And when you lump us all together at all that's bad enough, but when you lump us all together in order to say some pretty despicable stuff, like you did? Stuff that says we're (somehow) all in this just to take money from our fans that we all secretly hate, and that none of us really care about the books we write, and how we don't listen at all to what our fans have to say? That's pretty shitty, and fantastically wrong.
If you want to make the Shadowrun writers stop coming to a forum, and make us hate the fans, and make us want to tune out all criticism, and make us stop listening to fan opinions? Comments like that, my friend, are the perfect way to do it.
