Just don't go to far, communities constantly rage about changes that are actually good or suggest/demand crap that is a bad idea.
I tend to agree with this. Case in point: Mass Effect 3 and the ending debacle. Was it bad? I thought it was. I like the ME series and have played 'em all, and it was by far the worst ending of any of them. But that said, to actually expect/demand a new ending is a little overboard. After all, the game itself was fun from a pragmatic standpoint. Often times, if a game has a bad ending, that's where fan-fiction comes in.
The main time I side with communities raging is when a game is chock-full of bugs, or has unfinished features. In this department, I would hold up as examples The War Z disaster (which revealed a sort of laziness on the part of Steam to actually confirm what the game could do and offer), as well as Red Orchestra 2 (incredibly buggy at launch, still not overly stable), and Never Winter Nights 2 (game-breaking bugs and progress halting bugs galore). But the problems have to be big. My main gripe with Diablo III wasn't the real money auction house
per se, or the always-online issue, or even not getting to play the first 16 hours because of clogged servers: most of that stuff they either acknowledged ahead of time, or was to be expected. No: my main problem with Diablo III was the way they constantly patch the game for 'balance issues', which seems likely a scheme to make people have to constantly buy new stuff on the RMAH as whatever is working gets nerfed into the ground. That's where my issue with the game is.
Diablo III is the perfect example of when a real issue (constant, almost needless patching and 'balancing' to make people run back to the real money auction house) gets buried under a bunch of garbage people should have already read about or expected (the Error 37 or whatever, along with the always-online stuff).
But ultimately, Diablo III, to me, is an area where a micro-transaction-like system is too easily exploitable. Imagine if in TF2, the optional weapons (like the Kritzkrieg) were not patched and balanced every 6 months or more, but were patched and 'balanced' every six weeks (or less).
And War Z is more of the same. Any time you have a multiplayer game where you can pay real money for items you either lose (War Z) or have 'balanced' (Diablo III), that's a breeding ground for distrust between consumer and corporation. And in both cases, you see people claim (as I tend to) that the system gets abused: lots of War Z players thought the game's own creators were cheating to kill other players and make them have to rebuy items (though I'm not sure there's enough proof to prove this 100%), while Diablo III gets accused of doing exactly what I have accused it of.
Micro-transactions work best when the items are cosmetic, or at least are permanently owned and rarely messed with. Which is what makes the system work in Guild Wars2 and TF2.
Some of them need to really be brought back, if under different names, and updated for the times.
