you have to be open to their expectations and fulfill them as fast as you can, because you no longer do it only for yourselves, but for people who use your "product".
Sounds good written down. But as said countless times, there's already a problem with "as fast as you can" and that problem is called real life. Also, while it is true that players' opinion should be listened to, it doesn't mean devs should let this game become an abominable monster very different from their original idea because of that.
And for me, the best reward is knowing that people enjoy my work and are using it, otherwise there's no point doing it as I could take time to widen my own knowledge in other fields or spend more time earning money or having fun with family. If you really want to do it only for yourselves then close down the forums and make project closed. But as I said, since the moment you went with it to the public and let people use it, creating a community, you no longer do it for yourselves, but for people/community that uses it.
Not entirely true... Players LOVE this game, and enjoy it a lot. That's why they keep coming back to the forum and some even play again after quitting. But anyway they keep posting stupid things such as "wipe or gtfo", "wipe is a myth", "fuck devs and gms", having no respect to the people that makes this game exist and work. If players want devs to really care about their opinion, they should work a bit on their "discipline" a bit.
And the worst thing that can happen to an indie project is loosing player/userbase, and I'm suprised you don't know it yet.
I don't think this game will ever lose its playerbase. As said above, people complain a lot, but even if they don't want to admit it, they love this game.
I'm aware that it's hard to estabilish any deadlines with projects like that, but it's always a good idea to set up at least a basic development plan, and I can say from my very own experience that it's way better to introduce smaller updates but more often, because this keeps users hooked up to the project and they know that stuff is being worked on all the time, than release one big update once a year or even less.
Maybe they first need to do great changes, which demand time to work on, to allow smaller changes? And do you think players are not hooked? I am sure that a great majority of the "wipe is a myth" people who kept trolling on these forums will come back as soon as they know the server was wiped. Some of them even keep cheking the forum, some of them even keep spending time trolling even when they're not playing!
Also the more info from devs about current development status the better. You've got blog and you hardly use it to inform players what's going on right now, what you plan to introduce after wipe and so on. This keeps players eager to play and wait for upcoming release.
It was obviously nice to see, for example, Scypior's posts, and I'm not saying I give no importance to communication, but I think it's better if devs spend their "FOnline time" doing actual work instead of typing blog posts. Why? because with blog posts they try to communicate stuff to the playerbase, but the playerbase will continue trolling. So I perfectly understand if devs don't want to "waste time" typing such posts.
A good idea is to set a fixed shedule for wipes and seperate them from updates development process.
Has it not been said that some updates (such as the upcoming ones) require a server wipe to be implemented?
Right now I made few characters to max level and there's no point in playing this game further with lack of people and having everything achieved.
Oh really? And tell me, what is this "everything" you have achieved? A tent, a base and professions? This game has no real goal. You can keep fighting against other factions over towns, the power struggle will still be there. You can keep annoying people as a suicide bomber if you like that. And if you like crafting and trading, there will always be people willing to buy stuff from you, just because you paid for your tier 3 profession doesn't mean you're reached some "end" and that there is nothing else to do...
you could just shut it down, prepare next wipe, and switch it on again for 2 months, waiting for people to get bored, you would save money you spent paying the server for whole year
I really hope devs do not do this, because there are some people who actually enjoy the game.
