We are just giving everyone a chance to provide their feedback and being sure at 100% that someone in the office will read it as it is, with no filters or additional steps (Community > Team > CM > LCM/Game Design) but directly Community > Game Design.
If you want to try it out you know where the application form is, if not... as I said, we did everything possible, it's your choice to not share your opinions and to see some game changes that you may not like, and we don't even know you don't like it before working on it.
First of all: GPC is not giving everybody a chance to provide their feedback - everybody
has the chance to provide feedback from the day she or he joins the game. There are lots of players who have not taken that chance for years - you have never seen them in the forums, you have never read any feedback or suggestions provided by them, and now (in several markets) they randomly reply to an ingame message announcing a player council, writing their first posting ever in the local public forums, telling us how interested they are and always have been in the development of the game (an interest they have hidden very well for the past up to 7 years), and how they are just the right person(s) to represent their community. And some of them have never been spotted again after having provided their application.
I cannot understand why active participation in community life and in the forums was and is not among the main criteria for application for the GPC if such a thing is intended. You say "we did everything possible" - no, you didn´t. You did not talk to the active forum users or DevBlog readers before coming up with a ridiculously complicated three-body-concept with an equally complicated structure of rights and obligations, rotating access(es) and other features more apt for administrative bodies or political parties.
You cannot claim that users who have been providing feedback and suggestions for years (and continue doing so) are now chosing "not to share your opinion and to see some game changes that you may not like, and we don't even know you don't like it before working on it" only because they feel steamrolled by a concept that had not even been discussed with the players beforehand, and thus doesn´t encourage any trust in any new or advanced kind of "cooperation".
You don´t know whether we like new features before you are working on them (and in most cases even implement them)? Well, that has been IG´s main problem all along, and IG alone can solve it - in communicating with all users interested in communication, in not only reading but discussing the feedback provided with all users providing it - and not only with some unknown applicants who have just woken up once in all their Grepolis years (or do not even find the time to apply but let others do it for them as I have just seen in the Italian forums - where none of the "applicants" so far will get my vote, that´s for sure!)
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- Make sure that each market is represented, even if no local representatives were found for the respective term (ideally through beta)
- Beta representative shall listen to all comments made on beta forums, no matter which language version the respective player might be coming from originally
Even though I know the reason(s) and share the serious doubts of the previous speakers, my heart is aching when I see that there is no Beta application so far. Not one.