there was a whole section of the forums for that.
Friction. If you want something to be used, you reduce the number of steps required to the bare minimum. By saying people could make their own forum threads or blogs about AE arcs, rather than explicitly put such structure directly into the game where a player had direct access to it at the moment they were browsing the AE the devs were signalling - deliberately or not - that it wasn't worth anyone's time. Whenever someone would say that something didn't need to be made any easier for players (in user interface terms, not game difficulty) because all that was required was X, Y, and Z, I would remind them that the methodology I used to decrypt the devs coded message contests could be expressed in exactly the same way. For that matter, writing your own City of Heroes clone is just a matter of doing X, Y, and Z enough times in the right order.
Human user interface design was not one of Paragon's strong suits. But to be honest, MMO game developers rarely excel at this. Its almost as if there's a conscious decision to believe that since the game itself is supposed to be challenging, its ok if the interface to the game itself is also challenging. And its one of the reasons I believe game development is still in its barest infancy even compared to software design in general. There's a backwardness to it that isn't just accidental but almost embraced.
I've been playing Star Trek Online recently, and STO has had a very persistent bug that crops up under different circumstances where everything in your power tray would either reset or disappear, forcing you to put it all back. There is a way to save that configuration, but its problematic and can itself sometimes mess up - its also tied to, in City of Heroes terms, saving your build, so imagine if occasionally your power trays would randomize themselves and using an old save of their configuration reslotted your entire character with whatever enhancements you had back when you last saved, emptying those slots if you no longer had that enhancement. Yeah, its like that (a little more complicated than that because the differences between enhancement slots and devices in the two games affecting available abilities, but close).
For years, STO has had this bug. For years, they haven't put in the basic capability to save the tray, and only the tray, like we had in CoH. In any other field of software, this would be embarrassing to the literal point where it ought to drive at least one programmer to fix the bug on their own time, lest they be unable to show their faces in public. In any other software field, this would be considered a show-stopper bug that was at the very top of the bug list, compelling programmers to do nothing else but fix it, or find a new career placement in the food service industry. But in the MMO space, its not even particularly unusual in its severity.
To me, as a professional, that's dismaying.
