Well, given the sheer insanity that occurs in the Forums, I think you may be taking GC's kidding about that sort of thing a bit too seriously.

Dude.
As much as a scientific approach is doomed to failure, so is design by player comittee.

The problem is that MOST players are compromised in terms of objectivity. This includes business concerns, other classes's concerns as well as their perception of their own class.

There are posts that I have seen that try really hard to sound reasonable, but are just missing the point in terms of the wider game and how silly they sound in that context.
e.g. The numerous threads from DKs angry about the nerfs and using arguments such as how much they enjoy playing them now and how they are supposed to be a "hero" class so being OP compared to everyone else is fine. They totally miss the point about their effect on other classes and their enjoyment, about the meaning of hero class and that, like warlocks, the only reason they are OP is because it sold boxes as yet another reason to upgrade and/or start playing wow again.
I would even argue these particular people even miss the point about why they are enjoying the class.

As anyone who has had anything to do with committees or large groups of people will vouch for: if you try to give everyone what they want you will fail, and hard.

Even if you succeed you will realise that people don't actually know what the NEED, they only know what they WANT.

Fufilling WANTS only ever leads to more wants and dissappointment that the want did not satisfy them as much as they hoped. It is good to fufill these when you can and they make sense, but they are not the priority.

Fufilling NEEDS is that only way to go. Unfortunately asking people is not the most efficient way of working out what these are! You should, as GC points out, LISTEN to what people say. But then you take it all with a grain of salt and pull information from other sources and THEN make a decision.

"But that doesn't mean that player suggestions and advice should be treated like a horde of bothersome gnats.'

Dude, have you ever read the official forums? Any developer taking suggestions from there should get axed. Reminds of the ctrlaltdel comic:

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comics/20080227.jpg

This strikes me as the sort of arrogance that causes large, successful companies to ossify. Blizzard is pretty indifferent to what customers want; thinking they know best. I can't think of another culture where customer 's complaints are ridiculed as just QQ. Each customer is the world expert on what *they* personally like in WoW. No opinion or spreadsheet of Blizzard has the slightest relevance to that customer's opinion. Blizzard thinking the customer needs to adjust their desires to match what Blizzard is serving this month seems the height of arrogance. Oh well, I think history is full of industry leading companies that lost interest in being customer-driven and thus no longer had to worry about dealing with being a leading company.

I think the situation is hopeless in the short term; Bliz will do what they think is best, regardless of their customers' opinions. The question is once Blizzard misses a couple of quarterly growth forecasts, perhaps even has a subscriber decline, will management bring in some adult supervision in time? The alternative is to just relabel WoW a "cash cow", slash the budget, and invest in other products that are growing.

The good news is with all the recent change classes for change sake plus the ancillary annoyance of the decline in software quality ( how could you ship software that crashes when WG is over, has ice stone melting, and won't authenticate Macs ) and senselessly discouraging addons, means I am far, far more indifferent to whether WoW continues or not.

Hagu:

You are living in the very naive world of the consumer.

Every company thinks of customer complaints this way. have you ever seen how people talk on help/support desks when the phone is off? And they are TOTALLY RIGHT in thinking about it this way. Customers that use forums and ring in do so with a purpose 80% of the time and they are jaded and/or compromised in their view of things.
Blizzard are just being more honest than most and calling a ranting, whining little child what they are is certainly not a crime.

Every person is an expert in their own wants, yes. The fallacy of this me-me-me generation is that they (aka: you) think that that somehow matters more than it does.
It would be logically impossible to design this game by player committee because of all the contradictions. It would also destroy the game. Simple.

Clint Eastwood said it best: "Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one."