: >> "What I did a poor job of articulating because of the nature of
: the intended audience"

: This pisses me off. The thing is, Josh's GDC talk was a terrible postmortem.
: The language that he used to describe the issue that exploded across the
: internet was very external in tone, and described why the weapon was
: dropped using reasons that conflict with those given by David Ellis when
: he said that it was internal staffers who thought the weapon played like
: crap. When your "intended audience" is supposedly game
: developers, this kind of ambiguity and ignored conflict in your team's
: accounts of the problem does not make for a helpful description of the
: process . The problems with the talk had to do with vague and misleading
: language which had nothing to do with "the intended audience."

: Normally this would be a minor thing, just some random guy who happens to
: work at a game development house being sloppy about defending himself on
: the internet, whatever... But what frustrates me about it is that 343i
: ALWAYS does this; every time they apologize for something, they make
: absolutely sure that everyone knows they're patting themselves on the
: back. Their method of dealing with perceived mistakes is to claim that
: they weren't actually mistakes and that their audience (though reacted
: understandably) just doesn't get it. It comes off as opaque and devoid of
: trust. They need to learn that when something does go wrong, the best
: thing is to laugh about it, make fun of themselves, and move on. Rather
: than say that there's a deficiency with their community and trust us™.
: I had hoped that they would have figured this out after the "14 day buy
: and play" bullshit, but while they haven't had anything of that scale
: recently, it still seems to be their attitude.

I thought the whole postmortem was excellent. Very up-front, honest, and self-aware. They didn't shy away from highlighting their mistakes to make things look better (I know that's the point of a postmortem, but they still could have held back in such a public presentation), and they generally seemed to acknowledge nearly all the points that fans have brought up against the game.
It shows that they're aware of the missteps they took. Hopefully this awareness indicates an effort on their part to correct those mistakes the next time around. Given the nature of game sequels, I think it would be impossible for them not to.
I enjoyed the postmortem, and I thought that Josh did an excellent job carrying the whole thing with humility, while at the same time trusting and not backing down from the creative choices that they made as a studio.