EDIT (Damnit, I can't stay away from the edit button lately).
I am sure there are a bit of all kinds of motivations working together. For everyone's benefit
. Here's a guess-list:
- Promotion & Hype (inexpensive way of doing it, except time - people read it and repost on news sites and forums. And we like this better than some unreal trailer close to release)
- Taking the pulse of the community (seeing what they talk about)
- Constructive feedback on WIP presented (for improvement/correct inaccuracies if present - tough crowd here)
- Collecting wishes and good ideas for delivering a better Storm of War (everyone wins)
- Genuine gratitude to community and desire to treat them well (including not promising stuff that won't be there)
- Explaining why things are, or cannot be, a certain way (that is something you almost never see from others - great public relations)
- Maintaining contact can help in recruiting general help from the community
There's so many benefits to this. In fact, I am surprised that developers don't do this as much elsewhere. Maybe the norm is to be bound by contract to silence and let some PR department supply those orchestrated trailers..
If I was Oleg, I think.. the worst thing about this is the language barrier. Imagine for any of you here that you had to communicate in something almost completely foreign to you at first (maybe Chinese? French/German? For those who are neither). Something we did maybe not even read in school. I had it since I was 10 to 18, and the standard was quite high.
Спасибо, Олег.