sliver-bloglord asked: You didn't actually answer paulapolos' question, so let me try re-wording it: How do you decide which complaints you hear are valid enough to make changes?

It comes down to a bunch of things:

1) As with “bad” cards, is it something we are able to not do? If it has to happen, players complaining isn’t going to stop it.

2) Is it the only viable path? Introducing Standard wasn’t popular, but there were forces that were going to destroy Magic if we didn’t act, so we didn’t have much choice but to weather through the complaints.

3) Is it something that we feel the audience doesn’t understand? Yes, changing the rules (Sixth Edition, Magic 2010, etc.) got negative reaction, but change tends to upset people and there was literally no way for players to understand the new thing without experiencing it. We had confidence that once they experienced it, they’d like it and they did.

4) Is there a long term gain that players don’t understand? Sometimes we’re doing something that takes time to pay off and we weather complaints until we reach the new state.

The rotation wasn’t #1, we could not do it. It wasn’t #2, we had other business options. It ended up not being #3 because players understand rotations and their dislike of them wasn’t because it was a new thing they didn’t understand.

#4 is the one we hoped to hang our hat on, but research showed that we overvalued the positivity of change to the environment and undervalued the negativity of people not being able to play the same deck for a long period of time. It turns out many players have more negative associations with rotations than positive. They understand they have to happen, but they want them to happen at the slowest rate possible.

The TLDR answer is that we have to gauge why players are upset and judge it against whether time will bring about change.