Quoted from Aurich:
I obviously have no idea what goes on at Stern, but that said, I can't see how they'd win in any way by responding your emails.
Even a little "thanks for the feedback" note will immediately get posted here on Pinside. The language will get picked apart, the fact that there's any response at all will start a back and forth over what it means, should we be doing this for every game now, etc etc. There will be a thread for every game with people posting about how many different email addresses they're CCing ("emailed Dwight, George, Gary, Chas, and Bug Report").
I'm not saying don't do it, do you, not my problem what emails Stern deals with. Just saying, I can't see any upside to them actually responding. At best they'd talk internally and act or not, and probably never acknowledge any changes were in any way prompted by fan feedback.
I've had good luck emailing Stern over the years, however all the emails were focused on very specific concerns/issues. I also tried hard to direct the email to the right person. Emailing Chas for the issues discussed in this thread is off target.
The issue of making Munsters "better" is too general. I'm sure Stern reps are thinking...if you don't like the game, don't buy it!
The 3 year in development KISS update was more actionable, since the KISS "cities" were totally unimplemented. Fortunately, this dropped ball enabled *someone* at Stern to make magic happen (the update totally transformed the game...).
Quoted from TechnicalSteam:
I think Stern should open up the source code a bit more for us and allow the community to make changes to ruleset.
Would make for a great second tier of hobbyist and crowdsourcing. Then you could make your own updates and be proactive.
Unfortunately I don't think this is an option for anyone outside of the homebrew pinball community.
This is a naive idea. For one, the licensee's don't want arbitrary, unmanaged changes to a game. In general, this would lead to an arbitrary number of versions of a game...impossible to support on many levels. The only way open source works is if folks contributing are being managed by the mothership (in this case, Stern). I was one of the open source pioneers in the mid-80's, and understand the development model.