Fundamentally, you have a relatively straightforward choice in front of you. You can speak up openly and honestly, take responsibility, respond to criticism and deliver your message -- or let others decide what to say about your plans, goals, and policies. The latter skews your customers' perceptions of you beyond all recognition. It distorts otherwise useful feedback beyond all usability. It feeds baseless criticism, but also fosters substantiated negativity.

Substantiated negativity sees likely negative outcomes based on a pragmatic assessment of documented performance so far. Sure, you're probably trying to make this feature, patch, alteration or class-rebalancing/nerf work better than the last ones did -- but unless you tell your customers how, why shouldn't they expect more of the same? After all, there's no available evidence to substantiate a more positive outlook, other than unmanaged and unfounded hopes from your apologists.

This is a long, and difficult road to start, if you are already established and operating a product or service. Take a look at your forums, and at your customers' own blogs. In the absence of information from you, there is truly vast and daunting breeding ground of people telling others what you are, have done and are going to do -- much of it wrong or distorted or occasionally just plain loco, because it has none of your own speech to reference.

Your PR message, the fundamental communication of your actions and your ideals to your customers and would-be customers is being Chinese-whispered into bizarre scenarios and wild, misleading constructs, for no other reason than that you don't speak up clearly and publicly for yourselves. Does that seem frightening? It should. It is.

The good news, is that the process is accretive. The more of your words you put out there in highly visible places and into conversations, the more can be pointed back to, and the easier the road becomes, and the clearer and more transparent you become.

Some of that baseless criticism is never going to go away, because people are people after all. You have the opportunity, however, to control it by simply speaking up. Though, you had better be honest, because attempts at deception or evasion will get you torn to bitter and bloody shreds by your customers.