I'm a member of a gaming community and a recent patch caused some severe breaking changes to the expected behavior of some user-generated content in the game. This has understandably made some users very angry, including very prominent members in the community who are strong advocates for the game and develop a lot of content for it. Some of them have been making gestures that they will stop playing over this change.

The developers don't really communicate with the community at large, but in private conversation (not with myself) they've acknowledged that the changes were a mistake and that they will be rolled-back in the next build. They likely won't take any further action to address the community backlash on this issue.

As a member, I can't speak for the developers, but in an effort to keep the community focused on the quality of the game I've been trying to keep a level head about the problem and catalog the issues and potential workarounds that were generated by this change.

The users that were hit the hardest by this are, so far, absolutely inconsolable. When I presented my efforts to catalog and reproduce the bugs caused by the changes and suggest workarounds, I was met with verbal abuse because I didn't have a workaround for their specific problems. In my brief conversations with them, I don't think they understand that this change has caused multiple bugs with different scopes. They aren't technical users at all, and some are quite unwilling to learn how the game server could have broken their content in more than one way. After investigation, I found that their specific problems don't have workarounds -- the changes will simply need to be reverted by the developers. Until then, it seems like it is all doom and gloom.

Is there anything further I can do to support these hard-hit users, and perhaps help them through this period? Some of these users have made wonderful content that was broken, however temporarily, by this change... and I would hate to see them leave before they can release it publicly.