In a way, we are “forced” to work together. You can work together with the community and developers while you continue to play Halo, or you can stop and leave. The difference is what work people think should be done. To some, the Halo franchise needs a heavy hand to make Microsoft/343i understand that today’s Halo content does not live up to their expectations. To others, 343i is doing well and they don’t want any big changes.
These two sides both getting their message across is them working together, I think. Not everything has to be presented as a shade of grey where the people who hate 343i need to give a list of things they like along with the list of things they don’t, and likewise those who love 343i’s games don’t need to try and look for flaws to balance out their enjoyment.
It’s up to 343i to look at the big picture, and both sides, however polar opposite, are part of that big picture and are important contributors to Halo’s future.
Compromising is great when it’s possible, but when you’re dealing with this many people it’s just not reasonable to expect it. No one is going to accept “Okay 343i, you can keep X in the game if we can take out Y”, because in this large a community every single possible X and Y are going to be a major part of many people’s opinion of the game and be that one thing which they won’t compromise on, even if they would be willing to compromise on a hundred other things. Discussions of compromise only work within small groups, hence why it’s just up to 343i to sift through everything that’s being said. That’s also why everything that can be said should be said, no matter how far to one side or the other a person is on the love/hate spectrum.
Obviously, all feedback is best given respectfully and best directed at actual points of discussion about the games and not the people making or playing them. Even the people who are too immature to do that, though, can have something to contribute to the conversation. So rather than encouraging people to change how they look at things, or try and meet in the middle, I’d rather encourage people to change how they state their opinion and how they convey the way they see things to others. In the end, the more feedback the better, although the less whining and less dogmatic fervor that feedback is tangled in the better. That’s the responsibility of the individual, though, and isn’t a matter of cooperation.
What Halo 5 is praised for came out of complaints from Halo 4, so I’d say the complaints were good. The backward steps Halo 5 took seem to have been because the complaints drowned out everything else, though, so I’d say more praise would have been good. We need both, but it’s not up to individual people to provide both at the same time.
The common ground is we all want what’s best for Halo, no matter what each person thinks that “best” looks like. In that sense, it begins and ends with each person, regardless of stance on issues, just taking time out of their day to participate in the community.