[lotharbot]

I never was a Civ player, but through involvement in a different gaming community (Descent) I ended up as friends with the guy (Bob "Sirian" Thomas) who led the Civ IV alpha-testing effort. He noticed that they didn't have any inexperienced testers to look for the sorts of things that would make the game hard to understand for new players, so he asked me if I'd be willing to get involved.

In the middle of all of the balance tweaks the expert players were calling for, the devs took the time to listen to my newbie feedback along the lines of "every so often this chart showing political alliances pops up, but I have no idea how to trigger it intentionally" and they added easy-access buttons to the HUD for me. At one point I counted something like a dozen minor UI improvements that had come out of me saying "I don't understand what I'm doing". They, of course, didn't make any game-balance tweaks for me because I had no business even attempting to comment on game balance.

The fact that they knew not merely to listen, but what types of feedback to listen to from which testers, really made the game shine. They listened to experts when it came to strategy, and noobs when it came to discoverability, and all sorts of players when it came to general aesthetics and coolness. IMO a lot of game-design efforts could learn from that.