Hi!
In some of the last topics in this forum I noticed some kind of "gap" between the players and the devs, and often some of them felt misunderstood or treated the wrong way by the others.
Simultaneously, the suggestion forum in its current shape always seemed kind of chaotic and of only limited use.
Now my idea is easy: the devs appoint one (or more) community managers. Those members have task of mediating between the devs and the community. Besides of that, they are "moderating" the suggestion area.
Their tasks are:
- releasing news and information about development progress
- writing official statements and answers to current affairs
- asking "viable" community questions to the developers and posting their answers
The suggestion forum will be newly formed. The old forum will be moved into an archive forum, so that for some time older posts can still be referred to. The new suggestion forum will be divided only in "General suggestions" and "Game Balance". The "Realism" forum is rather pointless, because gameplay and balance are always more important than realism. Yes, in some cases you can make decisions in favour of realism, but those cases are that rare, they don't really justify an own subforum.
In the two remaining forums there will be a sticky topic with a list of all created topics, sorted by idea and the dev's response. In the general suggestion topic it could look like:
Archery - Repeating crossbow [Declined]
Archery - Increase bump range against archers [Accepted, WIP]
Horses - Implement heraldic bard [Impossible]
Horses - Taking damage when hitting solid obstacles [Impossible]
Horses - Picking up a second rider [Declined, Impossible]
Shields - Shieldbash [Discussed]
That way you could press ctrl+F and could search for the suggestion you hve, instead of creating yet another topic about always the same ideas.
The task of the community managers would be to first sort out the totally unrealistic, dumb, retarded and biased suggestions (they get rough instructions from the developers), and have to edit the title of the topic, according to the current state. In regular intervals the CMs brief the developers about certain suggestions, and those give their answers. These answers are forwarded to the topics, and the title is being modified accordingly. If something is techincally impossible or has been declined, the topic gets closed. If the developers are not sure, the topic gets a "discussed" flag, and the developers can follow or even participate the topic, to meet a finaly decision. Accepted suggestions are closed, too. Whenever a suggestion is added or the status of a suggestion changes, the overview topic gets updated, too. (You need a seperate topic with a summary post, because there you can search by ctrl+F, which you can't do in the forum itself, because the amount of topics displayed on one page is limited. You would have to search every forum side an extra time)
That keeps the suggestions rather neat and the developers lose only the minimum time possible to give feedback to suggestions, whereas the community gets constant replies to their suggestions, instead of complaining for weeks that a commonly accepted suggestion is completely ignored by the developers, just to see it implemented in the next patch (as it already happened several times).
But to have this whole CM thing working the developers first need to state a few things, e.g. what kind of game they are planning to make, what's more important to them and so on. How much should personal skill and how much should teamplay have an impact on success? How important is realism? Questions like these.
What do you think? Would the community like to have a few people standing in constant contact to the developers, keeping you always informed? Would the developers like someone to filter all those thread sin the forum only for the important stuff, saving them a lot of time which can be spent developing?
I think the community could benefit a lot from it, given that the CMs are really eager to keep up a stream of information by constantly asking the developers (forwarded) questions, and if the developers would be willing to let the CMs have quite a good insight into the development process.
