TL ; DR : Add an official community bug tracker, so the community can keep the bugs and suggestions clean. It’s easier, and more beneficial than a forum.
I would like to suggest the addition of an official public bug tracker to the collection of Guild Wars 2 web sites.
A bug tracker is a piece of software, designed to manage the reporting, tracking and solution of bugs, and change/feature requests. Users can create issues, such as “No explosion in forging the pact” and then add information, such as game version, screenshots, category and more. Admins are capable of merging the issues, marking them as duplicates, changing category, and marking them as completed. When an issue is viewed by a user, they can add their own information on it, along with comments, and can often vote the issue up or down, based on if they wish to see it implemented or not (In the case of a bug, up votes may indicate how widespread the issue is, while on feature/change requests, up / down vote gets used to agree / disagree with ideas).
I believe that this sort of system would allow the community to manage much of the complexity of bug tracking, and keep the way of dealing with it manageable. I see it being implemented much like the wiki, with Arenanet employees managing it from the very top, but with average users being the ones adding much of the content. In an ideal world, it would be tied into the internal bug tracker, allowing issues to be public, private or both. In this way, we could see the actual updates on issues, while Arenanet could still keep sensitive information private. I can however understand the security and privacy risks associated with this, and imagine it will not be implemented.
Arenanet could use the information from the bug tracker to prioritise fixes, or changes based on votes. Of course, they will have the final say, but it may give them a more informed picture of the community, as forums tend to be most active when people are negative. It will also help get more info from the community on bugs, as there will be text fields prompting the user for rarely offered information like the version it appeared in and so on.
All the same, a bug tracker would provide a place where the community could easily remove nonsense posts, that do not add to the information about the bug (“Good luck getting this fixed, Anet r 2 busy selling the gemstor to the aliens to care about fixing bugs, Am I rite?”), merge issues and keep only one active issue for each bug, while additionally offering a voting system for suggestions.
If other people could vote on this, I would appreciate it, but since we are on a forum, I guess posting with your opinions and suggestions will suffice.
PS:
Looking at developers of other games that I have enjoyed being a part of the community for, I see a large level of openness and interaction with the community, especially when it comes to development. CCP and BIS are both companies that have a very open dialog with their players, and both seem to me, to be better for it. Arenanet are not quite there yet, in my eyes. We were given the official blog post on ascended gear only 3 days in advance of the patch. While some things need to be kept secretive to be fun for players, I think the introduction of a new tier of gear was something that would have been better served by a very comprehensive post, weeks or months in advance. The way it was handled, a bullet point, and a tweet, with no solid information, lead to much of the confusion, and anger about the gear. There was always going to be people made happy or upset by the introduction of new gear, but the way it was handled meant people didn’t have a lot of information, and that means crazy speculation.
(edited by Zalifer.6140)