Guild Wars 2

Hmm, with the new “Collaborative dev” threads about to be posted in the various PvE/WvW/PvP subforums, I can’t help but feel that it further sidelines the Suggestion subforum.

Already it’s a bit of a place where topics go to die, buried in a hundred requests for mounts or whatever. Getting a topic moved there pretty much guarantees that there wont be any visibility or discussion of the issue.

According to the sticky on the subforum itself:
“Please also note that the Suggestions sub-forum will not be open permanently. This is a temporary solution until we roll out a better, more organized way to provide suggestions to the development team than using the forums.”

I dont think the “Collaborative development” threads are an improvement. If ANet is serious about “Collaborative development”, then I think serious effort needs to be made in making tools that help sort out feedback, discussion, and suggestions.

Hire some web programmers and do something like this:
http://share.blog.us.playstation.com/
-> This site combines suggestions, discussion, and polling.

HOWEVER, that site makes a few mistakes too, so some additional work is needed.
-> It needs to have the usual forum functionality of quoting and replies.
-> It needs to seperate out +1’s from “I agree with this topic” versus, “I think this is an important issue that needs more attention and discussion.”
-> Topic creators can grey out offtopic posts in comments of their own suggestions. People can still read them, just that it gets de-emphasized. Anyone who abuses this feature to grey out dissenting voices will suffer from reduced credibility since anyone can still read grey posts.

Also, a stronger ANet presence is required:
-> Developers can sticky/earmark topics as, “We are interested in this issue right now, we are working on something in this area, and we want people to discuss it further.”
→ Devs to contribute to the discussion of a suggestion. “We tried this in testing and here’s what happened” / “This is technically difficult, but what about this alternative that’s more possible to implement?” / “We’ve been discussing this in meetings, and here are our thoughts.”
-> Developers can promote Suggestion topics into ingame polls. The ingame poll links to the suggestion topic so people can get more information on the issue if they want.
-> In fact, I’d suggest that ALL ingame polls are directly linked to Suggestion topics. If a dev wants to ask an ingame poll question, it gets added to the Suggestion site first.

Anyways, I guess the Collab Dev forum topics that are coming soon aren’t a bad thing, but just like the suggestions subforum supposedly is, they are NOT an adequate tool for getting player feedback. If ANet is serious about Collaborative Development, they should announce and deploy something like my suggestion as soon as they can.

When I think of suggestions on these forums.

I think of this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhZRi2x8mk0

Azure Prower.8701:

When I think of suggestions on these forums.

I think of this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhZRi2x8mk0

Pure win lol

For a suggestor, being ignored is a worse fate than being killed

Rieselle.5079:

For a suggestor, being ignored is a worse fate than being killed

Think threads as being the ‘suggestor.’ And think being killed is being sent to the suggestion sub-forum. Also think about what color of whom is doing the ‘killing’ of ‘suggestors.’

If Anet will be really interested in making the exchange of suggestions between us and the developers more efficient and collaborative in the end, Anet absolutely has to change alot of how they have to handle with us, the community as also how they have to handle the forums with especially the suggestion sub forums, which would need a huge rework in the first line to allow it at all in overall, that we can provide in an efficient and overviewable quick to understand way our ideas to the developers.

Stage 1 – Brainstorming Area
This would be a suggestion forum, which works exactly like this one now here.
Everyone is allowed to suggest whatever they are thinking about. There would be just only 1 new rule for every suggestor that has to be mainly followed, if one wants to let their ideas gettign recognized by Anet.
Put in the first place of the Thread Title the TOPIC CATEGORY

Example:

[CLASSES]-[NEW] Insert the Name of your idea here.
That way it would be easy to understand on 1 view, what the threat is about.
Threads in this stage would be only open to 2 partitipators to write in them.
The Thread Starter + the Developers being the only ones.

If a Developer has read your Idea, he can then post somethign about it in your thread naturally and share a bit his mind on it.
Its then in the decision of the developer to say either, that he/she gives that idea a “green light”, because its actually possible to make that idea happen really and its nothing thats way over the top and impossible to implementate.
Otherwise the TS would get from the Dev just right away a red light, say some words why that idea is impossible and will close the thread moving it to the recycle bin.

Stage 2 – The Discussion Area is then for all ideas that good a green dev light.

Here will land all potential good and makeable ideas that the devs want to see getting discussed by themself together with the community in a much larger detail, receiving more feedback from as many players as possible.
After some time will the devs end the discussions to overwork all of the impressions, feedback and comments collected to make then an internal live stream discussion among the developers about the idea.
The results of that round of dev talk will be presented than in Stage 3 – The Blogpost.

After the Blogpost, we reach nearly the last stage.
In Stage 4 – The last words – will be made 1 last discussion together with the community about the Blogpost, before anet will begin with the last Stage 5 – The Poll Area.

Every Idea that has went through all of the five stages ending up in the Poll Area will be there for some time, letting a final poll run, in which we players have to make our final decisions at which of ANets presented options we like the most, or something simple as like a final YES or NO decision where the community basically has the last chance to make up for their voices.
However, Polls would be optional and just Anets last way to get a better impression of what the community wants, and what not.

They also need some more community managers extra into the forums, which would have mainly the work here to ASSIST the developers in organizing and managing all the suggestions to keep the suggestion forum as clean and overviewable as possible being sorted in their categories just like an organized database.

Those Community Manager Assistants would also have a secondary job each month.
They together would have to pick out every week a month from all the made suggestions that got a green light by a dev the for them together 10 best ideas of a week.
However these up to max 40 ideas would receive some special recognition by ANet.
ANet would overlook those ideas and seperate them into 3 different tiers.

• TOP PRIORITY IDEA (TPI)
  Ideas with the most highest priority as the devs think its the most interesting and improving thing for the game that is makeable.

• HIGH PRIORITY IDEA (HPI)
  High Priority Ideas are also very good, but are something, where the Devs think, it has some time, until they think about making that idea happen out of various reasons and isn’t just so super important, that it has to be made ASAP like TPI’s.

• LOW PRIORITY IDEAS (LPI)
  Ideas that quite caught interest for some developers and what they’d like to improve the game with, but implementing takes up either alot of time, ressources or anythign else that needs first preparations ect. and thus makes these kind of ideas more something for on the long run or something, that they can/will bring out on surprise within living story patches ect.

After that order we could see then, about what we could expect mostly to see sooner or later in the game maybe.

At this point they should give up with it. The game isn’t even balanced at the core. If the classes themselves aren’t balanced how could we possibly improve upon sPvP, WvW, or Dungeons?

They need to post a thread on each class forum and take the time to actually read what is being discussed by the players for a change. We’ve waited months for today’s balance patch and unless you play a Warrior or Guardian, most classes are considering it a miss.

The canned response is of course ’it’s been life for 5mins… how could you form an opinion’. But with how little has changed for a lot of classes, there’s really no excuse for this anymore.

Can the idea of WvW, sPvP, and Dungeon threads and get your classes in order.

Suggestion forum should be renamed oblivion forum.

I dunno.

From what I read of the Collaborative Dev thread, they seem to want to focus on discussing one issue at a time.

IMO, this would be a better way of approaching it. Instead of being bombarded with hundreds of different complaints / suggestions to do with things totally unrelated, they can focus on one topic at a time and, if possible, provide more in-depth answers on that topic, instead of trying to spread themselves out over multiple topics (and as we can see, “It’s something we’ll look into” and the like isn’t an adequate answer for a lot of forum people).

At the end of the day, when devs are in work, they’re being paid to work on the game. If they have to try and answer and reply to multiple topics to keep everyone happy, then they have less time to do what they’r being paid to do.

However, what the forum mods and community team could do is monitor which threads are generating a lot of discussion, and then pass them over to the devs to do a focused discussion on.