Guild Wars 2

we have not had any CDI topics for some time now and i wonder if Devs planing on doing more CDI’s threads in the future?

at the moment HOT been out more than a month and we players have a lot of thoughts on different features of HOT me included.

I would like to have a sit down post with devs to talk about the feature or features that’s highlighted on the post and ask question. unlike the CDI is just a brain storm of players giving ideas to devs its more of talking with devs why did this happen what brought us here how we like to move forward. Another game did this a long time ago and it worked great it helped bring the community and the devs closers and relieve some stress from both parties.

Given that the CDI was something Chris Whiteside did (for the most part) and he is no longer with Anet, I’d guess it’s at least dead for now.

Players can always create their own on an subject that they like and encourage constructive posts. A dev doesn’t need to lead it.

Ayrilana.1396:

Players can always create their own on an subject that they like and encourage constructive posts. A dev doesn’t need to lead it.

But not suppose to use CDI in thread title if player made post. Anet say in past it cause confusion with real CDI start by devs and might confuse player think it is topic dev looking into for idea. So in other word just make suggestion post but do not call it CDI.

Qugi.2653:

Ayrilana.1396:

Players can always create their own on an subject that they like and encourage constructive posts. A dev doesn’t need to lead it.

But not suppose to use CDI in thread title if player made post. Anet say in past it cause confusion with real CDI start by devs and might confuse player think it is topic dev looking into for idea. So in other word just make suggestion post but do not call it CDI.

Or we can make up our own acronym.

Well, I tried that. And it’s currently on page 4 with only a couple of constructive replies :I

jarieleledan.8249:

Well, I tried that. And it’s currently on page 4 with only a couple of constructive replies :I

That is thing about suggestion I guess. Do not guarantee that it is topic other player have interest in.

I can understand that, but then it’d be nice to have a way to keep the suggestions orderly somewhere where the discussions can keep going on, and not get lost in a sea of troll-treads etc. :O

Use to be suggestion forum but Anet close it. They say it was too hard for dev to find suggestion in topic they have interest in. That forum also move really fast too.

jarieleledan.8249:

Well, I tried that. And it’s currently on page 4 with only a couple of constructive replies :I

And therein lies part of the problem. Other people will be more inclined to give their opinion on a topic if they have even a slight reason it will be viewed by someone in power. The CDIs were in essence a way to be sure your opinion was indeed looked at.

With all the “noise” posts on these forums we have no reason to assume they are being looked at by anyone else save the occasional mod. And in most cases that will just combine them in a single thread.

The other problem being that the CDI’s could be a real painful experience to read through, but even one gem idea in there was worth it IMO. The alternative is, what we as players can only assume, are being seen and heard. This becomes more difficult in a combined thread that may or may not be on the exact same topic depending on the mod that merged them.

Tommyknocker.6089:

jarieleledan.8249:

Well, I tried that. And it’s currently on page 4 with only a couple of constructive replies :I

And therein lies part of the problem. Other people will be more inclined to give their opinion on a topic if they have even a slight reason it will be viewed by someone in power. The CDIs were in essence a way to be sure your opinion was indeed looked at.

With all the “noise” posts on these forums we have no reason to assume they are being looked at by anyone else save the occasional mod. And in most cases that will just combine them in a single thread.

Perhaps the forum experts could act as a bridge and resolve that issue if they’re not already doing that. Or someone can maintain a running catalog of sorts for all suggestions.

Gaile Gray.6029:

vonbladewing.5973:

we have not had any CDI topics for some time now and i wonder if Devs planing on doing more CDI’s threads in the future?

Not that I know of. It’s possible that could happen, but at the current time there are plans to communicate through other means, including forum posts from team members or on behalf of a team and of course on our official website, in the “news” section. (The “news” is really a blog, and that’s where a lot of info goes. Once posted, forum members invited to share their thoughts here on the topic at hand.)

The thing is that the News topics aren’t quite the same. What the CDI’s did was propose a theme for discussion on something not yet in game, possibly not yet even in development, and encourage in-depth brainstorming from the community on how to develop the idea vis a vis GW2. The moderating dev (usually Chris Whiteside) participated in the discussion while making it clear everything was hypothetical in nature. He might drop in some guiding questions, or ask for elaboration on suggestions. And then much later, if/when the system under discussion came to the game, the community could see how the CDI had helped shape the system design.

That complexity of brainstorming collaboration with back and forth feedback is what people are asking to see again when they yearn for more CDI’s. Yes, communication on development is also being requested, but the CDI was more than communication, it was conversation.

I personally think CDI’s need to come back.
It made the people who truly cared for the game think about it and weeded out the people who just troll and think absurd ideas.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Qugi.2653:

Use to be suggestion forum but Anet close it. They say it was too hard for dev to find suggestion in topic they have interest in. That forum also move really fast too.

That’s right, the Suggestions Forum was hard to parse. Having individual suggestions in the appropriate forum — a suggestion about Warrior balance in the Warrior forum, for instance — makes it easier to gather the input.

Could any of the developers maybe add a new notification to the website in order to indicate whether a dev or anyone else from the staff has opened a topic? I can fully understand that devs can’t respond in every topic, but without a response people have no idea whether their input is read by any staff member or whether they are just talking to their own community. A notification or visual emblem next to a topic might resolve this problem.

Bluewizard.2694:

Could any of the developers maybe add a new notification to the website in order to indicate whether a dev or anyone else from the staff has opened a topic? I can fully understand that devs can’t respond in every topic, but without a response people have no idea whether their input is read by any staff member or whether they are just talking to their own community. A notification or visual emblem next to a topic might resolve this problem.

It would be nice if there were an indicator pointing out that the specialists had posted in a thread, too! We each have specializations, and we post a lot in the most popular topics associated with the things we cover, but right now those replies sometimes get lost.

I am fairly confident, though, that not a single great suggestion that was met with high public agreement has gone unmentioned by me in my reports on topics I cover. Sometimes I even get into conversations with developers in-game where they ask for clarification on what was meant, or things to that effect. Ultimately, I can guarantee the developers are seeing the suggestions that are most prevalent and most widely supported throughout these forums.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Qugi.2653:

Use to be suggestion forum but Anet close it. They say it was too hard for dev to find suggestion in topic they have interest in. That forum also move really fast too.

That’s right, the Suggestions Forum was hard to parse. Having individual suggestions in the appropriate forum — a suggestion about Warrior balance in the Warrior forum, for instance — makes it easier to gather the input.

Ayrilana.1396:

Perhaps the forum experts could act as a bridge and resolve that issue if they’re not already doing that. Or someone can maintain a running catalog of sorts for all suggestions.

Both my team (EN (2), FR, DE and ES) and our Forum Specialists do gather and share suggestions with the developers, yep.

I would suggest a public (to players) bug-report and suggestion platform like JIRA or the similar thing that google has where people make entries with searchable tags and suggested priority/severity level or what the problem is about as well as flags like “Bug”, “Suggestion”, “Criticism” or whatever types you wish.
Then there’s a comment section for the other users to give additional information.
Any user can also flag the entry as duplicate and link it to the duplicate one and then it can be moderated as mods see fit (removed, merged, keep the duplicate).
Would be easy to search and moderate.

It could possibly tie in to your private company tracker in that that the public system is duplicated into your bug tracker, with a flag on the entry that it’s from the public and not from the company.

Then when an issue is being worked on, it is flagged as such in the tracker.
When it’s done, it’s flagged done and the delivery date.
Then when delivered, it’s flagged as such.

The big big big advantage to this over the current system is transparency and that people see exactly what you know about, what you’re currently working on and what’s done and ready to launch.
This is good because then people can clearly see that things are happening and don’t have to worry, rumour monger or complain about stuff and everyone becomes happier.
EDIT: Aside from being much more structured than random forum posts that are easy to lose track of.

From a PvP perspective, I can guarantee that the developers are seeing the reports.

There have been some player requests and issues that have been addressed that have made it to the game ((though rarely the patch notes)) [[Mystic Forge Conduit now works btw]]

I do stay in constant contact with 3 Anet Employees. One of which I have at least a weekly convo with.

The biggest thing I can ask and I’m sure other FS can agree on, is to make your suggestions threads more detailed and specific.

Good Example:
I don’t like this, how about
A)
B)
C)

Instead

A bad example of:
I don’t like this! Refund me refund me! WoW, LoL, Puppie and cats!

Wolfey.3407:

From a PvP perspective, I can guarantee that the developers are seeing the reports.

There have been some player requests and issues that have been addressed that have made it to the game ((though rarely the patch notes)) [[Mystic Forge Conduit now works btw]]

I do stay in constant contact with 3 Anet Employees. One of which I have at least a weekly convo with.

Of all the PvP issues and requests that need addressing the MF conduit being able to work has to be one of the lease significant. It’s kinda bordering insulting to fix something so mundane as glaring issues go unattended.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Not that I know of. It’s possible that could happen, but at the current time there are plans to communicate through other means, including forum posts from team members or on behalf of a team and of course on our official website, in the “news” section. (The “news” is really a blog, and that’s where a lot of info goes. Once posted, forum members invited to share their thoughts here on the topic at hand.)

You actually mean ‘on reddit’, right? because that’s the only place anyone’s seen anyone from ArenaNet except you (and the API developer) for months now…

As Qugi suggested, calling it a CDI can be confusing, but you’re welcome to initiate or join a thread on any topic you’d like to discuss.

Which isn’t even a pale shadow of a CDI. Its almost an unrelated concept compared to a thread hosted, guided, and read and responded to every day by a Developer with the ability to drive in-game results on that topic.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Both my team (EN (2), FR, DE and ES) and our Forum Specialists do gather and share suggestions with the developers, yep.

And it all happens INVISIBLY, which is an unbelievable waste of opportunity to build community goodwill.

Your feedback loops suck. Period. Full stop. If you’d post even a weekly highlights roundup or something, point out things that caught your eye even if they will never specifically be acted on, it would be a huge boon to keeping the boards to a low simmer instead of boiling over with frustration.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Bluewizard.2694:

Could any of the developers maybe add a new notification to the website in order to indicate whether a dev or anyone else from the staff has opened a topic? I can fully understand that devs can’t respond in every topic, but without a response people have no idea whether their input is read by any staff member or whether they are just talking to their own community. A notification or visual emblem next to a topic might resolve this problem.

It would be nice if there were an indicator pointing out that the specialists had posted in a thread, too! We each have specializations, and we post a lot in the most popular topics associated with the things we cover, but right now those replies sometimes get lost.

I am fairly confident, though, that not a single great suggestion that was met with high public agreement has gone unmentioned by me in my reports on topics I cover. Sometimes I even get into conversations with developers in-game where they ask for clarification on what was meant, or things to that effect. Ultimately, I can guarantee the developers are seeing the suggestions that are most prevalent and most widely supported throughout these forums.

I would suggest you and the other reps get together and settle on a unified tagging scheme in thread titles so us poor peasant readers can find you. Something as simple as always putting [PvP rep] or [WvW rep] at the start of your thread titles would make it a million times easier to pick you out of the background noise when skimming topic names looking for something to read.

I don’t think FSs can edit other posters’ thread titles. I’ve rarely seen the PvE FS create a thread, but I might have just missed them all. /shrug

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I don’t think FSs can edit other posters’ thread titles. I’ve rarely seen the PvE FS create a thread, but I might have just missed them all. /shrug

I’m not saying they can or should. If something particularly useful/exciting comes out of a discussion or they just want to update us with their collected insights for the week or something they can/should make a new thread, tag the title, and if need be include links to what got them all juicy.

I pay attention to their tags with I see them in thread. I’d be more inclined to click on and read their threads if I could identify them at a glance from the forum pages. If the board software supports a different color (blue?) tag for them that gets overridden by a red tag if a Dev shows up, great. Until then there are ways to achieve better communication than we’re seeing now with tools we know are available.

I just hope ANET gets player input in some way. Let’s face it. The WvW HoT changes were a disaster and most players would say that season one of the leagues weren’t set up very well.

We really need some player interaction at this point.

Essence Snow.3194:

Wolfey.3407:

From a PvP perspective, I can guarantee that the developers are seeing the reports.

There have been some player requests and issues that have been addressed that have made it to the game ((though rarely the patch notes)) [[Mystic Forge Conduit now works btw]]

I do stay in constant contact with 3 Anet Employees. One of which I have at least a weekly convo with.

Of all the PvP issues and requests that need addressing the MF conduit being able to work has to be one of the lease significant. It’s kinda bordering insulting to fix something so mundane as glaring issues go unattended.

That is just the most recent one bug wise… other issues have been reported… just haven’t heard anything back on them. You can bug the devs for the reports if you believe none of the important issues are being reported on.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I don’t think FSs can edit other posters’ thread titles. I’ve rarely seen the PvE FS create a thread, but I might have just missed them all. /shrug

Sorry for Double posts but just saw this after re-reading,

Forum Specialists do not have any special rights or anything.
We have the same access as anyone else on the forums, all that is different is that we have small font under our forum display names.

For those who are curious how the system works:

Forum Specialists reads forums → Gathers Constructive threads → Compiles them into a formatted document the way the developers want the information formatted.→Sent to an Email that is given to us → Wait for a response if there is one.

That’s it.

Wolfey.3407:

Essence Snow.3194:

Wolfey.3407:

From a PvP perspective, I can guarantee that the developers are seeing the reports.

There have been some player requests and issues that have been addressed that have made it to the game ((though rarely the patch notes)) [[Mystic Forge Conduit now works btw]]

I do stay in constant contact with 3 Anet Employees. One of which I have at least a weekly convo with.

Of all the PvP issues and requests that need addressing the MF conduit being able to work has to be one of the lease significant. It’s kinda bordering insulting to fix something so mundane as glaring issues go unattended.

That is just the most recent one bug wise… other issues have been reported… just haven’t heard anything back on them. You can bug the devs for the reports if you believe none of the important issues are being reported on.

I guess that’s kind of a symptom of being left out of the loop. We simply don’t know what’s being reported or seen. Is there a NDA that the forum specs have agreed to as to not disclose what they are reporting? If not maybe a forum spec thread in the respective section would help alleviate some of the symptoms.

To be honest I think that the CDI program was dead when in active use. It really did seem more like a distraction than anything else.

The problem with starting “suggestion” threads is that it is difficult to get people to take the time to write up long posts with detailed suggestions and ideas when everyone knows none of it will lead to anything.

Even most beta feedback and the previous CDIs went ignored when push came to shove, so at a time like this when it appears as if no one is answering phones at Anet except Gaile, what’s the big incentive to waste time? The devs don’t even read this forum – only Reddit.

Ashen.2907:

To be honest I think that the CDI program was dead when in active use. It really did seem more like a distraction than anything else.

Are you kidding? The CDI’s on Raids and on Guild Halls went like gangbusters, miss a day of reading posts and you’d have enormous amounts to catch up on. A great deal of the discussion bore fruit in the systems we see now, albeit without exactly matching any one person’s suggestions (as we should expect). Though I did see some people commenting the Ranger CDI was a no-go … I wasn’t really cognizant of any CDI’s outside those in general discussion.

I’d give some examples but I can easily see this thread bogging down in discussion of those examples rather than remaining focused on the desirability of CDI’s as a format for community/dev exploration of ideas.

Donari.5237:

Ashen.2907:

To be honest I think that the CDI program was dead when in active use. It really did seem more like a distraction than anything else.

Are you kidding? The CDI’s on Raids and on Guild Halls went like gangbusters, miss a day of reading posts and you’d have enormous amounts to catch up on. A great deal of the discussion bore fruit in the systems we see now, albeit without exactly matching any one person’s suggestions (as we should expect).

The experience may have been different with PvE, but it certainly wasn’t stellar with the WvW CDIs. I can’t comment on the PvE ones since I don’t give a kitten about PvE.

Donari.5237:

Ashen.2907:

To be honest I think that the CDI program was dead when in active use. It really did seem more like a distraction than anything else.

Are you kidding? The CDI’s on Raids and on Guild Halls went like gangbusters, miss a day of reading posts and you’d have enormous amounts to catch up on. A great deal of the discussion bore fruit in the systems we see now, albeit without exactly matching any one person’s suggestions (as we should expect). Though I did see some people commenting the Ranger CDI was a no-go … I wasn’t really cognizant of any CDI’s outside those in general discussion.

I’d give some examples but I can easily see this thread bogging down in discussion of those examples rather than remaining focused on the desirability of CDI’s as a format for community/dev exploration of ideas.

My apologies for not being more clear. I did not mean that the CDIs were not active, but rather that their activity seemed to largely be a matter of smoke and mirrors intended to distract and/or pacify a restless forum community rather than a genuine effort to address concerns.

I suppose we each look at them through our own lenses, since we can’t know what the devs were doing with the discussions on their ends. My sense was that the PvE CDI’s were for systems ANet actively wanted to build but in no way wanted to promise they would build. It seemed to me they did take our input into account; we just couldn’t directly see the effect because of their need to hide development plus the long turn around from suggestion to implementation. Then there’s also the problem that even if a lot of people suggested doing something a certain way, the overall design vision might make it impractical or twist it to something the players don’t find as good.

One thing I think they did implement, for instance, was the lack of upkeep needed to retain a guild hall. Once you get the hall, once you upgrade it, you don’t have to pay monthly fees. So long as the guild exists, the hall exists at the level of advancement earned. This was a huge point of discussion in the CDI and I was very happy to see that it came down on this side of the debate. (And very unhappy about how they set up the costs of decorations, but that’s a separate issue).

I can’t say for certain how much of the Raids CDI is reflected in raids as I haven’t beaten Vale Guardian yet but it certainly seemed there was a lot of community input that made a difference.

One advantage I may have, or if not advantage, one thing that may influence my perception of the CDI process, is that I have a good friend I’ve known for quite a long time now who happens to be a lead writer on a major MMO. Through him I’ve gotten a number of peeks into what goes on in MMO development and gained a great deal of sympathy for what the creative teams go through. I know how unwieldy it is.

@Papelito: Come on, there’s no reason to go with insults here. It is true scouring the forums can be hard, as it was discussed before with all the ‘noise posts’.

But one thing I have to agree to, with Nilke:
Having this process being invisible really doesn’t help, for the simple reason that I, along with all the others trying to post about suggestions/answers, are honestly waiting not even for a full reply, but at least a…let’s say sign? That it’s been brought to the attention of the team.
Of course, talking among us helps fleshing out ideas, helps having feedback on one side or the other, but in the end we’re in your hands, right?

I am kind of glad I found this as I was going to write a wall (and then edit down to nothing) speaking on a very similar topic.
So this is certainly a bump of sorts, but we need a place where serious, well thought/formulated suggestion pieces can be posted and have some form or interaction associated to it. CDI could be that place, or at least be an example. I also think this New CDI-like thread category should have stricter rules. A dev/moderator could provide us a template to go off as well as refer people back to the official constructive feedback thread. I’m all for community initiative, but I think an Anet sponsored (or Forum Specialist) thread to funnel feedback (for each KEY feature released w/ HoT) could go along way in making the community feel valued.
If anyone would like to make another attempt at trying to collect the minds to a build this new CDI topic, we should probably move it to another thread XD, but we’ve got to make this happen. Thoughts?

Well, I think a dedicated/strictly moderated section would be the ideal for this kind of stuff :O