Guild Wars 2

Yo Dawg, I heard you like making suggestions…

The way you present a suggestion is important.

No-one wants to read a wall of text that takes up the entire page, and no-one wants to try to figure out what your suggestion is. Too long, and it seems like you’re babbling, and too short means, chances are, you haven’t put in all the information.

Same goes with Class Concepts. Saying “they use x, y and z” isn’t quite enough.

Therefore, I have decided to write a general run-through on how to create your suggestion, both for general suggestions, as well as a template for Class Concepts. Anyone seeing a fault, or possible improvements to this post is welcome to point them out

General Suggestion Tips

These tips can be applied to any suggestion.

Layout – Layout is important. Layout can turn a wall of text that blends into each other into a well structured suggestion that is easy to read. Layout includes a number of things, such as:

• Paragraphs – Even if you don’t do anything else, make use paragraphs to separate topics. It makes it much easier to read. White space is your friend.
• Headers – Outline the topic. Usually are formatted differently to the rest. I like to use bold for my headers to make them stand out.
• Page Breaks – Repeating minus signs causes a page break, which can also help divide topics.
• Lists – If you have a list, rather than writing the content of that list onto a sentence, use a bullet list to separate the points, especially if you want to expand on them points.

The Suggestion should be a Suggestion – As in, “Fix so and so” isn’t a suggestion. That’s a bug, and should go into the appropriate forum. Same with “Ban botters”. That’s not a suggestion. That’s an on-going process.

Include Examples on how it works – This helps make the Suggestion clearer to the reader if you provide a working example.

Use the Search – This keeps clear the clutter up of having Suggestions that are exactly the same. Instead, Search for the topic and post there. This keeps the suggestion in one thread, and helps develop the idea, instead of having the same / similar ideas posted everywhere. Courtesy of Dysmetria

For example:

My suggestion is to have lodestones available at dungeon vendors and 5,000 karma. Lodestones should require a combination of tokens to stop people running just the one dungeon, for example: Charged lodestones should require 10 Ascalonian Tears, 10 Beetletun Seal, 10 Deadly Bloom and 5,000 Karma, and Molten Lodestones should require 10 Manifesto of the Moletariate, 10 Flame Legion Charr Carving, 10 Shard of Zhaitan and 5,000 Karma each. This will help people have an alternate source of lodestones without grinding gold, as well as help revitalise some dungeons that are not often run.

If we apply the above:

Suggestion

My suggestion is to have lodestones purchasable from dungeon vendors for a mixture of tokens and an additional Karma cost.

What does this Suggestion Address?

This suggestion addresses two things:

• It provides an alternative way for players to get lodestones.
• Having lodestones require more than one type of dungeon token will help revitalise some of the lesser run dungeons.

Example

Charged Lodestones would require:

• 10 Ascalonian Tears
• 10 Beetletun Seals
• 10 Deadly Blooms
• 5,000 Karma

(Reserved for Class Concept)

A fellow suggestions and creative poster of my own heart! This is a good list of writing tips. How do I recommend for sticky??

+1 for sticky. Very nice framework for anyone not used to forum etiquette or whatever you want to call it. If people would follow this, my brain wouldn’t hurt reading half the suggestions in this section XD

You forgot one important piece of advice: First do a search and see if your idea has already been suggested.

Creating a duplicate thread is not likely to get a suggestion implemented, while posting in an existing thread with new comments and/or ideas will avoid rehashing what has already been said before.

TLDR for below: History seems to say suggestions forums are futile, it’s fun while we do it, but when has it ever worked? Also, I’m a wet blanket (but I love these forums!!)

Also, there’s a point to be made that the suggestions we make, and changes to the game, are not really a democratic process. While being heard is incredibly important to us and we can refine our concepts from feedback and give support to other posters, ultimately having the devs read it once is all that is needed to accomplish our goal.

I’d love massively.com to do a review of the times and ways MMO devs have ever implemented suggestions. I’ve participated in so many suggestions forums for a good number of games, and I don’t remember seeing that many ideas actually adopted. More often than not new UI or mechanic improvements tend to come out of left field, something born directly from the vision of the devs.
Not that imagineering and drafting design documents isn’t a lot of fun and gets a lot of people in the community involved, but I would love to hear of any examples where a suggested class was actually implemented by an MMO.

It’s likely that whatever suggestions have ever been taken on are an incredibly small proportion of all the ideas sent to devs because there’s infinitely more ideas than there are resources to action them.

Edit: Oh yeah, I just remembered that Wurm Online is pretty good for listening to suggestions. They got a great voting system called Uservoice, and the Devs tell players when they are attending to an idea, considering it, or have plans to implement it. I even suggested in-game note paper and writing pens and it went into the game.