[SOLVED] Outcry to developers for better feedback tool

Well, I know, when you were talking about being more open you meant that you will publish more information than normally, not about actually reading and analyzing tons for suggestions per second. After all, you want make this game, and you are probably don't want to give up all most creative (and fun!) part of game-making.

But anyway, I feel very bad about all this epic chaos. We actually may get a few good ideas in this endless stream, but they would be lost in no time, before anyone reasonable will be able to even notice them.

I ask you, very please, make (or announce for future) some better tool that forums for suggestions and ideas. You'll need such tool for alpha/beta-tests, anyway (for submitting bug-reports). There is enough well-known community members who seems to fit role of community moderators for such tool, as prefilter. If any kind of voting (both positive and negative) would be implemented, than it would be easy to view only few most popular requests.

But, actually, even basic bug-tracker software, like Redmine or bugzilla with voting support (both have it) would fit this much better than forums.

Please, make it. Currently it's just useless to post anything here and any good stuff, like community artwork thread, fastly sinking down.

Update: There would be no such tool. If you are going to submit anything to forums, be sure to make it clear, interesting and not TL;DR in the very first post.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

Wut?

This has nothing to do with testing at this point, it's all speculative and the point is to DISCUSS ideas and suggestions.

Über is reading these(or at least any relevant threads) and they have said they have and will use community opinion to help get a second perspective of close or borderline cases.

Mike

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

Discussing may be (should be) still done on forums. You may easily post a link to forums thread in your report. Reports are just for organizing and reducing overall chaos. You have a lot of duplicates on this forums, repeating same idea/question/concern over-and-over again.

What I'm asking for is simple tool with integrated search and ability for a few chosen community members to validate and organize all this flow. This would be much easier for everyone - for Uber, of community itself.

I have nor time, nor will to read all the threads and posts on this forums, most of which are irrelevant. I doubt that any Uber employee has enough time for that either. They probably reading only few first pages of most popular topics. But "most-popular" not exactly is "most relevant".

If I got any idea I want to share, I'll go and search it. If I haven't found anything alike, I'll post new report. If I'd mistaken and there is something alike, than someone more responsible and constructive will close this report as duplicate.

I don't understand how forums could be any better?

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

In before a thread talking about the bad signal:noise ratio on this forum itself becomes mired in the very problem it's talking about.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

I'm very much a KISS type of person. To me this forum is great. I read pretty much everything in here and I love (some) of the polls people are doing.

There are so many insanely smart people in here who know the score with these types of games. A big part of the community feedback is having the community hash some of this stuff out itself. I love the threads where people go back and forth on design points that seem minor and there has already been a bunch of stuff come out of the process that's useful.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

IMO, this solution makes feedback process harsh for some categories of people, like non-native speakers who had bad times throughly explaining their thoughts in first post. Well, actually any person with low communication skill fits.

But you made your point, thanks for that.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

And for stuff like that a forum is better because the community will spend hte time getting the clarification instead of a Dev having to do it.

And I just want to point out if someone's communications skill is weak for whatever reason, using a report system or something won't make their communication skills any better.

Mike

At first I thought the same way. We need more order, more surveys!

But then I noticed that the popular ideas prevail automatically against the less popular. And in this forum are in fact some very smart people.

So maybe it's better to be silent, if you have nothing clever to say. This is sometimes a little sad, because you also want to be heard. But this is how the system works.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

This is really cool and I haven't seen it done to this extent before with other companies; the amount of threads ive seen you guys participating in is really awesome.

That makes this forum very worthwhile and I am glad this community has helped that much. I haven't had a chance to contribute much thus far but I'll be sure to add to the process as much as I can

Out of interest do you have any favourite ideas or debates on design points put together by the community so far?

[Edit] Another thought - are there particular kinds of threads of the forums that you think are unhelpful?

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

I agree that it's harder on non-native speakers but I'm not sure how we can fix that. Maybe we can do some language specific forums where speakers of those languages can help each other.

Game design itself tends to be highly technical and the discussions can get long and very involved. If someone isn't in a position to participate they can monitor and maybe slowly put their toe in the water over time.

Also keep in mind that we are trying to build a fairly flexible framework of a game that other people can build cool stuff on top of. Not every idea is going to make it. We have to prioritize our work and look for items that have great cost/benefit ratios anyway (for example a lot of the UI work is simple and gives a good bang for the buck).

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

There has been a ton of stuff actually. Probably one of the biggest no brainers is area commands.

I've been following the discussions on interplanetary travel with great interest. I have some ideas on how this will work but I don't want to say too much until I've had a chance to try some of them.

Everyone needs to keep in mind that we normally don't let people into the process anywhere near this early. There are more questions than answers at this point.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

Fantastic idea that

I'm quite excited to hear that! I'll be interested to see how it is handled once the ideas are ready for prime time.

I'll definitely keep it in mind and thank you for sharing so much during the early stages. I'm interested in the process of making of a game and I look forward to seeing it develop from concept to completion!

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

thank you for telling this.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

Just out of interest, any chance you could let us know what some of those questions are?

Don't be afraid to ask the to the community, we may have some good ideas. I truly hope this is the future of game development where the community plays an active and important roll in the development of the game.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

I think you guys are doing a pretty good job in the thread of asking some of those questions. I think one of the big issues is how easy it is to move between planets early/middle/late game could dramatically effect balance. There are also a bunch of tech issues here as we are designing the planet servers to be able to run on different physical machines which means we have to have a very well defined interface for moving things around.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

o rly? =P

As Neutrino said I think we don´t realy need a new tool to keep up to date, the forum is pretty smooth and looks great.In addition not to much people are active here so 5-10 post per hour is realy great.
But Neutrion when can we expect the new website for offer stuff?You said it needs a bit more work but how much?1-3days?

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

Would issues like this mostly be balanced and corrected for in Alpha/Beta? or would balance issues that large be hard to do late in development? - until that stage I guess the community should keep hashing out interplanetary travel ideas!

I have exactly zero experience tackling issues like this but I'll really enjoy seeing how these kinds of challenges are overcome.

I initially thought that a forum like this would wind up being swamped with repeat ideas but I am impressed with the communities continued generation of ideas and debate surrounding them - also it's ability to self regulate to an extent without becoming draconian in slapping down ideas (even if they have been brought up before).

There has been a lot of discussion, and we don't always know what's been discussed. It might be handy to have some sort of wiki that contains a list of things that has been discussed, even if just to maintain an overview or provide directions to new people.

Large topics can be many pages and it's a pain having to go through them all. Having a summary somehow would be meaningful.

Or even the community could set up something on wikia if Uber isn't into it. I'm willing to volunteer setting one up if there's enough interest.

Re: Outcry to developers for better feedback submitting tool

^There exists a wikia already in the top sticky thread about feature suggestions and confirmations I think.

True, except the slapping down of whoever it was that suggested strategic zoom was completely warranted in my opinion.