What is the point of creating suggestions?

This is my suggestion box at work and let me tell you why it's a genius idea.

- Average CEO on LinkedIn in 2026

Yeah, imagine

Edit for the person who keeps sending me anonymous mail:

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#chedging

Legitimately better than most resumes I've seen.

Yeah it’s just hopeless which is sad, there’s some good stuff and some solid low hanging fruit for improvements.

It’s not particularly surprising with Torns development speed, how many times were we told that C2.0 releases would speed up as the full image was formed and back end changes were made when previous ones.

I feel like a broken record but at a time with a “record player count” everyday it seems development has actually slowed down somehow.  

Oh except for HD planes and a very odd inventory display for flying.

Is it just a smart click bait strategy? Gets folks to advertise clicks/engagement with the forums. 

That's weird, I just get the usual page when I click your link.

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I don't think that what you see is intended.

the great illusion of choice. 

Lol, Their own image says, "Christmas town is not  open to public"

They are probably able to access it because they might be a Christmas town map maker

This is exactly the reason.

I was just talking to someone today about my idea for Jail 2.0 and I decided not to bother suggesting it - because it would go nowhere and just be wasted effort.

I think there is a reason they put Suggestions right next to the Graveyard.

Yee sadly this is the consequence of poor handling about suggestions hence this post. I hope Ched will read this post and give us some kind of clarity or else the younger generation will just stop suggesting/ think its a waste of time with suggestions. 

You have a good point that the quality of the suggestions needs to be improved Pen. I do think people see it as a waste of time to "flesh out" their ideas since we already have a lot of suggestions that has reached the 250 + upvotes and been waiting years for a reply. In  Cheds own post from 2020 he says " may be looked into" and "at the very least make a comment on those getting 250 upvotes". But there is no comment in a lot of suggestions passing 250 upvotes nowdays, hell some have been waiting years and keep spamming their own already upvotes 250 votes + to get some kind of feedback. Players dont know if their 250+ suggestions will be looked into nor when they can expect some kind for feedback nowdays, the whole suggesting section is just a mess and interestingly  it has almost the same amount of posts as GD... 

I imagine that a big part of it is that Ched is himself the bottleneck.  I don't say that as a condemnation or specifically as a good or bad thing.  It has its pros and cons.  But requiring a single person to sign off on all impactful (large or small) changes means that there's only so much that can be done.  On the other hand, it does mean there is a strong, singular through-line in the vision for the game which maintains consistency in how it is presented and where priorities are placed.

It's sort of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation.  Yes, Ched could delegate the power of final approval to part of the team and we'd likely see faster responses to Suggestions and perhaps more interaction with them from the official Torn team.  On the other hand, what happens if they misinterpret his goals as the owner and original creator of the game and approve something that he genuinely does not feel would fit the game itself?

It also has to account for available developer time.  If a new "good" suggestion comes through even once a month, then how do the developer team fit that into their workload?  Especially when most of those suggestions would take MORE than a month to design, code, test, and release.  Realistically, none of us have any real idea how much time any of the suggestions made would take to implement.  And as has been pointed out...  Most of the suggestions are nothing more just the loose framework of an idea, rather than deeply broken down mechanics and explanations and balancing.  Trust me, as someone who's dabbled in game design, ideas are great but it takes a LOT of time to balance something out to be ready for release.  And what do you do if you discover that it can't be balanced properly for the game?  All that development time is basically...  Wasted.  Or at best, the change is put on hold until a new solution is come up for it.

I've replied to a handful of Suggestions in the past, and almost always part of my feedback is "This is a good starting place, you need to expand it more though."  Sure, you don't need to give exact math formulas and precise calculations for the final release.  But begin with ballpark numbers.  It's a lot easier if developers can see the specific intentions and interactions through example numbers, and just dial those numbers in to their preference later.

Torn has a LOT of different and very finnicky mechanics that have a lot interplay.  We have OCs that use Racing Skill.  Those two systems are completely unrelated, aside from that one link.  Once upon a time, wasn't Intelligence (a work stat) somehow related to crit chance or something?  So while a suggestion on the surface might sound good, making sure that it doesn't accidentally have some busted and overpowered interaction with some other line of code that was written fifteen years ago when there were only four people playing the game is hard.

Yes, I think that it wouldn't be a bad thing to have someone who has an official duty of answering those threads, be it Ched or someone else, to make sure they're replied to in a timely manner.  But if anyone OTHER than Ched replies, do you think the community would actually accept what they said?  Or just gripe and grumble until Ched is forced to answer it anyways.  Which would be fine, if he wasn't also an active developer in his own right, who (from observation) seems to like doing the actual coding part of the process as much as anything else.  And if we did pull Ched out from the active developer side of things, would that hurt his own investment and interest in the game?  Is it worth it to him to become miserable, just to appease a relatively small portion of the playerbase?

If anyone had started to create a map with the Christmas Town Editor, they can access CT all the time.

If they haven't, they cannot.

Edit: It is so you can continue to build/test maps in advance of Christmas :)

16:40:54 - 09/07/26 You were sent $1 from someone with the message: It's cute that you think enough people look at the Suggestions forum unprompted to even get eyes on good ideas. You don't really understand how it works.

The little pussy did it again. Too scared to show his face

Maybe people would look at the suggestion forums more if it wasn't full of crap.

Huh. Well I'll be damned. Fair enough, I stand corrected. SOME people can access CT year round.

#chedging

I wouldn't even disagree with that, honestly.