Discussion for Better Suggestion Forum

Edit: bogie insists this is a suggestion because he's clearly never read any of my actually well put together suggestions. So since it's staying in this forum, I'll offer an actual suggestion directed at devs (unlike the rest of the post) : rename Suggestions to Graveyard 2

For this discussion I'm curious what the community thinks about some of  things that could be done to clean up the suggestions forum.

Here are some ideas to discuss, not to be mistaken as suggestions for dev consideration at this time.

A) Basic moderation by the player Elizabeth. Why? She answers most suggestions, often as the first responsez and takes into consideration game mechanics when responding. Her activity, interest in the forum, and approach would make her a good mod for that forum, in my opinion.  This requires a bit of setup from devs, which means it'll probably never be considered.

2) Reformat the Suggestions forum to have a system similar to b&i to help sort. 

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Instead of a bug, a lightbulb. Green means it has dev response, red means it has met criteria and is awaiting dev response, yellow means more information is needed (flush out your suggestion more), white/grey is a new suggestion that hasn't been reviewed, and black means the suggestion has been locked (repetitive to another established suggestion, does not meet criteria such as X upvotes in X days to "stay alive").  I think this is a good idea but would take 14 years for devs to implement and delay thr next crime until the next century, making it unrealistic.

iii) Lock the whole damn forum up and stop giving people false hope. The point if the forum was to filter bad suggestions from good ones, but it's clearly not effective enough to allow Ched enough time to respond to all the solid suggestions. Let suggestions go to GD (where devs actually respond to popular ideas) and where the players will self-mod bad ideas. (inb4 GD rips this suggestion apart). This is probably the best possible avenue, and the laziest for devs, which is why they might actually go for it.

7. Implement a basic auto-sorting system in the Suggestions forum. If a post doesn't receive 50 likes within 14 days, auto-lock (prevent bumping). If it doesn't receive 250 likes in 90 days, auto-lock. If it reaches 250 likes in under 30 days, auto pin.

Personally I'm a fan of Roman numeral iii. It's the cleanest, it's the fairest, and it would highlight solid suggestions much faster. The only issue is really bad suggestions would also hit GD, continuing to get bumped from pure player ridicule... but then those people ask for self grave and learn their lesson.

Please discuss.

I think that uhhh wait nvm 

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I wasn't interested in clogging up suggestions even further. This is exactly counter to what I was trying to prevent.

Just grave it. I guess that's what you did.

Not really related, but while we are here for a "Petition for Better Suggestion Forum"

I find it so hard for little suggestions to get the 250R, taking months or even years just for a suggestion that can be implemented in a couple hours/days. Weeks in a worst case scenario.

Just like this one:

A "suggestion size" meter could be implemented to solve that

Something like a 1-10 scale

With increments of 25 upvotes (so it's 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 175, 200, 225, and 250 upvotes respectively) for it to get a response. Could be even increased to 1-20 for a 500 upvotes for very large updates (like the one we have for wars atm in GD, it got to 500 upvotes)

The size could be determined by op or even the community with a "poll like" thing, and confirmed by staff/managers 

Edit: ah, this was supposed to be a discussion point, but now it's moved to suggestions, idk if it's okay to post "another suggestion" in a "suggestion", edit it all if not

I think bogie should have stayed on vacation, of all the crappy posts GD is littered with that gets to stay there, a proper discussion post gets moved to suggestions..go figure lol!

I like all your ideas, +R

Yeah seems the issue is devs don't know the difference between discussion and suggestions. 

As a product owner, it is never about the amount of yeeah but about the added value a feature/suggestion/dev/etc may bring to the platform that I consider to make me dev work on it.

The suggestion forum here is useless from my POV as a product owner and a player. To me it just ticks, IF something meet X amount of rating we shall consider looking into it. So you have to expect players to browse all suggestion threads and hoping they will like this specific suggestion as part of their comfort zone.

In short: Nothing is important, if you get a rating of 250, then, we'll look into it and decide IF it is.

As a product owner, I never reject any suggestion as opposed to here where you get straight, 'just no'. I try to understand the issue of my user, assess the immediate impact that it ma bring and advise why this cannot be done for now or will not be done.

The conclusion that I came in was simple: It's not my game, nor am I as an individual player opinion/issue important enough unless I lobby 250 rating. So, just play the game as is, there are already predetermine roles that was chosen to do that and the suggestion forum is still a closed and sealed door.

Edit:
Really like your way of trying to leverage current resource to make a positive impact.
Although as describe above, I have zero hope but as a product owner, your suggestion is one of those things we get to pitch in trying to make things better without messing with the upper heads.

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Great idea

If this was unintentional it’s absolutely hilarious 🤣

Clarified the purpose of the post.

As someone who has spent big efforts in creating and promoting important suggestions, and considering many qualified suggestions don't get a reply, and those that do, reply is often "this wouldn't fit our sophisticated backend structure and we are not willing to change it", I vote that the suggestions forums should be closed until the dev team comes out of their years long roadmap and can actually dedicate resources to implementing community voted features and improvements.

Thanks for your suggestion though.

yet another victim of the random wheel of forum moderation

maybe try to understand first what an experienced player is trying to do with his post?

in the meanwhile, this noob crap is still in GD

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Agree on Elizabet no matter what people suggest in forum i always hope they come up and feedback. pretty sure are qualify forum mod for suggestion 

Aw Pen, that's so sweet. I do spend quite a lot of time here in Suggestions and would be absolutely honoured, but I doubt I'd get the chance. There's a difference between voicing thoughts that take several factors into account and actually moderation. Not indicating that I couldn't, but it'd look different than what I do now. I do hope that what I've shown is that I care about where this game goes (even if I don't always agree with the suggestions that get implemented). As a side-note, I did previously apply for staff a few times, and I will go ahead and share a little insight from bogie himself a few years ago:

Hi Elizabeth, I think at this time it comes down to what I feel is a limited amount of in game experience. Level holding at 12 I don't really think does you any favours, of course thats entirely your game choice and I wouldn't ask you to change that, but it doesn't give a great deal of actual experience in the game itself, certainly not compared to other candidates who may be stronger. 

 

At the risk of being too blunt - Whilst I appreciate you are active in certain areas in the suggestions forums you are coming across there as an authority in matters that you simply don't possess, without necessarily being helpful in the same sense that I would see from someone simply answering questions in the forums might have. 

I've gotten real close to leveling past 12 a few times in the past, and every one of those times was sparked by re-reading this message. Obviously, it still hasn't happened as of writing this, but there have been a few times where I've disabled TornTools and hovered the level up button. As for my approach to responses here in the Suggestions forum, he was absolutely right, I was speaking like I was already staff at the time, which wasn't productive or helpful to those who were making suggestions, and I made a concerted effort to stop doing that. I worry, though, that because of all this, I may have shot myself in the foot and pissed off bogie enough at the time to ruin any chance of having the honour of taking on any kind of staff role. I hope I'm wrong, but I won't hold my breath.

Now as for the other things you have here, the lightbulb idea is quite good. Very simple suggestion that would give everyone a summary of suggestions statuses with a quick glance rather than having to make a completely separate B&I post. Don't get me wrong, love CJ, that man works super hard over there, but it does feel a little silly to have to make a post over there when your post here passes the threshold.

Locking the Suggestions forums would be an absolutely wild move. It would probably accomplish exactly what you think. The worse suggestions would get absolutely shit on with the poster likely receiving numerous attacks, bounties, and dislikes. But that's also probably why that's not how it operates. You've been in here enough to know that a significant portion of the people that post here in Suggestions are newer players, and while I do think it's important for new players to go to the school of hard-knocks every now and again, there are enough green leafs in here that I worry they'd be so devastated by GD's response they'd stop playing entirely.

I think the out of left field number 7 would be a little silly and somewhat invalidated by your first two suggestions. In the B&I forums, you can view posts by bug status. If you scroll to the bottom of B&I, you can see how many posts are in each status (as of right now, there are 15,856 bugs fixed), click on one of them, and see only the posts with that status. The need for automatically sorting or locking posts would be a bit redundant. Of course, all of these statuses are accomplished by the incredible work of CJ.

We'll see, though. I'd be curious to know what Ched thinks.

#chedging

Lol - I upvoted this because I thought bogie was just being sarcastic.  Extra funny/sad that it was true.

^ bogie, Elizabeth did a better job of assessing and responding. 

Also his response about your ability is a tad short sighted. A tiny bit of coaching and direction on how to mod a forum, and you have the experience needed. The devs rely too much on a singluar type of player view, when Torn is a sandbox game. 

I love the idea of the B&I style system, but haven't there been complaints of there being many threads that hit the threshold long ago, without any response?

Being cynical, I can't see a desire to highlight the fact that the Suggestions forum has been (lightly) abandoned. Being optimistic, having a "50 posts reached the threshold" indicator could prompt a response.

Upvoting your General Discussion suggestion because it would be nice, but I can't really see a world where it happens.

Whoa whoa whoa, what are you doing discussing this? bogie said this is a suggestion. Clearly no place for discussion. I thought I was very clear in my title and description when I said discussion and discuss that I obviously meant suggestion. 

bogie has spoken. Now lets all go back to GD and read about that green leaf selling animated profile pictures.

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These are general ideas of things that could be implemented.

Another idea is: instead of telling people they'll get a response at 250 upvotes, that this is a dumping ground for ideas they may or may not look at, may or may not respond too. It's what it is, they could just be honest about it.

To be clear, this is a thought for discussion, I'm not suggesting them to do this. In fact, I wasn't even talking to devs at all with the original post...