It's about time.

[RoyalWolfe]

Its been one hell of a last year hasn't it?

look at the games current state and you can clearly see it developing into quite the game. what is also clear is that it is developing some solid direction for a change. things are being planed out. concepts are being tested and implemented in ways that will move forward but also looking back at whats already possible.

well it's about time we also look at this and see what we really need right now. The galactic council is just about to help to do just that. but they cant do it without a collaboratively minded effort. this is what we need to do something about, right now, in order to help them do so. all of the applicants are all hard at work doing this big Q/A secession thing, getting people to ask them why they should be elected, who they would vote for. All that is fine and dandy if this was a political popularity contest. It's not! So maybe you need to stop shopping for votes, and figure out why we really need you guys.

what they really should be doing is putting their heads together, and start figuring out what the issues are that they need to decide on once in the council. they need to know what we want, or how can we possibly expect them, to then tell the devs this information.

what's planned for the game, is a good set of points to start on, and one tool was recently made to help with that, the tags system here in the suggestions forums. But, it lacks one thing that really would be helpful, and that is the ability to gather the tags in a searchable database for them to boil down and look at all of them and take the best coarse of deliberation needed.

that's where we come in ,and I say the best way to do this is to develop some tags, ones that fit general areas the game is currently lacking. what kinds of tags, well there are already ones for planed features, ones for asking more feedback, and some for brainstorming. but what about tags for say, P.V.P. Topics, P.V.E. topics, mechanics gameplay. these would let us link several topics which would let us then search by these tags and look at what people are asking for specifically.

this could help the council do it and then collect these tags into one large list to be deliberated as a whole. letting us help them help us. they stepped up, so lets start speaking up, before its too late to act.

 

[jayman38]

What about sub-suggestions? I'm thinking about how useful it is to look at things being suggested several pages into a thread that would not otherwise be considered unless one of the devs happened upon it. I'm concerned that those separate ideas won't get their due attention. Sometimes, the writer of those hidden ideas can make a new thread about it, but sometimes not, and it would be a shame to see those ideas fall through the cracks.

Tags could be interesting. Then the web dev team could implement a "tag cloud" on the front page, that would automatically show what subjects are being hotly discussed. On the other hand, tags would influence discussion of the most popular subjects and possibly leave less popular but equally-interesting ideas unread.

The council's ability to make decisions will be very limited. My interpretation of the job is data sorting, suggestion prioritization, condensing duplicate information, and rejecting ideas that not only lack popular support, but have already been dismissed as impractical. (I firmly believe that ideas that lack popular support but that aren't dismissed should be presented, though with an absolutely low priority, compared to more popular suggestions.) With this interpretation, the dev team will get all the individual, unduplicated suggestions, in order of how the community wants them, without having to read through thread hijacks, personal attacks, pro-con arguments that can go on for quite a while and can result in interesting variations, trolls, duplicates, and repeated suggestions from folks who aren't efficient at using search.

One thing that the CIR could be useful for that is not really a popular idea yet, is to take the various suggestions and maybe develop a list of good API hooks that the community would be able to use in multiple ways. This way, the community could help develop a scripting system for the game that would evolve naturally from needs in the community. With the CIR identifying needed hooks, the dev team would need to use less guesswork to determine what would be useful for the community.

tl;dr: CIR will have limited decision-making ability; tags are good for showing the most popular suggestions, but won't replace in-depth suggestion analysis.

 

[RoyalWolfe]

well said and I agree immensely with all of that. so i guess the next best action would be to start doing up this tag cloud thing. you brought it to a good light, we need the at a glance look at things. and perhaps the councils first coarse of action should be to set up, a Google group for council members. to better help them share info.

Tags could be interesting. Then the web dev team could implement a "tag cloud" on the front page, that would automatically show what subjects are being hotly discussed. On the other hand, tags would influence discussion of the most popular subjects and possibly leave less popular but equally-interesting ideas unread.

 

[Lidren]

Its been one hell of a last year hasn't it?

look at the games current state and you can clearly see it developing into quite the game. what is also clear is that it is developing some solid direction for a change. things are being planed out. concepts are being tested and implemented in ways that will move forward but also looking back at whats already possible.

well it's about time we also look at this and see what we really need right now. The galactic council is just about to help to do just that. but they cant do it without a collaboratively minded effort. this is what we need to do something about, right now, in order to help them do so. all of the applicants are all hard at work doing this big Q/A secession thing, getting people to ask them why they should be elected, who they would vote for. All that is fine and dandy if this was a political popularity contest. It's not! So maybe you need to stop shopping for votes, and figure out why we really need you guys.

what they really should be doing is putting their heads together, and start figuring out what the issues are that they need to decide on once in the council. they need to know what we want, or how can we possibly expect them, to then tell the devs this information.

what's planned for the game, is a good set of points to start on, and one tool was recently made to help with that, the tags system here in the suggestions forums. But, it lacks one thing that really would be helpful, and that is the ability to gather the tags in a searchable database for them to boil down and look at all of them and take the best coarse of deliberation needed.

that's where we come in ,and I say the best way to do this is to develop some tags, ones that fit general areas the game is currently lacking. what kinds of tags, well there are already ones for planed features, ones for asking more feedback, and some for brainstorming. but what about tags for say, P.V.P. Topics, P.V.E. topics, mechanics gameplay. these would let us link several topics which would let us then search by these tags and look at what people are asking for specifically.

this could help the council do it and then collect these tags into one large list to be deliberated as a whole. letting us help them help us. they stepped up, so lets start speaking up, before its too late to act.

Great ideas. I do have to say though, most of the council candidates, or at least me, are not doing q&a for popularity, but for the exact reason of nailing down our priorities and gleaning new information that we will need for the future.