While I like the idea of the Council, and it is good in theory; I feel a major issue it had/has is the falloff of interest in the council members and the community. It seems like an unnecessary barrier between Schine and the community.
I understand Schine does not have the time, energy or resources to be perusing through the suggestion forums. Finding issues and feature requests is time that could be spent on bugfixes, coffee and sleep.
I propose, in order to discover the communities demand quickly; Make the community vote for features/updates instead of the council.
So the process would go something like this:
Major update release:
- Update notes
- Bugfix list
- Videos, etc
"... so now we should have [x] because [y]
What would you like the next major addition to be? Vote here:
(link) "
The link will take you to a forum post or webpage to vote on the next feature, which should be decided upon by Schine.
There should be 3-5 selections, you must set preference for all of them - this will provide information on what order the additions should be completed according to demand.
This will ensure Schine still ultimately has control over what information they want to release to the public, as well as revealing a short term plan of game development, as well as involving the community by allowing them to directly influence the development pacing and short term direction.
The additions that Schine list for voting should also come with an approximation the work involved, not an ETA, but the theoretical workload.
I feel this would engage the community a lot more than a 7 person filter to it's voice.
EDIT:
I should make it clear that the additions Schine outline must be possible short term options.
In theory a good idea,
and if it would be possible to do that we would for sure go for that solution.
However,
Gasboy already mentioned one of the key problems in that:
If we cant load off reading and filtering for specific suggestions to the council, we wont be able to keep up with them at all.
And all our "short term" things are mostly driven by external factors.
We have always 3-4 projects running that are on the way down this list:
- planning
- building samples
- building assets
- creating textures
- creating 3d models
- writing the code
- testing the code
- balancing the config for them
- writing descriptions or adding and registering strings for possible text labels for translation
(Not everything needs every step)
But you can imagine, that any "decision" will need at least 3-4 weeks for coordinating and finishing it, even if its just a tiny grate type block the former council asked for in one of the meetings.
So giving those options, would need them already 80-90% done, as we often discover requirements for other things that need to be updated/changed for our addition to work.
Like having 20 puzzle parts with things we want to change, but each part has like 1-10 prerequisites that need to be filled before it can be used.
Circular prerequisites that make it impossible to start somewhere without breaking existing things, are quite common. Its then our decision to find the best spot to break that ring.
We cant give that to the community as they would need deep insights in plans we have, in terms of relations between systems and also understand the code side of all of those involved modules.
So it is impossible to achieve good decisions with "voted" next steps. Unless we publish heavily biased data and examples to make the community decide the way, we can do it, without rendering the game 6 months unplayable before the missing puzzle part finally arrives. (ome may argue we do that anyway, but we try to minimise the damage/problems as far as possible!)
With a dedicated council, we can put them under a NDA
and let them come a lot closer to the real details, and find ways to get a feedback from the community.
As they usually have a better view from the player side, than we have.
We also want to host, support, promote and participate in community events, but do not have the time for planning and detailing them, or even building the locations (or find someone to do it, without complains about our choice...).
Those events can also be a good place to get in touch with the community.
And create opportunities to get feedback in a different way.
Imaginary example for this:
We want to improve on astronaut fighting,
we tell the council about this and they create an event for this,
knowing we want feedback on current weak and strong points.
While testing the event arena with them,
we may find problems we did not know about, and fix them before the event,
and possibly even test the improvements while holding the event and gather specific data from the event.
So while it is "just an event" for the community, it may turn out as cooperation between the Council and Schine,
we can then have the Council present the results of the event and proposed changes we need to improve on that game mechanic.
If Schine would host that event directly, we would not have the time to focus on the things that do not work well,
or may end up with an arena that completely negates the problems we are looking for
because it was built to compensate that by someone who ran events like this before.
And then we spent a week on something that does not yield any useful information for us.
- Andy
