Suggestion to do away with the Suggestions subforum

Raffoon

This subforum gets less than 1/10 the views of the General discussion forum. This is not a place where ideas are discussed and debated, it's a place where things are shoved to rot and die.

I was just looking at the activity on this subforum. NO ONE MADE A SINGLE POST TO THIS SUBFORUM YESTERDAY (saturday EST), AT ALL.

The existence of this forum only fragments the players that are on the forum. What's more, with a broad enough definition, you could classify at least 9/10 posts as feedback about the game.

Questions about the game? Well that's feedback that something about the game wasn't clear initially.

Fan art? Feedback that a particular character or thing about the game is cool.

Quit threads? Feedback about what isn't working in the game, usually with suggestions to make it better.

Questions about sales? Feedback that a sale is wanted, or it's not clear whether there's a sale.

Those are just the tough ones. Forget threads where people do actually explicitly mention ways that they think the game could be better.

So what is it, will the mods:
-Actually go through to move every post that contains some sort of feedback here?
-Will they keep using it as a place to shove things where 1/10 the people will see?
-Will they get rid of this subforum
-Or maybe.... people could post things to this subforum when they want them posted here, and post things to General Discussion when they want more than 3 people to see what they posted. I thought that's where we were at, but apparently not!

(When I say 3 people, I'm exaggerating, but not much. There's a thread that's been up in this subforum 4 whole days (since Thursday) and it has 29 views/0 responses.)

timbopp

I kinda agree. I only saw your posts in this suggestions & feedback forum because I first saw your locked thread in general and the mod comment mentioning your original already moved to suggestions post and was curious to check it out.

I think the idea is that moving suggestions to their own sub-forum makes it easier for the devs to read them all in one place. Who knows? I see much more dev activity in the general forum but also a lot of ignored suggestions like the 20 iso thread that must have around 500 upvotes by now. I also see a lot of threads in general that are simply and obviously suggestions and/or feedback without any creative interpretation to turn them into that. What makes one suggestion okay to stay in general while another has to be moved. It can be confusing.
I believe a forum needs to be open conversation and expression with people feeling free to put their point forward which can be difficult when you have to be careful how you specifically phrase that point. If I'm not mistaken, you were told by the mod something along the lines of if you edited or reworded your original post about making 5* more available (which I'm inclined to disagree with) you could move it back to general. Stupid Jeopardy rules, if your answer is correct it is correct, who cares if you answered in the form of a question or not.

I think the solution might be duplicate threads. If a thread in general is considered a suggestion or feedback, copy and paste into that sub-forum but also leave it in general. Yeah that might seem messy and I think they're trying to avoid separate conversations on identical threads but as you've pointed out there isn't much conversation or any activity in the feedback forum.

Unknown

You could argue that people who don't care enough about their suggestion to place it in the right subforum aren't very serious about their suggestions.

I don't get why it's so hard to click over to the suggestions sub forum. It may be less active, but the quality of the content is generally higher.

Most of the suggestions sub forum is interesting and a lot of it is quite imaginitive. The general forum is where the problems are as there are a lot of reposts and pointless waffle, particularly from noobs.

Raffoon

Grantosium wrote:

You could argue that people who don't care enough about their suggestion to place it in the right subforum aren't very serious about their suggestions.

I don't get why it's so hard to click over to the suggestions sub forum. It may be less active, but the quality of the content is generally higher.

Most of the suggestions sub forum is interesting and a lot of it is quite imaginitive. The general forum is where the problems are as there are a lot of reposts and pointless waffle, particularly from noobs.

For the quality of the conversation to be better, it first has to exist. Looking this morning:

-There is a thread with 42 views and 0 responses from Tuesday, a full 6 days ago.
-The thread with 29 views and 0 responses from Thursday that I mentioned in the OP still has 29 views and 0 responses.
-If you look at the screen where you can choose from all the different subforums, the number of responses in this forum is 17,190, while it is 198,332 for the general forum. When I say that this forum gets 1/10 of the responses, as the general forum, I'm actually being generous.

The fact of the matter is that people do not check this subforum regularly.

You could argue that people who don't care enough about their suggestion to place it in the right subforum aren't very serious about their suggestions....... Or you could argue that they actually want their suggestion to be seen and discussed.

Unknown

The way I understand it, this sub-forum is for suggestions and feedback that you want the devs to read. The fact that there are fewer posts here only strengthens that argument. If we had devs reading every post in general it would seriously cut into development time. So this subforum does serve a purpose, and I don't share the opinion that it should be done away with. The argument that the quality of the posts can't exist when there aren't any posts doesn't hold up by virtue of the fact that there actually are posts in this sub-forum. You may have found a day where there weren't any posts, but that doesn't mean anything. After all, it's not every day that someone comes up with a genuinely worthwhile suggestion.

Possibly there may be an argument for less topic migrating by mods. "If you don't want your suggestion to be seen by devs and would rather have your suggestion discussed by players who are unable to actually implement your suggestion in the game, feel free to post it in general." Or if you think it's the lack of views in this subforum that puts people off, maybe hiding the counter for number of views is the solution? Fact is, IceIX was pretty much the only dev reading General and either he won't be reading it now or it won't matter that he is. If you think devs aren't reading your suggestions now (despite the fact there is a sticky explaining that they are) merging the two forums is not going to increase the number of suggestions that devs read.

Malcrof

I have been collecting data for a while now.. and not moving many posts over to suggestions , after the uprising of a month or so ago about people not liking me moving their threads..

Right now, the average post i would have moved to suggestions, last less than 6 hours on the front page of General Discussion, i around 85% of them (83.621% of you want an exact) are gone within that time period, well over 90% (93.44%)gone within the first day, most never to be seen again (feel free to check 5 or more pages of GD if you want.. just no mass necro-threading, thanks)..

The ones moved to suggestions, stay on the front page an average of 2 days. With about 50% gaining replies and staying for longer, some up to a week or more.

The experiment is ongoing, and some suggestions are still moved by other mods, i was only tracking ones i would have moved, but did not.

Just wanted to add some numbers to this, so you can see why threads SHOULD be moved..

Sure people won't obtain many upvotes or fake internet fame in the suggestions forum, but the thread will mean more, be seen by the game-makers, and mayhaps even make a difference.. in GD, it will likely die a quick death and be forgotten along with the others that were not moved since i began tracking. There are those 3% that stay a while in GD, but currently 0 are on the first page, which is what most see.

Dayv

Grantosium wrote:

If you think devs aren't reading your suggestions now (despite the fact there is a sticky explaining that they are) merging the two forums is not going to increase the number of suggestions that devs read.

This person gets it.

Raffoon

I didn't say that quality posts couldn't exist here. I said that quality conversations could not, because in order for there to be quality conversations there must first be conversations.

So maybe removing the subforum isn't the solution, but I still think that moving posts here is bad practice. If I wanted my post to sit for days with no answer, I'd post it here. If I want to start a discussion, I'll post it in General.

Just because something is a suggestion or feedback, it doesn't mean that it does not fit in General.

Edit: Here's another thought. When I want to have a conversation about a topic with a set of players (the 10x more people that read the General Forum), and I have to fight and plead to be allowed to do so, perhaps the moderation is missing the mark. I thought the idea was to facilitate conversation, not squelch it.

timbopp

Maybe it would help if they move the Suggestions & Feedback sub-forum up the list on the main page. It's 7th out of 8 sub-forums and on my computer screen it sits almost completely out of view unless I scroll down. Lazy I know but so are a lot of other people and sometimes you got to make it as easy as possible. I didn't even realize there was a suggestions forum when I first found the forum, I made my way down the list until General and didn't make it any further after that for a while. I'd wager I'm far from the only person to do that.

I was going to suggest changing Suggestions & Feedback' into 'Feedback & Suggestions' but after double checking I realized the sub-forum order was not alphabetical. That does make me question why Suggestions sits down the bottom of the list.

Malcrof

timbopp wrote:

Maybe it would help if they move the Suggestions & Feedback sub-forum up the list on the main page. It's 7th out of 8 sub-forums and on my computer screen it sits almost completely out of view unless I scroll down. Lazy I know but so are a lot of other people and sometimes you got to make it as easy as possible. I didn't even realize there was a suggestions forum when I first found the forum, I made my way down the list until General and didn't make it any further after that for a while. I'd wager I'm far from the only person to do that.

I was going to suggest changing Suggestions & Feedback' into 'Feedback & Suggestions' but after double checking I realized the sub-forum order was not alphabetical. That does make me question why Suggestions sits down the bottom of the list.

Will forward this to the proper people for review, this could work.

Rumbles

I think this section is under used and represented because it is a window dressing.

By creating this subsection it appears the developer is actually listening to the player base. Then you spend a little time reading the 400k posts regarding 5* ruining pve scaling, people sick of receiving 20iso the forty attempts after a node has been decimated to single point value. How 5* being link to rngesus blows farm animals....etc etc. Quickly you realize the developer doesn't give a tinykitty about the players. One either accepts the status quo or quits the game. Why bother coming up with innovative solutions to messes they create?