What's going on up there?

Raona · Post by **Raona** » Sun Feb 10, 2008 1:12 pm

I find that most of us are pretty unaware of what's going on with the code side of things, basically what the Imm team is up to. Sometimes, like now, it's helpful to know...so I'll share that it is my understanding that the Imms are currently working very hard on saving throws, implementing them, updating spells to work with them, balancing them, and testing them. Thus they are very busy, so please understand if they do not reply, or reply less quickly, to board posts, prayers, and the like right now. They have not forsaken us! They are just swamped with this major game improvement effort!

I've been thinking about Imm time a bit lately, and one thing that jumps out at me is that the amount of forum activity of late is super - but it mostly consists of bug reports and suggestions. Realize that the Imms have to read all that stuff! We have put in a system to help handle bug reports - a team of code minions checks that there is actually a problem, figures out how to reproduce it and how it should behave, and files a concise report for Mask to work on, with priority levels set. (This is why, once you file a bug report, it may disappear; it has been checked and put into "the system." Japcil's the grand master of this, he does most of the work. I'm one of the new assistants, but I'm still learning how to do it and find it very hard. I'm better at helpfiles, there's less to master there.)

Anyway, there's no such process for game suggestions. There are sooooo many suggestions, some great, some ok, some...well, yeah. Maybe we should set up a system where after some time, each suggestion gets a poll, and only those with lots of yes votes get promoted into a forum that the Imms would pay careful attention to. That might save them some reading time, and offer a way of prioritizing the great suggestions for Imm consideration. Thoughts?

I also wanted to say thank you to many the folks who provide helpful player-to-player feedback on suggestions and game mechanics. Like in the POSE discussion, where someone mentioned POSE RESET. That was great! It got added to the helpfile, and lots of people that didn't know about it, learned about it. So if you have an insight that might help fellow players...take the time to share it, please! And thank you to all the folks who have pointed out weaknesses in the helpfiles, and helped improve them. A big pat on the back to Mariela for getting the Gods buffed up!

Oh, and also a big thank you to all the people who help new players, whether you are on the player council answering ASKs or just helping players ICly. I keep hearing from new players that the best part of FK is how gosh darn welcoming the other players are, and how IC the experience often feels, the second you walk out of the Font.

I've said this before, but listen up, new players! Don't be shy about walking up to the experienced PCs and asking for help, or just talking to them! This isn't a game where they will blow you up. The game will be SO much more fun once you take the time to interact with other PCs. You don't need to restrict yourself to only talking with other new players!

Kohadon · Post by **Kohadon** » Mon Feb 11, 2008 8:30 pm

*blows up all ova raona*

Japcil · Post by **Japcil** » Mon Feb 11, 2008 11:52 pm

Given our small test case as a council for the voting, I think game suggestions are better left to the staff, certainly we can escort a suggestion to them but over all it should just be left to them. Anything else is really just leg work.

Rawlys · Post by **Rawlys** » Tue Feb 12, 2008 4:01 pm

Japcil,

Is that saying that the suggestion of the players are no longer desired or is that saying that based off of the suggestions of the players, the council will vote on the feasibility of the game suggestions and off of that, will be placed into a seperate 'list'?

Just wanted some clarification for my simple mind. Thanks!

Edit: Haha, I'm a knuckle head (and still waking up). I believe I understand what you're saying, Japcil

Japcil · Post by **Japcil** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 12:05 am

To reword: Deciding what should be implemented should be left to the staff. Ideally all suggestions are good suggestions, just that some are not workable to our code or cause unbalance.

Raona · Post by **Raona** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 1:21 am

Japcil wrote:Given our small test case as a council for the voting, I think game suggestions are better left to the staff, certainly we can escort a suggestion to them but over all it should just be left to them. Anything else is really just leg work.

My thought was that the general public (we, the players) would get to vote in polls on each suggestion - and that at least [insert number] people would have to vote to advance a suggestion, and at least [insert percent] of those voting would need to support it before the staff would take the time to really consider it. Then they wouldn't need to read every suggestion that was posted, because (at least now) there are a heck of a lot of them to read.

This isn't saying that most of the suggestions aren't good ones, just that they are coming in far faster than they could possibly be implemented, and gaging player support seems a good way of distilling them down to something the staff can reasonably be hoped to look over. But maybe I'm making a case for a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist?

Japcil · Post by **Japcil** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 1:42 am

Right. But like someone,I think it was Mask, said: there are two general types of suggestions.

A suggestion of something to add to the game just to have it.
and
A suggestion that fixes a problem.

If there is a suggestion made to fix a current problem, we need to look to that sooner and push that through the system to fix the problem.

As long as we still follow that rule sure, but whats a fair percentage? With a suggestion you cant just count yes's and no's, suggestions are open to a variety of different variations of the original suggestion. Since its not that simple, the poll option on threads are out. The reason I say no to polls is that when someone walks into a poll they might find one solution fitting as much as another, there is no reason to not allow someone to vote for more than one solution like the polling option does.

We need a system where a poller goes to an established thread and says "ok now that we have discussed this, what option do you feel fits our muds needs the best?" Then the poller is responsible for tracking this threads results and posting the solutions to the staff who then vote and debate their own variations to the suggestions made until either it is decided the change is unnecessary(as some will be) or it is moved to implementation.

Raona · Post by **Raona** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:59 am

Hey Japcil, I take your point on fixes versus enhancements; I view fixes as somewhat akin to bug reports; I'm focusing on enhancement suggestions here.

Knowing that far more enhancement suggestions are made than can possibly be implemented, and to some extent even considered, I'm proposing that enhancements require a strong poll showing before they are moved to an enhancement forum that the staff would look at. That wouldn't prevent multiple enhancements along the same lines from progressing to that point - they could (and presumably would) all have strong poll showings if they were all great ideas that lots of people wanted to see. The staff could choose the best of them.

In effect, this proposed process would weed out the weaker enhancement suggestions, as well as those only important to a small number of people on the MUD. Those with lots of support would move up the food chain, for consideration by the staff. Maybe that's not desirable, but staff time is finite (and all volunteer), and in my view it would both help them (give them more time) and improve the chances of the best enhancement suggestions (give them more serious consideration) if the volume of enhancement proposals that the staff had to wade through was throttled back a bit in a fair and rational way by we, the general player public.

This isn't an elite debate, people - if you make a lot of enhancement suggestions, yes, I'm talking about you, and I'd like to know what you think of this idea!

Would you be OK with some of your suggestions never even being looked at by the staff, if it means others (your best ones, hopefully) were given more consideration, and the staff had more time to actually implement them? Would you trust your fellow players to sort the wheat from the chaff?

Harroghty · Post by **Harroghty** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 12:21 pm

I do not make a large number of suggestions, but I do think that this makes sense. I'll qualify that answer with this: all suggestions should still be visible, but the ones that meet your criteria for success (voting) should be highlighted. This way the most agreed upon ideas are forwarded to the administration for review but all ideas are still visible if the mood strikes an administrator (and time allows).
I think this is a good way to streamline the process while keeping it fair. After all, we could all vote one way and -once implemented- an idea that maybe players didn't like at first would be very popular in practice. So, to be more practical about this, maybe the ones affirmed by votes would be moved to the top of a category (Suggestions) and listed there while the general posts would just be listed in order of appearance as usual.

Selveem · Post by **Selveem** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 3:21 pm

Is there a way to attach a poll to the same thread?

Like, after the fact?

Japcil · Post by **Japcil** » Wed Feb 13, 2008 11:54 pm

Only the original poster or a moderator of the forum can add a poll after.

Raona · Post by **Raona** » Thu Feb 14, 2008 2:30 am

Selveem wrote:Is there a way to attach a poll to the same thread?
Like, after the fact?

Japcil wrote:Only the original poster or a moderator of the forum can add a poll after.

But, effectively, that's a yes, Selveem. We could either have the idea originators do so after they think there may be enough response to their idea to warrant it...or someone can be assigned to do it. "Winning" posts can be moved readily enough, as well. Technical feasibility isn't a problem, I think.