User talk:HH LEADER/Guild Wars 2 suggestions/in game feedback collection

Discussion starts here.

Because it's no copying, it's "improving"

Solution 1: Have you seen the petition system in EQ1/EQ2? It works (or worked, time without playing actually) like an in-game mail-to-gm service, and is used not only for petitioning in-game problems, but also for reporting ill-manered player conducts, bug/exploit warnings or even for, as your idea, game feedback/suggestions.

Solution 2: I guess an option also could be for them to expand their support section on the guildwars website and implement an "E-mail inquiry" system simmilar to the one on iRO. Login required, confirmation of reception through e-mail, and separating inquiries by topic so the feedback goes straight to the feedback database or the people managing it instead of, let's say, the Support liason. --Fighterdoken 23:03, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, there are limitless number of implementations, though it is not a point. Main advantage is that people are already logged in and no separate login should be required for either implementation. Separate window/form does not mean here a separate login. The chat solution reuses the logs that are created anyways and being reviewed by ArenaNet personal. Specific channel that limits number of submissions is the simplest way to re-use already existing chat system.

No need to go to separate Website either (that also has to be done in all the supported languages). It is convinience for players and for ArenaNet that does not need to read limitless discussions whose idea is better and why. Whatever implementation is, it will exclude the need for players to do it in forums and try explain other players on a Wiki or a forum why their idea is not a stupid one. HH LEADER talk 02:22, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Then, in regards of "easy implementation", wouldn't be better something along the lines of "Have a known bot character online 24/7, and make it so he logs every private message he receives. Later, send these private messages log as feedback to the developers". Instead of creating yet another chat option, they could implement this tomorrow if they wanted.--Fighterdoken 03:12, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Excellent idea for one of possible implementations of in game feedback. But to answer if it would be easier one needs to be familiar with current/future system architecture and estimate pros and cons knowing the volume of private messages and how current private message log is handled, and I don't. Would love to, but don't. I was based on the premise that any introduced change should be as much isolated from current working processes as possible to decrease a chance of failure. Also I meant it as a new reusable component that will be used across all the games, not only in GW, hence it may look a bit differntly and provide some sort of structured feedbak/idea with categories, so the separate chat channel or a database looked as better and safer options to me.

If new bots are easier and a process of introduction few bots will bring less possible disturbance to the system and accomplished with less effort, then they would have to implement few bots, preferably by category 'Gw Idea', 'Gw Two Idea' , 'Skills Feedback', 'Gameplay Feedback', 'Bug Report', etc. Also an interval for messages to these bot characters from a particular user will have to be controlled differently than for the rest of the users and there could be a possibility of fake ArenaNet bots with similar names created by players for fun, which is not possible with isolated channel. To avoid the confusion with names if bot solution is considered, bot names have to be fixed on top of the Friends list and not allowed to be removed and may be dispayed in bold or/and capitalized as well.

But, yes, by any means, if this is something that will be easier to do, let's them go ahead and do it.

As long as users have a direct channel in a game and do not need to log twice, anything will do.

All I want is to eliminate any discussions and prejudgement by any sort of community and let players to have a direct channel in a game without need for second login. Even if they will never hear back from ArenaNet, they will be assured that their message will be at least reviewed and considered regardless of how 'stupid' it may seem by any type of community and fear of being mocked. It will be ArenaNet who will decide if they allow any particular user to continue posting to them and how often. HH LEADER talk 12:12, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Duplicate suggestions

How would duplicate suggestions be discouraged and / or filtered out? -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 01:41, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

It is really up to the company how they would like to manage this. They surely need to control the volume of submissions from a particular player by setting a submission interval to avoid spam, but they may decide to 'encourage' duplicates (coming from different players). Let me explain.

To identify suggestion as duplicate thay have to maintain inventory of all suggestions in a way similar to a form I was proposing here User:HH_LEADER/Guild_Wars_2_suggestions/Use_Case_Scenario, or some other form. It is impossible to keep all the ideas on a top of one person's head (any community trying to handle this will face the same problem ).

One thing is certain that the company will be looking to all suggestions with the full knowledge of what they are looking for knowing their current development plans and ideas in works and how any proposal can be considered in this context.

Some of the ideas the company may mark for later consideration and some simply discard.

There is no fool proof way to avoid duplicates because any idea can be trasformed to 'new' idea and become 'non-duplicate' idea from someone's prospective. Misery laughted at my demonstration of this sort of transformation: "Koala is cool - let's make Koala minipet" I transformed to "Koala is an Australian animal - let's make country bound minipet and give it each palyer depending on country of residence' -> American Eagles vs. Canadian Beavers. It works in sports, why not in game? This can be further transformed to: "Let's make country bound armor and/or weapon sets", why not? But it is not up to me to decide if this is stupid or funny or useless in a game context of which I know basically nothing or could it be used in another game by the same company. It is like mining: you mined for gold and found silver or copper, would you be throwing it away or keep mining? And it's freeeeee!

Another example: Let's allow to a character to follow 'good' or 'evil' path, or be 'neutral'. It could come in 2 flavours: choice is final and 'ever shifting' depending on certain factors. If 2 of these ideas are submitted would they be duplicate? Yes and No, because there will be multiple scenarios to work out one or another depending on whether the choice is final and leading to completly different player experience. Only a creative writer can decide which one will it be (or none of them, or both, actually) and will it be in works now or done as an extension pack or be discarded or used for another game.

So, initially they may decide: let's take everything and depending on volume of 'duplicates' see if we want to do any filtering.

Or they can count duplicates as 'votes' for particular idea, which is another way of player's survey 'for the same price' and will be extremely useful for them to find out where gamers want move the game. Yes, gamers should become the force that dictates how game is built,- it will bring them satisfaction and company their loyalty and profit.

After some piloting they will develop the rules by which non-productive users may be limited (by time intervals) or restricted from submitting on this channel. It should be no more complicated then stopping any spammer from spamming in the game right now. They may also declare from the start that no submission on this channel will be directly responded.

Finally, they can display some sort of info about the ideas that are in works directly in a game, which by the way, will increase its addictiveness to the players and their desire to give more ideas in lines with what is being developed.

There could be also an extract/summary of all ideas that were already considered that will be displayed somewhere on GW Main Website (or not)...

The list continues...

HH LEADER talk 14:25, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

The current system used by this wiki makes a direct attempt to eliminate duplicate suggestions by deleting them outright. What flaws, if any, do you see in this approach? (Terra Xin 17:06, 23 April 2009 (UTC))

I already gave this example before and used it as an example in this very post: you merged my suggestion (good/evil/neutral path) with the other person suggestion and did not do it right neither from my nor from other person prospective. He left and never returned and could have been given more suggestions if it wasn't your merge. The community does not check every edit. If they did it would be crazy. And neither will the development group if they rely on the community. You cannot half-rely on someone. In many cases the development group will have to rely on one member of the community as yourslf that did the last edit/merge and trust in your judgement. I don't. Neither I want to be stuck in endless discussions. My solution is 'no edits' and 'no discussion'. 'No edits' and 'No Discussions' means direct submission, a feedback form, if you like. Nothing new either. All it's new that it will be in the game and will give a feeling of involvement to everybody. I understand that having been in the middle for so long it is hard to give up this role and lose a feeling of involvement in a creative process, but you still will be doing that only on your own and directly if you so wish (providing company will be willing to establish said direct submission). And again, the duplicates could be a good thing as I pointed out above. It depends on how one looks at it. But no matter how we look at it, the company cannot delegate their creative procees to the group outside of it. It will result in potentially lost opportunities. 'Duplicates' may be a necessary price to pay for having one brilliant suggestion not being missed in a pile of all the submissions, because it might be not recognized as such by the outside group and sorted out. HH LEADER talk 18:06, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Under your proposed system, would it be possible for players to search through the suggestion database to see if their suggestions are actually original? Also, wouldn't duplicate suggestions make brilliant original suggestions more likely to be missed due to the greater suggestion volume and limited staff? -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 23:21, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Excellent questions. If Wiki/forum community can see all the suggestions, I don't see a reason why any player will not be able to do that, but in the case of direct submissions, the company has an advantage of showing only what it wants to show and choose to display, for instance, only a suggestions' summary for the area they are currently working on giving players a clue of where to direct their creativity accordingly to the company 'master plan'. In any case 'raw' suggestions should never be displayed and undergo an 'amalgamation' process first and be formulated accordingly to the rules of an 'idea inventory system' even if this inventory is in a spreadsheet form. An idea needs to be assigned an unique ID and its wording may change dramatically. The assignment of such ID in case of an idea management is not a trivial task for the reasons described above. Some ideas will not 'deserve' an unique ID becoming one of possible implementations of already existing idea and some way be junked right off the bat.

An interesting outcome of publishing all accepted/reviewed ideas is that since they will be licenced to a company and the competitors won't be able to use them. However, the company before publishing any idea also should make sure that none of the accepted ideas are copyright infringement. That is also another very important reason why community cannot manage this process for a company, but we can only speculate about the company policy in this area.

For your second question of what are the chances to lose an idea, it seems to me that company staff that is dedicated to the task and selectively seeking for the ideas that fit in their current design is in a better position to judge what is a brilliant idea or what not. The 'brilliant idea' is a relative term that should be considered in a light of specific circumstances. Some ideas may shine right away and some may need to be polished first and be adapted perhaps to the next possible release.

Returning to the Koala example that became 'a country bound pet/minipet' one may feel unsatisfied with the outcome, so let's continue transformations: in Guild Wars it will be natural that a 'country bound pet/minipet' should become 'a Guild bound pet/minipet', which leads us to a 'Guild mascot minipet' and perhaps to a' Guild bound monster(s)' that fight for a guild and/or protect Guild hall and bearing Guild logo. I do not know if these transformations will actually fit in a current game design, so I do not know if these ideas are trash or brilliant. I can go ahead and expand on a 'Guild bound monster' idea and come up with 1001 variations of it, but it is no use because I do not know what is in a creative designer's head and how does it work out with the rest of the game ideas. If, however, a creative designer has come up with this idea and the company published it on the Web and asked users' input on how Guild Bound Monster should look like, I am sure it will get a good creative response. The designer, however never did came up with this idea, because the original 'Koala' idea never came to his head and was not supplied for it was filtered out by the community. HH LEADER talk 05:17, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Just to clarify: The previous system allowed players to search the database for suggestions (manually by looking at the titles of each article), and were even encouraged to look through these suggestions prior to submitting their own. To add, rather than create a variation of one suggestion, a note was positioned asking them to participate in the discussions of the existing one. Ideally, that meant that 1001 ideas could stem from the one article instead of many articles that say almost exactly the same thing, save for one additional word that could make the difference. Prior to the suggestion's removal, the namespace would generate about 5-10 or so new articles every day using a tool that was easy to follow, but required a little bit of reading prior to submitting it.

Going back to the previous submission you made: In many cases the development team will have to rely on one member of the community - this is completely untrue. The development team relies on all of us to run this wiki - you've probably heard this time and time again, but the wiki is run by the community, not by the company. I never took to editing the suggestion pages because I wanted to get involved, nor did I do it because it was a task delegated to me. Most importantly, I wasn't the only person making edits like the one in your concern. I made the edits to ensure that the guidelines were followed, and these guidelines were always open to discussion so that they could be refined to become more effective. However, if a lot of people aren't reading the guidelines, then how can they possibly improve them? People always wait until after they've made the mistake before they actually start things up. I was online when you made the reply about the merger I made, and I'm sorry but I should have told you that I can't give you a satisfactory explanation that will make you think "I see where he's coming from" because your approach to this current situation is different to others and it would prove to be a stalemate should we ever have a discussion about it.

I would just like to reiterate Gordon's second question: Duplicates are one issue. What about other issues such as misleading titles, incomplete suggestions, at-length suggestions with lots of background and personal experience unrelated to the suggestion, submissions with multiple suggestions, unclear and vague suggestions and suggestions posted in the wrong category/game? Along with that consideration, how may developers best allocate their resources so their time is spent more on reading peoples suggestions than having to actually sort through them? (Terra Xin 15:08, 24 April 2009 (UTC))

I don't know. No one will, unless they will become involved in the process somehow. They actually have to come up with it. No one can force the company to be more effective than they are willing to be. If it is better for this company to set up Websites (wiki/forums) in all supported languages and rely on groups of off-shore volunteers to work on their gold mine, it's fine with me. Someone cannot be forcibly fed if they are not in a coma. I am too tired to continue on this game of guessing of what is better for them. They should make up their own mind. And to me it should be not 'the developers', but 'creative designers/story writers' who need to start working on the ideas and (it is a key) in a context of what is already in works. No substitutions can be made for this. All our guessing can miss by a mile. However, this company may be functionning very differently than I am invisioning and do not have a clear roles separation. If I was working there I could tell you. For now your guess as good as mine. HH LEADER talk 16:32, 24 April 2009 (UTC)