(Small apologies ahead of time for my long responses, I do realize its a lot of text, just trying to be as clear as possible with my own thoughts. Would also like to add that all of this is my own personal opinion as a user and not any kind of official staff response)
Clayflower. wrote:i want to preface that i 100% understand that it can take time to implement certain ideas! however i feel like that is a big ask from the community to put together something so large and expect people fill out a lot of the details and specifics. i believe that when you own a business or type of domain such as chicken smoothie, especially when you are selling virtual goods for real money, that some of the funds go to general site matinence at some point too **to edit, maybe something like a free-lance coder? not sure, just a thought **! and i know artists can be really expensive as well, but that is why i have emphasized how long some of the suggestions have been around.
i think if coders and admins took time to look at the general wants and needs of the community, maybe in a group setting / meeting, it's more up to them to ensure a system gets added in a way that works with what is generally wanted, and what's possible for the coders. the community isn't going to suggest things all the time that might not be possible, simply because we don't know how to code or how the system works.
i hope this made sense! a tl:dr is basically i think that when you are running a business, it should be natural to listen to feedback and take suggestions as your own building blocks. yes it can make it easier when compiled together, but it is also the owner's job to take the time to comb feedback and make general improvements over time <3
I'm not referring to users needing to figure out all the specifics of coding or anything like that, but I have often seen suggestions being made that are just a vague idea of something, when it could be implemented in 5 very different ways. I sometimes try to engage with these and ask for more specifics on how they would want it implemented and don't usually get very far, sometimes no responses at all. I didn't want to point out specific examples so as to not seem targeted towards anyone or a certain suggestion. Most of the time I'm not opposed to the suggestion as a whole but its usually not something that staff or admins could really act on without just assuming what the userbase would want and risk implementing something that doesn't actually fill the desires of the users.
As an example rather than taking from an active suggestion I'll just point to a recent update, so its not a 1:1 thing but as a general idea: Rarity update and changing the rarity bars. There were several proposed ways to implement it, some of which were very different from others and would have a big impact depending on what was chosen. Imagine a user suggestion that just said 'fix the rarity system' and nothing else, its hard for staff to act on that. A thread was posted to get user feedback and allow people to explain why they wanted one over the other and offer ideas for changes (especially for how the rarity bars should look). Thats a lot more helpful feedback for staff and admins and lets us make sure we are implementing what the userbase wants. That should be the goal of suggestion threads. Theoretically the admins could make a thread like that for every suggestion of its type, but realistically they aren't going to do that unless they already plan to make the change and just want to confirm what the userbase wants. And I personally don't think there is any reason users should need to wait for or expect admins to make a thread when they can start those discussions themselves.
Obviously this doesn't apply to all suggestions and some are more self-explanatory and don't need added details or extended discussion like the rarity update. This usually ends up applying to suggestions for entirely new (and often large) things being added, or a change that would have a large impact on the userbase (like a rarity update). Other suggestions like tweaks to existing things on the site and small QOL don't usually have this issue. So not saying we need to have an indepth discussion on how reordering pet groups would work or anything like that.
It is also very hard for us to 'see' the general wants and needs of the userbase or how they want those implemented when they are scattered around a 200 page thread or talked about in a discord server instead of onsite. Suggestion threads also fill the roll of consolidating the userbase's feelings on a specific suggestion in one place. This thread itself is only a few pages and already has people discussing suggestions they want here instead of on the suggestion threads themselves. Perhaps the users have already made their opinions known on those threads so its not necessary to do so again, but I imagine some either have or will be posting here about what they want and not on those suggestion threads.
The thread I was referring to in my last post was full of this. As much as I try and keep up to date on the suggestions board, I personally did not have the free time to read every post on that thread, which got about 2k posts in 10 days. Very few suggestions in that thread were ever given their own thread (if there wasn't one already) or got their original thread for it bumped. As a result the actual suggestion threads don't even reflect how users were feeling because they were posting about it in a different thread. I'm not sure that staff should be expected to strain out the useful comments and try to match them to the relevant suggestion, especially when over 100 suggestions were discussed on that thread. We could (and did at the time) discuss it and there were suggestions from that thread that were implemented, but what about the rest going forward? Do we from now on need to reference not only the original suggestion thread, but also need to check any other places people talked about it? Even after asking users repeatably to give their support for those suggestions on the relevant threads? I'm not saying that staff shouldn't be keeping up to date on how the userbase is feeling in general, but I think its a pretty simple ask for users to also copy-paste their opinions into the relevant threads.
echo into void wrote:i understand your point of view 100% but if nick isn't able to keep up with the site and keep up with the changes that the community really want to see, shouldn't they hire another coder? it would help ease nick's load and also make sure that the community is actually feeling heard.
i feel like the big issue is that no responses/updates have been given for some suggestions that have massive support. if it can't be done, i'm sure we would all appreciate just an explanation as to why it can't be done. if it can be done but probably won't be done any time soon, we would appreciate that explanation as well. if the admins could just communicate a bit more in regards to specific suggestions and whether or not they are feasible, we would at least feel listened to.
in regards to the popular suggestions thread: yes, there is a suggestions directory, but that's not exactly the idea. the idea is to create polls and record the outcomes of those polls in order to figure out which suggestions have the most support and which ones the community thinks are the most important. to me, that is a completely different thing than just a directory.
I personally don't have any say on whether we get more coders. I think it would be helpful for there to be more and I've made my opinion on that known. Just in my own opinion I don't think its especially constructive to say that we should just get more coders. Moving forward assuming we'd get more coders when we might not, in my opinion, creates unrealistic expectations. I'd rather focus on working what what I've got right now and continue to make my opinions known. Thats why I move forward with suggestions under the assumption we will only have one coder to help implement it. If others feel differently thats fine, but thats the perspective I am writing from in my posts.
I also don't really have any say on what suggestions can or can't be done. This is often decided by admins who are far more familiar with the intricacies of the back-end of CS and are more knowledgeable as to whether a certain suggestion can't be done due to issues it could cause, that its just too difficult to do, or just isn't something they want to implement. We do pass up user suggestions to the admins and if they give us a reason why it can't be done we communicate that to the users. From what I understand there are plenty of suggestions that admins think are fine but haven't been able to implement yet. Its possible part of the concern is that admins posting on a thread saying its on their to-do list would probably create the expectation that it would happen very soon or is high on the list which may not be the case. Its likely in those cases they wouldn't be able to even give a time frame on when it would happen, which might end up feeling like empty promises to users after a while. Thats just a few possible reasons why the admins may not want to do that, not a point I'm arguing for or against.
I do also realize the proposed thread would be more specific to the most popular suggestions as opposed to all suggestions but polls don't really replace actual conversions, and would probably encourage people to discuss the suggestion in that thread instead of the actual suggestion thread, splitting the perceived support, any new ideas or proposed changes to the suggestion, etc. Is there some reason that just posting on the threads users support would be less effective than answering a poll? At least in my eyes, the threads on their own are essentially already a poll. I'm mainly just concerned with what I talked about above in my response to Clayflower about opinions on things being scattered around. As said, I'm not really against the idea of a thread compiling all the most popular suggestions, but I am not sure it is enough of its own thread, when compared to similar ones like the existing directory, to be useful.
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