User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

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Nalates
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Nalates »

On the forums and the debate...

All the interest from here is in the voting results. The 5 or 6 here that will likely create or be involved in creating a game server will likely only be 'influenced' by what they learn. It is not like they need to sell their ideas. Fans can debate all they want. It is the ideas they have that may have been overlooked that can be helpful. Someone may have a better idea. The initial poster and OU peeps do not have to engage the debate. Observe and learn... or not learn if there are no good ideas presented. Nothing the participants say is binding.

In any event the information is more along the lines of a marketing study than a mandate of what must be done. This is something to guide developers' decisions. Developers will make their decision based on what they decide from the information revealed.

The debates gives the participants something to do and keeps them out of trouble... :)


As for testing the game scenarios... several companies are experimenting in SL. A number of RPG's do testing in SL. Whether there is enough time and it is worth the effort is a question. Eder D'Uru is growing into an more and more complete Uru. Observing how things are working there may provide answers. It is always easy to find someone that is clueless about Uru and ask or pay them to help (L$100=US$0.38) and give you first impressions.
Nalates
GoW, GoMa and GoA apprentice - Guildmaster GoC - SL = Nalates Urriah
realXCV
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by realXCV »

At some point, the debate needs to end.

If a developer is going to work on an independant shard, it doesn't matter what decision he takes. He could modify Ahnonay to avoid skipping the fourth sphere. But if a standard is created based on the results of the debates. Having more and more ideas is not best thing that could happen. Only a small part of the entire uru-fanbase is on this forum (openuru.org) and we still don't agree on any concept. What will it be if we start the same debates on forums with thousands of members? If no common decision is made, we will end up having many shards that are completely different. Most of the discussions here tries to find a way to simplify things. The threads about where to begin look if there's a better way to enter the game. The threads about instancing want to find a way for more consistency between public and private instances. Things that help the players to understand the in-game concepts. If a new player asks how instancing works and every shard has its own way of handling it, the answer will sound like this:

- When you click on the book you end up in you own private instance, you can also invite other players to it. If you click on the symbol on the left page, you can then share the book with another player that will link to your instance. However, if you are in shard B, everybody links to the same public instance. To access your own private instance you need to use the books in your Relto. On shard C, you click on the symbol to switch between private and public instances.

And if the player asks "Where am I at the beginning of the game?"

- Cleft
- Relto
- Desert
- Hood
- Small town
- Parking lot
- Volcano
- In a building
- New mexico
- In front of your house
- At your computer
- On which shard?
- See this thread: http://....
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Mac_Fife
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Mac_Fife »

Nalates is right in saying that you don't have to engage the debate attached to a forum poll, but human nature might make it difficult for some people to resist the temptation ;) .

That aside, there are things about forum polls that put me off: They're fine if you can express the (single) question and multiple-choice answers in a concise and unambiguous way, but you only need to look at some of the polls that have run on the MOUL forums recently to see how difficult that can be. But then wording a question properly in any format is a skill. The main negatives I see are:
  1. If you need to ask several questions, you need that many threads: Not very efficient.
  2. Questions are limited to "Choose 1 from n options" type responses: Can't have "Mark all that apply" types.
  3. Useful textual feedback gets buried in the thread, making it difficult to extract.
  4. Mostly, you need to have signed up with the forum to be able to vote. Some people won't want to join yet another forum.
  5. People need to be attracted to the question/thread title before they'll vote, or you otherwise find a means of directing people to it.
On point 5, and this applies to all survey formats, you almost need a "viral campaign" to get people's attention or you will only get a small population sample responding, and probably not a particularly representative sample. On the last on-line survey I ran, one of my beta-testers came up with a good idea on this issue: He suggested that at the end of the form we should add an option for the respondent to supply a list of e-mail addresses of other people he thought would be interested in the survey. When the form was submitted, e-mail invitations for the survey were automatically sent to those "referrals". Just as a benchmark, on that particular survey, of the total number of e-mail invitations sent out, around 47% of people actually completed the survey.

On the plus side, forum polls are easy to set up, while a more complex survey needs effort and access to the appropriate "tooling" to create the survey and manage the responses.
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Lehm
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Lehm »

I don't really think there's a need to find out what the majority of players want. Regardless of what ever a poll/survey might say, once the source is released various groups are going to take the code and go do whatever they want. Now here comes the great part, people will gravitate towards the ones that work best. In OS all the solutions CAN be tried. The ones that work will stick around the ones that don't will be forgotten. I don't think we should be worried about surveying users...natural selection will take care of this issue. If you really want to make a survey go ahead...I just don't see it making a difference in the long run.
realXCV
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by realXCV »

The discussions are not about how the engine should technically work. They are about story and gameplay. 50 differents codes to find how to reduce or remove lag is great. 50 different codes trying to create a new story is not.
Gehn, lord of ages
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Gehn, lord of ages »

Lehm wrote:Now here comes the great part, people will gravitate towards the ones that work best. In OS all the solutions CAN be tried. The ones that work will stick around the ones that don't will be forgotten. I don't think we should be worried about surveying users...natural selection will take care of this issue. If you really want to make a survey go ahead...I just don't see it making a difference in the long run.
The thing is, a poll or survey can keep the most obviously unpopular solution from wasting people's energies, and focus people on the solutions that a lot of people are okay with. In the end, we're almost sure to have lots of shard experimentation - some shards will gain popularity and some will fall - but we can have less of this (and therefore more work on other things) if we can see beforehand what will be supported. I don't think anyone would really want to spend a bunch of time working the code and modelling new areas and objects just for a solution that nobody wanted from the start.

Debates and discussions won't work very well, because they are filled with lots of counterarguments and fluff. People's opinions aren't very clear, and are tedious to check (if you have to check each person to make sure they didn't change opinions later in the thread, or that they aren't just talking specifically about one thing or generally about another...). A survey would present a hopefully clearer result, which would allow people to know which efforts would actually end up being used in shards.
Last edited by Mac_Fife on Thu Jun 25, 2009 6:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Fixed broken quote tag
My posts represent the views of me, Gehn, lord of ages, and not any companies or groups which I don't belong to. :D
realXCV
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by realXCV »

Even with a survey, there will be debates (not including the original one). People will want to express their opinion if major changes are concerns. It's not simply asking if one wants to see item X in age Y. It's asking about stuff that affect every players in a shard.

What needs more attention in the survey are options that kill options in others questions. If one of the question is "Would you like to Relto to be removed" and the user choose "yes". Every options in the remaining questions that assume the presence of the Relto will be automatically out. Every combination should be possible so the users will choose what they really want on each aspect of the game instead of being limited by a previous choice.
The stranger
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by The stranger »

Sometimes I go around mystonline.com forums and ask people for opinions. Sadly my threads usually get 2 pages and that's it :roll: . Some people don't agree with me, some do. But I never get enough posts to really see if people want it. Maybe it's because my "uru revisioned" thread is so big, no one read a lot of it.

The trick is seeing what people say about Uru. Myst fans, who knows these stuff. What they didn't like. Search at mystcommunity.com (I suppose you remember my thread there, GLOA), or at youtube videos.
we will end up having many shards that are completely different.
What's so bad about that? I hope to see what people think about stuff, rather than read it.
realXCV
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by realXCV »

The stranger wrote:
we will end up having many shards that are completely different.
What's so bad about that? I hope to see what people think about stuff, rather than read it.
I was talking about gameplay. Not which age should be in which shard.
The stranger
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by The stranger »

That's not so bad too. Different shards for different people.
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