User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

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realXCV
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User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by realXCV »

Mod Note: This thread has been split from "Where to Begin (the game)". The sub-topic of how you determine what the players really want rather than what developers/creators think players want arose:
Mac_Fife wrote:Thoughts mature as you think through more and more of the implications. What might have seemed a reasonable scheme several posts back might not look such a bright idea now :? . That's the development process and why these forums are so useful: You can throw ideas around and discover what works and what doesn't, what's popular and what isn't before you waste time and energy coding something.

Ignoring the details of "where" for the moment, I'd wonder what the "market research" would say on this:
  1. Do people want a new game to start a) Single player, b) Multi-player, c) Choice of either or d) Don't care
  2. Do people want to resume a game in a) Single player, b) Multi-player c) Choice of either or d) Don't care
At this point I'm not convinced that this thread isn't chasing something that the majority of players may not even want...
We're trying to figure what they want with the posts of only 17 people.
Last edited by Mac_Fife on Tue Jun 23, 2009 8:32 pm, edited 4 times in total.
Reason: Added context quote to help introduce the topic
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Mac_Fife »

Quite. The questions I posed would need to be asked in a more heavily used forum than this one (with no disrespect to OpenURU.org intended ;) ), like maybe the MOUL Forums, but in my experience forum polls attract the attention of only a very small proportion of the user community. You have to be interested in the subject before you read the poll, so you mainly get the views of the people who hold relatively strong opinions. And opening up the discussion on a second forum would result in dilution of the debate here.

There's no easy answer, but then we're really in no different a position from Cyan in that respect. I guess that what we're doing here is the only practical way to work: Debate it amongst ourselves until we're conviced that we either have a proposal that looks workable and useful or agree it doesn't hold water for whatever reasons. But I suppose we're going OT a bit here - I apologise for introducing the digression. Maybe we should have another thread on "validating proposals" :?: .
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realXCV
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by realXCV »

Until the content is released with its own license, it's hard to know exactly what we will be allowed to change.
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Lehm »

realXCV wrote:We're trying to figure what they want with the posts of only 17 people.
Not to mention 17 experienced players. Where how the game begins would be more important to a new player. This is why the game companies do play testing. Don't really know if thats a possibility in the OS world.
Gehn, lord of ages
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User "approval" for suggestions/proposals

Post by Gehn, lord of ages »

Mac_Fife wrote:Quite. The questions I posed would need to be asked in a more heavily used forum than this one (with no disrespect to OpenURU.org intended ;) ), like maybe the MOUL Forums, but in my experience forum polls attract the attention of only a very small proportion of the user community. You have to be interested in the subject before you read the poll, so you mainly get the views of the people who hold relatively strong opinions. And opening up the discussion on a second forum would result in dilution of the debate here.
And the timing of the poll could influence how many people voted as well (to very drastic amounts in some places, including the MOUL forums).

Perhaps we could have one big poll at some time with a lot of the various topics (instancing, the beginning of the game, etc.). We'd bring in the ideas that survive the debates here (so they shouldn't have too many major problems), and ask people which ones they were interested in. This would give the various developers and shard owners (who would be the people actually doing the work) at least an idea of which developments would be supported and implemented, and then they'd pick from that. Perhaps a specific site that we could just add ideas and polls to (they'd be approved from here and/or other forums and such by some process that I don't have a clue of yet), and then a coordinated effort to get links to this into the major forums and such.

Perhaps the OpenUru wiki? Each project idea or side of an issue could get a page (with a careful index to show all the choices), and then the best arguments for it (/descriptions of it) would be placed there with a link to a place where people could quickly add their vote (perhaps by putting down their forum names as a kind of petition thing, or perhaps just by a simple yes/no button or something) of support for the thing.

If one focused early shard gets in place (just taking the source code provided and getting up as quickly as possible after the source code is released), maybe this could "advertise" the poll a lot.

But yeah, sort of off topic. :)
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Mac_Fife »

Sorry back on the off-topic topic :roll:
Gehn, lord of ages wrote:Perhaps we could have one big poll at some time with a lot of the various topics (instancing, the beginning of the game, etc.). We'd bring in the ideas that survive the debates here (so they shouldn't have too many major problems), and ask people which ones they were interested in.
I was thinking along similar lines. Best bet, I think, would be to organise a "proper" on-line survey form where you can link to whatever background, explanations, etc., you need and with a database back-end you can query, then you provide links to the survey on other forums, e-mails, whatever. I've done these several times before (I've been working on a monster technical one for a work related task for the past few months) and it's easily done on the Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL platform we have here, or use something like SurveyMonkey.
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Nalates »

Handling the voting in a forum provides good feed back. It is easy for one to vote and reply. That gets many of the 'options' one may not think of.

Getting a large sampling of the fan base is tough. Postings and regular bumps during the voting period across the main forums is a must. Twitter and Plurk can help catch a few more.

Getting Dot or other Maintainers or fans to alert the THERE and SL communities gets more people involved. So, far forums for SL types are not very active... i.e., Eder D'Uru here and Devokan at GoMa.

One can write a good article about the status of Myst Uru Open Source (MUOS ... o.o ... Moo- os... oh noooooooo) and try to get a game site to publish it. That hits the search engines and anyone tracking 'Myst' items via Google gets notified. Plus some fans following the game site will see it.

Whichever way one goes the response is usually under 300 people (300/13,000fans = 2.3%). And I would not consider them a random or representative sample, just the best info available. ... seems like a lot of effort for a small return that might not really tell one anything really useful.

I think a couple of the ideas on how to start the game and handle instancing are good and and most seem to handle the key aspects. To go through and decide on one... would take some time. I'm not sure how many would research, decide and vote.

May be a rating on each concept (1 to 10) would be better and provide more useful numbers. One could have a sense of how well an idea is liked by those that look at it that is less tied to the total number of votes.

---Note: Reading the wiki I find the 3rd paragraph in the Proposed Solutions section to be backwards... I think. Relto=alone ... Cleft=together ? It is not clear which alternative the writer is referring to so I don't know if it is correct or not. The preceding paragraph would seem to indicate it is.
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Gehn, lord of ages »

Nalates wrote: One can write a good article about the status of Myst Uru Open Source (MUOS ... o.o ... Moo- os... oh noooooooo) and try to get a game site to publish it. That hits the search engines and anyone tracking 'Myst' items via Google gets notified. Plus some fans following the game site will see it.
And the article would talk about/link to/be the poll? (just clarifying)
Whichever way one goes the response is usually under 300 people (300/13,000fans = 2.3%). And I would not consider them a random or representative sample, just the best info available. ... seems like a lot of effort for a small return that might not really tell one anything really useful.

I think a couple of the ideas on how to start the game and handle instancing are good and and most seem to handle the key aspects. To go through and decide on one... would take some time. I'm not sure how many would research, decide and vote.

May be a rating on each concept (1 to 10) would be better and provide more useful numbers. One could have a sense of how well an idea is liked by those that look at it that is less tied to the total number of votes.
Yeah, I don't think a "which is best" question will do that much good, especially when we regard the amount of votes we can get. A rating styled poll would provide more info, and wouldn't run into problems with options splitting votes.

Plus, with the number of votes we'd be getting, I don't think we could decisively say that an option was decided to be "the best" by a majority. We could, though, show more of "which ideas are popular/unpopular among these [mostly rather vocal and informed, if they are to notice and go through such a poll] fans" which should show people which plans will actually get players to their shards (so there would be fewer shards which would make a large effort to make a change that few people actually wanted) or developers interested.
---Note: Reading the wiki I find the 3rd paragraph in the Proposed Solutions section to be backwards... I think. Relto=alone ... Cleft=together ? It is not clear which alternative the writer is referring to so I don't know if it is correct or not. The preceding paragraph would seem to indicate it is.
I'm pretty sure that the idea in that was to have a default public Cleft. It was proposed a long time ago, so I don't remember it that well. There are many more different ideas now, so that page should probably be updated.
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by realXCV »

A rating is probably better in this case. With a stardard forum poll, you will get more suggestions and more endless debates.
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Re: User "approval" of proposals/suggestions

Post by Mac_Fife »

Nalates wrote:Handling the voting in a forum provides good feed back. It is easy for one to vote and reply. That gets many of the 'options' one may not think of.
You get feed back. Whether it's good or not depends on your point of view :D . I agree with realXCV: Once you get to that stage, you want to avoid debate that then tries to open up whole new discussions or goes over old ground because people can't be bothered to read the background material. So, I don't really go with forum polls. Their format is too limited. You can get the additional feedback by giving a freeform text box on a web survey form. Things like "Do you prefer ice cream a) with no topping, b) with sprinkles, c) with chocolate sauce, d) with raspberry sauce or e) none of the above? If 'none of the above' please explain here ..." are easy to do in "proper" survey form.
Last edited by Mac_Fife on Tue Jun 23, 2009 8:29 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Removed request to move to new thread
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