Hi there



As a worker in the game industry myself, I always find suggestion boards equally exciting and chaotic. They're exciting because a lot of crazy stuff is written there, a lot of passion is rushing past you, you can feel the love. Yet, everyone is looking in its own direction, everybody seems to do his/her best to improve the game but nobody actually seems to get anywhere, because in the end, we fans don't get to see the big picture as you do. This is a pattern repeating on each and every suggestion board I've ever checked. As a game creator, I cannot get much use of millions of ideas (most of which I might already have thought of) that don't go in the same direction as my game.



Something should be done about it. The will to help is there, it only needs guidance. The games2gether votes is a good feature in that sense. You can actually channel fans into considering limited key options. There's no such thing as chaotic ideas flying around everywhere in G2G votes.





I would strongly suggest that you, Amplitude developers, actually pitch specific subjects on which motivated early access players could focus on. There's still a lot of room for random ideas floating around, but it doesn't hurt to get in here asking gamers about specific parts of the game, so that you may actually bullet proof them, or force the discovery of a breaking issue that you would otherwise had missed (because it seemed obvious to us players and invisible to you devs all that time).



It could go like this : say you believe that your hero skill system is pretty neat. You've never heard anything bad on it, while on the other hand it's a pretty much brand new mechanic in 4x games. So you just want yo make sure nothing is missing, everything is fine and move on. So you post this kind of topic :

Hey people!



Here at Amplitude we think we did a good job with the 3-part hero skilltree. Each part plays its role, the combinations create interesting skills cocktails, the leveling/skill points rate looks like it is pretty damn balanced.



What do YOU people think of that mechanic ? Did we miss something ?

Some answers could look like this :

It's all good and shiny but in the end the skill tree doesn't matter so much. The skills altogether don't help much. Heroes are so damn powerful right at the start that you mostly focus on their ability do deal and withstand tons of damage, and equip special items to boost them even more. There should be a more subtle way to level heroes or get useful skills because as of now, waiting for the hero to level is just a waste of time.

Very cool system, nice idea. You learn from first heroes how to understand each skilltree pros and cons and take an educated guess on which specific hero you should buy in the shop to get what you want out of it. Just don't break what's working!

I actually find it strange that some skills are crossing their dependencies between branches. Some of them aren't that much readable anyway (it's not obvious that a given skill may unlock another skill because they seem to be on the same level/radius). Otherwise it's fine.

I don't know if it's just me but I usually find myself never picking the center skills, especially when I play Broken lords. Anyone with me on this ?

You could get discussion far more effective than random topics on every damn subject you could ever dream of, suggesting your game should look a lot more like you're concurrents' ones And you might actually prevent fans from believing that every single one of their idea are valuable, while, in the end, even if there are great ideas out there, none of them actually fit you vision (which is predictable and totally ok), so you have to trash them all, and lose your fanbase motivation altogether.





I strongly believe it would get you faster, farther and easier than the traditional "just brain storm whatever you want and it might just get a hit at something".





Bien le bonjour à l'équipe Continuez de faire de bons jeux !

Other solution would be to creating a "master" topic where good suggestions would be presented as a list with brief description and link to the appropriate discussion. I believe the AoW3 forums had one of those. Additionally when there was answer from developers on the relevant topic it was noted under description of each proposition. Here is an example how it was done:

http://ageofwonders.com/forums/topic/gameplay-suggestion-compiled-topics-index-2/

Actually Amplitude have done such topics with the Endless space early access/beta program, like this one : /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/13098-community-suggestions-amplitude-is-following



It's useful, but it kinda comes a bit too late, and asking players about specific parts of the games doesn't mean nobody can suggest anything. So this kind of topic still gets very useful eventually. Both aren't mutually exclusive.

CXZman wrote:
Actually Amplitude have done such topics with the Endless space early access/beta program, like this one : /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/13098-community-suggestions-amplitude-is-following



It's useful, but it kinda comes a bit too late, and asking players about specific parts of the games doesn't mean nobody can suggest anything. So this kind of topic still gets very useful eventually. Both aren't mutually exclusive.

Actually, before even launching the Alpha, we did release the design documents (available here) where we start by sharing our vision and basically read the players comments, suggestions and sometimes try to reply. We will indeed publish our comments to the interesting ideas that were posted on the forums but it's quite a long process, as we did in the past with Endless Space and Dungeon of the Endless: we are collecting your ideas on one document but we then have to find the time to gather (creative director, the designers, me, and the producers sometimes) in order to discuss them.



I can however assure you that you have several team members checking out the forums and reading your threads even if we don't actually reply.

For ES we had very much the same problem in this forum and the main problems were two types of suggestions:

a) lists of various unrelated suggestions and bugs

b) suggestions that were repetitions of one main idea



So we ended up banning the former and collecting the latter, ending up in posts like these with all the links to similar threads (which were moved to an archive without posting rights) /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/12217-a-living-universe

That was extremely time-intensive and kicked about 60% of proposals out of the proposals section.



I'd like to organise it more and invert the order of chaos a bit, by having one proposals section with common thread posting rights out of which threads that aren't replied to would be auto-archived within 7 days. Those that last (self-replies should not count) would be up for mod-prereading, who'd either move the thread as a new idea to the top suggestions forum or dump it as an old idea into the archives. The devs would then only need to read the top suggestions forum, it'd be repetition-cleaned and free for everyone to comment on the sum of unique ideas left.



But I do not think such a thing is even possible within the current forum mechanics, sadly.