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@Pendragon @montag: Can We Get Some Feedback on Our Feedback?

djump·10/17/2013, 8:03:09 PM·8 votes·1,503 views

Hey Pendragon, Montag and others working on community beta,

I'm loving the new community outlet and it's features. And I'm excited to see how you continue to develop it.

I've given some feedback on my opinions of how it's working and what features I would like and such, and I've been reading others thoughts and your responses. I must say though, I'm left not really sure what's happening with development. I don't know what the most important issues/features are form your perspective or what things you are specifically working on first. More-over, I'm not even sure what you recognize as the most common/important opinions of the community from our feedback.

Is there any way you could set up some more communication on what's being looked at or in the works? I know it's always a balance of communicating openly vs. not getting raged at from impatient/immature people for communicating openly, but I'd be a lot more excited and in-to the community beta if I had a better sense of what directions you all were moving. At the very least I'd like to see some sort of list kept by you all that shows a summary of the issues you have heard about commonly from the community. This way we know what's already under consideration and maybe don't have to give as much feedback about.

If all you can do for us is say "we're working on improvements" without giving specifics I understand. You don't want to come off as promising things if it's still in early stages of formation of course. But it's still disappointing to see the new cool forums and be asked for feedback then to not really hear anything about what feedback is being acted upon. I'd love to be able to tag along the development process more closely =).

Please let us know if you can give us more info, thanks!

24 Comments

Pendragon10/17/2013, 8:30:27 PM11 votes

Absolutely, great questions.

Here's my take on things that people feel strongly about right now.

  • Players feel like it's difficult to consume a complete discussion and difficult to consume changes to a discussion
    • We believe this is because linear sorting provided people with a "progress bar" that was easily understood. . You know how much of a thread you've read, you know the last point that you left off, and you know how much is new when you come back. In a nested sorting model you've lost the progress bar
  • Players are concerned that some of tools needed to support the workflows of really focused & passionate communities aren't present
    • Polls
    • RP/Lore forums lack "continue the story" tools
    • Help & support forums lack attachments
  • We are going to need much stronger moderation. We'll also need to moderate differently than we have before. With the forums we practiced very loose moderation in all sections. With this style of discussion I think we'll have to adapt quite a bit. For example I think it's very important that there are no off-topic threads in the Beta Feedback community. However - I think moving threads from one community to another is no longer an appropriate moderation tool like it was in forums - since communities are groups of people here, and not categories of content, the same topic should/can exist in multiple communities with different discussions. Example : Jinx release can have a different discussion in a competitive/eSports community vs a lore/story community
  • Players feel like important discussions can't live for a long time the way they could in the forums (particularly because there's no mechanism for them to resurface. I think we'll likely address this with a dual approach - one will be technology (things like subscriptions, updates, etc) and the other will be community management practices (things like posting long discussions in series, (weekly, monthly, etc) instead of a single discussion.
  • Players feel like like the formatting tools here are not as good as the forums. Partially because of a lack of WYSIWYG, and partially because markdown is a new language to learn
  • Minor annoyances
    • Option to open links in new tabs
    • Easier onboarding to help people understand sorting and threading
    • Better browser/mobile support
    • Red tracker improvements

Some of the driving philosophies behind how we make decisions

  • Make the best use of people's time (better signal to noise ratio)
  • We don't want to force people to switch. The burden is on us to make a better product.
  • The community is in control over as much of the experience as possible

These are the things that I'm spending a lot of time thinking through right now. Would love to see where you agree/disagree

Lots of us also sit in the communityplatform channel on PVP.net if you want to swing by.

I'd love to get your take on where I'm right/wrong. Roughly 80% of the stuff on our todo list directly aligns to these bits.

ploki12210/17/2013, 10:27:26 PM1 votes

We have a lot of exciting things in the oven: integrated polls, formatting toolbar, and being able to report a post to name a few.

Quote from "Recen Updates", which I feel should be split into multiple smaller threads to actually show when updates happen (to convey the evolving feeling better)