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Enable Rioters to show their appreciation for threads

boozo·7/23/2014, 12:59:26 AM·2 votes·315 views

Ghostcrawler replied in his "balance" thread

That's a reasonable concern. My personal experience from a decade and a half of trying to communicate to players is that if you step into a good discussion, you risk derailing it. Devs can still read and appreciate the discussion, and we do, but if we try to "reward" the thread with our appearance, it ends up attracting a lot of folks who want to make "Rito where" posts or troll or whatever. Troll threads are in essence already ruined, so a dev jumping in can't make it much worse.

Maybe you can find a way to award posts/threads that the developers found helpful in some other way than actually posting a reply. Just put a "stamp of approval" on it, maybe even so it's identifiable who of the devs put his stamp on it, although that might have negative effects similar to what was described, like "ermahgerd, only lowlevel devs here, ghostcrawler doesn't give a hoot!".

Doing so might still kind of derail discussions because people might start to chime in just because they know the thread is being looked at, so maybe make the stamp visible only to participants of the thread? Or allow both options, giving people a personal incentive to keep the discussion flowing first by showing them that their thoughts are being recognized, and when a topic is about to dry out, get a public stamp on so others can look at what is helpful feedback.

13 Comments

Hyrum Graff7/23/2014, 3:08:22 PM3 votes

What if it were visible only to the OP? So the OP gets the satisfaction of knowing his/her thread has been seen and considered, but there's no mark in the redtracker, or in the post elsewhere.

I made a thread with a similar suggestion, actually my first thread on the CB, which a couple rioters responded to with their thoughts.

boozo7/23/2014, 3:41:53 PM1 votes

My idea to show the stamp only to participants of a thread was a compromise of doing nothing of that kind in order to not attract trolls/riot pls reactions from people that see where the Rioters attention is directed, and the opposite approach of showing the people in the boards that their feedback is appreciated. What would be achieved by showing the stamp only to the thread creator, in contrast to all contributors of a discussion? Because I not only fail to see an advantage in that approach, but also think that this might lead to people posting their thoughts in an own thread instead of replying to an existant one, in order to receive Riot attention^TM, although this might be a bit far fetched.

There are some interesting points in your linked thread, especially a post-, not threadwise stamp, but I also understand the problems the Rioters point out. If you post a well thought-out comment in a thread that is stamped you don't have any idea whether this one post was actually read, or if the stamp was put on 4 hours and 20 replies later, when a Rioter had the opportunity to read the first couple pages but didn't even reach your post.