So, we’ve not been so active in monitoring the Ideas category. When I visit now I’m met with tons of what I consider sub-par and incomplete ideas (no offense). How does everyone else feel? Should we change how it works?
Here’s a poll. Note: you can change your vote after casting, just refresh the page and pick another option.
Feel free to comment as well. Thanks!
Don’t change anything, it’s fine as it is.
We have too many incomplete ideas. Start locking them again.
Make a new Work In Progress category and put all the incomplete ideas there.
I feel like, in a perfect world, a WiP area would be the best option. However, the people who don’t care to complete an idea will probably not care to post said idea in a WiP area. That would lead to a lot of moved posts, meaning people wouldn’t necessarily care to post in the right place.
I think that locking the ideas instead would help to weed out incomplete ones.
Maybe we could make an arbitrary line. Say, a post of “I thought of XYZ, what do you think?” has zero substance beyond a passing thought. However, a item idea with some basic stats and a rough idea is a good start, if not up to the standard we would like to see. In these cases, we would lock the first and move the 2nd to WIP.
i think maybe if there was a soft lock that allowed you to edit posts and toggle viewability and then pm a mod to un lock it to make it readable and to have this also refresh it on the new topics that would be nice.
That would be fairly labor intensive on our part. While i’d love to say we would totally go for that, realistically I see us dropping the ball and letting it go to neglect from time to time.
Even so, technically it can’t be done. There is no soft-lock or hide-from-everyone-but-op features in this forum.
Well I’m honestly trying to figure out why you think you need to monitor the idea category. This is a forum to share things about the game and recieve feedback or help on it. I think if you have an interesting idea on anything involving the game, you could post it here and ppl can help tweek or even expand that idea to make it better. If you really think it is a huge problem, then I would definitely vote for creating an incomplete ideas section.
Feedback, yes. Help, not so much. I know it can be argued that feedback is help, but I see feedback as a comment meant to better a full creation and help as helping with the creation of something.
That said, I guess you were right, @Doc. A WiP section could work, but really, I’m with @Shatter. Both would be fine.
The idea of a separate forum area for incomplete ideas has been around a while. Lots of discussion in this thread:
However, what prompted me to start this today was an answer on Deca’s AMA on reddit:
The fact they visit these forums and look over the ideas area is great! From the start one of our goals was to have a better curated forum, meaning we wanted a serious increase of quality content. Originally that was just for ourselves, after years of watching the Wild Shadow and Kabam forums with hardly any tools to make improvements. But now, since Deca is here and watching, I have a renewed interest on making the quality to crap ratio a lot better. I want them to see all the great ideas people have, but it’s hard for them when there’s only 1 good post out of 10 bad ones, or worse.
My first thought was to run with the WIP idea, as posted in that link above. Anything incomplete or under developed would be in WIP, and as the idea is developed we can move it to one of the categories when it’s ready. This way Deca could look at WIP if they want to spend the time, but if not they could be more or less guaranteed to quickly find numerous interesting, worthwhile, and well thought out ideas. I thought it would be better to get some feedback before going that route, however, so we have this poll for the next week.
I should’ve emphasized the is and added always. Feedback IS always help. I’m not trying to get into an argument but I just don’t understand how feedback couldn’t be helpful, and how we cannot help (or have the ability to help) people with their ideas about items/dungeons.
I wasn’t arguing that feedback isn’t help; I was arguing that help shouldn’t be synonymous with feedback. When you ask for people to help you with a project, you’re asking them to work along you for it, while asking for feedback is for them to point out what’s wrong with it. It’s a similar concept with ideas.
Take my upcoming dungeon idea: I’m getting art help from Piggby. Without this art complete (although I haven’t started on my end at all) I would never post it. However, I’m going to ask some people for feedback from the concept prior to releasing it. If I had to release it before I could get all of this feedback, I’d be fine with it.
Now, I’m going to stop before this drives the post off-topic. My thesis is as follow: feedback is help, but one shouldn’t mistake one for the other.
Ayy, Doc. If you want need people to move ideas into WIP, don’t worry. I’ve been moving incomplete ideas to Community Hub for a while now, and I certainly will appreciate a WIP section!
Afterall I have proclaimed myself as the Ideas Dept. Janitor
In any case, I think as regs, there’s some “responsibility” of tidying up the forums, and having a section which I have been waiting for a while now certainly helps the sorting proccess.
On the other hand, having a WIP still won’t filter bad complete ideas. After all, the one which would almost guarantee a good idea is in #ideas:best. So if we are doing this to help Deca, then I’d say the most selective proccess has already been done. They just have to look at #ideas:best
