Sizeof Void
Ninja Suicide Squadron
496
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Posted - 2014.10.10 01:25:00 -
[1] - Quote
Making the forums look nicer on more devices isn't as critical as making sure that players feel like CCP is always actually reading the posts by players, esp. comments on devblogs. Sure, CCP can't fix or address everything, but players should feel that somone at CCP is reading what they made effort to write.
Typically, players feel that CCP devs only read posts for the first day or so (a week at most) after the devblog went up, and pick/choose a limited number of posts to which to read/respond, completely ignoring the rest. This impression creates bad feelings from players towards CCP, esp. since it is probably not true.
Unfortunately, CCP devs do not post as frequently as required, justifiably arguing that spending all day responding to forum posts means less time doing actual work - design, coding, debugging, whatever. Thus, relying on only the posted replies by CCP devs, as feedback for players to know if their posts are being read, is not sufffcient.
With this in mind, I'd like to suggest adding the following features:
1) Add seperate columns on the topic pages which track the number of "CCP Replies" and "CCP Views" - which, ofc, should only keep track of how many CCP devs have replied to or viewed the topic.
2) Add a tracker to each page of posts within a topic, which indicates the number of "CCP Views" of that specific page. This allows players to know that someone at CCP has read the posts up to page 5 or whatever. It also lets CCP track whether someone *should* make a special effort to read through the posts of the latest pages within a topic, since the tracker shows that no one at CCP has done so yet.
3) Add simple response templates for the CCP devs, with a customized dev-only forum UI, which will allow them to more quicklly indicate that they are indeed reading the topic posts, without needing to actually spend time to write, format and post a full message. For example, to answer posts from players about bugs or test server feedback, there could be a templated "bug/issue reply" button for CCP devs which simply quotes the original player post, and adds "Issue read and acknowledged. We'll fix it. Thanks!". Or for a longer thread, there could be a button that generates a templated post that says "I've read up to post #####. I'll post an update based on your responses soon. Thank you for your feedback - keep it coming!"
Note: Item (3) isn't meant to be abused by CCP devs - ie. used all of the time instead of posting "real" responses. It is only meant to let players know that someone at CCP is actually reading the posts, and hasn't had time to write a "real" response yet. |