The devs have long term goals and plans to make VO a great game. Those long term goals collide head on with the communities short-term goal to enjoy the $10 they pay for the game. I suggest a simple voting system (wine is developed using this model). Every subscriber gets 3 development credits. Subscribers can use their credits to submit new tasks, or to support already submitted tasks. The devs get a bunch of credits of their own to make sure long-term tasks do not get starved entirely (stuff like Read-AI-Papers that do not sound very exciting to the community).

hmmm... I dont know how well this would work, but it might be interesting to try. Unfortunately some of the items that the devs need to work on REQUIRE other, less obvious steps to be completed first.

I wonder if a certain % of the devs time (80% or more) could be devoted to things that NEED to be done, and players could then vote on how the rest was to be spent. Maybe the devs could post a list of things that could be successfully accomplished short term and the playerbase could vote on which ones to pursue first.

Reading the suggestion on these forums I'd be terrified to give us players any kind of actual say in the developement. The devs seem to have more clue than we on average. :D

Anyway, some more sophisticated community suggestion system might be sweet, both to rehash old ones and run some kind of ranking. Maybe the devs could also post what they are actually _going_ to implement, if they want to have our input in prioritizing. I see this as a community run effort, any takers?

hopefully incarnate will find time to get the design-wiki up and running soonish, that way we have some idea what is actually going on. Maybe making this the highest priority would be a good idea in light of the past few days incarnate.

I've actually wanted to do a voting thing of this sort for a long time. Not to define exactly what our schedule would be, we will always do that, but to allow the userbase to better demonstrate what they think are good ideas and how important they are. It would help us filter through the Suggestions forum, for instance, of the "best" ideas got voted to the top and so on. The people who proposed the best ideas could also accrue more points for voting on ideas. Sort of like how Slashdot posts work, I think.

Not exactly what you're talking about, but similar, and would be extremely useful to us. But a pain in the ass to implement, which is why we haven't done it :(.

i generaly oppose giving the playerbase any real controle over what gets worked on and when (mainly becuase in my expierience the most vocal players have the worst ideas IMO) however a poll type system could help us give better input on what we want to see most (as the sugestions forum tends to highlight the most controversial ideas, so the ones everyone agrees on tend to fall behind)

I agree with Lord Q on this. Let us have a poll so the Devs can see what most players want to see fixed/added first, but never allow such poll to actually dictate the development of the game, since the player base obviously has little or no idea of how hard it would be to implement any of the choices in the poll.

"to allow the userbase to better demonstrate what they think are good ideas and how important they are. It would help us filter through the Suggestions forum, for instance, of the "best" ideas got voted to the top and so on" - Incarnate

This one is fairly easily solved I think. Simply add a spot on the forums to rate each thread. Ive seen it used many times before. Now with just about anything user controlled it can be abused such as most of the time players will obviously vote the highest for their own threads.(not that thats really abuse but still) Anyway I think it would atleast give a faint impression of what the users think of as the most important threads/opinions. Then you can simply sort the threads by the highest rated.Sounds easy enough to me. Maybe I missed something though. Opinions/suggestions?

-Seta Solenk

What about a simple form, such as a PDF file (or maybe this can be done through a web page), that has a bunch of radio buttons that can list all of the wanted items. Players can vote say on a scale of 1-10 on how bad they want to see it implemented.
Each form would record who the player is, so that repeats are tossed. Maybe only have access to this form from your logged in section of the website.

Then, at the very least, Guild would have a lot paper to light a fire this winter...

The problem is just implementing the idea, and writing it out to the database and blah blah. It's not that hard, it's just dumb CGI work. But, we're all busy on actual gameplay right now, and no one's had a lot of time for dumb CGI work. We should probably do this sooner though, rather than later. It would help things a lot for me, and probably make the userbase happier as well.

We've already got a voting system...it's this forum. Ideas are tossed into the forum and hashed. The good ones receive favorable responses and the bad ones get picked apart.

Understanding that approach, the player base needs to really get involved in this forum and voice their opinions on each suggestion to make it clear to the Devs which ideas are important to them, good or bad.
[edit]
Also, remember three important things here...
1) Review suggestions so you don't duplicate,
2) Give your suggestion a descriptive title,
3) Don't list multiple suggestions in one topic.

The "big discussion" form of voting we have now isn't particularly easy to parse. I can tell you that so-and-so is strongly for or against certain ideas, but it's more difficult & time consuming to get an estimate of what the general consensus of all players is.

Seems I've got this habit of editing while you post, Beo :P

I agree...that's why it's so important for everyone to review and comment on each suggestion.

yea. my suggestion would be for the devs to set aside maybe 15% of thier programming hours a month for "community content"
then put up a list of non-critical game content that they can achieve within say.. a month or so, and let the players vote on which ones to pursue. 1 poll at the begginning of each month and then they work on maybe the top 2.

Additionally there could be a long term section for votes on content that isn't immediately possible, but having an idea what players want long term could help the devs put the behind the scenes parts into place to achieve them.

Lastly I think any form of voting or polling is going to HAVE to be restricted to paid accounts, simply to prevent the creation of many many many trial accounts to "bump" a particular favorite idea of one person or group of people.

I wouldn't say it has to be restricted, rather I would say it should be segregated. Have seperate counts of what the paying, registered users vote as good or bad, and what the non-paying users vote as good or bad. Usually the ratios of good:bad votes should be fairly equal between the paying and non-paying users, but if the paying users have a close vote, then the non-paying votes could possibly be used as a tie-breaker of sorts.

Although really, I think the devs should consider each suggestion on its own merits, with how the devs plan on designing the game. Just because a strong majority of the players show a desire for something, doesn't mean the devs should have to do it - they should take the desires of the players into consideration, of course, but as I see it it is ultimately the devs decision on how to develop the game.

Im personally still a fan of the rate system being implemented. I mean its easy, fast and effective. Taking time out of the devs already insane schedule shouldnt be an option for this IMO. If the rate system was installed then all they would have to do is take two seconds to find the best rated threads and then spend the time they wouldve taken to find said threads and read them. This would actually allocate some more time to the devs. Or atleast give them more time to respond to our most important threads. Because seeing as we wouldve voted on them then they would be the important ones to us.

-Seta Solenk