Denied Suggestions Suggestion - More Potential Back & Forth Before Conclusion

[Emilia Foddg]

What does this suggestion change/add/remove:​

Spoiler: How Things Are (From A Community Perspective)

The current flow of how a suggestion typically goes right now, as it appears from the outside:

1. Suggestion is made by OP.
2. Community respond and discuss the suggestion among themselves.
3. At some point when/where/if possible, the relevant staff see it and start to discuss it to some degree, depending on the suggestion itself.
4. After some more time and discussion, staff then give a brief collective response when/where/if possible and close the suggestion with a '(Partially) Accepted' or 'Denied' response.

Spoiler: How This Suggestion Says Things Should Be

How I am suggesting it should work, ideally - This is not exact and is more intended as a guideline as to how suggestions should work; The aim here is to provide the community with the opportunity to hopefully catch and potentially rectify any errors on the part of staff, additionally I am also suggesting the potential addition of a 'Pending' tag to apply to posts that have received at least their first response:

1. Suggestion is made by OP.
2. Community respond and discuss the suggestion among themselves.
3. At some point when/where/if possible, the relevant staff see it and start to discuss it to some degree, depending on the suggestion itself.
   
   
4. After some more time and discussion, staff give a brief collective response (of no different length or complexity than normal) when/where/if possible and indication of whether it may be '(Partially) Accepted' or 'Denied' - They then mark it as pending and leave the suggestion open for further community discussion.
   • This should obviously not apply in cases where the suggestion is overtly inappropriate, mingey or otherwise breaks the rules. For example, if someone made a suggestion thread where literally the entire content of the title of body are something like 'lol give me a staff position' - Something like that should just be straight up deleted or otherwise dealt with as appropriate. Common sense applies, this suggestion is somewhat esoteric and about furthering constructive discussion regarding server alterations and not trying to establish some kind of rule or anything.
     
     
   • As far as suggestions that potentially involve things mentioned in the FAQ... I think that should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis? Like I think just a suggestion that's just 'Hey, increase Chef job slots' with no further nuance, then sure, yeet it. But if it's something that does merit further discussion, then it could reasonably continue as a suggestion. I think that's pretty much how things are handled anyway? Also, add more Chef slots and remove TeamSpeak please (I shouldn't have to clarify that this is not part of this suggestion, although I do genuinely feel this way).
5. Community respond to response and further discuss the suggestion among themselves, which also potentially allows the OP to edit the suggestion where necessary and appropriate, as a result of both community and staff response. If OP does make edits, they should make that clear by posting another reply saying that they did so. It is always OP's responsibility to ensure there is a sufficient amount of information for CT to understand their intentions.
   
   
6. Following a period of at least a couple of days, staff may return to the now-pending (but are not expected to keep track) suggestion when/where/if possible and see if anything meaningful has been contributed to the discussion in light of their first response, that may reasonably influence the decision regarding its potential implementation.
   • If so, then give another brief collective response (of no different length or complexity than normal).
   • If not, then close the suggestion with the current staff conclusion of '(Partially) Accepted' or 'Denied'.
7. Assuming meaningful discussion was had since initial staff response and the suggestion was kept open further, this is the final time in that thread that the community will have to discuss and give any further input as to their reasonings whether the suggestion should be accepted or denied. Ideally the suggestion would not need any more edits if they were necessary before, but the same thing applies here - It would be especially important for OP to make it clear if they edit it again at this point.
   
   
8. Following another period of at least a couple of days, staff may return to the now-pending (but are not expected to keep track) suggestion when/where/if possible and give a brief collective response and ultimate conclusion of '(Partially) Accepted' or 'Denied'.

And if accepted, then this would be the basic guideline for how a forum suggestion should be treated. This is not retroactive - But should also apply to any new threads that intend to re-discuss a previously closed suggestion.

It may potentially be wise, assuming this gets considered and accepted, to trial the new procedure with this suggestion, to accomplish the following:

• Getting into the habit of doing it this way.
• Seeing how well it works.
• Having an example of how it works.

For this purpose, I have deliberately included things in this post that don't make sense, to be later removed via edits. We've basically done this already, so I'm just going to strike this out - But my point being here is that this should possibly be triaged in some manner before going with it fully, in order to work out what is ideal for staff. As with any new thing, especially of this nature, there are going to be teething problems and things to potentially sort out - I'm of the belief that the subforum will come out of this better.

Has something similar been suggested before? If so, why is your suggestion different?:

Spoiler: Relevant Past Suggestions To This Suggestion #1

It's hard to search for any kind of suggestion of this nature, as this is about suggestions themselves - Closest thing I could find was this suggestion by Pyro from September, about placing massively supported suggestions that would otherwise be denied, into the change-voting Discord channel for further community consideration (which was denied because the tickets system exists); While it does also suggest a change in the workflow of how suggestions are handled, it is completely different to what I am suggesting in this thread - I am suggesting what is essentially an alteration and extension to the existing suggestions procedure. This is an idea I thought of in another suggestion, in response to OP's apparent grievances regarding the lack of communication from Content Team.

Possible Positives of the suggestion (At least 2):​

Spoiler: Benefits of the Suggestion (4 points listed)

• A full suggestion discussion becomes more nuanced and more of a constructive back-and-forth between community and staff without being unnecessarily demanding of staff's time - Information which is also visible after the fact when searching the suggestion - Where a potentially more complex informative and easier to understand discussion about why something may be denied or (ended up being) accepted can be easily reviewable, making researching & thinking about suggestions/suggestion creation potentially easier, rather than going to create a suggestion. And as opposed to just the community only receiving a binary Yes/No, with optional additional statement of varying ambiguity in response to a given suggestion - Which may leave the community feeling frustrated.
  
  
• Prevents things like this and its follow-up from ever happening again. It did not need to be like that - And it's clear to everyone that staff are not perfect. The fact that this happened implies that it could (and probably has already, even if in part) do so again.
  
  
• Improved intuitiveness and accessibility of the suggestion process.
  
  
• Improves communication in general between staff and community, showing us that we matter.

Possible Negatives of the suggestion:​

Spoiler: Drawbacks of the Suggestion (5 points listed)

• Suggestions will take longer to resolve (and subsequently, implement). This point is basically moot because threads last an arbitrary amount of time, anyway? Like, there's some suggestions from a while back that have been discussed, but have not been resolved in any way. And even then, when a suggestion is accepted, it just ends up in the (already extremely extensive) backlog for a long time before eventual implementation, so really all the time issue is going to be on the forum-side.
  
  As-is, the suggestions sub-forum is just an infinite well. As far as time-constraints go, suggestions were already a thing that take place over the course of multiple days and get resolved whenever they get resolved, so the only real downside time-wise is that it will take up more staff time with a 2 or 3 response minimum which would take place over the course of multiple days or even potentially weeks to each suggestion, rather than just the 1, with threads remaining open longer.
  
  
• Suggestions may be more frustrating to deal with, especially from a staff perspective. I completely understand how hard it is to communicate that certain things are just simply not possible or otherwise reasonably feasible to implement. The big main reason why Content Team are the be-all, end-all, final say on things like this are because some things are simply beyond understanding. I am by no means attempting to subvert that with this, I just want improved communication between the community and staff to some degree, so that we can both make the server better.
  
  
• Suggestions backlog will grow more, as threads will be allowed to remain open past an initial response, and staff are unable to process as many suggestions at once. This is just something we'll have to accept - Ideally, the suggestions (and pending suggestions) that have been around longer should be prioritised, but it's unreasonable to expect staff to keep track of that. As things currently are, the community just see (the already long backlog of) suggestions lasting for some length of time (sometimes even for months) without communication, before some are seemingly picked at random and addressed (and sometimes denied with reasons that are just more complex ways of saying what amounts to "we decided not to").
  
  
• CT Meetings would take longer: This is not an intended effect of the suggestion and there are a few ways of interpreting this point, as there are a few ways in which this would possible (If one is missing, please detail it in a reply) -
  
  • Literally every suggestion presently on the subforum gets reviewed with every meeting - Which I hope is not the case and if it is... Please don't do that? I don't think anyone should be expected to sift through an entire, ever-growing subforum of threads at a time.
    
    
  • There is a goal to address X amount of suggestions. My suggestion in this circumstance is to either greatly reduce this amount or entirely discard the suggestion amount goal (constrain meetings by time, rather than getting X things done - since if there will always be a given amount of suggestions in the subforum and they're going to be left alone for arbitrary amounts of time anyway, it makes no sense to try and force yourself to endlessly roll this boulder up the hill (I thought I finished this sentence,, seems I accidentally left it unfinished)) , as and where needed in order to make it more reasonable for staff. Yes, this will reduce the rate at which suggestions are processed. This suggestion is about prioritising quality of resolution over quantity of resolution.
    
    
  • Time devoted to improving staff response per-suggestion compounds, and results in increased meeting durations. There is a misunderstanding regarding this. The suggestion only encourages improved response complexity for every suggestion when/where/if possible, but does not outright demand it. The primary aim of allowing suggestions to occur in distinct phases, rather than the present vacuum-like state of just "suggestion is made, discussion is had, time passes, is closed," is to give the community the opportunity to catch a staff error when interpreting the suggestion - Let us have the opportunity to say "Hey, I don't think this is right and here's why?" It also does not expect the same suggestion to absolutely have to be brought up in the immediate next meeting, only asking to be able to get around to it where/when/if possible. If that's next week, fine. If that's next month, fine. If that's next year, fine. If that's next decade, fine. Please just give us the opportunity to point out that something may not be correct - As it stands, we just remake the thread (as recommended) and you end up discussing it again anyway, only accomplishing the result of cluttering up the forum unnecessarily.
  
  
• Scenario: CT are working on something they can't tell the community about. A suggestion is made that is related to said thing and it can't be addressed in a way that either spoils what they can't discuss, or would otherwise ruin it in some manner.
  
  There is no good way to resolve this, if I were CT and I was in this position... Honestly, I think the best solution in this case would be to leave it alone (until closer to implementation of the thing that the community can't be told about, like say, until it's less than a day away). I know this is a very cloak-and-dagger response that is completely counterintuitive and in total contrast to what I am saying about improving communication, but if good communication is literally not an option in this case, then I would rather have none at all, than a poor and potentially confusing attempt to dismiss the issue entirely, with a potentially frustrating result. Would that potentially leave a suggestion open for literal years? ...Unfortunately, yes.

Based on the Positives & Negatives, why should this suggestion be accepted:​

We are constantly refining the way we do things on the server (What's that? There's other servers on CN? Nooooo) to improve the experience for players. It's about time we made a much-needed change to the way we make changes, so that we can make changes while we make changes better. It may be a little more arduous and time-consuming, especially on staff's part as mentioned, but I for one, believe that the benefits in this circumstance far outweigh the deficits.

Again, I get that staff have the ultimate final say on whether a suggestion is accepted or denied. I just want to improve communication. Sometimes it's difficult for staff to get something across, sometimes it's difficult for the community to get something across. This method may seem like weighting to fix one over the other, but this does effectively increase the total amount of information surrounding pretty much every issue that would come up in a suggestion - Which I mentioned would be useful to have when creating similar suggestions.

 

[Zen]

+ Support
Quite a few suggestions get outright rejected when they could easily be tweaked slightly to no longer have the issues they got rejected for. Also, a few suggestions (like the car horsepower one) get rejected because staff misunderstood the point/aim of the suggestion, and it would give the possibility of clarifying things.

 

[Kevin Ki]

+++Support

I'm sorry, and not to be rude to staff, but some of the reasons for denied are kinda dumb.

 

[Emilia Foddg]

Something I would like to add: This suggestion about having clipboards being added to dispensers from late October, was denied. But if you check the dev tracker, you'll find this task to add clipboards to dispensers in the backlog, that was added all the way back in January, as the result of an accepted suggestion (but seemingly not findable anymore, so it makes sense that it couldn't be found when trying to search for it in the forums (although to be fair, FAQ does say to also check the dev tracker as well, but that's beside the point here)):



So there is clearly something wrong here that needs to be addressed.

 

[Zen]

Like if we could have suggestions go something like

• Suggestion made
• Can't because X, Y, Z
• Suggestion edited to avoid the issues Content Team has been raised
• Edited suggestion accepted

That would be immediately much better, and you can't argue "it would make suggestions take longer", because with the current system those suggestions would have been outright rejected, so the only change to time here is one of never become a longer while than most suggestions.

 

[Emilia Foddg]

Like if we could have suggestions go something like

• Suggestion made
• Can't because X, Y, Z
• Suggestion edited to avoid the issues Content Team has been raised
• Edited suggestion accepted

That would be immediately much better, and you can't argue "it would make suggestions take longer", because with the current system those suggestions would have been outright rejected, so the only change to time here is one of never become a longer while than most suggestions.

...Yes - That is part of the intention behind why I have said the process should be like that, directly facilitating and encouraging this kind of interaction.

 

[Bill Nye The Guy]

+support

the amount of times a denial reason for an otherwise good suggestion is something you can completely avoid by explaining ONE THING TO THEM is too high

 

[Yeke]

Hello.

I would like to pop something in here as I do feel there may be a lack of understanding of how the Content Team works, when reading this suggestion I can understand your frustration when things are denied, especially if you feel you have put effort into a good suggestion with a short denial response and your left scratching your head.

The way Content Team currently works is;
Twice a week the Content Team will meet to go through the suggestions to prevent a massive back log (we get numerous suggestions a day), these take into consideration the written content (as we are not going to try guess what you want if it is unclear), community response (The supports, good and bad) and then it goes to content team discussion where they discuss at length the good, the bad and the ugly for the suggestions to try and see if the benefit outweighs the negatives, these discussions can last up to 10 to 30 minutes per suggestion depending on the depth, which with how many suggestions we get is a lot.

You did mention that you feel we should put a summary response and then leave the suggestion open for further discussion, this would add a significant extra workload to the content team to have to discuss a suggestion twice, if you feel a suggestion was inappropriately denied or the reasoning may have been subpar, you can contact either the Content Team Leads or the Community Divisional Lead(Superadmins) and request they review this is the reason provided nothing of value, however if its a case of valuable feedback has been issued, you can repost your suggestion taking into consideration the original denial reason and tailoring it to counter those points.

I think people do fail to realise the Content Team is made up entirely of volunteers who dedicate their time to attend these meetings and represent the community whilst also looking into the best interests for the server, its vision and balance, these meetings for content alone can take up to 4 to 5 hours, i think I hold the record of a 6 hour meeting, where topics are taken in depth, after a meeting, this then takes a lot of time from the Content Team Supervisors and Leads to go through each suggestion and append their accepted and denied messages, denied messages take significantly longer tailoring specific feedback to each suggestion

Prevents things like this and its follow-up from ever happening again. It did not need to be like that - And it's clear to everyone that staff are not perfect. The fact that this happened implies that it could (and probably has already, even if in part) do so again.

Unfortunately in regards to this, we base the suggestion on what is written in context, the suggestion that was denied was poorly written and started adding other things to it that were irrelevant to the title, and I do not blame content for denying this, then accepting the other one which better outlined the issue that they were trying to fix.

Improves communication in general between staff and community, showing us that we matter.

I do feel the content team are already communicative enough without turning threads into arguments etc, taking into consideration they are volunteers, the community does matter, however the content team take your feedback into account and make a decision based off everything provided and their current server knowledge.

Something I would like to add: This suggestion about having clipboards being added to dispensers from late October, was denied. But if you check the dev tracker, you'll find this task to add clipboards to dispensers in the backlog, that was added all the way back in January, as the result of an accepted suggestion (but seemingly not findable anymore, so it makes sense that it couldn't be found when trying to search for it in the forums (although to be fair, FAQ does say to also check the dev tracker as well, but that's beside the point here)):

View attachment 11690

So there is clearly something wrong here that needs to be addressed.

In regards to this, the reason the forum link was broken was unfortunately due to the attempt to copy the forum area over for DarkRP, a member of our team accidentally deleted the archive in the process, which removed the backlog, this was a genuine human error and as such we have made changes to how we make github tickets to avoid any incidents or broken links in the future.

Like if we could have suggestions go something like

• Suggestion made
• Can't because X, Y, Z
• Suggestion edited to avoid the issues Content Team has been raised
• Edited suggestion accepted

That would be immediately much better, and you can't argue "it would make suggestions take longer", because with the current system those suggestions would have been outright rejected, so the only change to time here is one of never become a longer while than most suggestions.

Unfortunately you are talking about increasing the time for suggestions, content if they have knowledge can comment, but it ultimately is the requirement of the OP to provide as much information in the suggestion to ensure it is thought out, as if there is a concern, then it wont be accepted, you are asking for content to have to discuss a soft denial, spend time writing a response to then wait until the next meeting to again discuss the same point.

As said prior, if you feel your suggestion has been denied unfairly or been given a poor reason, you should contact the Content Team Lead or the Community Divisional Lead which can be found HERE under the "Server Structure", this will show you who to contact, however if there is feedback given in the denial, you can re-raise the suggestion with the feedback appended.

As again stated, the Content Team are volunteers, they spend a significant amount of time working on suggestions and they wont always get things right, but they do work to try better the community, filtering out destructive or unnecessary suggestions to ensure the needed suggestions end up on Github, as horrible as this is to say, sometimes some majorly upvoted suggestions are bad for the vision and aim of the server, as a result, the Content Team acts as the arbiter and pushes back against it, without increasing their meeting times significantly and then their post meeting work, you are essentially driving them to increase their work 5 fold, on top of their original staffing duties, which personally is not fair to them and I think you could all agree, you would hate to sit in hour long meetings twice a week.

One thing I have taken away from this is some denial reasons are either half arsed or lazily done, and that will be addressed to ensure proper and appropriate feedback is given.

Regards,
Yeke

 

[Michael Dzhetnikov]

+Support

denials are either unexplained or very vague

 

[Zen]

Hello.

I would like to pop something in here as I do feel there may be a lack of understanding of how the Content Team works, when reading this suggestion I can understand your frustration when things are denied, especially if you feel you have put effort into a good suggestion with a short denial response and your left scratching your head.

The way Content Team currently works is;
Twice a week the Content Team will meet to go through the suggestions to prevent a massive back log (we get numerous suggestions a day), these take into consideration the written content (as we are not going to try guess what you want if it is unclear), community response (The supports, good and bad) and then it goes to content team discussion where they discuss at length the good, the bad and the ugly for the suggestions to try and see if the benefit outweighs the negatives, these discussions can last up to 10 to 30 minutes per suggestion depending on the depth, which with how many suggestions we get is a lot.

You did mention that you feel we should put a summary response and then leave the suggestion open for further discussion, this would add a significant extra workload to the content team to have to discuss a suggestion twice, if you feel a suggestion was inappropriately denied or the reasoning may have been subpar, you can contact either the Content Team Leads or the Community Divisional Lead(Superadmins) and request they review this is the reason provided nothing of value, however if its a case of valuable feedback has been issued, you can repost your suggestion taking into consideration the original denial reason and tailoring it to counter those points.

I think people do fail to realise the Content Team is made up entirely of volunteers who dedicate their time to attend these meetings and represent the community whilst also looking into the best interests for the server, its vision and balance, these meetings for content alone can take up to 4 to 5 hours, i think I hold the record of a 6 hour meeting, where topics are taken in depth, after a meeting, this then takes a lot of time from the Content Team Supervisors and Leads to go through each suggestion and append their accepted and denied messages, denied messages take significantly longer tailoring specific feedback to each suggestion



Unfortunately in regards to this, we base the suggestion on what is written in context, the suggestion that was denied was poorly written and started adding other things to it that were irrelevant to the title, and I do not blame content for denying this, then accepting the other one which better outlined the issue that they were trying to fix.

I do feel the content team are already communicative enough without turning threads into arguments etc, taking into consideration they are volunteers, the community does matter, however the content team take your feedback into account and make a decision based off everything provided and their current server knowledge.

In regards to this, the reason the forum link was broken was unfortunately due to the attempt to copy the forum area over for DarkRP, a member of our team accidentally deleted the archive in the process, which removed the backlog, this was a genuine human error and as such we have made changes to how we make github tickets to avoid any incidents or broken links in the future.


Unfortunately you are talking about increasing the time for suggestions, content if they have knowledge can comment, but it ultimately is the requirement of the OP to provide as much information in the suggestion to ensure it is thought out, as if there is a concern, then it wont be accepted, you are asking for content to have to discuss a soft denial, spend time writing a response to then wait until the next meeting to again discuss the same point.

As said prior, if you feel your suggestion has been denied unfairly or been given a poor reason, you should contact the Content Team Lead or the Community Divisional Lead which can be found HERE under the "Server Structure", this will show you who to contact, however if there is feedback given in the denial, you can re-raise the suggestion with the feedback appended.

As again stated, the Content Team are volunteers, they spend a significant amount of time working on suggestions and they wont always get things right, but they do work to try better the community, filtering out destructive or unnecessary suggestions to ensure the needed suggestions end up on Github, as horrible as this is to say, sometimes some majorly upvoted suggestions are bad for the vision and aim of the server, as a result, the Content Team acts as the arbiter and pushes back against it, without increasing their meeting times significantly and then their post meeting work, you are essentially driving them to increase their work 5 fold, on top of their original staffing duties, which personally is not fair to them and I think you could all agree, you would hate to sit in hour long meetings twice a week.

One thing I have taken away from this is some denial reasons are either half arsed or lazily done, and that will be addressed to ensure proper and appropriate feedback is given.

Regards,
Yeke

That's good to know. While I do still +Support the idea of more in depth discussion on suggestions, the vague/lack of feedback is also a big part of this, so stopping that would be great. I've had feedback that was along the lines of "it wouldn't be possible for developers to do this in Source" only to be told by Foodeater that it probably is possible, and I've seen feedback that has boiled down to "We talked about it and decided not to.".

Even just mildly improving communication here would be a big help, and I think that's part of the reason why:

there may be a lack of understanding of how the Content Team works

The current communication we get with Content Team is basically zero, so it's very hard to understand anything about what they do, how they decided things, and why was this rejected?

 

[Emilia Foddg]

I have numerous issues with Yeke's reply, which this reply does not fully cover. I will more exhaustively cover the reply in another reply, hopefully tomorrow, as well as make a substantial edit to the OP, both of which should hopefully better reflect my intentions and vision regarding this, as it appears to have been poorly communicated on my part.​

In the meantime, some quick (well, this post alone actually took far longer than anticipated and intended to formulate and put together - and several sections were cut and saved for being reworked for the full reply) nitpicks;

Unfortunately in regards to this, we base the suggestion on what is written in context, the suggestion that was denied was poorly written and started adding other things to it that were irrelevant to the title, and I do not blame content for denying this, then accepting the other one which better outlined the issue that they were trying to fix.

A readback through the thread in question makes me somewhat confused regarding this response - The suggestion was indeed very barebones, but was explicitly making a complaint about vehicles' inability to properly cross over uneven map terrain, asking for them to be able to be improved, such that that did not happen.

That thread's OP, under their reasoning section, did basically state something to the effect of [all the civilian vehicles are too slow], which was probably the only mention of speed and maybe an interpretable desire to make vehicles faster to overcome terrain -

But if we're talking about what is written in context, they wrote in the main changes section:

[...] these things literally can't get over a 25 degree angle consistently.

and under the positives;

Cars won't get stuck every once in a while on random janky pieces of terrain [...]

So there was clear intent that they wanted vehicles to stop getting stuck, due to their poor power at the time. But the Content Team's interpretation of the suggestion as a whole seemed to have been "Make the vehicles faster" and denied it based on that:

The content team sees no reason to increase the speed of civilian cars as the Pinewood area is quite small.

There was no mention of a need to get around the map faster.

This much should be clear to everyone - Especially given that we remade the suggestion, asking for the exact same thing, simply with superior wording and it got accepted. There doesn't appear to be any different context between the first and second suggestions at all. You said:

[...](as we are not going to try guess what you want if it is unclear) [...]

Yet based on what I've just evidenced so far, this appears to be patently false. An assumption was made about what was being asked and then that was addressed - Despite that not being what was asked for.

In regards to this, the reason the forum link was broken was unfortunately due to the attempt to copy the forum area over for DarkRP, a member of our team accidentally deleted the archive in the process, which removed the backlog, this was a genuine human error and as such we have made changes to how we make github tickets to avoid any incidents or broken links in the future.

The complaint here is regarding inconsistency - Someone asked for a thing and it was accepted. Someone else later then asked for the same thing and then got denied, despite that thing already not only having been accepted, but in the backlog. When people find this sort of thing out, they're going to wonder what the point of making a suggestion is, if it doesn't actually even matter whether or not it gets accepted or denied.

Now, I'm not saying "If a suggestion gets accepted, then it should absolutely be implemented, no matter what." I get that the stance of the CT may change over time and so old tickets/suggestions might be deemed not needed or necessary. Or even that an implementation turns out to be impossible/harmful to the server in some fashion. But surely you can understand that being on the other side of the curtain and seeing these sorts of things with no context or explanation, is frustrating.

I do feel the content team are already communicative enough without turning threads into arguments etc, taking into consideration they are volunteers, the community does matter, however the content team take your feedback into account and make a decision based off everything provided and their current server knowledge.

I firmly disagree with this and so far in reading your post and thinking on my full reply, I feel my point has only been proven - I get that you can't tirelessly work and work on pleasing as many people as you can within a given time span - And that you only can spend so much time doing so.

But in my opinion, this is not sufficient reasoning for people with all the power and responsibilities involved with arbitrating the final conclusion to a suggestion, to be making mistakes and misinterpretations of this level and at this frequency - Especially if it results in the suggestion just being made again anyway, effectively undoing all of the time and work you put into it in the first place.

More to follow.

 

[Kevin Ki]

Regards,
Yeke

Thank you for taking the time to explain all of that. I was always a little bit nervous about contacting the team leads as I feel that the content team does (as you explained) alot of work, and feel like doing so would've been kinda rude. But it does make sense that a problem can't be addressed if no one knows it is a problem. Thank you!

That said, addressing the content team workload, do you feel splitting the content team into teams would help maybe handle workloads?
My quick pitch would be these teams:

Weapon and equipment balancing (This team would review weapons balance and class equipment changes. So a
Map changes and model changes (pretty obvious imo but they'll hang suggestions of map changes and model changes)
Overall gameplay and rule changes (Someone suggests a quest giver addition, a new system to leveling, or a change to a rule, this team handles it)
Etc.
As there tends to be commonalities between the teams, and this would better allow for the content team to tackle problems separately.

As for a example of, well, poor responses

Denied - Surface Combat/RP Rebalancing Part 1: Nu-7 Loadout Changes

Content Team, specifically Derek, before you deny this instantly, Mercer told me to post it. Hear me out. This was discussed mostly by the US Nu-7 CO team, and when presented to the UK, I took their opinions that they presented to me into account and tweaked certain things accordingly. This...

www.civilgamers.com

And (in my own bias)

Denied - Change Perma Weapon classification

What does this suggestion change/add/remove: [Make perma weapons have more classification to better allow people to make their own loadout for their specific job. Such as, SMG, Rifle, Shotgun, Pistol. Currently if I equip a perma spas12 then it replaces my GBR. Making it kinda a pain to change...

www.civilgamers.com

The first stood out as a strange reply as it was basically "Don't make Nu-7 loadout change suggestions" (not exactly those words but I can't see the reply anymore for some reason)

The second (because it's mine) doesn't really make sense imo for rather obvious reasons being: Most classes already have a second weapon, and with a perma they have 3. A prime example is NU7 officer, with the sopmod, the 9mm, and a perma.

 

[Luft]

Players have absolutely no idea of what they want, would want and or what would work within the server regardless of the amount of +supports a change/suggestion gets.

Thought is put into suggestions, with great detail to what has worked in the past as believe it or not suggestions get re-posted quite frequently. Server's been out for quite a while, with SL/NL knowing what would fit within the realms of the server.

TLDR;

What you, and a decent chunk of the playerbase may think is a really good suggestion could be a horrible suggestion and or a suggestion that'd bring absolutely no change to the server in and of itself. There are many variables to this, e.g development time, different player opinions & general vetting by NL / Ventz for the larger suggestions.

The entirety of the Content Team do this within their free-time, they aren't going to bust out a complete set of reasonings 99.99% of the time for whatever suggestions end up getting denied/accepted.

 

[Emilia Foddg]

Continued from previous -

You did mention that you feel we should put a summary response and then leave the suggestion open for further discussion, this would add a significant extra workload to the content team to have to discuss a suggestion twice, if you feel a suggestion was inappropriately denied or the reasoning may have been subpar, you can contact either the Content Team Leads or the Community Divisional Lead(Superadmins) and request they review this is the reason provided nothing of value, however if its a case of valuable feedback has been issued, you can repost your suggestion taking into consideration the original denial reason and tailoring it to counter those points.

Unfortunately you are talking about increasing the time for suggestions, content if they have knowledge can comment, but it ultimately is the requirement of the OP to provide as much information in the suggestion to ensure it is thought out, as if there is a concern, then it wont be accepted, you are asking for content to have to discuss a soft denial, spend time writing a response to then wait until the next meeting to again discuss the same point.

As said prior, if you feel your suggestion has been denied unfairly or been given a poor reason, you should contact the Content Team Lead or the Community Divisional Lead which can be found HERE under the "Server Structure", this will show you who to contact, however if there is feedback given in the denial, you can re-raise the suggestion with the feedback appended.

[...] without increasing their meeting times significantly and then their post meeting work, you are essentially driving them to increase their work 5 fold, on top of their original staffing duties, which personally is not fair to them and I think you could all agree, you would hate to sit in hour long meetings twice a week.

This is largely contradictory and highly confusing - Everything highlighted in orange, in short, is raising the issue that by us generating more information that CT has to process, we are creating a larger workload for CT to have to spend more time dealing with, at a time. Yet in yellow, are existing systems being encouraged, for us to basically do just that.

In light of this, I don't see why streamlining and expanding upon the suggestions process in some form, would not be beneficial for both parties, in terms of both understanding and improving workflow. What exactly is the difference between "this is a re-opening/followup of X suggestion" and a discussion of "how X suggestion has potentially changed in light of CT response" (edit: aside from the fact that you make less progress on the suggestions backlog every meeting, but imo this is a necessary sacrifice to improve the state of suggestions)? Surely things would be improved, especially in terms of CT consumption, if everything surrounding one particular suggestion idea was better collated into a single stream, rather than having to be spread out across a multitude of threads?

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what I am trying to get across, and so:

Twice a week the Content Team will meet to go through the suggestions to prevent a massive back log (we get numerous suggestions a day), these take into consideration the written content (as we are not going to try guess what you want if it is unclear), community response (The supports, good and bad) and then it goes to content team discussion where they discuss at length the good, the bad and the ugly for the suggestions to try and see if the benefit outweighs the negatives, these discussions can last up to 10 to 30 minutes per suggestion depending on the depth, which with how many suggestions we get is a lot.

I think people do fail to realise the Content Team is made up entirely of volunteers who dedicate their time to attend these meetings and represent the community whilst also looking into the best interests for the server, its vision and balance, these meetings for content alone can take up to 4 to 5 hours, i think I hold the record of a 6 hour meeting, where topics are taken in depth, after a meeting, this then takes a lot of time from the Content Team Supervisors and Leads to go through each suggestion and append their accepted and denied messages, denied messages take significantly longer tailoring specific feedback to each suggestion

Unfortunately you are talking about increasing the time for suggestions, content if they have knowledge can comment, but it ultimately is the requirement of the OP to provide as much information in the suggestion to ensure it is thought out, as if there is a concern, then it wont be accepted, you are asking for content to have to discuss a soft denial, spend time writing a response to then wait until the next meeting to again discuss the same point.

As said prior, if you feel your suggestion has been denied unfairly or been given a poor reason, you should contact the Content Team Lead or the Community Divisional Lead which can be found HERE under the "Server Structure", this will show you who to contact, however if there is feedback given in the denial, you can re-raise the suggestion with the feedback appended.

As again stated, the Content Team are volunteers, they spend a significant amount of time working on suggestions and they wont always get things right, but they do work to try better the community, filtering out destructive or unnecessary suggestions to ensure the needed suggestions end up on Github, as horrible as this is to say, sometimes some majorly upvoted suggestions are bad for the vision and aim of the server, as a result, the Content Team acts as the arbiter and pushes back against it, without increasing their meeting times significantly and then their post meeting work, you are essentially driving them to increase their work 5 fold, on top of their original staffing duties, which personally is not fair to them and I think you could all agree, you would hate to sit in hour long meetings twice a week.

One thing I have taken away from this is some denial reasons are either half arsed or lazily done, and that will be addressed to ensure proper and appropriate feedback is given.

Regards,
Yeke

The OP has been edited in an attempt to address raised concerns. Additions/alterations have been highlighted in blue.​

Additionally, the idea of a 'Pending' tag for threads that have received at least one staff response was removed and reintegrated into the main suggestion.

Thank you for the response, Yeke - It was highly insightful as to the way CT works, as well as further shape this thread.
And thank you CT for everything you do. Please let us try and help, if possible.

 

[Emilia Foddg]

Players have absolutely no idea of what they want, would want and or what would work within the server regardless of the amount of +supports a change/suggestion gets.

Thought is put into suggestions, with great detail to what has worked in the past as believe it or not suggestions get re-posted quite frequently. Server's been out for quite a while, with SL/NL knowing what would fit within the realms of the server.

TLDR;

What you, and a decent chunk of the playerbase may think is a really good suggestion could be a horrible suggestion and or a suggestion that'd bring absolutely no change to the server in and of itself. There are many variables to this, e.g development time, different player opinions & general vetting by NL / Ventz for the larger suggestions.

The entirety of the Content Team do this within their free-time, they aren't going to bust out a complete set of reasonings 99.99% of the time for whatever suggestions end up getting denied/accepted.

This is an extremely pessimistic, but not entirely inaccurate, view of the situation. Not only that, but this is known and understood (and I should hope most people get this, too). However, what you've said here is not congruent with what the suggestion intends, as well as what it aims to do - I believe there is a misunderstanding as to what this suggestion is. Please read back over the now-revised suggestion.

 

[Michael Dzhetnikov]

I remember making a suggestion regarding a previously made suggestion, which got accepted, got denied

 

[Emilia Foddg]

I remember making a suggestion regarding a previously made suggestion, which got accepted, got denied

to be fair, nothing about this suggestion is aimed at resolving this sort of thing. it is entirely on the OP to check thoroughly to see whether or not their suggestion already exists in some format.

i only brought up this thing because it seems to be some strange consistency issue with CT, showing that they can't be right 100% of the time - reasoning as to why before closing a suggestion, we should be allowed the opportunity to make sure that it's the right move and attempt to evidence it where applicable if not.

...i sincerely hope that reasoning was obvious to most people

 

[Rushi]

As a previous Content Lead, I will explain how this type of stuff usually works. As mentioned previously, Content Team does group up twice a week to go over suggestions / planned features and other type of stuff that is important for server health, and these type of meeting can already take a few hours. When I used to be on Content Lead, we used to get on average 3-5 suggestions a day, which was already too much considering we also had to go through other content stuff. However, this number has increased and we are getting 8-10 suggestions a day which simply leaves no time for them to do other stuff, which will obviously cause some various issues, such as:
In the same time frame, Content Team has to go through an increasingly amount of suggestion, which makes so that there's less time for other stuff. Naturally, some responses will be more rushed and they won't have the same efforts as others.

I don't believe what you are suggesting is going to fix this issue, the current issue is that there's way too many suggestions being put and we are simply unable to keep up. If there was less suggestions, then it would leave CT with more time to go through them and even other stuff!

At the end of the day, Content Team (and the staff team) is made from volunteers that are giving their free time to help server, and players tend to forget this and not really understand what's going on behind the scenes.

I hope that you also understand our point of view.

King Regards,
Rushi

 

[Zen]

As a previous Content Lead, I will explain how this type of stuff usually works. As mentioned previously, Content Team does group up twice a week to go over suggestions / planned features and other type of stuff that is important for server health, and these type of meeting can already take a few hours. When I used to be on Content Lead, we used to get on average 3-5 suggestions a day, which was already too much considering we also had to go through other content stuff. However, this number has increased and we are getting 8-10 suggestions a day which simply leaves no time for them to do other stuff, which will obviously cause some various issues, such as:
In the same time frame, Content Team has to go through an increasingly amount of suggestion, which makes so that there's less time for other stuff. Naturally, some responses will be more rushed and they won't have the same efforts as others.

I don't believe what you are suggesting is going to fix this issue, the current issue is that there's way too many suggestions being put and we are simply unable to keep up. If there was less suggestions, then it would leave CT with more time to go through them and even other stuff!

At the end of the day, Content Team (and the staff team) is made from volunteers that are giving their free time to help server, and players tend to forget this and not really understand what's going on behind the scenes.

I hope that you also understand our point of view.

King Regards,
Rushi

Might it make sense for Content Team, and perhaps other teams within the staff, to be an entirely separate thing from server moderation? I feel like CT specifically really doesn't need anyone to have experience in handing out warns and stuff like that for people to engage in it, and it is closer to the Developer team than moderation in purpose and action. Perhaps splitting things out a bit more, like how GMs and Developers are not the same people as moderators and admins? It would probably give more time for people that want to stick more with the CT side of things than the moderation side of things, as they wouldn't need to also be taking sits and the like, and it would potentially open the door for more members to join that are interested in the CT side of it but also are really not interested in dealing with sits.

I myself would definitely be interested in joining the Content Team, but I'm very disinterested in the moderation side of things, so I've never applied for regular server staff and likely never will.

 

[Emilia Foddg]

As a previous Content Lead, I will explain how this type of stuff usually works. As mentioned previously, Content Team does group up twice a week to go over suggestions / planned features and other type of stuff that is important for server health, and these type of meeting can already take a few hours. When I used to be on Content Lead, we used to get on average 3-5 suggestions a day, which was already too much considering we also had to go through other content stuff. However, this number has increased and we are getting 8-10 suggestions a day which simply leaves no time for them to do other stuff, which will obviously cause some various issues, such as:
In the same time frame, Content Team has to go through an increasingly amount of suggestion, which makes so that there's less time for other stuff. Naturally, some responses will be more rushed and they won't have the same efforts as others.

I don't believe what you are suggesting is going to fix this issue, the current issue is that there's way too many suggestions being put and we are simply unable to keep up. If there was less suggestions, then it would leave CT with more time to go through them and even other stuff!

At the end of the day, Content Team (and the staff team) is made from volunteers that are giving their free time to help server, and players tend to forget this and not really understand what's going on behind the scenes.

I hope that you also understand our point of view.

King Regards,
Rushi

...So what I get from the amount of incoming suggestions increasing influencing how much time CT spends on them, suggests to me that CT actually do intend to try and address every single suggestion in the subforum, or something close to that effect.

Regardless of what the actual goal is, here's the ultimate problem with this loop - You get new members into the community, some of those new members take a peek at the forums, see there's suggestions and decide that they want to try and contribute for whatever reason (as well as some existing members that might just suddenly show interest in engaging if they deem it worthwhile - or otherwise get really frustrated with an issue to the point where they feel they absolutely have to try and get it addressed, the point remains otherwise). Each individual is a new source of suggestions, each of varying quality.

Now maybe the rate of incoming suggestions will die down after a while, one person can only have so many issues at any give time after all (I do want to stress that I am not making suggestions for the sake of making suggestions and I don't really think anyone should be); But I think with the community as is, this could be the plateau of suggestions influx - It could go back down. It could increase. What's constant is that there will always be suggestions coming in and CT can't possibly hope to reasonably keep up with increasing demand on this front.

Based on this reply, I still think there's a miscommunication regarding the suggestion, what it's trying to do and what its effects may be.

Let me try to clarify. Here's how I think things happen now:
The subforum has suggestions. During a meeting, CT go over some suggestions. Some might get closed - Which reduces the amount of outstanding suggestions. More suggestions come in.

Here's how I see this happening post-suggestion:
The subforum has suggestions. During a meeting, CT go over some suggestions. Some might get closed, but it'd likely be less, since only pending suggestions can be closed. The amount of outstanding suggestions is reduced at a slower rate. More suggestions come in - The backlog is ultimately larger as a result.

Like... I get it, but if the demand is getting to be too much anyway, why not focus on ensuring that the suggestions that you do get to are resolved to a good standard? As things are, the suggestions subforum is basically just a McDonald's drive-thru; The line's too long, everyone's getting the wrong orders and it sucks for the people doing all the work.

The staff responses are telling me that all of this needs to be examined internally. There's no way it's okay for things to continue like this.

Remember, any two of the three are possible, but never all three.