I don't see why you would really do that, I mean, having everything in one place trumps in the votes 19 to 8, it wouldn't really be fair to those 19 people.
The key thing is that I put the poll up to help me to make a decision, not to delegate the decision to a vote. For better or for worse, I have a lot more faith in my own judgment as a game designer than I do in design-by-democracy.
In terms of the merits of the particular decision I'm considering, I am actually talking about having all of the shops accessible in one place, it's just that the new place to do that would be in the Activation menu, rather than the Fight Evil menu. This would fit in really well with the upcoming ability to recruit through the Activation menu, and would probably be in the same subpage as recruiting.
I also want to point out that having the shops distributed throughout the city isn't as bad as it sounds to you. You tried the National LCS stuff and found it really difficult to deal with the different organization of different cities, and the lack of a commercial district was part of that. But no commercial district
alone isn't that frustrating, unless it's only the initial "oh, these moved" transition period.
For many many years, LCS had no commercial district, and I never saw a single complaint about the way shops were in different parts of the city. I moved them together because it struck me as a good idea to have shopping accessible in one place, and because I was trying to limit the size of the districts so that there wasn't any paging in the Fight Evil menus. I've shrunk the districts further since then, so that part doesn't matter anymore, and making all the shops accessible from the activation menu addresses the convenience factor.
I've known a lot of game designers, and the area that my personal strongest relative strength is compared to others is in seeing the game from a player's perspective, and quickly identifying likely changes in play patterns. Sometimes that means I make unintuitive decisions because I can foresee them being a net positive. When I put recruitment caps in the game, there was some passionate opposition to the idea. It was very disruptive, and it did nothing but make the player's job harder. I did it anyway because I felt that it would be an interesting system and it would dramatically reduce the amount of grind in the game, instead forcing you to go out and play the game before you can continue powering up. Despite the initial opposition, when I ran a poll looking back on the decision a few months after I put recruit caps in, only 2 in 16 people felt that the recruitment limits had made the game less fun, while 10 in 16 said they'd made the game
more fun.
Basically, I would do it because I think it's the best option, and because I think most people in both camps will be happy with that "compromise" in the long run.
Thought: If the shops show up in the Activation menu, do they need to show up in the Fight Evil menus at all?
Poll
30 (68.2%)
Author
Topic: Do you want shops to be sorted into The Commercial District? (Read 3470 times)