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Author Topic: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting  (Read 473453 times)

JanusTwoface

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #435 on: July 05, 2010, 12:56:23 pm »

Ok, i did a little thinking/looking, and what we really need is the ability to vote directly on suggestion topics. I found this mod for the SMF, which ought to do pretty well. http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1890

While the link you posted does look interesting, I don't see how that would help the Eternal Suggestion voting.  Basically, it looks like it could hide comments that people don't like and possibly add a reputation system for the voters, but how would it help sort out individual ideas?
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Silverionmox

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #436 on: July 05, 2010, 05:11:15 pm »

I agree that there are good reasons for voting on large categories, but it has the effect of making the eternal voting list very static and the information value very low. It could be avoided by having a main list of general categories (what needs attention) and sublists of how to improve these categories. More votes could workl, but I think the top ten will still be mostly static and imprecise.

If you can figure out how to make that work, by all means, write it up.
I'm programming impotent, sorry. It's not conceptually difficult, just separate voting lists (one main, and one for each item on the main list) with some moderation to decide what goes where... Basically, it's the current list with the appropriate items grouped under their overarching list.
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RCIX

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #437 on: July 05, 2010, 07:01:41 pm »

Ok, i did a little thinking/looking, and what we really need is the ability to vote directly on suggestion topics. I found this mod for the SMF, which ought to do pretty well. http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1890

While the link you posted does look interesting, I don't see how that would help the Eternal Suggestion voting.  Basically, it looks like it could hide comments that people don't like and possibly add a reputation system for the voters, but how would it help sort out individual ideas?
It offers a system to search (and hopefully sort) based on votes, and you don't need the reputation aspect, so you stick it in the Suggestions board as a replacement to the Eternal Suggestion Voting. People vote on suggestions, then Toady just sorts by votes and picks the best ones out that way.

Ever occur to you that maybe the list is static because more people are interested in spending their few votes on pathfinding and other seemingly important improvements instead of trivialities? 10 votes is all it needs to leave room for choice. We don't need to start spamming votes left and right on every issue.

And ultimately, we're being asked what we want worked on first, not what we want in specifically. Linking a suggestion to a specific official thread would just make make it a shopping list, not a general direction we want the game to go in.
THe problem is that people are voting on what amounts to a large subset of "IMPROVE MORE EVERYTHING", which isn't terribly specific for Toady. With 10 votes, people would still use most of their votes on the very generic topics and the specific suggestions wouldn't be very voted on.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #438 on: July 05, 2010, 11:55:48 pm »

Actually, RCIX, the ESV is very good at promoting the top 10 concerns that the most people have with the game.  And the biggest priorities are things like putting in the ability to have dwarves haul more efficiently through some sort of wheelbarrow or reworking of the stacking or hauling coding, and things that automate some process of the game (auto-mining or standing orders), interface streamlining, and then there are two things that actually relate to "improving" something, which is to say, are serious, well-developed debates about mechanics (a major focus of many DF players) and farming, which have benefitted from having a long, ongoing debate, rather than continual rehashing of the same basic ideas.

In fact, is there anyone besides RCIX who really hates the ESV?  It seems like he's just sore that his suggestions aren't going to be popular enough to make it to the top of the list, so he's just trying to destroy the list, instead.
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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #439 on: July 06, 2010, 02:29:20 am »

People here are cynical aren't they?

What i see is a list of 100+ suggestions, maybe 10 or 20 i like, and i get 3 votes. I also don't like the list because it's kinda hard to read and doesn't really feel organized. And yes, i think that if more people saw my suggestions more, then i think they would be more popular. So sue me :P you'll also notice that I'm not the only one thinking that something needs to be done with the list...

Looking at the list, i see 4 fairly general suggestions, just out of the top 10: More mechanics! More farming! More graphics! More pathfinding!
« Last Edit: July 06, 2010, 02:31:27 am by RCIX »
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G-Flex

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #440 on: July 06, 2010, 04:05:17 am »

In fact, is there anyone besides RCIX who really hates the ESV?  It seems like he's just sore that his suggestions aren't going to be popular enough to make it to the top of the list, so he's just trying to destroy the list, instead.

I don't hate it, but I don't think it's as reliable a metric as people seem to think.

For one, it's obviously not a proper random sampling of players; you're more likely to get suggestions from certain groups than others, like people who spend a lot of the time on the forums, and you're less likely to get suggestions from, say, people who are so turned off by some aspect(s) of the game that they would never even see it, or wouldn't care. Obviously, different groups like this can have different priorities.

There's also no differentiation with regards to how broad/narrow a suggestion is, or how easy/difficult it is to implement. This matters for the following reason, as well as for the fact that if you can only have three things, you're going to choose the broadest and largest changes, which can't even really be effectively ranked on the same scale as more piecemeal ones that nonetheless can be quite important.

Some suggestions will simply be more attractive than others regardless of how good they are. Vague, broad suggestions often tend to be a lot sexier, for the stated reason and because your mind fills in more details itself the way you'd like to see them, and some are important but simple and dry enough in terms of what you'd see in gameplay that the suggestions themselves sound boring.

The fact is that we're not even ranking things within the same category here. We have large wishlist-style items like "Improved Pathfinding" and "Improved Hauling" alongside even larger and more wishlisty things like "Kingdom Mode" (a whole new gameplay mode!), and more minor suggestions like placing ramps on the edges of water features instead of cliffs, or separating out armor and clothing in stock listings. We vote on all of these with the same pool of votes, which only really works if they all have the same value, but obviously they don't.


There's also the simple fact that you can't expect users of software (including games) to necessarily understand the impact of a change they propose. I think this is obvious enough reading what some people thought (and what a few still think) of the material/body system changes. For example, one of the lower-ranked suggestions with three votes is "Carry Multiple Items", which sounds rather minor, but if you read what Toady's said about such things recently, the implications for stacking, workflow, etc. are actually fairly major.


I'm not saying that the Eternal Suggestions list is useless, just that it shouldn't be taken as gospel, and I feel like some people are getting to the point where they almost are.
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zagibu

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #441 on: July 06, 2010, 05:21:15 am »

I don't think it's possible to address the problem of different suggestion scopes with an automated software solution. What would be needed is a two-step model, where suggestions first have to be signed off by moderators, before they enter the list to be voted on.
The current system has two mechanisms that could be used to counter the problem a bit. Firstly, Toady can comment suggestions. If a suggestion would take a major code overhaul, or stands against his vision of how to further develop the game, he could make a remark that would maybe scare a few voters off.
The second mechanism is the linkage to the forum and possibility to edit suggestions. If in a forum debate the suggestion is found to be not very specific, because supporters all have different opinions on how exactly it would work, the creator of the suggestion could go back and modify the suggestion entry to reflect the dispute. But that would require people to take responsibility for their suggestions and accept critisism. Also, many suggestions in the ESV are currently unlinked, which is a joke, if you think about it. How can someone support a suggestion there is no debate about?

I think the ESV has a different problem. It is just too static. If you'd clear all votes now, it would take a week and the list would be in a "final" form, with only marginal changes of position at the bottom. Also, it amasses votes from dead people.

I would really like to write a new version, but it's just impossible at the moment. When I had time and motivation, the new version of DF came out. Maybe there will be a small time window after the exams.
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RCIX

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #442 on: July 06, 2010, 05:23:39 am »

That's why i suggested that SMF mod.
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I suggest you don't think too much what you build and where. When ever you need something, build it as close as possible to where you need it. that way your fortress will eventually become epic
Because god knows your duke will demand a kitten silo in his office.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #443 on: July 06, 2010, 08:51:00 am »

People here are cynical aren't they?

What i see is a list of 100+ suggestions, maybe 10 or 20 i like, and i get 3 votes. I also don't like the list because it's kinda hard to read and doesn't really feel organized. And yes, i think that if more people saw my suggestions more, then i think they would be more popular. So sue me :P you'll also notice that I'm not the only one thinking that something needs to be done with the list...

Looking at the list, i see 4 fairly general suggestions, just out of the top 10: More mechanics! More farming! More graphics! More pathfinding!

Obviously, you haven't even read those suggestions before slamming them (yes, MORE time spent pathfinding is what we're looking for), but that's, OK, I'm catching that pattern from you.

No, I just can't help noticing that this little crusade of yours started when I told you that you shouldn't be posting 4 "new" suggestions a day, especially before you read the wiki to understand what the topic is, or even tried just playing the game, before you tried going out of your way to "convince" people to change something, only to insult them if they didn't agree with you, or assume that if they otherwise didn't, it was because they had yet to be gifted with the privilidge of reading your writing while you, yourself, are completely unwilling to read anything anyone else writes.  (As I have said before, such an attitude towards others shows a fundamental lack of respect for me and everyone else on the board.)

Even IF you hate those top ten (because, say, you haven't played the game long enough to understand what sort of FPS hit the pathfinding problems cause, or you haven't had enough dwarves to understand the GUI problems with trying to track over a hundred of them at a time), then, as Toady himself said, he's actually taking those top ten and putting them into his schedule for working on them right now, and as such, will no longer need to be up there, which means that your "MORE CONSTRUCTION" or "MORE PLANT" suggestions will be several spaces closer to the top.

The Improved Farming thread, for example, is a very long-running thread that has very well-developed ideas refined by the arguments of many people pushing those who participated in it to defend their suggestions against criticism and scrutiny, while doing the same for others, and required people to actually suggest means for implimenting those suggestions, and it has had many of the same ideas that you shallowly just mention in the "More Plantlife Thread".  Perhaps we should be encouraging people to read the thoughts of others before letting people write down their own suggestions, since that is the difference between trying to write your suggestions so that they would garner the support it needs to climb the ESV, as opposed to simply trying to shout out as many suggestions as you can in the hope that you bury everyone else's suggestions back a few pages, since that is the difference between a debate and a shouting contest.

For one, it's obviously not a proper random sampling of players; you're more likely to get suggestions from certain groups than others, like people who spend a lot of the time on the forums, and you're less likely to get suggestions from, say, people who are so turned off by some aspect(s) of the game that they would never even see it, or wouldn't care. Obviously, different groups like this can have different priorities.

I'm not sure who, exactly, you are saying is being excluded, here.  If we are talking about peopel who are scared away from the game, and hence the forums, because of some aspect of the game, then they aren't going to be voting on anything, no matter what voting system we use, so there would be no point in changing anything to accomidate them.  If you are talking about people who play DF, but who never use the forums, on the other hand, I honestly wonder how many of them there are? 

There's also no differentiation with regards to how broad/narrow a suggestion is, or how easy/difficult it is to implement. This matters for the following reason, as well as for the fact that if you can only have three things, you're going to choose the broadest and largest changes, which can't even really be effectively ranked on the same scale as more piecemeal ones that nonetheless can be quite important.

Umm... I like the inter-breeding suggestion, which is a fairly small one.  I like several of the things at the top of the list, but don't feel the need to vote for most of them, because I know that they have far more votes than suggestions lower down on the list, and hence, there is little risk of them slipping down in the polls without my vote.

I would see this more as a sign that many people are generally happy with the game, or trust Toady to impliment the things they want in the game without their suggestions, and simply want priority put upon things like the ability to haul multiple items at a time, or optimizing code to preserve FPS. 

Some suggestions will simply be more attractive than others regardless of how good they are. Vague, broad suggestions often tend to be a lot sexier, for the stated reason and because your mind fills in more details itself the way you'd like to see them, and some are important but simple and dry enough in terms of what you'd see in gameplay that the suggestions themselves sound boring.

The fact is that we're not even ranking things within the same category here. We have large wishlist-style items like "Improved Pathfinding" and "Improved Hauling" alongside even larger and more wishlisty things like "Kingdom Mode" (a whole new gameplay mode!), and more minor suggestions like placing ramps on the edges of water features instead of cliffs, or separating out armor and clothing in stock listings. We vote on all of these with the same pool of votes, which only really works if they all have the same value, but obviously they don't.

Of course, this only holds if Toady follows a strict and mechanistic determination of which suggestions go into the game based on an arbitrarily decided number of top-ranking suggestions, instead of using his own judgement on any given suggestion.  I don't speak for Toady, but if something is ranked 19th, and takes him only 10 minutes to program, we might just be seeing that before something ranked 9th that takes him a year and breaks saves to impliment.

I'm not saying that the Eternal Suggestions list is useless, just that it shouldn't be taken as gospel, and I feel like some people are getting to the point where they almost are.

This is a place for suggestion and debate.  Saying that there is something with any given subject is necessarily followed by the question, "So how can it be made better?"  I am hardly opposed to the very concept that the ESV be changed or improved, but I always try to confront any idea with its possible negative ramifications, and questions its assumptions.  Good suggestions should weather such punishment, and all but the worst can be re-examined to become good. 

There's also the simple fact that you can't expect users of software (including games) to necessarily understand the impact of a change they propose. I think this is obvious enough reading what some people thought (and what a few still think) of the material/body system changes. For example, one of the lower-ranked suggestions with three votes is "Carry Multiple Items", which sounds rather minor, but if you read what Toady's said about such things recently, the implications for stacking, workflow, etc. are actually fairly major.

Which is, if anything, a reason to push for a system that encourages smaller numbers of suggestions that are more thoroughly debated, since that is what increases the chance of people bringing such things up into the thread.
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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #444 on: July 06, 2010, 09:38:15 am »

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NW_Kohaku

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #445 on: July 06, 2010, 10:29:40 am »

In retrospect, I'd like to clarify a point I made, before it might cause confusion:

...which means that your "MORE CONSTRUCTION" or "MORE PLANT" suggestions will be several spaces closer to the top.

In this, I am arguing against the notion that something like the suggestion to optimize the pathfinding code is being demeaned as a "MORE FOO" suggestion.  The incredibly resource-intensive nature of the game is, as many people point out, one of the greatest weaknesses of the game, and "the leading cause of fortress loss".  Many players actually take extraordinary measures to try to reduce the CPU toll that things like pathfinding and fluid mechanics take upon a fortress, so that they can still enjoy the game.  This is a major, and entirely valid concern, and not something that is as simple as "MORE PATHFINDING, LOL".

In fact, if we are to be reducing anything to a "MORE FOO" suggestion (edit: and frankly, given the apparently very loose constraints of what qualifies as "MORE FOO", almost anything can be described as "more" of something) the "More Plantlife Thread" is actually headed in the thread as "a thread for the suggestion of an expansion of plantlife."  (Which sounds an awful lot like "More Plantlife" to me...)  It isn't even a serious attempt at fostering discussion, just an attempt to build the longest list possible.  That seems just slightly hypocritical to me.
« Last Edit: July 06, 2010, 10:45:41 am by NW_Kohaku »
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Draco18s

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #446 on: July 06, 2010, 10:36:35 am »

That seems just slightly hypocritical to me.

Only slightly?
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Pilsu

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #447 on: July 06, 2010, 11:08:56 am »

Also, many suggestions in the ESV are currently unlinked, which is a joke, if you think about it. How can someone support a suggestion there is no debate about?

Pretty easily if the title and description are clear and easy to understand. Reading the debate is unnecessary.

Also, it amasses votes from dead people.

Is there a single reason their votes are worth less if they don't regularly post anymore?


Saying that people vote for farming improvements because it's broad is an unsubstantiated fallacy. Repeating it ad nauseum won't make it ring any truer. Your dwarven lipstick suggestion or whatever it is is losing on it's own merits. People simply want farming improvements over whatever specific little things you have in mind! Voters not being able to choose a top10 in a poll that focuses on the top10 is the only real criticism thus far.
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zagibu

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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #448 on: July 06, 2010, 01:06:25 pm »

Also, many suggestions in the ESV are currently unlinked, which is a joke, if you think about it. How can someone support a suggestion there is no debate about?

Pretty easily if the title and description are clear and easy to understand. Reading the debate is unnecessary.

Also, it amasses votes from dead people.

Is there a single reason their votes are worth less if they don't regularly post anymore?


Saying that people vote for farming improvements because it's broad is an unsubstantiated fallacy. Repeating it ad nauseum won't make it ring any truer. Your dwarven lipstick suggestion or whatever it is is losing on it's own merits. People simply want farming improvements over whatever specific little things you have in mind! Voters not being able to choose a top10 in a poll that focuses on the top10 is the only real criticism thus far.

Yeah, maybe I mistyped what I meant there. I see how you can easily vote for unlinked suggestions, but this is exactly the problem. The small entry on the ESV list doesn't provide enough information. Everyone will form an individual idea on the specifics, and, as can be seen in the threads of some of the suggestions that ARE linked, these ideas can clash so hard that the original suggestion should be split in several to make everyone happy.

Amassing of dead votes is a problem, because new df versions might make suggestions obsolete, or even counterproductive, blocking valid suggestions from rising to the top. This could in theory be countered by regular vote purges, or if the suggestion creators would act responsibly.
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Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« Reply #449 on: July 06, 2010, 01:12:28 pm »

Amassing of dead votes is a problem, because new df versions might make suggestions obsolete, or even counterproductive, blocking valid suggestions from rising to the top. This could in theory be countered by regular vote purges, or if the suggestion creators would act responsibly.

Well, if we have a mass vote purge, it should probably have one of those "News" announcements up at the top so that people know they have been purged.  Having those vote purges on the occassions that suggestions from the top ranks are integrated would make the most sense, as it would be the time to start re-casting those votes, anyway.
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