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 
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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Topic: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting (Read 473680 times)