Star Sonata
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Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=62983		 Page 1 of 3
Author:  dreadlordnaf [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 10:16 am ]
Post subject:  Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
I like the SS Discord, it is useful for many things, and not so useful for other things.

The big thing its not useful for is putting forth your ideas for big and significant changes, and allowing a conversation to happen where people can explain their views, and you can easily reply back and explain to them why, AND most importantly keeping an easy to follow and find record of that conversation where others can then see it evolve to understand why the changes ended up where they did or what the motivation behind it is.

Right now now on Discord it is a disaster to try and follow such conversations if you weren't there taking place in them at the moment.

Apparently MF control bots are getting F'd and people with slaves are going to take a huge hit? Trying to find info about this on Discord is a mess, and even harder to ascertain why these changes are occurring or if they are being done in tandem with other changes that balance things out etc. Same with changes to the delquad, resistance, prawn, etc. Hydra gear being removed or nerfed? Who, what, when, where, why, how do I find out about this? Maybe these changes all totally make sense, but unfortunately its impossible to understand why unless you spend hours scouring Discord.

Etc, etc, for every other change where the majority of the conversation happened almost exclusively on Discord where its impossible to follow or determine who replied back to who on a convo that happened in the past. This game already suffers from so much information asymmetry that give players significant material advantages over one another simply from knowing some info that should be easily known to all. This new way of proposing and working through major changes primarily on Discord seems to amplify this problem.

LATE EDIT: To understand what I mean, I thought the fighter rework was a good example of a significant change where the conversation that informed the eventual changed was initiated by the devs on the forums, and because of that allowed a wide universe of SS players to chime in and help provide input on that effort to have it end up in a good place, AND for players to understand why it ended up there.
Author:  Rounder [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 10:55 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
Completely agree
Author:  dreadlordnaf [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 11:07 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
Not to pile on my complaints, but its worth pointing out that the move to have more dev/player interaction on discord has also had the following negative impacts:

The "community meetings" that get hosted to discuss certain topics excludes a lot of player from potentially participating. You go from getting the thoughts and input of a large universe, anyone with an SS account who knows how to use forums to --> only those with Discord AND only those who know of the SS discord (not everyone does) AND only those who can then also be in front of their computer at that exact time ( I can never participate because of this reason).

It seems like a brief forum post that lays out the discussion topics, some issues people have with it, and some potential solutions, then keep that post open for a week or two for people to engage on it, would provide a much better method to get input on the matters at hand.
Author:  Antilzah [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 11:26 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
Rounder wrote:
Completely agree
Author:  redalert150 [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 12:08 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
Antilzah wrote:
Rounder wrote:
Completely agree
Author:  NattoKilla [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 12:33 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
Couldn't agree more, also to add that not everyone is 100% comfortable with talking so that they can add their ideas and suggestions, also the few times I was on there it was difficult to follow the conversation due to lack of structure, ideas were just being thrown all over the place.
Author:  redalert150 [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 12:49 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
Forwarded to the rest of the dev team... via discord.
Author:  Max235 [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 1:38 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
More people use the discord than the forums.
Author:  dreadlordnaf [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 2:04 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
Max235 wrote:
More people use the discord than the forums.


That is irrelevant to the point im making. That discord is a poor medium if you want to get quality feedback and conversation from the player base since it requires the players to provide that input during an exact specified time period when others are talking about it, and if they miss that exact time period, too bad....

If someone made a good point 6 hours ago, its impossible via discord to successfully continue that conversation in a manner where others can quickly see what is being responded to and talked about unless they spend an hour searching back and trying to piece together random discord chats between tons of other random chats... Alternatively, for people that miss the initial conversation on Discord, it doesn't require 20 redundant chats just to ask the same question again and again since its not clear if those points were addressed already, etc.

On the contrary its very easy to facilitate this type of discussion on a forum message board.
Author:  Max235 [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 4:16 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
If you don't come onto the forums within the week/two time frame, you miss out on forum question time too.

I don't see the issue. If you're not there, you don't get to participate. You can still voice questions to the dev team and they'll answer them in the next weekly blog post. Are you going out of your way to not ask questions to the dev team?

The one disadvantage the forums has over a chat program (be it IRC or Discord or even a voicechat like Teamspeak) is that when you get a message on the forum, you must refresh the page to see you got a message. The other three listed do not. Forum pming devmins takes much much longer than Support Tickets, Discord, Teamspeak, literally calling them, etc because even the dev team half the time look at the forums and even less look at specific topics.

Posing questions over a time period? Sure. Using forums to get an informal response? No. Relying on either for anything entirely? Fuck, Hell, Shit... No.
Author:  dreadlordnaf [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 5:22 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
Max235 wrote:
I don't see the issue


The entire response you provided would not have been possible if we were talking about this via Discord discussion. The convo would've long been gone and we would've all missed out on your insightful response :o

Discord is superior to SS in-game chat, and is great for stuff like support and quick question asking since it provides instant chat. It's bad for proposing significant changes to the game for player feedback, and then only really using the input from those there at that single moment in time to base those changes on, while providing no real record of what and why it happened to everyone else who has a life and can't monitor discord 24/7.
Author:  Max235 [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 7:00 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
As long as the devs make a sticky in the community discussion channel of the date each convo started and lock it after the convo is done, there is no problem.

It's the same as starting a topic on forum (because the first post is dated) and locking the topic after X time.

You CAN actually search for specific words, time, and or channel on Discord. It sounds like to me you just don't like Discord for whatever reason (or a program like IRC) and would rather use the forum.
Author:  redalert150 [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 10:58 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
You're completely missing the point max.
Author:  Max235 [ Sun Feb 26, 2017 11:48 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
This is a selection of General Channel, on 12/07/2016, from Hober Mallow. It shows all conversations he was in on that day.

As far as I can see, the only place where a dedicated forum is superior is when you want to only see a specific rank's posts, which surprisingly, other forums have this feature. Star Sonata forum does not have a feature to *only* see Developer posts or jump to next Developer post.
Author:  redalert150 [ Mon Feb 27, 2017 12:07 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Devs: Use forums for things where Discord is inferior
dreadlordnaf wrote:
I like the SS Discord, it is useful for many things, and not so useful for other things.

The big thing its not useful for is putting forth your ideas for big and significant changes, and allowing a conversation to happen where people can explain their views, and you can easily reply back and explain to them why, AND most importantly keeping an easy to follow and find record of that conversation where others can then see it evolve to understand why the changes ended up where they did or what the motivation behind it is.

Right now now on Discord it is a disaster to try and follow such conversations if you weren't there taking place in them at the moment.

Apparently MF control bots are getting F'd and people with slaves are going to take a huge hit? Trying to find info about this on Discord is a mess, and even harder to ascertain why these changes are occurring or if they are being done in tandem with other changes that balance things out etc. Same with changes to the delquad, resistance, prawn, etc. Hydra gear being removed or nerfed? Who, what, when, where, why, how do I find out about this? Maybe these changes all totally make sense, but unfortunately its impossible to understand why unless you spend hours scouring Discord.

Etc, etc, for every other change where the majority of the conversation happened almost exclusively on Discord where its impossible to follow or determine who replied back to who on a convo that happened in the past. This game already suffers from so much information asymmetry that give players significant material advantages over one another simply from knowing some info that should be easily known to all. This new way of proposing and working through major changes primarily on Discord seems to amplify this problem.

LATE EDIT: To understand what I mean, I thought the fighter rework was a good example of a significant change where the conversation that informed the eventual changed was initiated by the devs on the forums, and because of that allowed a wide universe of SS players to chime in and help provide input on that effort to have it end up in a good place, AND for players to understand why it ended up there.
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