Polling and Suggestion Communication (Message for the Devs)

[Trin Tragula]

All threads in the forum are read, i and others do so every week (day for me), but there’s simply no time to post in all of them. As some have noted in this very thread the suggestions forum moves very quickly.
Those of us that are reading it are the devs working on the actual game. This is great as it allows you to give suggestions directly to us, and for us to reply and discuss them, but it is also quite time consuming. There’s no time to reply to everything and that is not the function this forum has.
When we do adapt something we will, if able (sometimes what’s in the future can be secret), post so in the relevant thread (as anyone reading the forum for a longer period will have seen). For significant contribution we have in the past also acknowledged people in our dev diaries.
Sometimes we also deliberately avoid replying to let a discussion have its own life, a dev response might well end a useful suggestion thread prematurely when others might contribute more. We also avoid replying if it could be seen as promising something we aren’t entirely sure we will provide.
The suggestions forum remains a great resource for many of us but polls would not really give us anything of worth, it’s not here to check the majority opinion (and a poll would be unlikely to give us that anyway), it’s here to be a provider of ideas and feedback, and I personally have quite a few threads marked for future use.

I encourage anyone to use this forum that want to influence the game but I cannot blanket promise anything in terms of replies or implementation. If you feel it’s not worth your time in that case that is up to you. I do feel the forum itself and the possibility for us to participate here (something we do as often as we can) is a strength for development purposes and I am glad that so many find their way here.

 

[Trin Tragula]

If I may be so bold, how about bringing back the ancient tradition of marking a post as helpful if the devs have read it? Or maybe even a separate rating "acknowledged" that only the devs could add and only on the suggestion, bugreport and tech suppor forums. Just a way for the community to know we are being read.

I sometimes still mark as helpful but it’s from what I understand not very easy for posters without moderation privileges to see who marked something as helpful which when pointed out to me has made me use it less.
The special “read by dev” mark is an interesting suggestion and I will forward it. For now though it is safe to assume anything in the suggestions forum for eu4 will be read.

 

[DDRJake]

Following up what @Trin Tragula said, we do read suggestions, I myself check the suggestions forums every day, weekends included. Many ideas from these forums have been implemented and we appreciate what are brought up here.

With that said, it is unfeasible to reply to all these threads. As you can see, the suggestions forum gets a whole tonne of posts each day and we don't have the time to give feedback to them all. Further to that, it would add to the feeling of "My post was ignored" if we reply to many but not all of them.

Of course, I understand the frustration of feeling that your posts do not get seen, and while I can't make a promise on its implementation, a way of seeing that a dev has read your post would be neat for the forum.

To address the point of a "polling" system, I can confidently say I look at all the suggestions made and have no interest in what drums up the most agrees or likes or thumbs up as suggestions are here to improve the game as best as we can, rather than have a popularity contest for what people want to see. Some great suggestions I've seen have been single post no-reply threads while very busy threads can contain things that we are not going to introduce to the game for whatever reason.

So yes, we do read the suggestions and we do act on them and in an ideal world I would love to spend much more time here discussing them with all of you, but the reality of the matter is that it's an unrealistic desire.

Cornering me in a pub is a completely different matter, as I always promise to hear out either 2 suggestions or 5 seconds of an idea pitch from an EU4 player at the bar