No Point of Suggestion (at this rate)

[biostem]

TL:DR - They're not implementing what I want, so I'm gonna complain.

[Krimson]

23 hours ago, LightMaster said:

That’s where I am getting at, and thank you very much for clarifications. I avoided mentioning you specifically in the OP to avoid possible witch-hunting, which is an Internet-wide issue as far as I know.

 

I used to think the worst possible implementation meant “poorly balanced / strayed too much from concept”, I wonder what do you mean by people reacting like that.

I'm inclined to agree with you but don't be surprised if people don't take people who use the term "Witch Hunt" seriously, especially in a video game. I was sympathetic up to that point. 

 

People in these forums don't hunt others, they take shots of convenience. There's a difference. One involves malice and the other, boredom. 

 

You can make suggestions but yes, nothing will come of it. The game may be licensed from NCSoft but the game belongs to the Homecoming Team. They will do what they want. 

 

I've watched game become more unfriendly to solo players and I'm personally not impressed with content that forces people to hold hands like children, but it's not my game and never will be. I'm just here because I still have a few friends from Live who haven't yet died. I have to play solo due to disability knowing full well that the Homecoming Team doesn't like players like me. But that's okay, the game is small and works decently as a chat client so I can still connect with the living ones. 

 

Good luck. The game has a direction which only aligns with player wants by coincidence or cosmic alignment. 

Edited August 29 by Krimson

[DrRocket]

The problem with suggestions is that plenty of folks come in with a negative frame of mind, which after they spew the suggestion is pretty much dead.

 

I agree that the suggestion may be bad, it is only fair to explain why it would be bad in an informative way and not in the typical condescending manner

 

If the suggestion is ok, but needs more finesse, then provide the augment, that is build in a positive way which is excellent and can lead to a nice well thought out suggestion.

 

Often Quality of Life are rejected by the negative minded, by saying and in some cases (if polite) actually providing the work around, which is great while the QoL is done and not as an excuse to reject it.

 

So once a suggestion is plagued by negativistic attitudes, and at times personal disputes, lets face it, the devs are not going to read through pointless chaff, despite it was a good workable idea and the suggestion is therefore dead. Once a suggestion has more than 3 replies that are not additive, the suggestion is pretty much toast

[tidge]

9 hours ago, DrRocket said:

Often Quality of Life are rejected by the negative minded, by saying and in some cases (if polite) actually providing the work around, which is great while the QoL is done and not as an excuse to reject it.

 

This is a somewhat narrow perspective. I've seen plenty of suggestions labeled as "Quality of Life" improvements that were more like "radically change the game to suit *me*", some that address specific individual pet peeves, and some that focus exclusively on things like the User Interface are are agnostic to powers and play styles.

[battlewraith]

9 hours ago, DrRocket said:

So once a suggestion is plagued by negativistic attitudes, and at times personal disputes, lets face it, the devs are not going to read through pointless chaff, despite it was a good workable idea and the suggestion is therefore dead. Once a suggestion has more than 3 replies that are not additive, the suggestion is pretty much toast

 

All the suggestions are toast. The point of this subforum is to make toast. 

The negativistic Nancies that congregate here accomplish absolutely nothing other than frustrating other players, characterizing them as complainers, etc. 

There is no world where the devs are going to see a bad idea, something impractical or unworkable, and run with it based on what someone suggested here. And the quickest, most efficient, and most civil way to respond to these ideas is to just ignore them. They would quickly fade away.

[Ghost]

16 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

 

All the suggestions are toast. The point of this subforum is to make toast. 

The negativistic Nancies that congregate here accomplish absolutely nothing other than frustrating other players, characterizing them as complainers, etc. 

There is no world where the devs are going to see a bad idea, something impractical or unworkable, and run with it based on what someone suggested here. And the quickest, most efficient, and most civil way to respond to these ideas is to just ignore them. They would quickly fade away.

Irony is calling people names for disagreeing, and then suggest being civil.

 

 

[tidge]

The "devs" have implemented objectively bad ideas. The most obvious one that comes to mind had these characteristics:

• It "solved" a specific "quality of life" issue that was experienced by a small number of players (possibly only one)
• Was added with no summative testing (i.e. no time to get feedback)
• Was immediately removed from the game (not even added as an option/toggle setting, which should emphasize just how poorly considered the idea was)

The idea was: "Alignment Tip missions should just keep rolling in, discarding the tip missions the player isn't choosing."

 

On its face, this doesn't look to be that big of a deal... but in practice it was a nightmare. A small amount of kibitzing would have exposed the likely defects with this idea. I don't think this idea came from a public suggestion, but there have been plenty that would have introduced similar painful experiences if implemented.

 

I'm not dumping on the dev; I bring this up to point out an example of something that the devs choose to work on and implement, in an area many of us can look at and think "no big deal" or "I see an issue, maybe the issue could be addressed by _____" but was still bad enough of an idea (and/or one with meaningless impact) that it isn't in the game.

[battlewraith]

47 minutes ago, Ghost said:

Irony is calling people names for disagreeing, and then suggest being civil.

And then the added irony of you taking me to task for this.

 

9 minutes ago, tidge said:

The "devs" have implemented objectively bad ideas.

Ok, so with respect to this conversation you're pointing to an idea that had nothing to do with this forum and was immediately removed.

[Ghost]

6 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

And then the added irony of you taking me to task for this.

 

 

Absolutely!

 

[battlewraith]

3 minutes ago, Ghost said:

Absolutely!

 

🍻

[tidge]

1 hour ago, battlewraith said:

Ok, so with respect to this conversation you're pointing to an idea that had nothing to do with this forum and was immediately removed.

 

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

[Gerswin]

I would like to commend the devs for responsibly rejecting nearly all of the slop that is posted in this forum.

[GM_GooglyMoogly]

On 8/28/2025 at 5:27 PM, Oklahoman said:

 

Pretty sure that was my remark, and I don't really consider if off-hand at this point. Recently, a GM^* counted through the 2019 posts and said they'd found 4 that had been implemented. You can go count for yourself how many posts were made in this forum in 2019, but I believe my rough count was over 1500. Let's say if the GM had kept counting they would have found 8 that were actually implemented from 2019, and let's say that a solid half of the suggestions posted were jokes or junk. That's where I'm getting the 1% (8 out of 750) - which is just a rough number, sure, but I honestly think it's generous. Let me know if you come up with a different number.

 

The other half of that is the reaction from this segment of the community to pretty much any suggestion here - "100% will be implemented, and in the worst possible way." That's been discussed at length but by and large it seems to me people don't seem to care. We know the culprits, we know the tactics, and we seem to be OK with it.

 

So, yeah, based on what I see here only about 1% of the suggestions will make it into the game, and people tend to react to suggestions as though it DEFINITELY will make it into the game, and with the worst possible implementation. 

 

 

* That GM was me. 

 

I did accept battlewraith's challenge to find any suggestion that had ever been implemented into the game and I found four that I provided links to before I got tired of looking and I was still in 2019 (This was in The Idea Police thread).  I didn't count how many threads I looked through, and it was a very cursory search -- not at all scientific, or thorough.  So please don't take what I wrote on this topic as anything authoritative.  It may be 1% it may be 10% it may be .01%.  I don't think anyone really knows.

 

I also suggested that folks look at the long list of changes by Issue made by SCORE and HC and use their own memories to see that a lot of changes have taken place over the years that players have suggested. (https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Issues)  And that doesn't include an even longer list of costume and base items that have been requested and added.

 

Players should feel free to make whatever suggestions they want and other players can critique those ideas as long as they do so respectfully.  Whatever the actual number is, I think it is fair and obvious to say that most suggestions will never make it into the game.  That's not a slight at the people making suggestions.  That's just practical and real.  Not all suggestions should make it into the game.  And even some great suggestions are too difficult or time consuming to be feasible.

[Steampunkette]

A lot of this thread reads like Giles Coren pissing and moaning in a 2021 Times article about how men aren't allowed to write anymore...

 

Because in 2005 he wrote one of the worst possible takes on sex in an awful book.

 

 

The passage that won him the award was a paragraph consisting of one run-on sentence 137 words long and then a 2 word sentence. The first contained things like "Rattled against her teeth" and "like a shower dropped in an empty bath" and the two word sentence was "Like Zorro".

 

By all means. Go read the excerpt. Giles Coren, Winkler, 2005 Bad Sex Award is all you need to find it, though the keywords I've added above will help.

 

A lot of suggestions, including many of my own, are bad suggestions. And other people may see the problems in the idea that we, ourselves, don't.

 

In the same way Mr. Coren thinks that society shuns male novelists because he wrote something and didn't get massive fame and acclaim, and insults those who critique his bad writing, do we run the risk of holding our suggestions and ideas beyond reproach.

 

Embrace critique. Go from there. Don't be like Giles Coren.

[battlewraith]

32 minutes ago, tidge said:

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

 

Absence of evidence is an indication that you probably shouldn't take a particular claim very seriously.

I don't haunt this place like some, but I haven't seen a rash of the devs implementing bad suggestions posted here.

I haven't seen that happen to anything close to a significant degree at all.

 

5 minutes ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

I did accept battlewraith's challenge to find any suggestion that had ever been implemented into the game and I found four that I provided links to before I got tired of looking and I was still in 2019 (This was in The Idea Police thread).

 

And it was nice of you to commit your time to doing this. You certainly did find examples, but I think it's also important to remember that those examples took years to go from a suggestion in a thread to implementation. IIRC, the first example you cited took 5 years to be implemented. The person who asked for it has long since left the game, or at least the forums on that account.

[GM_GooglyMoogly]

7 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

IIRC, the first example you cited took 5 years to be implemented.

 

True, it was four or five years, but I specifically started at the end of the list, so I was only looking at the very oldest ones.  I also later found one that took about a year -- make controller pets controllable. 

 

[battlewraith]

6 minutes ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

 

True, it was four or five years, but I specifically started at the end of the list, so I was only looking at the very oldest ones.  I also later found one that took about a year -- make controller pets controllable. 

 

 

As you noted in that thread, that guy's idea was largely  rejected by forum regulars--to the point that he accuses Rudra of existing to flame people.

His actual idea was not implemented. The general idea to give controllers (but not doms, like he asked for) more control was implemented.

The implementation that happened was what MMs and lore pets already had in game.

 

You really mean to tell me that this thread had some impact on this transition?

Like some dev read that and thought "wow, what a great idea. We should do something about that."

And then they hustled on that idea and got a change implemented within a year, whereas simpler examples took four or five years to implement.

Yeesh.

 

[GM_GooglyMoogly]

I have no idea what any or all devs see or think.

 

But I have decided that I will no longer respond to you on this topic.

[Oklahoman]

6 minutes ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

* That GM was me. 

 

Yeah, OP didn't tag me, so I didn't tag you, either. Seemed like the neighborly thing to do. 🙂 

 

9 minutes ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

So please don't take what I wrote on this topic as anything authoritative.  It may be 1% it may be 10% it may be .01%.  I don't think anyone really knows.

 

I get it, that's why I said let's double what you found, and let's halve what I found just to get to a percentage. Either number or both could be higher, but until proven otherwise I'm going to stick to what I believe is a very generous 1%. And I think it's a shame we don't really know.

 

15 minutes ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

Players should feel free to make whatever suggestions they want and other players can critique those ideas as long as they do so respectfully.  Whatever the actual number is, I think it is fair and obvious to say that most suggestions will never make it into the game.  That's not a slight at the people making suggestions.  That's just practical and real.  Not all suggestions should make it into the game.  And even some great suggestions are too difficult or time consuming to be feasible.

 

I'd go so far as to say almost all of the suggestions made here will never make it into the game, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. I understand that we don't have unlimited volunteer manpower, and a lot of what gets posted here wouldn't be a good addition to the game, anyway. The thing is... a lot of things DO make it into the game that don't come through these forums. 

 

I've wondered what the thread might have looked like had someone suggested a first draft (draught?) of Labyrinth of Fog before it was put up for focused feedback. My guess is that the usual suspects here would have shot it down harshly, say we have something similar already, it will take too much of the devs time, there's no way to build it with the tools we have, they'd rather the devs focus on something else, etc. No improvements or refinements to the first draft, no additional suggestions, no thoughtful critiques... just responding as if it will be implemented as-is in the worst way possible. The usual parties making the usual arguments, often disrespectfully I feel, that we've just come to tolerate and even expect. Fortunately, that idea didn't have to endure all those slings and arrows, and I know a lot of people enjoy LoF and are thankful it made it into the game. That's great. I'm not here to pick on LoF, just to say that most updates feel to me like it has a lot of stuff like LoF (ideas that bypass this forum) and very little (if any) that come directly from here. I wish that were different.

[Ukase]

On 8/28/2025 at 4:27 PM, Oklahoman said:

based on what I see here only about 1% of the suggestions will make it into the game

I'm not into math. And you can trust that I've lost in-game friends over my position on some of the things that were never even suggested and made it into Beta. Some made it to the game, and some, thankfully, did not. 

This is what little I do know:
I know that there are suggestions that might look positive but be impossible to implement because of limited resources or knowledge on the part of the current volunteer team. 

I know that me, along with a number of other people, think of a suggestion, post it - and then suddenly we're swamped with "you forgot/didn't think about X, Y and Z". (and that's probably more polite than some folks will put it) The X, Y and Z, regardless of what they are, are sometimes valid points, and sometimes conjecture that came from the farts of the opposing poster. 
I know there are some suggestions that are fairly harmless and we think wouldn't have any impact on anything, like some new costume element. Let's say a horse's head. I'm ignorant, but for all I know, a horse's head would cause some powersets to not work properly. Or something else. I really don't know. I think that's the boat most suggestions fall into. On the surface they seem like decent QoL additions that would add some fun to maybe 3 to 5% of the players, but it isn't feasible for technical reasons, or coder ignorance of how to implement it where it doesn't cause Ms. Liberty's liberty belt to fall off. 

I do think the HC Devs read this stuff. They're volunteer and they're not likely to work on a given suggestion because they'll want/need to be interested in it. 
The longer/harder it is to implement, the more interested in it they'd have to be. It's amazing the additions we've gotten over the past 5-6 years!

What we don't know is how many suggestions have been attempted, but were not accomplished due to it being technically impossible/improbable. 

And I think if our devs were to say, "We tried Okie's idea, but it fell like a cow patty on a hot day" for even a few of the arguably better suggestions, that would be a good thing. Or conversely, we tried Okie's idea, and if it passes the smell test on Beta, we should see it next patch. 

[golstat2003]

I think there ARE a few suggestions that folks have agreed with that should eventually make it into the game. My issue has always been with the weird expectation that it should be any faster than the manpower that the dev team has. I’m fine if a suggestion takes 3 years or more to make it into, as I keep a realistic perspective on what resources HC has . . . namely basically none.

 

18 devs is ridiculously small for a project of this size. But it is what it is unless NCSoft is willing to make this a for profit product again (LOL pipe dream).

[GM_GooglyMoogly]

I don't know of any game that gets much of it's content based off of player suggestions or that runs dev concepts through a suggestions forum to see what happens.  If such a thing exists, I'd be interested to find out.  I'll see if I can convince someone on the team to post one of their works-in-progress on the suggestions forum as an experiment.  I doubt I'll get one.  But assume we did.  Do you think that the idea would not get implemented because some players critiqued it?  I think our devs are thicker skinned and more determined than that, but I could be wrong.  Either way, what would the experiment prove?

 

Regarding "suprise" development.  There were (and are) a sizeable number of players that suggested they wanted harder content and the devs, especially Cobalt Arachne, responded by creating 4 star content and the Labyrinth.  While it didn't go through the suggestions forum gauntlet, it went through rounds of in house testing, then closed beta player testing, and open beta testing.  While the general framework didn't change, a lot of the details did based on player feedback.

 

I, personally, am not a fan of content that "forces" players to choose only certain ATs and powersets to engage with the content.  But I understand that there are a lot of others who like that kind of stuff.

[LightMaster]

5 minutes ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

I don't know of any game that gets much of it's content based off of player suggestions or that runs dev concepts through a suggestions forum to see what happens.  If such a thing exists, I'd be interested to find out.  I'll see if I can convince someone on the team to post one of their works-in-progress on the suggestions forum as an experiment.  I doubt I'll get one.  But assume we did.  Do you think that the idea would not get implemented because some players critiqued it?  I think our devs are thicker skinned and more determined than that, but I could be wrong.  Either way, what would the experiment prove?

 

Regarding "suprise" development.  There were (and are) a sizeable number of players that suggested they wanted harder content and the devs, especially Cobalt Arachne, responded by creating 4 star content and the Labyrinth.  While it didn't go through the suggestions forum gauntlet, it went through rounds of in house testing, then closed beta player testing, and open beta testing.  While the general framework didn't change, a lot of the details did based on player feedback.

 

I, personally, am not a fan of content that "forces" players to choose only certain ATs and powersets to engage with the content.  But I understand that there are a lot of others who like that kind of stuff.

I appreciate giving your saying in the matters, particularly the “surprise” development.
 

Regarding Hard Mode / Four Stars, It helps that players aren’t forced to participate on it at any point nor does Four Stars replaced the original (Lady Gray / Imperious) or the Four Star being the original one (Dr. Aeon) regarding Task / Strike Forces. They moreso serve for those who thinks those aren’t difficult enough and it helps that each Star adds additional objectives beyond boosting the critters’ numbers, with increased rewards in Prismatic Aethers. It does have an unfortunate effect of only certain ATs and powersets being selected a vast majority of the time for Four Stars, with loads of Corruptors and a Tanker back in the day, and then five Corrs, one Tanker and two Blasters.

 

Back into the subject, I do think that civility should be enforced more given we saw some threads getting derailed a bit (if not severely so) with a few reaction post / snarky things in a row that didn’t add much to the conversations.

[srmalloy]

4 hours ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

I did accept battlewraith's challenge to find any suggestion that had ever been implemented into the game

I know that one of my suggestions was implemented, although I forget off the top of my head whether it was here or back on Live. I had noticed that during the monster phase of Hamidon raids, when you got an inspiration drop that included an EoE, there was always an 'ordinary' inspiration that dropped, too, and the ordinary inspiration dropped first -- so if you only had one open slot in your inspiration tray, you could never get another EoE. My suggestion was to reverse the drop order, so that when you got an EoE and something else, the EoE dropped first, so that you could maximize your EoE drops more easily. It got put into the game, but I never saw it in the patch notes, because it didn't really affect the way the game played at all. 

[Oklahoman]

2 hours ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

I don't know of any game that gets much of it's content based off of player suggestions or that runs dev concepts through a suggestions forum to see what happens.

 

I don't know of many games that were closed down, resurrected by the fans, gained a licensing agreement with the original company, and then is continuing with active development via volunteers. I don't disagree with you, I just think our situation is a little unique. I'm also not suggesting that devs should be required to run their ideas through the forums.

 

2 hours ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

I'll see if I can convince someone on the team to post one of their works-in-progress on the suggestions forum as an experiment.  I doubt I'll get one.  But assume we did.  Do you think that the idea would not get implemented because some players critiqued it?  I think our devs are thicker skinned and more determined than that, but I could be wrong.  Either way, what would the experiment prove?

 

Remember I have 2 separate points - (a) 1% of the suggestions made here will ever make it into the game, and (b) posts here are generally hammered as if the idea DEFINITELY will make it into the game with the worst possible implementation. So, what do I think would happen if a dev posted one of their works-in-progress to the suggestion forum as an experiment? (a) If they weren't a dev there would be about a 1% chance it would make it into the game, and (b) the usual suspects would show up in the comments with the usual arguments.

 

What would the experiment prove? Well, if everyone responded positively and/or constructively to the suggestion I guess you'd prove me wrong on my second point, and I wouldn't even be mad about that. But, regardless of feedback, I bet it would have a better than 1% chance of making it into the game so that part doesn't really apply here.

 

2 hours ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

While it didn't go through the suggestions forum gauntlet, it went through rounds of in house testing, then closed beta player testing, and open beta testing. 

 

The question I posed was related to the second part of my statement about how this community tends to respond to suggestions - NOT about LoF (or anything else) in particular. If Cobolt, under their regular muggle account, had posted this brand new idea they had to create a Labyrinth of Fog, I suspect the usual suspects would have showed up with the usual arguments against it. The 1% part of my statement wouldn't factor into it in this case.