A Sticking on what can be done and not be done. Some format to posting suggestions.

[plainguy]

There should be a Sticky on what just cannot be done in game. 

 

And maybe a rating of could be asked for based on difficulty / time consuming.

 

The suggestions and Feedback is great but honestly what is the point if more then half are just impossible. 

 

Or maybe request a way for Suggestions to be listed..

 

EG the title should have a specific format. 

 

The first few lines should have a certain format.

 

This way this data could be collected and reviewed.  

 

EG  after 30 days the biggest request is about Base Storage. The 2nd request is about Blaster power sets and within those Blaster request a majority are about Knockback.

 

 

[justicebeliever]

Anything can be done, given enough time and resources...but, we know that Homecoming is limited on resources...Until they release a roadmap then, we really don't know what they are doing with their time, so it's impossible to say what they are capable of right now.

 

Also, given that the community is able to do some of the lifting, and some parts of the process could likely be crowdsourced, the resources are actually broader than we might think...@malonkey1 is making a new powerset...It might never get into the game, but crowdsourcing IS possible

 

Putting the above aside, I'd hate to "pre-judge suggestions" before they are made. Sometimes a wild and impossible suggestion sparks another idea that is doable, but would never have been thought of were it not for the crazy idea.  Sometimes a crazy suggestion sparks an innovative way to do something that hadn't been thought of before to solve the problem.  

 

Finally, we have plenty of people here willing to poo-poo suggestions all thread long because someone dares to suggest it would be easy.   I could suggest a spelling change to mission content, and if I said it was easy to fix, there would be 3 people here telling me how hard and impossible it is to do in the code...So I would rather not put up more barriers to suggestions and let's keep the crazy ideas coming...

 

 

[malonkey1]

6 hours ago, plainguy said:

There should be a Sticky on what just cannot be done in game.

 

I get where you're coming from, I really do, but it's honestly pretty difficult to say what can and can't be done. There are certainly things that would be very hard, or shouldn't be done for design reasons (see the Cottage Rule), but CoH is a surprisingly flexible game, and even the devs were still plumbing the depths of what is or isn't possible by the game's sunset. I've seen the power system from the back side, and it is crazy how robust it is. The Medicine Pool has this power, for example, called Injection, and it actually has both effects built into it, but can check for whether the target is friend or foe as the power is being executed, and the i24 Sniper effect actually works by redirecting the power to a different version based on your to-hit in order to get around the normally intractable interrupt time of the power.

 

Hell, even hard-coded limitations aren't always hard and fast. The Ouroboros team has been working on code to allow asymmetrical costume parts. It's pretty neat (but still very buggy).

5 hours ago, justicebeliever said:

Also, given that the community is able to do some of the lifting, and some parts of the process could likely be crowdsourced, the resources are actually broader than we might think...@malonkey1 is making a new powerset...It might never get into the game, but crowdsourcing IS possible

Actually, I'm making an archetype. I have one primary, one secondary, the inherent and the Epic pools in a workable state. Once I've built more powersets, I'll see if there are any servers or individuals willing to test it, but for now it's really a proof of concept.

 

That said, I might decide to actually make some of the powersets that I've suggested. The tricky part for new powersets is that the FX are a pain and I don't know anything about them yet.

[Primantis]

One thing I've seen used on other private servers is a kind of "grading" system that the mods themselves do.

 

Essentially they read the overall feedback on the suggestion. Then bump it to the appropriate sub forum. Which were "Approved" and "Denied". If the topic was still in the parent Suggestion forum than the subject was still being discussed.

 

Approved meant the devs themselves said "Ya we want to do that" and the community also voted favorably. It did not guarantee the suggestion would ever come to fruition, but the devs at least thought favorably of it.

 

Denied meant that either the devs said no, the community voted against it, or it was plain impossible.

 

 

Edited August 5, 2019 by Primantis

[justicebeliever]

5 hours ago, Primantis said:

One thing I've seen used on other private servers is a kind of "grading" system that the mods themselves do.

 

 

I would love to see more dev input on suggestions...it would help with having to have the same conversations over and over again in different threads...

 

 

[Steampunkette]

There are actually a great many things that cannot be done in the City of Heroes engine. Would it be possible to create the code required to allow City of Heroes to do those things? With an infinite amount of time and manpower sure. But there's stuff that could take literally years with the development team we have to try and add to the game. 

 

There's also going to be stuff that's strictly beyond their abilities. No offense intended, obviously. 

 

To some degree or another we need to pull back our expectations. The biggest bottleneck in game development is artwork. It has been for a very long time. That's why schools like Full Sail University offer "game industry education" programs and then it's just modeling and artwork rather than the discussion of game mechanics or spreadsheet management. Artists are constantly cycling in and out of game development simply because they have their own projects they want to work on. The turnover for artists at any studio is going to be significantly higher then any other position except maybe community moderators and testers.

 

Now there's a fairly large number of people who are volunteering to be artists for the game, and I am super excited about that! But until it's confirmed that the team has grown by adding artists we probably should aim for suggestions that don't require a lot of artwork.

 

So things like proliferation of power sets or value tweaks, new ways to do old things, and stuff that requires minimal art investment are much more reasonable suggestions then a brand new power set with a whole new art style for all of its various effects or the creation of new costume pieces or weapon types or animations.

 

Unfortunately those are all the coolest f****** things!

Edited August 5, 2019 by Steampunkette

[justicebeliever]

I think we should definitely manage our expectations...Yes, the Dev's have limited resources, and I would agree artwork is key among them...

 

There is a difference between managing our expectations and our suggestions...

 

We should have lots of cool suggestions going on out there...you never know when just 1 part of a goofy suggestion gets pulled out and becomes a really cool reality...And sometimes, in the suggestions posters learn about other capabilities the game already has...there have been a few suggestions here were someone posted back - "you can already do that by doing x".  We should encourage the dreamers...

 

We should not expect that any of our suggestions will be a reality...Even if they are easy...We are not subscribers to the game, thus there is no commitment from Homecoming to provide us anything...They will work on what they WANT to work on regardless of difficulty or ease, regardless of who it appeals to or not...They will likely factor in ease/difficulty, level of appeal, etc, but they are not required to...We are just guests here...

[Steampunkette]

22 minutes ago, justicebeliever said:

I think we should definitely manage our expectations...Yes, the Dev's have limited resources, and I would agree artwork is key among them...

 

There is a difference between managing our expectations and our suggestions...

 

We should have lots of cool suggestions going on out there...you never know when just 1 part of a goofy suggestion gets pulled out and becomes a really cool reality...And sometimes, in the suggestions posters learn about other capabilities the game already has...there have been a few suggestions here were someone posted back - "you can already do that by doing x".  We should encourage the dreamers...

 

We should not expect that any of our suggestions will be a reality...Even if they are easy...We are not subscribers to the game, thus there is no commitment from Homecoming to provide us anything...They will work on what they WANT to work on regardless of difficulty or ease, regardless of who it appeals to or not...They will likely factor in ease/difficulty, level of appeal, etc, but they are not required to...We are just guests here...

My thing is if we just continually throw out pie-in-the-sky ideas that our current development team cannot do or isn't interested in spending months or years trying to do we wind up either alienating them from the suggestions forum or burying stuff that can be done in a pile of stuff that cannot be done.

 

if we as a community have some kind of understanding over what can be done and what cannot be done can we can make suggestions that are meaningful to the development team. That are actually useful and helpful in a rather immediate sense.

[justicebeliever]

2 hours ago, Steampunkette said:

My thing is if we just continually throw out pie-in-the-sky ideas that our current development team cannot do or isn't interested in spending months or years trying to do we wind up either alienating them from the suggestions forum or burying stuff that can be done in a pile of stuff that cannot be done.

 

if we as a community have some kind of understanding over what can be done and what cannot be done can we can make suggestions that are meaningful to the development team. That are actually useful and helpful in a rather immediate sense.

I would agree 100% if we had any idea how Homecoming operates...They might be mining the forums for suggestions...they might not...they might have projects they've been working for 7 years that are real game changers, and it might be we've seen all they are capable of...Their current development list might have 50 suggestions from the forums or 2...We have no idea what's really helpful for them and they haven't been very chatty to share...

 

I don't think we as a community can come to any kind of understanding unless Homecoming joins the discussion and shares some/all of their road map...which, I also think, for them, would be a colossally bad idea, because that'll set expectations on what/when things will happen that they will inevitably fail to meet because, real life happens when you are a hobbyist, and it'll anger the community...

 

I do like @Primantis's idea about having the dev's comment or grade suggestions...that wouldn't solve the expectation of when or what could happen, but a little bit better on the if it could even happen question...