4Game

o7 CMDR's. Been seeing a lot of hate lately on people with ideas/feedback on the game.

Here's the "behind the curtain" perspective from an employee of one of them "illusive developer companies" out there.

I'll try and format this for ease of reading:

Just because something has been suggested before, doesn't mean you shouldn't suggest it again…

Developers (usually) have dedicated staff monitoring all public feedback/perception of a piece of software.

These people (sometimes also developers) are partially responsible for collecting, aggregating, and ranking feedback based on the community.

A single thread with 1,000 replies/upvotes/etc. will (in a lot of models) often be regarded as "one piece of feedback" with a lot of "engagement." This will rank lower than 1,000 separate threads of people all "coming up with the same idea "from nothing" and here's why:

An "engagement" is a low-effort interaction on behalf of a user. A "fave" or "like" or "upvote" or even a comment, is mostly a passive-interaction. A new thread (especially some that y'all come up with in here) detailing "new" (i.e. the same) ideas over and over, are regarded as high-effort interactions.

A few quick things:

1. Yes, we are aware you know nothing about coding and we literally don't care
2. Some of the greatest ideas that have had the biggest impact on development resources were suggested by people who "know nothing about development" or software design (on my team we call this the "kid" suggestion, we love these, sometimes they're hilarious sure, but sometimes they're eye-opening)
3. It's OUR job to determine whether something is actionable or not, we don't need our community to tell our own community "not to suggest something," agree or disagree, those are valuable datapoints, simply telling someone not to speak (for whatever reason) is unhelpful

If you are "tired of seeing the same thing suggested over and over" with no traction, often times you're unaware (and we can't make you aware) of long-term plans. We can't say "you can stop suggesting this, we've heard you" until we are VERY deep (i.e. pre-beta) in the development cycle. Sometimes we read 10,000 threads suggesting something we are working hard to develop, that's fine, keep posting, it let's us know we're on the right track.

Not everyone on our teams will always agree with each other, we're human too.

Developers, we're just like you! We all have our own priorities and agendas and wishes… and sometimes, there's a leadership change or a new person brought on the team who's really passionate about something and will start looking at aggregated feedback and go "why haven't we done this already! Do it now!" That wouldn't happen if people stopped posting.

Here's the one thing you must always remember:

If someone tells you to stop posting/use the search before posting/etc. they don't work for the team looking for the feedback, we'd NEVER say this to our community.

If someone tells you "that's impossible, it'd be too difficult to code it just means they don't work for a developer (or maybe used to, and got fired, probably because they told their boss something would be too difficult to code!) take their reply for what it's worth to developers, i.e. "nothing." Keep dreaming, keep posting, (keep giving us neat ideas for free, we love that!).

If someone disagrees with you, that's okay, we find that valuable too, but if someone tries to shut down the conversation entirely, we ignore them… you should too.

Dream big CMDR's… regardless of what happens behind the space curtain, I'm 100% confident that FDev appreciates the dreamers more than the dream-police.

o7