I would like to see a player council (council name TBD) drafted that coordinates player suggestions and concerns with the Devs involved with that council. This system has been pretty effective at QC during the process of development with other developers that have tried this method. The Player Council just pretty much voices the validity of our suggestions and concerns with the game's development with a team of players that have knowledge of the game mechanics, play styles and/or exploits. I threw out some guidelines and suggestions and everyone is welcome to add or modify any of the below in their post.
Player Council (name TBD)
- The Player Council shall be elected by the player community to represent the player community's interest in development.
- The Player Council shall have at the most, annual term limits. (max number of terms to be served - TBD)
- The Player Council shall have as many positions available as there are aspects (or offices) of the game with each member of that council occupying each aspect (office). (e.g. C&P, Power Play, third-party devs, etc.)
- Fdev may dictate the offices to be occupied per their development structure (as needed). I feel this may help Fdev streamline feedback from the council.
- The Player Council shall communicate with Fdev directly during scheduled council/dev meetings and before scheduled releases of new content, betas and/or features.
Player Council Restrictions
- Council nominees cannot be; currently employed or formerly employed by Fdev; a moderator for Fdev; relatives or friends of any staff member of Fdev.
- Council nominees must be active in the community forums
- Player Council members must have knowledge of the aspect they are representing when nominated and elected.
- Council nominees must have purchased, at least, Elite : Danergous (Non-horizons) to qualify for nominations.
Maybe council members can have a special in-game tag for their commander like, Counselor BLAH instead of CMDR?!
I hope this suggestion may help the devs and the community communicate better.
Here's my thoughts on the subject from experience with the concept from other games and situations.
council.
1: Election, sounds the proper way, but given the internet it rarely if ever falls out that way, those elected are in no way assured to actually have other players interests at heart then their own, thus you can have a subsection of the users, those that for example are loud on the communities, or certain groups in the community group together and get their perspective elected. And silent majority gets no say in it, because the silent majority is often those playing the game, maybe reading the community sites and posting rarely, so a minority with their specific view can quickly affect the game negatively, if it even needs to work, there needs to be some solid checks and balances.
2: Given the nature of gaming, 'terms' isn't really going to work, if you ask me, rather they should be able to be removed if people disagree with their view on the game, so we avoid people getting a role and then misusing it. Of course this opens up to groups 'attacking' each-others representatives, and given the volatile nature of things online it can turn sour, but more then if people get a set term and misuse it which has happened in other games.
3: amount of positions seems a given yeah.
4: course.
5: considering how timing works with RL and people working and fdev, yeah, this seems impractical?
restrictions:
1: if they are a player of the game why would this matter, because they would 'favor' fdev? how? how about the much substantial risk of council/player members misusing their power, given the nature of how many of these discussions go?
2: well yeah, but at the same time, does that make it fair though? I know a ton of players that avoid community sites like the plague due to the volatile nature of such forums/reddit e.t.c. and simply enjoy the game and talk with their friends they play with about it, discuss things there, their views aren't any less valid?
3: how is this even going to be monitored? anyone can read something online about a topic and come up with idea's that ultimately do not take a lot of things into consideration, but "It sounds cool" would just waste time if those kinds of people got in, but again how would you monitor that?
4: well yeah, you need to play and know about what you are dealing with, and not make decisions about stuff that doesn't involve you.
as for in game special tag, no, don't in game rewards would has in the past simply encouraged bad behaviour in such situations, the reward should be in itself, helping a game you love.
That said, I propose an alteration to the idea of the council.
A dedicated feedback pooling page for various subjects involving the game. Think of it in design akin to discords feedback page:
https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land
Which seems to be driven by the uservoice platform, something frontier could easily adopt?
A dedicated page like this, where people log in with their game id so it is registered properly, and then they submit their troubles/issues in an orderly manner, and while duplications likely will happen, anyone that wants a topic seriously discussed with FDev will pool together under one thread, and it would rise accordingly to the top of its respective topic.
The forums with suggestions 'could' work like that yeah, and look at page length but that really doesn't work work that well due to forum structure. But the uservoice product manager seems to be focused on exactly this.
This would require far less radical changes, and generally avoid the whole one representative issue and the problems therein, and it should be possible to make it check if a person owns the game before they are allowed to post.
