Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-26172435-20170318090215/@comment-26172435-20170319070116

LOTRMod wrote: I would just like to say that, back when I originally wrote the 'do not suggest anything mentioned in the lore or in the real world', it was in the context of 'pls add minas tirith' and 'pls add easterlings' and 'they should add peaches in harad'. Obvious ideas, and useless clutter. See, this was before the whole suggestions forum with long posts thing really came about. I wanted people to stop cluttering up the forums and the facebook page with one-liner suggestions that would have been obvious to anyone with a moment of thought, let alone an entire mod team with years' worth of discussions.

When I wrote that, to 'suggest' something was to post on the page asking us to add it, not to write up a long detailed essay proposing a feature with enough subtleties as to be worthy of an entire mod for itself.

Not to prevent any discussion of 'obvious' ideas, but rather, to encourage discussion of them. Thanks for responding here Mevans. You should realise this entire mechanism is here to ensure you get useful suggestions and as discussed on several occassions elsewhere, I do wish to stress it is you and your mod team who can only decisively determine what you wish to end up with at the end of the funnel of improvement idea processing. You did point out it was up to us to adjust the FAQ and WntS pages to our best insights. Now again, as I indicated earlier, it is really up to you to determine whether you wish for an ongoing stream of suggestions on addition of 'obvious' new features and on the way of how to implement them, or if you wish to limit that inflow. In extremis, I could imagine you could settle for the variant I described here (quoting myself):

"In my view the mod team should just be able focus on what is in lore, in their own gamers/memers minds and what is planned and implemented, and be relieved of any other noise coming from the suggestions forum. Consequently contributors should only provide improvement suggestions on existing features, unless the mod team explicitely requests for input on a planned feature, which can be dealt with outside the suggestions forum."

That may be an option to consider, maybe even just for a limited hiatus.

If you don't want that, I propose to adjust the description on the WntS page by focussing on the fact that we want people to focus on: "Don't simply suggest a feature, but tell us how you would suggest to implement it.". For that to be effective, we just need to adjust a few lines.

The difference between both options is to get or not get a(nother) truckload of suggestions on features that are planned and/or obvious additions with for example multiple suggestion threads per different feature on how to implement them. This would for instance consider: polar bears, peach liquor, fell beasts, avari elves, campfires, biomes in the uttermost east and magically imbued rings. I do wish to stress that if you would opt for that variant, it may be very useful to still exclude types of features you do not want any 'how to suggestions' on before they are implemented, but that is entirely up to you. All a matter of weighing priorities: spend effort in processing suggestions versus chance of finding rare, yet unknown, gems worthy of considering.

And, again, please indicate whether you guys consider it valuable or not to have this updated on a continuous basis. I won't recommence putting effort in that if I don't have any clue about it's added value to you and the mod team. That is a promise, not a threat. ;)