Idea: Community generated List of Node Names through controlled forum Polling

Warth

Node Naming in general:
We all know, that the node name can be chosen from a list of pre-chosen names.
What I'd like to suggest and have suggested in another thread is, that this list is created entirely through the suggestions of the community. There has been overwhelmingly positive feedback with follow up suggestions based on that, so i figured that it would be worth a thread to solidify and talk about the idea in general.

My idea behind it was as follows:

1. Intrepid opens a Thread with suggestions, within which every member of the Forum can bring suggestions.
2. Either a Mod or CM goes through that list, strikes out the ones they deem unfit and adds the rest to a database/excel sheet.
3. Every Week, 20-50 suggestions out of the database will be chosen at random and compiled into a poll.
4. The Top 1-3 voted upon named will make the ingame List of selectable Node Names. The others move bank into the database/excel sheet so they might be drawn again.

This way, we'd have (estimating an Q1 2023 release) a list of 100 (when 1 per week is selected) to 300 (when 3 per week are selected) List of names by the time the game releases.

I think this Idea would have a lot of interesting merits:

1. It involves the community into the game development (which is, by the claims of Intrepid itself) the whole goal they wanted to pursue through kickstarting. Time to make that happen.
2. Voting on 20-50 suggestions at once will ensure, that the votes aren't split to thin and we get significant results.
3. We get a wide variety of community suggested names by release.
4. The names come from the community, but will have been controlled by Intrepid to avoid "Dickville", "3rd Raich" as well as political and religious names.
5. The community will appreciate the feeling of contribution towards the project, even if its just the selection of node names.
6. More parts of the community will looks into the forum periodically to vote, which will also encourage further discourse in other topics.
7. It's not much work at all, compared to creating a studio-internal list. Compiling them into a list doesn't take long, and creating a poll from 20-50 randomly selected ones doesn't take a lot of manpower either.

The only valid argument against this idea which i have found would be that the node names are based on lore-based towns and cities from the game itself. Other than that, i think that its a great opportunity to do exactly what Intrepid justified their kickstarter with: Involve the community.

• How would you improve upon the idea?
• What's your general opinion on it and what would be counter arguments apart from the one stated?
• and finally:
• Which suggestion(s) would you make, if you had the chance to suggest names for the Nodes.

BigPapa1

I think if this is done it would be better if it wasn't done as part of a forum polling but rather a completely separate poll on the website, as some people won't touch the forums with a ten foot pole. Of course, you might argue that the most engaged people in the community might be the ones that have a right to vote, but that would make the voting demographic a bit too narrow. The only requirement should be to have a game account registered prior to a certain date (before the poll is announced), that would make any organized mass voting via fake accounts impossible.