Improve the forum system, many good comments are going unnoticed

Often there are multiple answers to a post, and there is no clear way to see answers that many people agree/disagree with.

Suggestions to solve this:

update the forum to use a system closer to Reddit (for example), where top-voted content is displayed more clearly and sub-conversations are allowed;
make the like/dislike buttons bigger, some posts have 10-20 replies agreeing and not a single "like";
And let us sort posts by most liked, least liked etc;

The forum is using a very out-of-date system, which will end up hurting the game. Ideas can only be sorted by "most replies" and that doesn't necessarily mean they are the best ideas.

This is urgent IMO, especially with the influx of new players.

<EDIT>example of a good forum structure:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ideas/ct-p/newideas </EDIT>

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Noaani

A better idea would be to understand that forums are a discussion.

If you want a Reddit style format, go to the Ashes section on Reddit. You won't get much in the way of discussion there, but you will get what you are after.

Fairtale

Noaani wrote: »

You won't get much in the way of discussion there, but you will get what you are after.

what a completely useless answer. Read my post again, try to understand it before you reply.

Noaani

mr n0body wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

You won't get much in the way of discussion there, but you will get what you are after.

what a completely useless answer. Read my post again, try to understand it before you reply.

I understand it, you seem not to understand what I said though.

A forum is not about popularity contests, or promoting specific posts. That is what Reddit is for.

Forums are about discussion. Any given thread is not just about the idea presented in the first post in the thread, and in many cases, the best discussions on these (or any) forums occur naturally on threads and are not inherently connected to the specifics of the first post.

Again, if you want a system of tracking individual ideas, Reddit is for you. If you want discussion, the forums are your best bet.

Fairtale

Noaani wrote: »

Again, if you want a system of tracking individual ideas, Reddit is for you. If you want discussion, the forums are your best bet.

Reddit? How will admins track the number of votes on ideas in a system where ideas are "achieved" and users cant vote for them anymore? Or where there is a "timeline" and no decent search features, promoting duplicated content?
And what is the point of this forum if you cant sort the results? Do you actually believe the AoC team will read every single comment made in here individually? And if not, how are player's ideas going to influence the game if no one is reading them?

And where are you getting these ideas from that a forum should not have a voting system if EVERY decent forum tool out there has these features?

Here some example of forum solutions for you to compare and grasp your head around it:
- Lithium (one of the best, used by spotify) https://khoros.com/platform/communities
- Spotify demo of a well built community: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ideas/ct-p/newideas
- Vanilla Forums https://vanillaforums.com/
- Tribe https://tribe.so/
- Discourse
- Wix (extension)
- phpBB (extension)

This here is an amazing example: I am spending my time teaching you what a forum is for and completely derailing this conversation in the most useless way. Comments like these just spam everything and take the focus away from important contributions. What if someone before you made an important contribution? His comment would be lost behind your insistent comments that contribute nothing.

This is the official forum. This is the official place for an exchange of ideas around AoC. Sending people to Reddit, where there are no categories, no filtering, nothing decent, is detrimental to the game and the community since ideas posted there will be lost forever.

You should have some common sense to understand that we want all comments around a matter in the same place so that the conversation can move forward productively.
You should also have some common sense to understand that the AoC team can't read every comment individually and needs some way of summarizing results.
If you add A and B together, you realize that the game needs a better forum.

Please consider how (and if) your suggestion can help solve a challenge before contributing.

Dreoh

Damn, you are coming off condescending as hell

And I thought I could seem condescending at times lmao, this is a whole other level

Noaani

mr n0body wrote: »

And what is the point of this forum if you cant sort the results?

Forums don't have results, they have discussions.

If you want to know what the discussions conclusion is, read the discussion.

The problem isn't the forum format, the problem is that you do not know the point of the forum format.

mr n0body wrote: »

You should have some common sense to understand that we want all comments around a matter in the same place so that the conversation can move forward productively.

No, we want all comments around a conversation kept where they are, so the discussion can evolve organically.

That is why the proper use of quoting is important in a forum - a quote gives players a link to the quoted post, so that context can be maintained. This makes it easier for long forgotten posts to be made relevant again, should the thread take a turn that warrants their being quoted.

The only thing the like button on these forums is monitored for are forum badges.

CptBrownBeard

Typically Intrepid creates an official thread when they want feedback on a specific topic. Which seems more efficient to me than having to piece together multiple "upvoted" threads that may have many tangents anyway.

McShave

I think Intrepid is noticing the comments. It's not like a million threads are made a day, it's not too difficult to read all the posts.

CriminalCupcake

Not for Ashes....

CROW3

mr n0body wrote: »

The forum is using a very out-of-date system, which will end up hurting the game. Ideas can only be sorted by "most replies" and that doesn't necessarily mean they are the best ideas.

This is urgent IMO, especially with the influx of new players.

if you don't know what a good forum looks like, check this example

Neat. I like the card-like dashboard using different dimensions. Though...hurting the game? No. Urgent? No.

Also, good messages can be lost by bad messengers.

Aerlana

Most of us here (if not all) did roam in different official forum and/or reddit... We all know that popular ideas are a thing that devs never ignore. There is community manager, and also, major subject (those really important needed to be see) are rarely in only 1 topic, because many people feel the need to do their own topic... even when there is already 3 or 4 topic on the same subject on the first page of topic list. and even if from those 4, two are the first on the list...

Don't say "this spam on the same subject would not happen with my idea" ... we all know people will do their way...

And what you show isnt even a forum... else you consider reddit or comment section under youtube video are forums...

I mean, while yes, there are suggestions, there is also lot of topic that are NOT suggestion. debate between the beautifulest outfit, announcment of a community event. poll to have thought about a specific subjects. etc etc... your idea can do good work only for one thing : suggestions... We need far more than this for a MMORPG ! if they implement this, it would not be in place of forum but in addition, and then you will come explaining how bad way to add it because many people will just stay on forum and post suggestions in it... (because again, forum is far more than just suggestions...)

Fairtale

there is not a single company in the world that has the manpower to read all comments objectively without a ranking system. Subjective opinions will always weight in more, it is human nature, which is why the voting system is important to help the team have an objective view on opinions.

Maybe some “forum mod” is reading your opinions, but most of it won’t reach the devs and decision makers in an OBJECTIVE way like this.

The only way to circumvent that is to have a team manually go through the forum and count all opinions into an internal ranking system, but the manual work for that is just not worth it and quite impossible to avoid duplicates.

And since posts are already getting +25 LONG replies, it shows the need for a new system to make sure that YOU, the player, have your voice heard, which should the the objective of anyone looking for a good MMORPG (or any other game/product).

This doesn’t cost 500 usd to solve, maybe 1000-2000 if you include the migration of old posts into a new system.

This is an important issue, and is an issue that is already hurting the game.

Azherae

mr n0body wrote: »

there is not a single company in the world that has the manpower to read all comments objectively without a ranking system. Subjective opinions will always weight in more, it is human nature, which is why the voting system is important to help the team have an objective view on opinions.

Maybe some “forum mod” is reading your opinions, but most of it won’t reach the devs and decision makers in an OBJECTIVE way like this.

The only way to circumvent that is to have a team manually go through the forum and count all opinions into an internal ranking system, but the manual work for that is just not worth it and quite impossible to avoid duplicates.

And since posts are already getting +25 LONG replies, it shows the need for a new system to make sure that YOU, the player, have your voice heard, which should the the objective of anyone looking for a good MMORPG (or any other game/product).

This doesn’t cost 500 usd to solve, maybe 1000-2000 if you include the migration of old posts into a new system.

This is an important issue, and is an issue that is already hurting the game.

Wait did you just imply that a voting system leads to objective opinions?

Also, you don't have to manually go through the forums, there are entire software libraries you can use that will literally 'score the sentiment' of things for you.

You're coming from a good place, and maybe Intrepid in particular doesn't have that up and running right now, but you're still just wrong. You could totally read every post at the moment (I can keep up now without running any scripts), and you could compile specific topic targets easily (again, no scripts, just data gather as basically raw text, plus perl or bash commands in a shell).

bloodprophet

This a thing in the old forums.
It got HEAVILY abused so they removed it. It became the same toxic mess that reddit is.
The dev team may not read all the posts but they read enough.

Fairtale

Azherae wrote: »

Wait did you just imply that a voting system leads to objective opinions?

It is the best system we have nowadays. It is what we use for politics, it is what we use for reddit, it is what every other community management solution out there is going for nowadays.

Of course, if you know some AI that does this better, please bring it to the table (sarcasm), but right now, in 2021, this is what we have.

I see that you are really trying to make an effort here mate, but trust me on this, I work in this area, and every few months I get hired by a new company asking me "I don't know why my customers aren't satisfied, we even have a forum!" and it is always the same story:

Some trainee, often underpaid and/or uninterested, is in charge of the forum while dev's sit behind the company walls, developing things based on their personal opinions, maybe once in a blue moon checking the forum, and then surprised if the product doesn't match expectations.

And no one is saying players are always right. On the contrary: This thread is being a prime example of people give their opinions without any basis of what really works and brings results. However, the company needs to be able to SEE the user's opinions to make their own decisions better.

This is even important for the employees. When they go to their boss and say "oh a few players asked for this" the point does not come across with the same weight as showing a comment with 50-100-1000 upvotes.

Don't expect the DECISION MAKERS to all go through the forum and read all comments. They either get a summary made by someone else (not objective), or they have a ranking system that brings good suggestions to the top (more objective).

This is not a question of "which system is perfect", this is a question of "which system works better".

Azherae

Well, you can trust me on this too, I worked in this area, and in my case, it's explicitly 'using web crawlers to scrape forums, twitter, and News Feeds, with the explicit intention of presenting that data to CEOs and top corporate decision makers'.

If Intrepid needs this done, they can hit me up for 'help', even if just a bit.

Forums are fine as they are, the internal search functions for them can be way better than what we see, easily.

CROW3

I'd suggest contacting Intrepid then (maybe Margaret) and providing your advice?

We're going to use the tools provided to us to discuss more interesting topics like 'weighty weapon swings' instead of the tools to talk about 'weighty weapon swings.'

Fairtale

Azherae wrote: »

... 'using web crawlers to scrape forums, twitter, and News Feeds, with the explicit intention of presenting that data to CEOs and top corporate decision makers'.

Seriously, do some research before presenting things are the truth.

Tools like that can only scrape SENTIMENT as in "are most posts positive or negative in SENTIMENT". These tools are unable to give you a list of the most suggested topics, ideas, bug reports and organize them by most requested in a format that employees can present to decision-makers what bug reports, ideas and issues need the most attention by number of users requesting them.

If you find one like that, as I said already: show me. I would love to use that.

You've been watching too many Terminator movies, Skynet has not been invented yet.

Azherae

mr n0body wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

... 'using web crawlers to scrape forums, twitter, and News Feeds, with the explicit intention of presenting that data to CEOs and top corporate decision makers'.

Seriously, do some research before presenting things are the truth. Tools like that can only scrape SENTIMENT as in "are most posts positive or negative in SENTIMENT".

They are unable to give you a list of the most suggested topics, ideas, bug reports and organize them by most requested in a format that employees can present to decision-makers what bug reports, ideas and issues need the most attention by number of users requesting them.

If you find one like that, as I said already: show me. I would love to use that, and so would all my customers.

You've been watching too many Terminator movies, Skynet has not been invented yet.

It's really hard to take you seriously, and at the same time I don't want to reveal too much about myself online by just 'randomly promoting my old company' so I'm just going to tell you to search 'Enterprise Market Research Solutions' on Google.

I could understand if you had brought some examples of things that they really don't do, but you said... most suggested topics? Ideas? Bug reports? You understand that I was saying that we built actual search engines, right?

We're talking 'literally the most basic thing offered by an enterprise search engine' here.

I hope for your customer's sake that you find it. Truly. Because if you honestly believe those things are not possible, your customers are missing out, as you imply.

Fairtale

Azherae wrote: »

You understand that I was saying that we built actual search engines, right?

We're talking 'literally the most basic thing offered by an enterprise search engine' here.

I hope for your customer's sake that you find it. Truly. Because if you honestly believe those things are not possible, your customers are missing out, as you imply.

Dude you are spelling so much bullshit one message after another, when will you stop spreading lies on the internet.

AI technology has not reached the point yet at which language recognition software can recognize intention and context to an extent that this would even be possible.

For something like what you are saying to exist, the software would have to recognize that different posts, written using completely different words and slang, are talking about the same issues (not possible). It would then also have to scrape through all replies, and filter them:
- first sorting out trash messages like yours (not possible);
- then recognizing comments that agree/disagree with the main post (only partially possible);

Implying that software has reached a point in which it can understand language is implying that we have reached a point very close to sentient AI, which we are so far from achieving that it isn't even worth touching in this conversation.

If that was possible, we would not have moderators or GM's anymore. We would not have bots in games, we would not have a need for phone support anymore, since everything could be done by AI.

and EVEN IF ALL THAT WAS POSSIBLE, software like lithium can cost up to 50 THOUSAND dollars per year. Are you suggesting this type of expenditure just to avoid adding a voting system in the forum? do you have any idea of AoC's budget? You know this is a crowdsourced project, right?

You are severely misinformed, or completely misunderstanding the topic at hand. It is embarrassing seriously. Just "shhhhh" let it go, nothing will come of this.

I am having fun though, so by all means please tell me your next fantasy.

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