Pinned Post Feedback

Stardock,

Pinning posts does not appear to be working as a method to necro-revive these old discussions. The pinned posts are not attracting any new feedback. Look at the posting dates. (And look at the people who are posting to them.)

I've also noticed that there is little discussion, in general, about past updates going on now. Sure, you have people referencing ideas/feedback they created, but you do not have any new posters digging into them and submitting new feedback.

I propose that these discussions be unpinned. As an alternative, keep a running tab (bullet point list) of what topics need relevant feedback. That way, you can better manage us.

I propose for Stardock to reveal why in the world did those threads get pinned (and basically were pulled out of commenting cycle, since nobody pays attention to pinned posts for several reasons).

Hear Hear!

Though I suspect that it was something cooked up by the team management in order to solicit more feedback without increasing the level of interaction or information.

^ I posted in August 2016 dev log thread. See if it's bold for you. I think they fixed the persistent title bolding.

I think it would help if particular points for discussion are raised explicitly by StarDock. Several posts that I review I may have minor thoughts on (either for, or against), but not feel strongly enough to actually commit a post for it.

For example, several threads do a breakdown of the monthly update. I look at those in parallel with the update itself. Forming my own opinion but also looking at it from somebody else's perspective. I appreciate the threads, and agree on most of the discussion (or disagree on relatively irrelevant things, like whether I like ship A or B more personally).

However, if StarDock said explicitly: we're looking for Founder opinions on whether 20 planetary types (terran, arctic, dessert, gas, etc) are just right, or too little, or too many... then suddenly there's incentive to discuss the types and special wishes. (I'd be happy with 20, subject to an additional 20 "unique" types existing as well that are only present once in a cluster (e.g. broken but semi-together planet, ruined civilization world where the entire planet is tech remnants, etc)

Personally, I find it confusing at times when I login to read what's going on, but that's just me.

Exactly. They're not really specifically prompting us on anything in particular, and users have been making these threads rather than moderators. The resulting disorder is what happens when you let a mob take matters into their own hands in any situation.

I don't know if it makes a difference to Stardock since they claim to be observing comments regardless, but there could definitely be a little more structure and moderation rather than just letting the forum govern itself. I assume it's just not a high priority.

It is fixed. We did it! It is evidence that we affected something!

They did try this once.

Phase 1: Everybody created their own threads.

Phase 2: Everybody created their own threads. Then Andrew created some discussion threads. People still posted new threads.

Phase 3: Andrew becomes a lurker. Everybody created their own threads, and there was some friction over having too many threads.

Phase 4: Brad mentions that some forum posts are going to be stickied. Posts get stickied. Some posts get necro-stickied. Nobody posts in half of them.

Phase 5: Everybody created their own threads. I create mine minutes before the update goes live because I wanted to make sure that other posters don't front-load their opening post with images. (That suuuuuucks.) It worked!

Phase 6: No new posts get stickied. I gripe about too many sticky posts.

What structure would work? We'd need more interaction with SD for any structure to work better. This is probably the first game of theirs I've been associated with with such little day-to-day interaction between forum fans and the dev team. Granted, my previous interactions were when SD was much smaller, but still...

I am surprised that they don't put out topics for discussion very often.  They do this very differently than we did in the board game industry, and I've been involved with a lot of these types of things in the past with computer games (a long time ago, anyway).  But they could get more out of a group like this by several different methods that we used on the SFB Staff.  For example, every week they could pick one issue they'd like to get some "focus group feedback" on and created a thread about it.  Be consistent, every monday for example.  The computer game industry takes the idea of not corrupting the discussion a bit too far, in my opinion.  That is a valid issue, but at the same time you want to use your "staff".  The SFB Staff is a bit extreme, we truly were assistant designers and that's how SVC wanted it too be.  But things like what we called "Ketrick's Korner" (putting out an issue for discussion on a regular basis) would work very well here.  Then, they should stay out of it... to not corrupt that discussion.

It's not that they don't do this, they did it in last months update, but I would think they would get a lot more use out of us, and wind up with a better game for it as the more people you are getting ideas from the better off you will be.  These are the kinds of things you have a designer for, in the computer game industry's way of doing things.  The programmers and artists generally don't have the time for this stuff on a regular basis, but the designer does.  In fact, this type of group, if you are lucky enough to have one, should be considered one of your greatest resources.  It should be used more.

I am not criticizing Stardock, the computer game industry in general doesn't really use these groups well.  I understand that the SFB Staff model is too... invasive... for their process, but going 1/4 or so or the way toward that model would be of great value too them.

Andrew could do a Ketrick's Korner thing once per week, and Brad could do a "To Ask The Question Why?" type of thing each week.  That is a regular column in the SFB magazine where SVC would answer "Why?" questions that aren't actually rules questions, but are relevant to the game.  So Brad could make that, "interesting things about the game, that aren't related to its design".  Whatever those may be.

Just literally a few regular things like this would be, I think, very useful and helpful too them.  But, of course, I don't have their perspective on how things work for them.

We're working on getting the forums organized which will be important as we will have a bigger community once the next phase of Founders is opened up.

Things that help:

• Threads that focus on a specific topic whether it's direct feedback to something posted in the vault, or a specific request for feedback. 
  
  
• Keeping the Founder forum posts to only direct game related topics.

Much of the team is extremely busy working on the game itself, so I will be helping pass along the info and feedback from the forums.

^ Thanks for the heads up.

Can we now unpin the messages since they aren't attracting anything other than dust?

Correction in RED:

Phase 1: Everybody created their own threads.

Phase 2: Everybody created their own threads. Then Andrew created some discussion threads. People still posted new threads.

Phase 3: Andrew becomes a lurker. Everybody created their own threads, and there was some friction over having too many threads.

Phase 4: Brad mentions that some forum posts are going to be stickied. Posts get stickied. Some posts get necro-stickied. Nobody posts in half of them.

Phase 5: Everybody created their own threads. I create mine minutes before the update goes live because I wanted to make sure that my post is the one that gets stickied, since it's the first one and people will naturally just start adding to it. (It didn't work, but still might)

*** Goddamn. The sheer number of things you guys find to gripe about boggles the mind, and why I literally can't even bring myself to come on here every day anymore. How about instead of complaining about, like a million points about the way posts are stickied (and don't bold and now do bold), we just focus on the meat of the game? Oh, right! Because you don't care about the gameplay or the story or the aliens or the ships... you care only about the ship combat, and the "images are too pixelated" to comment on those. Great input!

And this weird, new idea about how you make a header-post briefly explaining what you're about to explain, and then post an explanation post right beneath it (that's only 3 sentences long) explaining what you could have just explained in the first post, but instead create a second post within the same thread to explain what was only touched upon directly above it, is a terrible idea and makes no sense. It made sense with long opinion posts, but makes zero sense here.

Take Island Dog's roundabout, indirect advice and stop bothering them about these nothing-things. They're "extremely busy working on the game itself". Shocking!

/Rant over

I have some feedback regarding the pinned posts

(My next post will have the full details.)

^ Here's the full details of my previous post:

I just went back and read all the pinned posts and many of them are very important, and loaded with good ideas. 

I posted in all of them, so the date is updated to today's date, and hopefully they won't die. 

(My next post will have thoughts on how ludicrous of me that was)

^ In this post, I'll explain that it doesn't MATTER if nobody posts anything anymore, to the pinned posts. They were exceptionally thoughtful posts, filled with good insight at the time. Things have changed since, you know, the June update, so while it's not relevant to talk about anyMORE, the developers themselves can weed out all the other inconsequential posts that get talked about on here, ad nauseam... and instead, go back and refer to the QUALITY posts that people have spent the last year compiling and put a lot of effort into writing.

Hunam's post in August, with all the Photoshop and guidelines is still a good read, and if the developers are smart (which they are), they'll refer to it often. 

And lucky for them, they won't have the clutter of this "Pinned Post Feedback" bogging them down by being unnecessarily critical of unimportant things, and actually get to the good, helpful stuff! 

^ Dam, son. Chillax, bro. He wasn't all THAT serious. 

@Frogboy

@Island Dog

@Vaelzad

Pinned posts don't get bold when new posts added. Plz fix. 

::looks at the remaining 3 posts.:: Apparently not. Dude, wow. You ok?

On the plus side, you broke your rant up into 4 posts. You get some credit for that.

::Sees that CB spammed every single sticky AND posted 4 times in this thread.::

Holy fuck. You went crazy.

But if you were going to spam in all those topics, you should have asked for local multiplayer. You could have been my squeaky wheel surrogate.

My hero.

Lol, it's just so, so, so, so soooo stupid. What a great experience this could be. Like, I've been around the entire world, visited 14 countries, lived in Italy and Cancun, gotten married abroad, had three kids and all the crazy cool experiences that stuff provides - yet, THIS - having actual input on the followup to the game that shaped me the most, should be one of the coolest, most fun things of my life.

I imagined getting on here every day with hundreds of other adoring fans, examining IN DETAIL, all the fun things the developers throw our way, and offering input and constructive criticism with 500 other people, going back and forth and analyzing every little thing, really getting into the meat of the game with hundreds of other people who adore Star Control as much as I do...

Instead, I get you two. The ONLY two people that post on here religiously, pretty much every single day. And it's always all "Wahh! The pinned posts don't bold" and "Your planet names suck" and "The pinned posts are useless, please remove" and "Don't put explanations in the main post" and "I don't care at all about Star Control being an epic space opera, I just like shootin' stuff! Wahh!" and "I wish the forums were a different format" and "The pics are too pixelated, I'm not responding" and "Wahh! No confirmed local multiplayer!" and any other number of minute, unrelated, annoying nags you have on here.

And that's fine, whatever, you can make your jokes (and I'll admit, I chuckled at Hunam completely ignoring my rant and asking Stardock to fix the bold, and IBN with his "squeaky wheel surrogate" comment), but honestly? Completely honestly? It's a huge disappointment. Because it COULD be so incredibly cool and fun and just this incredible opportunity! But nobody wants to do any of that. Especially not the only two other people who post on here with any regularity. Y'all just want to complain instead of dissect. What a downer and a sad, sad thing.

So, yeah, I did go crazy! You guys pushed me over the edge with this post, and I'm usually very tolerant and reserved. But I'll be damned if this isn't a huge disappointment. And joke all you want.... you know I'm right.

Ok, back to regularly scheduled programming.

Hey Stardock, Arial font suxxxxxxxx, please change the font here on these forums!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, just an fyi, that's uh...you know, it's difficult to respond to that. Is this your first time? Because none of this is new to me. Believe me, I survived the Flight Fiasco in WoW, the release of Beyond Earth, the Spore Collapse. Forums in general aren't exactly a pleasant place to be all the time. And as has been mentioned, if more structured feedback were to be implemented, I think we'd see some semblance of order, but you're always going to have the restless banter of those with too much time on their hands. 

Breath of fresh air, Volusianus. Thank you.

I was a part of Starbound Early Access, but that's mostly it. That community had literal hundreds of people posting constantly about every aspect of the game, coming up with new ideas, sharing experiences and thoughts. Sure there was complaining, but it wasn't so... petty. It was usually about game features, etc. And the horde of people on there actually WANTED to comment on the game's various aspects.

Even still, the game that released suuuuuuucked, lol. So, mission failed, I guess.

Even if we don't get more structured feedback, we should listen to Island Dog when he says, "Keeping the Founder forum posts to only direct game related topics."

That's a good place to start....

Soooo... Stardock, can you please make the logo at the top of the page different? I don't like how I can't really see the full emblem because it's behind the words "Star Control". Can you fix?

Agreed.

With the new people we will have coming in to the community soon, we're not going to let this continue and affect the greater community. 

I'm going to be cleaning threads of some of this nonsense, and if it continues we'll need to take it a step further.

Allright. See ya in 19 days. 

Thank you, Island Dog. Thread closed.

I'm done with debating plot. I'm done with debating quests. I'm done with debating filler. We aren't getting enough feedback from Stardock to have a continual meaningful dialog.

We only get information once a month, and we are almost 2 weeks past the last update with another 2 to go. We have no idea if our ideas are being implemented. We question whether or not we are making a difference. Why should we put forth any more effort than we already have?

Ask yourself this. Aside from your two lengthy posts regarding the latest information dump and various other comments, what else have you contributed in October? Nothing. And that isn't your fault! You cannot work in a vacuum either.

If SD doesn't like how the forums are operating, they need to change things so that there is more transparency into what is happening with the game. A monthly newsletter just isn't going to cut it.

When are we getting the meaty prototype?

Apparently the Thread is NOT closed....  

So I'm trying to figure out, what makes anyone think they deserve more feedback or updates than the Devs are providing? Is it the whole I paid to be a founder now cater to my whim? I hardly think so. Frankly I paid for the Game and Lifetime updates and to name a planet. Everything else is GRAVY. If you don't like what you see and can't provide constructive feed back, get a refund and please leave. Do the community a huge favor. I come to this forum to provide feedback to the Devs on what they shared. I tried to participate in conversations by offering my opinions and was promptly told I was wrong for my opinions by members of this community. I don't care what you think, any of you, unless you have a Stardock under your profile name. Even then, only if it relates to my solicited feedback. DEVS Thanks, you don't owe me a damn thing but a game sometime in the next fiscal year. Message me an email I can submit my feedback to and I will stay off this forum and away from this madness and the all knowing, always right, legendary (in their own mind) game masters that populate this forum. Thanks.