Question: May I suggest...

[Terminator]

As some other people said, the atmosphere of this forum has changed recently.

Frankly I am more used to Software Development forums where the people post their coding problems and other people propose some solutions. There is no money involved and people enjoy helping each other.
But I have always been amazed by this particular forum and the fact it is so reactive and leaving. This really used to be a great forum.


But now, reading some threads is becoming unpleasant, and posting in some threads is even becoming risky. It is now usual to being called a noob or being replied "your post is BS" by people just not sharing the same point of view. This is a bad evolution of the forum spirit.

I see that some famous people have reduced their posting here. Maybe they play less, but maybe they don't like the aggressive atmostphere there is.


So I'm far from being a forum expert, but may I suggest the following ideas?


1) Quality versus quantity

• I have never totally understood the need of the Rep system. I mean we can Rep each other and then? But I can see that when I +Rep someone for a good post, I am sometimes +Repped back on a random post of mine. Surely it seems a polite behaviour, but IMO it messes the Rep system.
• I can see some people posting several dozens times a day. Sometimes trying to push the same message in various threads. (Me included.) For sure EU is a passion for all of us, and when we are stuck at work, PCF is a fix, but there should be some limits to the posts.
• So here is the first idea: to modify the Rep system so that a limit of posts per day is set, and is dependant of the (new) Reps received. That way, a person making good posts can continue writing good posts. Less posts for better posts.
• For example we start with 10 posts a day, and it can increase to max 50 or decrease to min 1 according to the quality of them.
• Some routine could prevent abusing the system as: auto-ignoring someone having already received 10 -Rep from one person or auto-friending someone receiving his 10th +Rep.

2) Constructive complains

• Yes, EU is expensive and buggy. It has always be and will probably always be. And yes there is a RCE, we invest our personal money. But we are not efficient with our bugs threads, we just annoy each other. (And MA probbaly just ignores the dedicated sub-forums now. )
• The idea is not new at all, but I believe it could help MA and ourselves to have a kind of Wiki for the defects. This would have several objectives:
  • First we could enter a lot of data as: screenshots, method to reproduce, workaround, etc... I believe having a clean DB (we use Quality Center at work, that's a good example) this would be more usefull for MA than the thousands Support Cases they have to analyze/understand/reproduce.
  • Second, the severity of the issues or defects would be set by us by a voting system.
• This should look like a Wiki, but should be included here so that we have immediate access, no need to log, and this could use the new Rep system proposed above. This way MA could see that a defect has 1000 votes and the other one has 500 and decide which one fix first.
• There would less complaints here as we would be responsible for the criticity of defects, not MA.

3) More votes

• This part is more for MA but I write it here too. I doubt having a so negative forum is good for their business. Helping us may help them.
• There was a survey some months ago, it is good but far from enough.
• You (MA) really need to know more what your players like, want, dislike and avoid. You keep on saying that the Universe is still in development, that's great, but you should have an active participation of your Customers in the design phase of it, don't you think?
• I'm not convinced that Community Managers are (were?) efficient, so I think the ingame voting system discussed for years should be implemented. ASAP, not in 3 years with the new citizen system of CLDs.
• For example, there have been many threads about some missing VU9.x features, but not all people need/want them. So it leads to angryness, and useless disputes here.
• Any democractic government applies elections/votes, and their citizens don't feel the need of a "revolution" when they see they are in the 48% of people in minority. They just accept.

I won't speak much about loot/cost to play/return because:

• It should be addressed in the point 2 with complaints and point 3 with votes.
• Anyone can reduce his losses by reducing his expenses ingame. Remember what MA told us: "You feel you can't stand minor defects, please wait until next patch. So we should have something lile "We can't stand losing that much, let's wait until crisis is over" (Yes I know, we are addicted... )

I could write more but the wall is long enough.

This post is more aimed to Forum owner/moderators and MA, but feel free to post (constructive and mature) comments...