EVE General Discussion

It's pretty clear to me that using forums to gather feedback on features is frustrating and wasteful for all concerned.

1. For those who hang on forums all day, it's annoying to see repetition.
2. For those who don't, reading it all to get up to speed is not going to happen.
3. Many ppl avoid all forums as they tend to be dominated by certain personalities and/or children, and are a pretty poor medium for structured feedback.
4. Many people want to make just one point about one thing and don't want to wade through a ton of unrelated (to them) comments of varying quality.
5. If staff comment on a thread, they are damned if they do, damned if they dont. Don't -- "CCP aren't listening". Do -- risk of annoying more users by ignoring other comments in thread by only answering one, perceived favouritism, etc.

What you need is a structured, categorised Feature Tracker with public and private realms. Feature tracking is managed internally to facilitate prioritisation and general product backlog management.

The business case is, we are wasting dev cycles making amends to launched features, wasting resources monitoring unstructured user feedback, and the users feel they are not being listened-to & and many users are not bothering to give feedback.

The cost is building/buying a new tool & training in its use, and more product management overhead. We gain dev cycles, better feature tracking, user happiness and thereby retention, and improve product quality thereby converting more trials into paid accounts.


The cycle looks something like this:

1. Your community management folks boil the userbase moon-howling into requested features.
2. Feature requests entered into tracking system & categorised (e.g. PI, FW).
3. Each feature has a perma, public URL and has a category. Can be open/closed/frozen, prio P1-P5, and other meta data as per bug tracking systems.
4. Features are discussed at weekly product backlog meetings.
5. State of feature in tool (prio, t-shirt size estimate of resource reqd) is updated as a result (often a one-liner, entered by PM).

Example:

• "User request wings put back on ship model X"
• Does feature exist? No, put in tracker.
• Tracker generates feature URL, URL put in related forum.
• Team estimates effort in t-shirt size (e.g. "S" - small - 1/2 day dev effort) decides not worth doing now, very low prio, but leave it there incase further user feedback makes it higher prio -- so freeze it, add reason why you wont do it now, assign P5 (low prio). Team comments are internal-only by default but public comments can and should be added to inform players at a high level of the decision.

Why?

• People can see that they are being listened-to.
• Features aren't discussed endlessly in the same threads because ppl aren't going to read 27 pages in a thread to check their request hasn't been asked.
• Ppl could up/downvote requests to aid you prioritisation and get more accurate, and easier feedback than forum "likes" and loud shouting.
• You have a perma historical record per request and easily-found canonical answers to issues.
• Your developers and designers can see *why* they are implimenting something and the root problem they are actually trying to solve, more than a high-level task assignment note from a PM.

Also;

1. The intersects between this process and sprint (I assume) planning meetings should be obvious.
2. You could automate bi-weekly announcements of new features so ppl can read them, and up/downvote them.
3. When are *planning* repeat *planning* a new feature it can be added to this list for structured feedback instead of wading through moon-howling *after* release and wasting dev resources fixing/changing subsequently.

Yes, I used to manage engineering teams across timezones for a very large software company you will have heard of ;)

That only addresses the tip of the iceberg of what I am suggesting, and is of no help to new players.

Because this is less work for them, therefore CCP and the players get a better ides of what players really want.

Hmm maybe the thread subject doesn't well describe what I am proposing -- more that a feature tracking system should be used to formally track and respond to user issues, wherever they be raised. Rather than an ad-hoc system of occasional forum replies and dev posts some time after the fact.

- liking of features, not posts(!)
- integration into CCP's product development process
- canonical URLs for ideas in a tool also used internally by CCP and thereby managed better than forum threads, which grow chaotic and diluted over time
- better metadata around features to assist in product planning and automation

I would assume that some kind of tool like this is already in use in CCP, given their geography and the complexity of their products.

In a nutshell, what I want to see is organisation around this tool and making parts public, so users have better visibility into the decision-making process by CCP and can easily find the discussion & history around features, rather than wading through forums. Also people could see a list of features every two weeks and vote without even leaving the client.

Also is does make CCP more accountable in that they have to show they have considered the request, even in a cursory manner. TBH i think that would help enormously with the "CCP don't listen anyway why should i bother posting in the forums?" vibe.

Solution in search of a problem.

Try petitions and bug tracker. And Features and Ideas forum.

They do work. Most of the game you play today was player ideas, including key features like the market.

Thanks, and yes they "work" to some extent. Seems to me I am thinking about different problems, mainly around decision-making visibility, ease of making feedback and ease of structuring & recording that feedback.

Decisions are intentionally not made public long-before releases. First of all it commits them to the idea. Second of all it really fucks with the market and allows people to make vast wealth speculating on changes. A feature tracker would give the vigilant and endless amount of isk by speculation.

That is why CCP announces big changes in highly-trumpeted dev-blogs, to give everyone a mostly equal-shot at the speculating.

Brother, You are spot-on and make complete sense.

Do not let the trolls create doubt. CCP *needs* a more professional way of managing their assets AND interfacing with their clients.

Also, and I do not know if this has yet been mentioned in this thread, a feature tracker and knowledge base is a fantastic means for bringing new talent (employees) up to speed on the product, historical customer dialogue and whatever internal documentation relates to relevant IP elements for which the new hire is responsible.

tl;dr - reduce the knowledge transfer cost associated with new hires and mitigate the risk of lost talent with the feature tracker.