Oct 31, 2017, 07:41 PM
With the development of some new internal tools, we feel as though it would be useful to tell the community how the development team deal with suggestions now, along with a couple of Q/A's.
What we do with suggestions?
Some of the community believe we don't care about suggestions. This is not true. Whilst we may seem like it, with year-long delays for some suggestions, along with implementing other things, it's simply not true. As we can see with a couple of recent updates such as the Prop Update and Sea of Green, we do use your suggestions. Whilst we may not directly implement the suggestion, we may use it for ideas, to base our own improvements upon. We do care about your ideas, we do see suggestions, and we do what we can to make the community as involved in the process as we can.
How do we handle suggestions?
A couple of internal tools have been developed to help assist the development team in managing suggestions. One example is a tool that links to the forums and gives us an overview of all the current suggestions.
Why do we require polls?
Polls are required because it's quite difficult to scrape posts for +/- supports, especially when people quote the +/- support. Therefore the +/- support poll makes it easier for us to tell at a glance the overall direction of a suggestion.
What's up with Suggestions, Popular, Staff Review and Approved?
These are the four stages of suggestions.
Firstly, when a suggestion is new it goes to the suggestions area. Once a week or so has passed, and it has passed a minimum number of votes and approval percentage, it can be moved to popular.
In popular, after another week, and getting past a higher number of votes and approval percentage, it will be moved to staff review.
In staff review, the development team will look over suggestions. Any extra +supports or -supports are ignored at this point. If it's small enough, it will be approved then and there. If it's larger, it goes to a staff vote. Then it has to go through a feasibility check, to make sure the suggestion is possible. Once these have passed, a suggestion is moved to approved.
In approved, it waits until a development team member is free to start working on it, where it is then implemented.
So why's X suggestion been in staff review for Y?
Because there's quite a few suggestions still waiting to be reviewed. There are 24 currently being reviewed, with 262 left to review. Whilst we're trying to make this as fast and as painless as possible, it will take a while to get through them all.
What are the minimum votes and percentages?
Due to the potential for abusing the system, we won't be releasing the specific values. However, they are around 20 people, at about 50% +support to get to staff review.
What about suggestions which don't get the minimums?
After a month of not being moved, the suggestions are flagged for manual review, whereupon a developer or administrator will check the thread, and either move or deny the suggestion.
What about suggestions that are too complex to have a poll?
Suggestions without a poll are also flagged, and thus can be manually reviewed.
If you're interested in anything else about the development process?
Feel free to drop me a PM on the forums, message me on steam or reply to this thread.
(This post was last modified: Nov 22, 2017, 10:14 PM by Doctor Internet. Edited 4 times in total.)
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