Hi! I would like to start a discussion about the way the Feedback threads are handled. Current situation At the time I'm writing this we are at 144 Feedback threads that haven't yet been accepted or denied. Two of those threads are from 2018, one is from 2020, two are from 2021, the rest are from 2022/2023/2024. A lot of them haven't got a single response from the Staff, despite being open for a long time and receiving support from the Community (via likes and/or positive comments). My question/concern My main concern is about the (lack of) communication between Staff and the Community in the Feedback section. As I mentioned, a lot of the undecided threads haven't got any response from the Staff at all, even if the Community showed support for presented idea. Just to clarify, I don't expect Staff to instantly agree on and implement every suggestion. My point is about communicating with players about their ideas and informing feedback creators about the next steps for their suggestions. My personal experience I currently have three undecided Feedback threads open. Two of them received minor attention from the Community, and one of them in my view received Community support: Let all pets use transparent pet equip Thread about pet cosmetics, created 2023.06.25., got 26 likes, 2 posts showing support, 0 posts with objections. Despite time (7 months) and shown Community support, there still isn't any communication from the Staff about what are the next steps for this suggestion, so I'm just left out here wondering about it without any information. Will Staff discuss this suggestion internally? Are the Staff waiting for more comments from other players? Are there concerns (for example risky client edits) that make it difficult to decide on it? Are the Staff waiting for information from developers about potential feasability of the implementation, which causes a delay to answer due to overload of tasks on devs? etc. I personally feel very discouraged by this situation, and although I have a few more ideas, I'm not sharing them because I just don't want to feel frustrated and disappointed that yet another thread of mine will get ignored. And if there are valid concerns regarding suggestion presented in a Feedback thread, then I would prefer to receive a negative answer with a clear reason rather than not getting any reply at all. That is the reason why I'm creating this thread to hopefully find some solutions to improve the communication with Staff. Other examples While there are some Feedback ideas that might be controversial or could impact the game balance or lead to abuse etc. (for example the oldest undecided thread in the Feedback section, Automatic Rewarp for Boss run DC) and understandably require more time to discuss and consider, there are also many threads that gained Community support (even if small support, but no objections for a long time) and in my opinion are straightforward to decide whether to accept or deny them, and yet there are no decisions/comments from the Staff. Spoiler Disable potion usage during trading - thread about preventing accidental potion usage (for example onyx apples) when trading Created 2023.01.02., got 16 likes, 2 posts showing support, 0 posts with objections Adding Ocean I.C to Aqua Road Dolphin Taxi - thread about quality of life in Aqua Road Created 2023.07.02., got 16 likes, 0 posts showing support, 0 posts with objections Pepe transformation potion - thread about adding new transformation potion (thread author also volunteered to prepare required graphics files) Created 2023.07.19., got 24 likes, 6 posts showing support, 0 posts with objections Inventory Sorting Improvement - thread about quality of life in inventory management (to have related items (ores, dinner, christmas quest items) sorted together) Created 2023.12.13., got 11 likes, 0 posts showing support, 0 posts with objections A new Royal Tip suggestion - thread about adding new [RoyalTip] Created 2024.01.21., got 13 likes, 0 posts showing support, 0 posts with objections Solutions I would like to suggest an improvement to Feedback thread handling, so that Staff could provide information to Community about the Feedback threads even if final decision about given idea is not reached yet. If the Staff are unable to discuss and decide about some suggestion due to time constraints, then add a label "On hold" to the thread or write a post to let us know about this. If the Staff are waiting for more input from the Community, let us know about this. If the Staff have concerns about potential abuse or game balance etc., let the feedback author know so they or Community could update their ideas to overcome issues pointed out by Staff. etc. Conclusion To summarize, I would appreciate if we could improve the way the Feedback threads are handled, so that Staff could provide some more information to the thread authors in the Feedback section. Even if a decision is not reached yet, a simple "We are going to discuss this within Staff" or "Let's wait for more feedback from other players" would do, so that players don't feel ignored and know what is going on with their Feedback threads. I think that Zancks' recent answers to Feedback threads here and here are great examples of how Feedback threads should be rejected if Staff takes such decision (a negative answer given with very clear reasons for this decision) but it doesn't address the "waiting time" (which in some cases is months or years without any info) before a decision is made. I don't mind waiting for a decision on Feedback threads, I would just like to know the reason for that. I also don't want to blame/flame Staff with this thread, I appreciate what you are doing for the server, and I enjoy playing it thanks to your work. I just sometimes wish we could have better communication between Staff and players.
I feel personally in most private servers of any type of a game (not only MapleStory), there is always a "suggestion box" or a "feedback thread/forum", that eventually is forgotten / left as "meh, i'll get to that later" type of thing. It feels like there are a lot of good suggestions being either ignored, not given enough attention, put in the "to-do-later" list, or just simply unanswered. Sure, there might be bad suggestions, but even the bad suggestions should get a response. I feel like the feedback forum was good for a small amount of things that the staff really took and implemented / thought about, but most of it is just out there. I think that one of the things that developers / balancers should look at at least once a day/couple of days/week is this forum. Go through the whole first page at Sunday, see some reactions from the community, then either comment or put a note to yourself for later to respond, but just look at it and think about it. Do that again at Monday and so on through the week. that's just a suggestion anyways, but it's not unrealistic. No flame towards staff ofc, I'm curtain that ya'll have your work to do, and that you have enough on your table, but this is a part of the job (imo). You don't even need to comment "yes/no" straight away. letting the community know that you saw the thread, and that you will discuss it, is already enough encouragement to keep on giving feedback. That's from a player POV anyways, you guys know more / do more than I know obviously, and kudos to every staff member for doing their job well <3
I intentionally waited to reply to this one because I wanted to give the community more room to discuss. I agree that we or I did bad regarding feedback handling for some time. In fact a few weeks before this thread was made we changed the way we handle feedbacks/discussions internally. We for example added a „awaiting developer input“. I mainly use it for ideas we want to implement but the devs still have to investigate and tell us how exactly we could do it. It might also turn out the idea is not feasible for us. For transparency let me list you some roadblocks we face and why some feedbacks are unanswered for long: real life commitments as staff is an unpaid volunteer position shorthanded team and after all what happened issues to find new trustworthy staff members distraction by other staff tasks and frequent forum drama big projects still taking much of our limited time (RG, VL) development backlog and not wanting to overload developers sheer amount of feedbacks lack of details / wrong information in feedbacks leading to more research work/double checking staff opinions are very different on said idea leading to uncertainty how to move forward feels bad to have to deny so many ideas I can assure you one of my goals on staff is reach a faster feedback reaction time but we are still working against a quite big backlog. Hope these insights help you to understand why some things take longer than expected.
Pay people for their time and labor. I'd happily sign up for a monthly dev donation sub, even if it was just a few months (or weeks) out of the year for scheduled paid time. I don't care about the RP or anything else except that folks working on something get treated right, which serves the server and community directly. I put in enough time giving free feedback lol, but I'd still pay for folks to do a good job at what they're skilled at
