I think the entire uservoice usage is garbage. It's a barrier to voicing suggestions that alienates 99% of the playerbase. Most players never even us the forums - they certainly aren't using uservoice.

The only good way to get feedback is through the site itself, not from a third party site that will only ever get a tiny minuscule portion of the community to touch it.

A forum to advertise uservoice suggestions is a good step in the right direction, but frankly I think even that's not good enough. Something like ranker.com would likely work much better - where people could directly rank ideas in order of their importance, and could specifically denote which features are merely not priorities as opposed to things they'd prefer never be implemented.

Edited 12/5/2017 15:17:29

I'll volunteer only if there aren't enough qualified/passionate volunteers since I'm not a mod dev.

Getting regular players to natuarally look at uservoice, the forums, blog posts, map of the week, clans, etc is impossible because of their placement in relation to the main game. If I remember correctly, you said most new players join/play solely on mobile. Those players wont see anything but what you put in the app. I believe I saw somewhere you said you were going to bake some of warzone.com into the app, and that's the only way to get more than the same 20 people voting in uservoice. If the app had a main tab that was a dashboard of blog posts, new uservoice, and 'hot' forum posts, then normal players will gravitate to them.

I see many great people already have volunteered :) Nevertheless, I would be happy to do it aswell.

When it comes to Uservoice, I think that a similar suggestion to that someone made for maps some time ago. Every time a new map gets published it should get a thread on the forum.

For uservoice, I would apply this; let's say if a item gets 10 votes it gets a official thread on the forum. Given the current number of new ideas on uservoice with more then 10 votes there should't be an issue of just having this in the general forum (if there turns out to be a need, then by all means a sub-forum is justified). The main reason of doing this, as have been pointed out by others, is that the new ideas are getting different exposure.

Trivia: A famous P. website uses user-voice.

Edited 12/5/2017 17:35:58

I think that a similar suggestion to that someone made for maps some time ago.


That was me, and you can find it @ http://warlight.uservoice.com

I don't mind helping out with uservoice. I want to start learning Lua and the mod framework during 2018.

I agree with MOTD that there should be a subforum to discuss uservoice stuff, lot of ideas need community feedback to get ironed out into something feasible, and that forum thread should be read properly before the idea is implemented.

Contrary to what Fizzer claims i don't think ideas that are popularized by forum threads are being carried into popularity by folks making a ruckus, plenty of new ideas pop around all the time and people ask others to vote for them, but only a few really obvious ones take traction and collect a lot of votes. I think Fizzer should improve on how he responds to uservoice, moderators would be useful, i already do a little of that work writing comments when i look around uservoice, pointing out dupes, flagging things that are already implemented and should be closed. But the feeling i get is that Fizzer doesn't go through uservoice that often, so it's normal that the community feels it's a bit of a wasted effort to participate there. This announcement and call for moderators is a positive step to improve that though.

I would suggest a monthly livestream where Fizzer goes through the list of uservoice and answers / discusses / explains priorities of things. So people would have better expectations of what is on the roadmap, what can be done with MODs, and where they should be investing their votes. Would also be a nice channel for people to pitch new ideas and get immediate comments from others (and Fizzer) if it's something worth submitting to uservoice or not.

I don't mind being made moderator of uservoice, but i can't commit to checking it more then once or twice a month.

Edited 12/6/2017 00:01:49

I just went through a good bit of the Uservoice ( https://warlight.uservoice.com/forums/77051-warzone-features ). There are about 800 idea requests and only some of them are replicates or already implemented additions. The majority of them are either unreasonable for the amount of input required or would be considered low priority because of how small the change is or how low the popularity is. The problem with merit-based popularity is that I don't think many people get through a few pages of ideas though.

As for feedback changes:

• So I am all for a moderator, a significant scale back is definitely needed to make the uservoice less intimidating
  
• I think the comments for each idea is sufficient for discussion of the idea
  
• I opt for easier to find directing to the uservoice, i was thinking a button or small section on the community dashboard, possibly at the bottom of the forum section with a "Have new ideas for warzone and want them to be heard? Share here!" link
  
• I would like the livestream idea ps mentioned, but I understand that may be consuming
  
• I could help clean up some of the uservoice but I fear I do not have enough understanding of the warzone framework to determine if some additions are feasible
  

As for the mod implementation process:
First concern is that many people posting ideas would not exactly know whether or not it can be implemented with the mod framework and they will not post in the right place. Not sure how much flexibility the uservoice website allows - whether or not you can add different categories/subpages(for mods vs normal features, and a mod -> normal feature category) or buttons (with link like: "Need help finding where to post?") to our domain. If possible it would help organize a lot and both parts of the process could be done on the site.
If not though, I think a "Mod Ideas" subforum could be helpful, separate from CLOT/Programming. It seems as if a large amount of current uservoice ideas would be implemented via mods first and not as built in features or interface changes to the game, so I fear there would be a lot of mod requests flooding out non-Mod threads.

And for current mod status:
I have tested several (some I found problems with but that is not my point). My problem is that even with it available to all members, I still have difficulty filling game seats. I feel like if we want the mod -> normal feature ideas to get a lot of support on uservoice, more people have to have access to them. I suggest make mods available at a certain (possibly very high) level. Or maybe if mod -> normal feature ideas required less votes for implementation than other feature ideas, that could work.

Thanks for all the restructuring lately! ;)

In my opinion, uservoice is quite essential for warlight cause it is an excellent way to post now feature ideas altho the voting system could be improved. With the system, I think of, you could give every post one vote. One example for that is the Video Indexer Service of Microsoft https://cognitive.uservoice.com/forums/598144-video-indexer altho it is used as a forum, but I think it could be adapted to warzone.

Another useful improvement would be to add the following subforums on uservoice(mod, mod framework, forum, core game, tournament, API) to get a better overview of the suggestions(also used at Video Indexer).

And the last suggestion would be to switch from warlight.uservoice.com to warzone.uservoice.com cause it is confusing for new players who don't know that the game was called warlight before.

Mods are a very new feature, and they will be a bigger part of the game going forward, but for now they're in their infancy and as such are limited to a smaller audience.

:)

One of the big issues with mods being member-only is open seat games are impossible to fill. My proposal is to maintain a list of members that are willing to play with mods, like I did here:
https://www.warzone.com/Forum/285875-remake-advanced-diplo-mod-members

But this list needs more visibility. Can someone rename that thread to say something like "List of members that are willing to play with mods" or something like that.

This is without adding any more work to Fizzer. But it gets tedious to invite 39 people to a game, then having to manually check between who accepted and who did not in order to remove them from the game and get the game started.

Speaking of Mods, I added a list of mods to the wiki page and started doing a description for some of them. Can use some help create pages for the other ones:
https://www.warzone.com/wiki/Mods

Edited 12/7/2017 02:16:50

Also, can we get some non-video step by step tutorials on how to do mods? I know dabo had a video but his accent is so thick that I couldn't understand him. Here's the thread with his tutorial

https://www.warzone.com/Forum/257453-programming-tutorial-mod-explenation

I might try to transcribe dabo1's tutorial and put it in a text on the wiki

^
Didn't look at the video, put I've got a list to guide you here:

1) Play strategy games - should help you to break down problems.
2) Learn to program. Chose a good teaching language like Smalltalk since it doesn't have many WATs and WTFs, it only focuses on OOP (object-oriented programimg) principles rather than language-specific things.
3) Learn Lua - mods have to be made in this language.
4) Practice making things in Lua, get familiar with it.
5) Learn the mod framework.
6) Look at existing examples of mods. Observe how the mod framework is used and how the mod idea was made. Question why the mod was made how it was.
7) Pick an idea on Uservoice and turn it into a mod.
8) Get people to review the code.
9) Upload the mod to GitHub.
10) Repeat steps 6 to 9. This'll be good practice for learning the mod framework and Lua. Don't stop learning.

You shouldn't rush any of the above steps for the best results.
Edit: another good guide - https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-best-ways-to-learn-programming.

Edited 12/7/2017 12:13:58

Sorry, 1 through 4 are not needed. I don't need to learn Lua or programming in general. I already know Java. I get the rest of the points 5 through 10.

I hate studying APIs. I don't need to know all the warlight API either. It's like learning all about the mechanics of a car, but I won't know how to drive it.

Edited 12/7/2017 16:21:10

Huge thanks to DanWL for helping clean out a ton of Uservoice entries!

i can see few problem with Uservoice:
- visibility - is there any way to find it on the website? i think not or it's well hidden

- voting system - that's bigger issue - how should i choose between something big like 'add diplomacy system' and simple changes like 'add sorting by time to boot' - there are many uncomparable things that's it's pretty hard to prioritize if you don't know about chance it's really going to be implemented, estimated timeline, etc. Other problematic thing is "not on immediate roadmap" - highest voted feature is created 7 years ago, it's not on immediate roadmap. Same was with diplomcy system. Soo, what should i do if i voted for it? Keep my vote there - but what for? It's there so long and nothing happens. Votes wasted. So, change them? Then it goes down, if it wasn't on immediate roadmap for 7 years with such high score, what are the chances that it will appear on it when people remove their votes?

- the biggest issue - i would call it 'trust problem'. It's linked with the 'not on immediate roadmap'. What are succesfull uservoices propositions? I recall two - 3v3 ladder and sorting past games by end time. It's fine with ladder, there was/is group of very active players who wanted it, they voted for it, ultimately they got what they wanted. That's how it's supposed to work. The second case is not so obvious, sorting ended game by start time is really bad(if you can see one of you game disappeared it's hard to determine which one). Yet it required guy that started the whole campaign - mailed people, created forum topics, agitated in clans to get decent number of votes and fix it. Pretty much efforts for something that might be considered bug and i'm pretty sure it would be buried amongst other small things in uservoice without so much advertize. Also i'm not sure how many votes goth both of those features and as far i remember it surely was far from top of the list - no more than 200 for sorting, maybe a bit more for the 3v3 ladder.
What the other recent new features in warlight comes from? Bomb card, commanders, commerce, coins etc. Most likely there were ideas that suggested something like special units, new cards, gold or something. But also most likely it was buried deep and differs from what we've got.
So the point is - why should we bother with using UserVoice if it doesn't give effects? Highly voted ideas are not implemented, and we get things that weren't supported. I may be wrong, maybe there are many features taken from UserVoice i just overlooked. In such case just publish them - list all implemented ideas from uservoice with number of votes and show people it's worth to spend time for it. Cause currently i feel that there's no point to spend time for uservoice and i'm pretty sure i'm not alone with such feeling.

visibility - is there any way to find it on the website?

Help -> How can I submit feedback or suggest new features?

While we could make it more visible, I don't think it's too necessary. Would there be a benefit to getting every player to visit that site? We just need a representative sample of the audience to get accurate voting. More players just means the votes are more accurate, it doesn't help idea get implemented faster.

how should i choose between something big like 'add diplomacy system' and simple changes like 'add sorting by time to boot' - there are many uncomparable things that's it's pretty hard to prioritize

Indeed it is! This is part of my job, to prioritize unrelated things like those against each other and figure out what is deserving of time. I have even more things to prioritize than what you see here, like database optimizations, bug fixes, support requests, requests to join livestreams, marketing, legal, ad optimizations, managing finances, taxes, etc.

Other problematic thing is "not on immediate roadmap" - highest voted feature is created 7 years ago, it's not on immediate roadmap.

The fact is there are thousands of people with feature requests, but only one person implementing them. And it can take weeks/months to do a single item. So yes, progress through the items will always be slow. If we had a team of 20 devs implementing features, Uservoice participation would be a better experience since features could be cranked through at a more reasonable pace. But we have what we have, what is your proposed solution?

What are succesfull uservoices propositions?

Click the "Status -> Completed" filter.

For the start, I recommend that you post direct link in the game page. I know where the usevoice is placed, but, as it won't show as a link in the game itself, I don't read it often.

More reader or posters would probably do a thing toward better game or better game experience.

Huge thanks to DanWL for helping clean out a ton of Uservoice entries!

Thanks! I did 77 of them yesterday. Np. Was a bit bored.

wow the first post isn't highlighted :O

Help -> How can I submit feedback or suggest new features?

In fact it's Help -> How can i submit or suggest new features -> Wiki -> Uservoice. I think it's right to call it 'well hidden' :P

While we could make it more visible, I don't think it's too necessary. Would there be a benefit to getting every player to visit that site? We just need a representative sample of the audience to get accurate voting. More players just means the votes are more accurate, it doesn't help idea get implemented faster.

Of course there would be benefits. Cause now you are not getting representative samples. Check two opposite ideas: Bring back old 1v1 ladder vs Don't bring back it. 339 vs 83. Completely different from what you get in poll posted on forums. Isn't it lack of accuracy?
There are 400 votes for Windows Phone client. Isn't it dead already?:P Current UV is highly dependent on efforts that are put into advertizing given idea. That's not going to give true opinion.

Click the "Status -> Completed" filter.

My bad, i overlooked that (however, i'm pretty sure i've used it already).
So i've checked top 2 pages of completed ideas(i could go beyond page 2 and find more ideas that was completed in recent years, but if something with 40 votes is done, it's not done because of 'vox populi), picked those completed in 2014 and later (without "can be implemented by mods"). What we get there:

- 2017:
HTML5 Client - completed because of Unity WebGL client. 55 votes. I suppose it's not the 55 votes put into this convinced you to do it, just the konwledge that Flash is dying and it has to be addressed somehow

- 2016:
Cleverer AI(94 votes), Increase Forum Posting to 30 level (72) - fine with it - looks like players wanted better AI improving forums experiences and they got what they wanted (even if the forum was resolved different way)

-2015:
3v3 ladder (149 votes + 65 for tweaking template), sorting Past Games by end date(173), Partial history(109), Secondary Colors(115), Standing in Round Robin while in progress (65)
So, a bit more here. I've already gave my thoughts about sorting past games. On the other side ladder could be example, that UV is really working - people wanted it, people voted for it and they got it, even if you weren't fan of this idea(i remember that you didn't expect this ladder to get enough players). Other things are also nice and useful features that we can belive were inspired by uservoice (maybe beside secondary colors, i suspect it was mostly for preventing checking coin game opponents:P)

-2014:
Flag in profiles(304 votes)
Well, that could be another flagship example of UV usage. Lot of votes and got implemented.

How i see it:
In the recent years there is only one highly voted idea that got implemented (flags), there are some "decently voted" where it's hard to determine if the community's desire toward them is really bigger that toward other things. And there's only one feature that impacted actual gameplay(AI), but it's not a big impact for most of the players. Those are of course nice features, but definitly minor ones.
Especially that in the meanwhile we got a bunch of feature that weren't mentioned in uservoice.

But to be clear - i'm not going to complain, that you don't implement highest voted ideas from UV. Or that instead, you implemented other things (even if they weren't welcomed warmly). Or there is not enough completed ideas. You are creator of this game, it's obvious that you have your vision how it should look like, you know better what can be done and what can't. All i'm trying to do is to show that there is justified feeling that "uservoice doesn't matter". You can't deny it .There may be good reasons for it as there were other things to do - like flash that won't wait for Warlight. But the fact is, that we see is that there is place where people put ideas, votes for ideas and comment other ideas. And in the end they got very little for it. That's not encouraging to going there. As you said, you are alone to work on it, 20 another devs are rather not expected soon. So, neither we should exepcted improvent . And if it can't be improved i would suggest removing it.
My solution would be quite simple - create another subforum for ideas. Without any sofisticated tools, simple voting Yes/No should be enough. It will give you view if the proposed change is accepted by community, other people can point out any shortcomings or potential backlashes of implementing it or improve this idea (and more people see it, the bigger chance someone will notice something useful - that's something you are not getting from UV currently). There still will be complains("my idea has 95% upvotes, why it's not in the game yet") and you won't be able to prioritize according to number of votes. But looks like it's how it is done currently in most cases and also looks like it works quite fine. So, not really big loss.