The ideas board should support user voting, and some Staff feedback where they can answer/defend/rebuke ideas with some rationale. Top voted ideas that Staff agrees with should be implemented. :)
Votes are already planned (although not yet implemented):
Votes allow you to to vote on which features or content will be added to Glitch next. They have not yet been implemented in the game. Votes are only available to subscribers and unspent votes "roll over" or continue to accrue until used in a referendum.
This was discussed a while back. Essentially, we concluded that the +1s (or other voting options like 'liking' or 'starring' or whatever) was left-out for a few reasons. The first was that Devs don't want to be pressured to add something simply because it has a tremendous amount of votes. The second reason was that simply voting doesn't really show what the player's thought was. By forcing people to reply and discuss, the Devs get to see what people think. As a side effect, it keeps the idea developing.
Votes would be neat indeed.
But I think every one should be able to vote for the features, even if the vote could be about a subscriber only feature...
For example, here is a great example of a voting page : www.synthesiagame.com/featu...
Each account is connected to the forum, and you get a new star periodically. You can place up to three stars for a feature.
I'm not sure you'll see the text, so I'll paste it here:
Hi Lemo, add stars to the features you'd like to see next. As I finish them, you'll get your stars back. You're out of stars right now, but you can reclaim them if you've changed your mind. You'll earn another star on September 30.866 users have used a total of 3561 stars. (all: show / hide) (new: show / hide)
I don't know how much the devs have on their plate or if TS is growing enough to deal with the growing number of Glitches, but this would really help the community focus on helping with particular issues as well.
Perhaps allow us to put tokens on a forum post, to give it higher importance, on some kind of timer. That way the thread can actually get more eyes before it starts to sink to the next page where no one looks and it's not easy to search.
I've been in a game system before that had user proposals and voting. What happened was a completely unworkable mess, and tons of back-biting politics. It combined all of the worst features of our Real Life legal systems that cause so many useless and unjustified lawsuits over trivialities. We'd end up with votes over how many pixels away your gnome has to be from your neighbors house, and what font his announcement is in. We'd end up with 100's of competing proposals for mining bonuses using formulas and equations two feet long that no one understands. We'd end up with suggestions of laws that let you tear down your neighbor's house or steal all his stuff or otherwise grief them if you could "prove" that they griefed you first.
I'm hoping that the "referendums" referred to will be already worked up prototype additions to the game that will simply be prioritized or voted in or out based on user responses. I'm sure the Dev's will sort through the forums for popular, useful and interesting ideas, and have quite a few of their own ideas. Based on the current and upcoming changes, it's clear that they're not automatically including everything that comes up here, but they are definitely listening, though sometimes they disagree with us too. I would guess that based on all the sources of ideas the game will move forward in ways no one currently expects. If a lot of us like it, we'll stay on, and if it doesn't work for us, we'll move on to the next new virtual realm.