Do devs read this forum?

[voddan]

Hi, dear Factorio developers!
Do (any) of you read topics on this forum? All threads or just some?
How do I know if any of the devs have read a particular idea or suggestion topic?

Maybe it is just my problem, but sometimes I feel that there is no adequate reaction to my suggestions / bug reports.
To give you just one example, this suggestion of mine got no comments from the team or any statement on the team's position. There are other topics like this, from me and other users, which have no reaction to them.

So, Factorio devs, do you read this forum? If not, why do we even write, if yes, how about some indication of it?
A short comment to every new topic from a member of the team would be very nice. Or maybe a status icon SUBMITED -> OPEN -> IN CONSIDIRATION like in Jira.
Let's discuss this problem here, find a satisfying solution and make the factorio experience truly great!

[Koub]

Hi,

I'm not a dev, but here's what I can tell :

The devs do read all the topics (Source). They also usually let community debate on the suggestions, and hop into the discussion when they feel their intervention is needed. Typically when a consensus seems to appear in the community, but something we players don't know in how the game works makes the suggestion unsuitable.

Most of the suggestions just die on their own after a few days. Because few people get interested into them, usually. Some of them keep coming back, or have topics that stretch across several years. These ones will most probably get a lot of attention. It doesn't mean the devs will follow the community though, because they have always been clear that their goal was to make Factorio the best game they could, not just make some fan service if they feel it would harm the game.

TBH, I'm glad they don't lose their time answering the thousand ideas and suggestions and balancing requests, and focus on the game developpment.

[voddan]

Thanks for the input.

Communicating with users is not "wasted time", but a central part of the software development, particularly in gaming.

Not all popular ideas are good and not all good ideas are popular, so the devs certanly shouldn't differenciate topics by user engagment.

Discussions in the community are always fun, but most of the time I write on this forum I am looking to connect with developers directly. Other users may add their perspective to my issue, but the official position is the ultimate goal.

Still looking forwatd to the reply from the team.

[Jap2.0]

I'm fairly certain that at least some of theh devs read everything on the forum. I'm fairly certain that the mods do as well, and I'm sure some other users do as well (I read everything outside of the modding subforums). I'm guessing there are a few reasons they don't reply to everything:

• 1. Time. They are hired to develop the game, not manage the community (except Klonan), and answering everything could take a huge amount of time away from that. Following the forum takes up enough of my time already, I could easily spend several hours a day on here if I replied to everything, so, as I have a lot of other things to do, I don't.
  2. Most of the suggestions have major flaws or have been suggested repeatedly before. Letting the community work out these problems, explain previous answers, or dismiss widely disliked ideas can save a large amount of this time.
  3. They're not here just to respond whenever you beg them to.
  4. The purpose of the forum isn't to talk to the devs. It's a gathering place for the community of sorts; if you go back to the origins of the word, a public place where people can debate.
  5. If they comment on every topic or have a system of labelling, people will want more - why did they say it's not under consideration, why did they change that part of it, why, why, why - and then everyone would either be less happy then we started with or the devs would spend even more time on the forum than "short responses," and it'd probably be quite a bit more complicated as well.

Tl;dr: the devs are smart people. They know what they're doing.

[eradicator]

*snip*

I concur.

85% has already been suggested before.
10% is new but technically implossible.
1% is actually worth considering. But "consider" does not mean anyone tells you. Because if they did that people would start complaining when the outcome of "considering" is to discard the idea.
1% is idiots who call other forum members "randoms" and tell them to piss of because they only talk to the devs, and thus are ignored by everyone.
1% is things that are already in-game.
2% is... dunno, other stuff. like unintelligible grammar.

TL;DR:
Don't sweat it. If you didn't get a reaction to one of your suggestions then it simply was a bad suggestion. Even if you think it's the best idea in the world. Reflect on that. And make your next suggestion better. Until you finally do get a reaction. From experience i can say that i frequently don't even get any reaction at all on things that are implemented. Or some thing i suggested a year ago suddenly gets implemented because someone else talked about something similar.

[Bilka]

90% of the suggestions that are made simply wont happen because the game is ""nearly done"" already. Looking at the suggestion you linked in the OP, I'd say: might be considered in 0.17 if there is some kind of combat overhaul which I highly doubt. I can tell you that, as somebody who has more knowledge than the average player, but isnt a dev in the traditional sense.

If the devs were to respond to every feature request that deserves it with "no, the game won't change that much anymore", they would just make people upset that their ideas arent even considered, and the devs would get pressed for further explanation when there often is none. I doubt this would make anyone happier, since it means even less satisfaction for the suggesting person, and more pointless discussion for the answering dev.

[Klonan]

A lot of ideas come and go cyclically, old ideas come back up, new takes on game mechanics etc,
And always the game, community and the team here, we are always changing and developing,

Shutting down an idea, or confirming an idea, without any actual substance to it, is never going to help,
In the years since it was suggested, it could start to make more sense, or it could start to make less sense,
Putting some developer mark on an idea that it's either approved or disapproved, will cause only misinformation in the long run

I like to let threads and ideas play themselves out amongst the community,
If I say something or interfere, I could change the natural outcome of the discussion

[voddan]

Thanks, Klonan, for your perspective.

The approach you've described certainly seems logical.
It minimizes the contact between the developers and the community and clears the team of any road-map commitments.
Which, being a software developer myself, may be nice in certain situations.

May I suggest a few improvements to the issue reporting process:

A lot of ideas some and go cyclically, old ideas come back up, new takes on game mechanics etc,
And always the game, community and the team here, we are always changing and developing,

I would call it "duplication" of ideas. And frankly I don't see what is good about it. Users spend their time describing the same thing over and over again instead of adding their perspective to an existing issue. Besides some may wonder if they are the only ones who have a particular problem when in reality a few issues have been created on their topic, but they can't be found in the bloat of the forum. This can be easily avoided with centralized collection of duplicating issues by moderators. Btw, a better search system will never cut it - many tried, all failed.

Shutting down an idea, or confirming an idea, without any actual substance to it, is never going to help,
In the years since it was suggested, it could start to make more sense, or it could start to make less sense,
Putting some developer mark on an idea that it's either approved or disapproved, will cause only misinformation in the long run

Shutting down ideas would certainly be no good. Usually it takes forms of "we know about the problem and hope to fix it in the next release cycle" or "we would like to implement it but it clashes with this and this ideas which we also really want". Without those input s from the team and connections to the development many of this forum's discussions loose their focus or deviate into fantasies not grounded into the reality.

I like to let threads and ideas play themselves out amongst the community,
If I say something or interfere, I could change the natural outcome of the discussion

You are a member of the community who has "actionable insight" into the development process. We would very much like you to use this insight to help our discussions by providing context, formulating constrains, focusing the discussion on the topic, etc. You already do this with FFF posts, but it needs to be done for all (or most) topics, not just for the most problematic ones.

-----
Above I've listed a number of problems that I have when trying to influence Factorio development by my comment and some solutions to those problems. If they seem too hard or too time consuming or impossible to implement, here is a small example of (IMHO) user communication done right:

There is this small company JetBrains . They are the world's leader in what they do, and and a huge part of it is their attention to their user's feedback. For every product they have (proprietary of free, doesn't matter) they have a *public issue tracker*. Which means that anybody on the internet can see their development process or login and comment on any issue they want. For example their flagship product InteliJ has its bug tracker which is totally public. And it makes their process completely transparent. Users see the road map for bugs and who is responsible for fixing them. If a suggestion is turned down, the context is provided and the reasons are clearly stated. At the same time developers have ho problem shifting roadmaps and be agile in their priorities. Cool, right? And it is not like they spend much time on it - they just use this tracker for themselves for their day-to-day work.

I hope you'll have a think about it and maybe consider adopting some of the practices I'v described.

[eradicator]

There is this small company JetBrains

JetBrains s.r.o. (formerly IntelliJ Software s.r.o.) is a software development company whose tools are targeted towards software developers and project managers.

Let me be the advocatus diaboli here and tell you why that approach could never work for factorio: JetBrains targets a group of people who professionaly deal with software and thus are intimately familiar with the concept and usage of a bug/issue/etc-tracker. Yes, developers can be assholes too, you just need to look at linux to know that not everybody can be mister nice guy every day. But. And here's the important part: Factorio targets "common people" who have no fucking idea about how software development works, nor should they need to. But this means they can never interact with an open tracker on the same basis as a bunch of professional developers. And besides the "gaming community" as a whole is one of the most "toxic" minorities on the internet, even if it's not as bad with factorio yet as it is elsewhere.

TL;DR (attentions, these words might be ever so slightly exaggerated):

JetBrains target audience: a bunch of people who professionally deal in software
Wube: over a million assholes who think every idea they have will save the world and don't fucking care about what other people think. And who are quite generous when it comes to death threads when they don't like something.

[voddan]

assholes who think every idea they have will save the world and don't fucking care about what other people think

Ouch. I can't agree with you. From what I've seen from this forum, the people here are generally well meaning and civil. But the format of the discussion and the lack of meta-information (aggregating duplicates, status, etc) makes it easy even for them to go in circles. Moderators try compensating for some of that, which is a clear indication of peoples' abilities to communicate here, but a centralized effort is needed.

[Jap2.0]

Wube: over a million assholes who think every idea they have will save the world and don't fucking care about what other people think. And who are quite generous when it comes to death threads when they don't like something.

I couldn't agree more, I couldn't agree less.