0
* * *
Two important posts/threads to preface this one:
Russ Bullock, on The Community ECM Challenge
Garandor, on Electing a Player Council
The post I’m putting up in this thread is essentially a repost from Garandor’s thread, but I wanted to get discussion of this idea out of that thread as that one is its own idea with its own goals. I feel that this proposal outlined below is a better fit for the MWO community, and more likely to be successful, but I wish to encourage everyone who reads this thread to comment in Garandor’s, as well.
Now. As an amendment to the below: what Russ has handed us is no more and no less than an amateur development project. He’s challenged us to act like a professional development wing of the company and put together a proposal for consideration by the company at large. That’s how we need to treat this – as an professional opportunity with our reputations at stake as much as the desired changes for ECM. I cannot recommend enough that players take this as seriously as possible and bring their job faces to this thread, as well as Garandor’s. If you wouldn’t say it to your boss or your coworkers, don’t say it to me or Garandor or, and here’s an incredibly important one, Russ. We have a real chance here, folks – let’s make the most of it.
1453 R, on 12 September 2014 - 04:24 PM, said:
ANYWAYZ!
A couple of other posts gave me an idea I honestly like a lot more than a semi-permanent player-run council, especially after finding/reading Russ’ post. Instead of treating this like a nominations thread for public office (which it isn’t)…what we should be doing is organizing an explicitly temporary player-run task force, razor-focused down on the issue of ECM.
Don’t even call it a council. Call it just exactly what it is – a task force or task group. They have one job – guide player discussion on ECM and narrow down the community’s voice into a viable proposal for this one issue Russ has potentially given us the reins for. They manage the community polls for ECM, keep their finger on the discussion, and as has been pointed out their primary task is culling the wheat from the chaff and putting a polish on it, proposing the Good Ideas for additional community refinement and discussion and making sure the Bad Ideas (and the bad posters) never see the light of day. And when the job is done, one way or another, these guys go back to being regular ordinary joes. They may or may not be tasked with additional work later, if this sort of thing takes off, but I’m betting the community will be more civil and willing to engage with a temporary task group than it would be with a Player Council set above it, even if they were set above it by the community itself.
As such, I propose the following as a loose framework of what to do:
1.) Assemble a list of reasonable, respected players who’re willing to spend the next month or two guiding a discussion of ECM and what to do with it. No Badges of Office, no baroque requirements like being a married college professor with four kids and a ferret, no anything. Ask these people two questions: are you willing to devote your time for the next few months to helping Piranha and the community fix ECM?, and would the community be willing to listen to anything you have to say? If the answer is “Yes” to both, you have a candidate. These candidates (seven sounds like a good number of top heads for this particular task group) are then voted upon by the community at large. The process of collecting and voting upon names should take no longer than a week – we need to get to striking while the iron’s hot and Russ is willing to listen, and more importantly we need to show that we’re able to motive and organize ourselves effectively enough and quickly enough to be worth consulting when Piranha is having issues like this.
2.) Create ONE ECM Task Group Discussion Thread, in which all players are encouraged to post their ideas in a concise manner, and keep it as clean as possible. Ask Niko to sticky this thread for the duration of the task assignment. Once we have our task leaders, they need to see what the community wants to do, and I know that if I were tasked with heading up an initiative like this, I would be very frustrated trying to follow seventeen different threads scattered across the first five pages. One, singular thread, akin to Guild Wars 2’s Community Development Initiative threads (look it up, it’s pretty much exactly what we’re trying to do here minus the task leaders) is something the people we vote in can keep an easy track on. They may spend all their forum time reading that one thread, sure, but that way they’ll know where all the ideas are. The task leaders should be guiding the discussion at this stage, doing their best to point out flaws for correction and to let people know which ideas are floaters and which ones are sinkers. This should not be from their own opinions, but a simple analysis by the people we’ve all decided we want to head up this process that a given idea is Up or Down. Kinda like manual up/downvoting in Reddit, except without the mindless bullscheiss that happens on every Reddit ever.
Give this process, say, two to three weeks. Enough time for people to ruminate on their proposals and get some good discussion in, but we cannot afford to stagnate. If this whole mess takes six months, then it’s taken too long and we’ll have lost our shot/proven that we can’t come to a proper consensus. Two to three weeks should be plenty of time to get first-draft proposals.
3.) The task leaders, and ONLY the task leaders, hammer out the collected Good Idea first drafts into a poll thread, which is locked to poll ONLY (no written replies permitted). The Good Idea first drafts are each described as clearly and concisely as possible, probably with links to a cleaned-up version of the proposal by its creator in another locked thread. Matter of fact, there should be a locked thread created after Step 2 which contains absolutely nothing except the Good Idea proposals, for easy reference. Anyways. The poll thread is used to collect absolutely nothing but numerical data. No discussion whatsoever is allowed in the voting thread. You don’t let people discuss their ballots at the voting booths in a political election, do you? No. We need clear, unambiguous data as to which proposals are worth refining and which are let go. This process should, ideally, take no more than three days, but will likely need a week to ensure good numbers, and should be publically advertised with, ideally, an Announcement or even a Command Chair post linking to the player-generated discussions and polls. Which would be a good idea throughout, but will be especially important here.
4.) Iterate Steps 2 and 3 as needed, but do it QUICKLY. If we have a clear winner after the first round of voting, then we have a winner, and the task leaders move on to Step 5. If there are two or three proposals which are (reasonably) neck-and-neck, then we go back to Step 2, but on an accelerated timetable. Again, we cannot afford to stagnate. This has to keep moving, keep showing progress, or Piranha will very rightfully write the whole thing off as yet more senseless, round-and-round community bickering. This is why we elect task leaders in the first place. These guys can, at any point after the first Step 3, decide that things are starting to mire up and force things into Step 5.
5.) Consolidate the top community choice(s) into a single proposal, then attach it to a “Yes/No” poll, and ask the community if they want it done. It should be made very, very clear in this poll that you are not voting for “This proposal or some other idea you would rather see instead.” The final Step 5 poll is the community voting for “This proposal, or flat nothing done and also you guys never get to do this again.” Ideally, we should be seeing a 100% Yes rate on this poll, but we know better than that. Nevertheless, we need to be very, very certain that we’re ready to put our bacon on the line for Step 5. This is where we show Piranha that yes, the MechWarrior Online community can get scheiss done. This is where we prove to them that we are worth listening to, and even if we and Piranha don’t always agree, or they can’t do whatever we propose because of technical or other such dev-side issues, we’re still effectively able to engage in useful discourse.
After that, it’s all on Piranha as to what happens, but if we can do this, or something like this, then I’d say we have a very good chance at getting some real good accomplished in this game.
A couple of other posts gave me an idea I honestly like a lot more than a semi-permanent player-run council, especially after finding/reading Russ’ post. Instead of treating this like a nominations thread for public office (which it isn’t)…what we should be doing is organizing an explicitly temporary player-run task force, razor-focused down on the issue of ECM.
Don’t even call it a council. Call it just exactly what it is – a task force or task group. They have one job – guide player discussion on ECM and narrow down the community’s voice into a viable proposal for this one issue Russ has potentially given us the reins for. They manage the community polls for ECM, keep their finger on the discussion, and as has been pointed out their primary task is culling the wheat from the chaff and putting a polish on it, proposing the Good Ideas for additional community refinement and discussion and making sure the Bad Ideas (and the bad posters) never see the light of day. And when the job is done, one way or another, these guys go back to being regular ordinary joes. They may or may not be tasked with additional work later, if this sort of thing takes off, but I’m betting the community will be more civil and willing to engage with a temporary task group than it would be with a Player Council set above it, even if they were set above it by the community itself.
As such, I propose the following as a loose framework of what to do:
1.) Assemble a list of reasonable, respected players who’re willing to spend the next month or two guiding a discussion of ECM and what to do with it. No Badges of Office, no baroque requirements like being a married college professor with four kids and a ferret, no anything. Ask these people two questions: are you willing to devote your time for the next few months to helping Piranha and the community fix ECM?, and would the community be willing to listen to anything you have to say? If the answer is “Yes” to both, you have a candidate. These candidates (seven sounds like a good number of top heads for this particular task group) are then voted upon by the community at large. The process of collecting and voting upon names should take no longer than a week – we need to get to striking while the iron’s hot and Russ is willing to listen, and more importantly we need to show that we’re able to motive and organize ourselves effectively enough and quickly enough to be worth consulting when Piranha is having issues like this.
2.) Create ONE ECM Task Group Discussion Thread, in which all players are encouraged to post their ideas in a concise manner, and keep it as clean as possible. Ask Niko to sticky this thread for the duration of the task assignment. Once we have our task leaders, they need to see what the community wants to do, and I know that if I were tasked with heading up an initiative like this, I would be very frustrated trying to follow seventeen different threads scattered across the first five pages. One, singular thread, akin to Guild Wars 2’s Community Development Initiative threads (look it up, it’s pretty much exactly what we’re trying to do here minus the task leaders) is something the people we vote in can keep an easy track on. They may spend all their forum time reading that one thread, sure, but that way they’ll know where all the ideas are. The task leaders should be guiding the discussion at this stage, doing their best to point out flaws for correction and to let people know which ideas are floaters and which ones are sinkers. This should not be from their own opinions, but a simple analysis by the people we’ve all decided we want to head up this process that a given idea is Up or Down. Kinda like manual up/downvoting in Reddit, except without the mindless bullscheiss that happens on every Reddit ever.
Give this process, say, two to three weeks. Enough time for people to ruminate on their proposals and get some good discussion in, but we cannot afford to stagnate. If this whole mess takes six months, then it’s taken too long and we’ll have lost our shot/proven that we can’t come to a proper consensus. Two to three weeks should be plenty of time to get first-draft proposals.
3.) The task leaders, and ONLY the task leaders, hammer out the collected Good Idea first drafts into a poll thread, which is locked to poll ONLY (no written replies permitted). The Good Idea first drafts are each described as clearly and concisely as possible, probably with links to a cleaned-up version of the proposal by its creator in another locked thread. Matter of fact, there should be a locked thread created after Step 2 which contains absolutely nothing except the Good Idea proposals, for easy reference. Anyways. The poll thread is used to collect absolutely nothing but numerical data. No discussion whatsoever is allowed in the voting thread. You don’t let people discuss their ballots at the voting booths in a political election, do you? No. We need clear, unambiguous data as to which proposals are worth refining and which are let go. This process should, ideally, take no more than three days, but will likely need a week to ensure good numbers, and should be publically advertised with, ideally, an Announcement or even a Command Chair post linking to the player-generated discussions and polls. Which would be a good idea throughout, but will be especially important here.
4.) Iterate Steps 2 and 3 as needed, but do it QUICKLY. If we have a clear winner after the first round of voting, then we have a winner, and the task leaders move on to Step 5. If there are two or three proposals which are (reasonably) neck-and-neck, then we go back to Step 2, but on an accelerated timetable. Again, we cannot afford to stagnate. This has to keep moving, keep showing progress, or Piranha will very rightfully write the whole thing off as yet more senseless, round-and-round community bickering. This is why we elect task leaders in the first place. These guys can, at any point after the first Step 3, decide that things are starting to mire up and force things into Step 5.
5.) Consolidate the top community choice(s) into a single proposal, then attach it to a “Yes/No” poll, and ask the community if they want it done. It should be made very, very clear in this poll that you are not voting for “This proposal or some other idea you would rather see instead.” The final Step 5 poll is the community voting for “This proposal, or flat nothing done and also you guys never get to do this again.” Ideally, we should be seeing a 100% Yes rate on this poll, but we know better than that. Nevertheless, we need to be very, very certain that we’re ready to put our bacon on the line for Step 5. This is where we show Piranha that yes, the MechWarrior Online community can get scheiss done. This is where we prove to them that we are worth listening to, and even if we and Piranha don’t always agree, or they can’t do whatever we propose because of technical or other such dev-side issues, we’re still effectively able to engage in useful discourse.
After that, it’s all on Piranha as to what happens, but if we can do this, or something like this, then I’d say we have a very good chance at getting some real good accomplished in this game.
Edited by 1453 R, 12 September 2014 - 05:44 PM.
