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Please understand where I'm coming from here: I'm not saying any of your suggestions are bad, etc. (Even if they are), but if this is not cleaned up, the chances of the devs being able to see any of our ideas, good or bad, become slim to none. So please, please use the following guidelines before making your post.
- Read what the devs have already said about these things before even thinking about posting here. There's a good compilation here. The more you post things that the devs have already made up their minds about, the less room there is for new ideas to show up.
- Do not create a new topic for an idea when one already exists. Spreading the discussion of an idea out only weakens the apparent support it has. A few scattered topics not only seem to have less community support than one very active one, but it makes it very difficult for the devs to read all the ideas on the topic.
- Itemize ideas into specific topics; do not make massive posts filled with every element that would make your perfect mechwarrior game. I, myself, am guilty of writing something of a novel on this, but we have a place that devs can go to read individual, contextualized ideas. A massive post with multiple topics is immensely hard to discuss, which makes it harder to get people to read, and therefore harder for the devs to see your ideas. Instead, take each element you have, post about it in the relevant topic, and if some ideas go great together, provide a link to your post in the other topic for the other idea. Don't try to dump it all in one place.
- Use the "Like" button on posts that you support, even if it isn't exactly what you want. Especially if it is exactly what you want, and you don't have anything worth replying to it about. This lets the devs sort out who is a good speaker for the majority, and who's just a highly vocal minority. Might be hard to remember at first, but if you make it a habit, it'll help everyone out. Also, if you do have some addendums to make, make sure to post those as well, since merely liking it won't provide any extra ideas.
- Stay on Topic. This should be self explanatory, but this is a place to post suggestions, not complain about features you don't like, or discuss the game last night, or have a big fantasy circle...poo. Stay objective.
Aside: Suggestion to Devs:
I can't expect you to take too much time out of your schedule for this, but could you please try to make a bit more concrete rules for this area? Anarchy isn't working, and we can be quite sure that no matter what you do, at least a few people will make counterproductive posts.
Personally, I'd promote a few active, fair, and most importantly, objective community members to a type of "Moderator", whose job more or less comes down to removing duplicate posts, locking/merging/deleting redundant topics, and making sure things stay civil. We do want this to be readable, after all.
