Issues with the suggestions website

I've noticed that the bug reports get a lot of requests that technically aren't bugs.

Perhaps the feature requests should be handled in a similar manner.

Someone has an idea, submits it, then a "curator" evaluates it and either puts it in a todo list or in a todon't list. Similar requests get put together. The todo list gets voted on by necessity rather than popularity.

The idea being that you can deal with the requests in a timely manor while not overloading the development.

Yeah. And it doesn't have to be just one person curating it.

Although whom ever does, would need to be very well versed in C3.

At least someone with intimate knowledge of the sdk.

If Scirra can't afford to triage the bulk of the ideas on the platform (which is understandable), then yes, please, it would be great to get some official response to the most popular ideas, even if that means shutting some of them down and giving people their votes back so other ideas can be elevated.

Speaking of voting, a system that allows a single up or down vote per user per idea might be a good way to go, rather than a finite pool of votes per user. This is how Netflix, reddit, Steam reviews, etc. all work, and it seems like a good system. That way everyone can give a bump to any ideas they like without fear of running out of an arbitrary number of points. We wouldn't be able to add additional weight to our pet ideas with a system like that, but I don't get the feeling that having a couple extra points to throw at an idea makes much difference right now, and I personally tend not to spend more than a vote per idea anyway, since there are so many good ideas and so few votes to give away.

In terms of managing the platform, I was wondering if the external team building the example projects might be able to help with triage of ideas, since they're actually building games with the software and have a working relationship with Scirra. One concern I have is that Scirra doesn't appear to use their own software to make real games. They don't "eat their own dogfood", so to speak, so they may not be feeling the pain points in the product the way some of us do. But since they now have a partner that's constantly using the tool, perhaps they could request some help from that team with prioritizing ideas on the platform?

Sometime like:

*Plugin maker - with set of rules to avoid compatitibility problems. User should be able to modifie simple templates and add features to templates of official plugins. Allows users to do small changes to plugins to add some expression, condition or simple change.

I have kinda wished for a while there was a way to edit the code of things like the platform behavior per project. Or if we could alter the plugins per project, I could just add collision tags to the jump-thru instead of having waited I think 3 years now.

Only solution which I can see:

Better guide, tutorial, manual for scripting or plugin making. Plugin and simple change automation for runtime and editor, which simplfies work enough, so users can do their own version of stuff. Case, which in overall should make scirra work easier too.

Sometime like:

*Plugin maker - with set of rules to avoid compatitibility problems. User should be able to modifie simple templates and add features to templates of official plugins. Allows users to do small changes to plugins to add some expression, condition or simple change.

Yes, I've found writing a plugin for C3 to be more difficult than writing portable components for Unity (using C#) or Unreal (using Blueprint - I don't mess with C++, haha), partly thanks to the somewhat bare-bones SDK documentation and lack of tutorials for writing C3 plugins. Of course, a simple, baseline C3 plugin is just more complicated than a simple, baseline component for other engines, so it's a bit of an apples/oranges comparison. But the bottom line is there's a lot of friction with getting started writing C3 plugins. Having some built-in software to help manage complexity in C3 and some plugin programming tutorials would be pretty great.

In general, C3 logic isn't too easy to encapsulate and port between projects. It's actually somewhat dangerous to do - if you do your event sheet/object copying and pasting between projects wrong you can wind up with a corrupted project file that can no longer be opened. (I recommend Plastic SCM Cloud for an easy to use, binary-friendly version control system, for what it's worth!)

Anyway, I digress... there are already suggestions on the ideas platform for ways to address all these issues, but sadly they're mostly buried.

I think anything that involves curation or triage of hundreds of suggestions is not going to work. We want to spend our time improving Construct 3, not researching the feasibility of things only one person wants. Only us developers know the codebase well enough to really evaluate that, and even then, as my past blog post describes, it's often impossible to know what the work will really entail once we start it. Small ideas can easily snowball in to lots of work, so even an initial evaluation that says "should be easy" could simply be wrong.

For this reason I think it would be best to remove the "minor suggestions" category, so we stop pretending we know what is and isn't easy, because in truth we don't know. I think we should also aim to design something where we are not expected to reply to every single suggestion. It's just too much work, and often our conclusions about feasibility are completely wrong anyway. I think the things people are willing to actually commit their votes to is the best signal to rely on, in the context of the suggestions platform (as the guidelines stress, there are other things we take in to account too, outside of the suggestions platform).

I quite like the idea of basically deleting everything and starting from scratch every 6 months. It sounds like it would solve a lot of the problems. Instead of accumulating a mountain of old suggestions and votes, it keeps things fresh. It would be focused on what people want now, rather than what lots of votes went to in previous years, perhaps even by users who are no longer active.

I still think everyone should have a limited number of votes, probably just 10. Once you've voted on 10 things, chances are beyond that there is very little chance it'll really get done. What's the point in voting on 50 things if we only have time to do maybe 20 across everyone's suggestions? I think it's better if every six months you pick your top ten suggestions and that's it. You can always change your votes and vote on other things after the next reset. I also don't think there's any point in submitting suggestions with zero votes. If nobody is willing to put a single vote on it - not even the original author - it seems easy to conclude it's not a priority, given the vast amount of other work that could be done. In fact maybe we should even state our policy is to ignore suggestions with zero votes, to discourage anyone posting them. There's no point inundating us with hundreds of suggestions, so this seems like it would help mitigate that.

So: how does it sound to have a complete reset of the suggestions platform every 6 months, and everyone gets 10 votes? Any particular objections to that? I'm inclined to move towards doing that in the next few weeks, unless anyone can persuade me of a better way to do it... (and note if your proposal involves us doing lots of regular work or users being able to inundate us with ideas, I probably won't be keen!)

People will simply start reposting their suggestions every 6 months.

Well let them. If its a good idea then the votes would continue.

Unless of course its someone engineering votes.

That's why I think every three months would be better.

That's why I think every three months would be better.

Why half measures? Lets automatically delete each idea immediately after posting. No ideas - no problem! And no votes will be needed. Everybody happy.

If your idea hasn't seen any traction in three months you can assume its probably not going to happen any time soon.