City Reconstruction Question / Suggestion

[ChicWit]

Hey Inno,

Are you listening? Reading? I'll be waiting for a reply.

Question, when a player reconstructs their city, why can't we change the footprint / tiles? My guild-mates think this is a great idea and so do I. Anyone else?

 

[MJ Artisan of War]

Because strategy in initially placing tiles matters....

 

[Ebeondi Asi]

First off Inno designers are not reading these threads. If you wish to propose a suggestion for voting here. (which might be suggested via the moderators you have to do so the right way. Plus it cannot be on the do not suggest list.
There are many suggestions that are already nixed. i'm certain being able to move the city tiles is one of them.

Some players think making goofy designs with the tiles is good. Mistake. To be the most efficient, the city grid should be as close to square / rectangle as one can make it. The upper left corner is never going to be able to be a right angle. but it certainly is possible to make the other three corners a right angle. and straight sides.
The best city design stategy is to have as few roads as possible. all design of elements in a players city should be to have a few roads as possible and still have every thing connected.
This means road on short side. Biggest buildings at the outside edges, small buildings inner area.
And if you messed up placing.. realize eventually you can build up around your mistakes.

 

[NWWAkamai]

First off Inno designers are not reading these threads. If you wish to propose a suggestion for voting here. (which might be suggested via the moderators you have to do so the right way. Plus it cannot be on the do not suggest list.
There are many suggestions that are already nixed. i'm certain being able to move the city tiles is one of them.

Some players think making goofy designs with the tiles is good. Mistake. To be the most efficient, the city grid should be as close to square / rectangle as one can make it. The upper left corner is never going to be able to be a right angle. but it certainly is possible to make the other three corners a right angle. and straight sides.
The best city design stategy is to have as few roads as possible. all design of elements in a players city should be to have a few roads as possible and still have every thing connected.
This means road on short side. Biggest buildings at the outside edges, small buildings inner area.
And if you messed up placing.. realize eventually you can build up around your mistakes.

How do you know that no designers from Inno read these? Do they confide in you? If I owned anything that had a forum linked to it, I'm monitoring it. Any intelligent person would. The point this person is making is a good one, even though it will probably never happen. Players do make mistakes. Inno needs to figure out how to profit from giving the players options to fix them....

 

[Johnny B. Goode]

How do you know that no designers from Inno read these? Do they confide in you?

Actually, we've been told that in the past by staff members, so the answer to the second question is kind of yes.

If I owned anything that had a forum linked to it, I'm monitoring it.

They do have volunteer staff that does that, and if there is something they think should be passed on up the chain, it is. But the designers will never communicate to us here, except indirectly through announcements. They are busy designing...which is what they are paid to do.

The point this person is making is a good one, even though it will probably never happen.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this, mainly because:

Because strategy in initially placing tiles matters....

And finally:

Players do make mistakes. Inno needs to figure out how to profit from giving the players options to fix them....

Believe me, if Inno thought they could profit from this it would have been done years ago. People have thought moving expansions would be a good idea for as long as the game has had them.

 

[NWWAkamai]

This is amazing! So I understand this....A company that went from 2 million in revenue in 2007 to 220 million in 2020 is waiting on feedback from a volunteer staff on a forum that's directly linked to their games. No one from Inno's development department has any interest in what they average player thinks of their game or how they think it could be improved unless their volunteers like it and forward it on. Imagine how much more they could have made if they read the few recommendations submitted each day. Ok, thanks. I had totally got this wrong....

 

[RazorbackPirate]

I had totally got this wrong....

Yes. You have totally got this wrong.

All suggestions are from players and voted on by players. If the idea gets enough support from players, 70% or higher, the volunteer moderators forward the suggestion onto Inno. Beyond the one vote they're allowed like any other player, their opinion on an idea has no bearing on an idea being forwarded.

Going from 2 million to 220 million in 13 years just proves they don't need ideas from players and can manage improvements on their own. It is a false assumption to believe any or every idea from players will add revenue, that's just your inflated ego talking. What makes you think as a player you can do better than the professionals? People with experience evaluating such things, with access to user data you'll never see.

I suspect had Inno implemented half of the ideas that made it through the voting process, they are just as likely to have ended up out of business by now. Just because something might be good for you as a player, doesn't mean it's good for the game.

Have an idea? Go through the process. If players like it, it will move forward to Inno for evaluation. Once it does, Inno is free to toss the idea, put it in a maybe pile, or move forward with implementing it. I suspect most ideas end up getting tossed, which based on their financial track record, seems to have been a good thing.

The suggestion system, as designed, doesn't need the development staff to waste their time monitoring the forum for ideas. Ideas with enough support from the player base make it to them.

 

[NWWAkamai]

I came from a corporate staff. We excelled by listening to all suggestions, not just a few. Left to a few, you get bias. I guess in the European gaming world, the successful corporate model doesn't work and isn't needed. Good to know...

 

[Johnny B. Goode]

I came from a corporate staff. We excelled by listening to all suggestions, not just a few. Left to a few, you get bias. I guess in the European gaming world, the successful corporate model doesn't work and isn't needed. Good to know...

Wow, talk about apples and oranges! And you listened to suggestions from every employee directly throughout the corporation with no structure or process in place to filter out the ones that weren't practical or that weren't in line with the corporate vision? Because that's what you're advocating here.

Inno has a process in place for suggestions about the game. Furthermore, they have empowered their volunteer staff to forward anything outside that process that the staff thinks might interest the developers. In other words, they listen to all suggestions, just not directly. And I would bet my entire retirement that you didn't listen to all suggestions directly either...unless your "corporation" only had about 10 employees. So get off your "corporate staff" high horse and either go through the process or take your chances that this thread will prompt the staff to forward the idea. They won't.

(Incidentally, did your "corporate staff" increase their revenue by 11000% while you were there? If not, then maybe you should have done it Inno's way.)

 

[Ebeondi Asi]

From new players come foolish questions and requests to change the game mechanics.
If I ran / owned Foe new players wud have a separate question only area. and any player would have to play for at least a year before they could suggenst anything. Whiners would be booted for six months.. period.
Generally new players ask to change stuff they personally find difficult. Endlessly. None of them think: tens, hundreds of thousands of payers have managed to to do this. I should just try harder.. Noooooo they want to change it. and think they are the very first person to think of it. LOL
rant over.

 

[Emberguard]

. Imagine how much more they could have made if they read the few recommendations submitted each day

"few".... There's 25 servers! Each with their own community and separate forum. It's no small task. It would be physically impossible to expect any one person to read every single suggestion without a system in place. That's why there's 25 Community Managers, plus Co-Community Managers, plus Volunteers to go through all the feedback, bugs etc., compile it into a readable format and then hand it off to the Developers.

. We excelled by listening to all suggestions, not just a few. Left to a few, you get bias

All ideas are listened to by InnoGames, but listening to make a informed decision isn't the same thing as just implementing everything suggested blindly. A lot of suggestions are asking for something that already exists. There's no point in saying "devs please implement that thing you already implemented years ago". That's just wasting everyones time. You'd be better off identifying why it's confusing the player so you can forward feedback with "Players find X confusing. The UI could use improvement here and here".

Also there are certain suggestions that the Devs are already aware about because they've already gone over those ideas and made a decision on them. So there's no point in forwarding it for the xxxth time if it's the same idea, and it goes completely counter to the framework of the games fundamental gameplay

 

[Dominator - X]

How do you know that no designers from Inno read these? Do they confide in you? If I owned anything that had a forum linked to it, I'm monitoring it. Any intelligent person would. The point this person is making is a good one, even though it will probably never happen. Players do make mistakes. Inno needs to figure out how to profit from giving the players options to fix them....

Welcome to Corporate Think 101. You have successfully finished lesson 1.

 

[The Lady Redneck]

If I owned anything that had a forum linked to it, I'm monitoring it.

OK. Was the corporate staff you were part of that of a national or international company? This in not the only Forum there is. So you would not be monitoring it alone, you would be monitoring the ideas put forward by them all. Given the International aspect of INNO and the number of Forums there are to cater for this How would you monitor each one in a cost effective manner? For a start, How do you monitor those that are in foreign languages? Then there are the different international Time Zones. You need to be able to cover those. and this all has to be monitored 24/7. So it is far from just "few recommendations submitted each day" How many volunteer staff do you envisage this would need? Data is extracted, and checked to see if an idea has been submitted before in the years that the business has been running. Then it all has to be categorized. It has then to go the game developers and designers, for viability. How many paid staff would be required to oversee this? At what stage in this process do you change from Game volunteer helpers to the actual company people.? How much time does it then take to analyse all the data? Then it all needs to go before the relevant people in the financial department to run a cost/benefit analyses. THEN what is thought worth will be passed back to development and design to implement.

 

[Sharmon the Impaler]

You know that data is unrefined intelligence right ? The exact same information except once refined into intelligence it becomes actionable. This is what most of the professional world does with their data. Even if they read every message in this forum and devised a marketing plan from it they would still be only viewing a microscopic slice of what their customers want. They have the beta system , forums for every server , direct event feedback through usage stats which is a massive but unusable data set until it is refined into intelligence. Then it changed their fiscal outlook from 2 million to 220 million ; if used correctly as Inno did.