How is This Board Working? Revision #3

[ssilk]

This is not carved into stone and is also no lonesome decision of a moderator, it reveals the current state of doing things in this board.

First: You can post any suggestion about the game here (For suggestion about this forum use This Forum).

But before posting you should check the following things:

• Read this article: Read this OR be ignored!
• Look into Frequently Suggested / Link Collections (see below)
• Search, before you post, cause others have similar ideas.
• Are you in the right board?
  • Suggestions for the Factorio vanilla game go to the Suggestions board (this board). Take care, that you do not post accidentally in the subboards, while you crawl through existing suggestions.
  • Suggestions for the Lua-Api/Mod-Development go to the board Modding interface requests.
  • Suggestions for New Mods go to the board Ideas and Requests For Mods.
  • Suggestions for/about this forum go to the board This forum. You can use that board also for discussing where to post, if you are in doubt.
  • Suggestion for the wiki: It's a wiki, if you find something get an account and change it yourself, instead of posting suggestions. You cannot break it, there is always an UNDO. . If you are unsure or for any other reason use Wiki Talk, but it is eventually better to go to the appropriate discussion page (again: You need a wiki-account to change on wiki).
  • Suggestions for the Mod Portal go to Mod portal Discussion.
  • Suggestion for mods: There are two or three options: Either a thread (or a whole board for some bigger mods) in the mods-board (look into the mod-description!), a discussion on the mod-portal itself, or - if it is hosted on github - it is also a good idea to open up an issue there.
• Use the Suggestion Template to post. The most important points are repeated there.

Before posting you should know also the following things:

• This board primary goal is to create ideas/suggestions that eventually end in an implementation.
• But the second goal of this board is to discuss and become friends. In other words: TO HAVE FUN!
• So don't write for the devs, write for the forum members.
• A suggestion is taken by the devs when they are about to look for new ideas. Or when they just stumble upon it.
• They will not implement your suggestion, just because it is wanted by many other users of the forum. This is no democracy... so polling doesn't make sense. They pick your suggestion, because of game value. See below about it!
• The devs have enough ideas/material for the next 3 years. Their TODO-lists are full. Which doesn't mean, that they have fixed plans (only the next version is relatively fixed).
• There are not only the devs, that will implement new ideas. There are also modders. Some of the best mods where originally ideas from this board or Ideas and Requests For Mods!
• If your suggestion is too long, unclear, too complicated or doesn't add a game-value (see below), it has a high chance, that the devs won't read it. See how to write better suggestions.
• It is then also a high chance, that moderators or other forum users will begin to ask questions. That is nothing bad in general - misunderstandings can be found.
• The devs love explanations with pictures. A picture says more than 1000 words. And in the end it spares you and others a lot of time.
• Don't tell the HOW. A suggestion is most times not implemented in the way it is described here. They take the suggestion as inspiration. So don't explain how much items should be used for research and how many tiles an entity should be. It has not much relevance, cause you cannot know, when that suggestion might be implement. That is part of balancing! Much, much later. This is about IDEAS.
• Don't tell the WHAT. Explain the WHY!

Example

Bad suggestion:
I didn't searched for it, but what did the devs think about a new exo-skelletons. It should be faster and more durable. The crafting should take 8 iron plates and two electronic circuits. And it must be researched before.
... 10 lines of what he wants to do with the new exo-sekeletons ...

Good suggestion:
I always have the problem, that the F-key is too near to the D-key and so I pick up items all the time, that I don't want. I want to have more distance between that keys. My idea was simply, that we use the G-key instead of the F.
Do you have better ideas?

Posting Doublettes

About 50% of all suggestion in this board are already existing. So you have a high chance, that your suggestion is such a candidate.

There is nothing against making a doublette-suggestion! It reveals, how many of the players want it. But the moderators don't like them.

Not again...

The point, which is important, and which makes the difference is this: You should know the other ideas, before you post a similar one! You should have an answer to questions like "Why is yours now better than X?" "How can I combine all the good ideas from X, Y and Z into yours?" ...

The Frequently Suggested / Link Collections

We highly recommend to study that lists, before you're making a suggestion.
In the case, similar suggestions already exists, a moderator might add something like "Added to ...some link to article XXX...". That is neither positive nor negative. But latest at this point you should take some time to read that linked other ideas.

Game value

At the Factorio celebration party the devs underlined it: The top priority is the game value. If there are two options and they need to choose which one and one has the bigger game value it will hit over all other arguments.

What will this suggestion bring for the game-play? What is game-play-value?
That means, there is always a consideration: How much more complexity will a suggestion bring in vs. how much more game-play?
In simpler words: Added game-play vs. added complexity.

The calculation is simple and in most cases very objective: If the awaited rise in complexity is higher, than the awaited rise in game-play, well, then this is not a good suggestion (and eventually will be rejected). That may be discussed. If there are good arguments, which bring in more game-value, then this can change of course, nothing is fixed here, but the measurement is really this simple line.

Examples

A suggestion, which brings in more complexity than game-play: "I suggest a new type of inserter, that can rotate 90 degrees". This can already be done with the game (there are mods, that implement them), but it adds a very high complexity to the game (I need to built so many new types of inserters, or how to choose the right type of inserter?).

Another suggestion, which brings in more game-play than complexity: "Female Character". This has a high game value vs. complexity, but is of course complex to implement. But this is not the job of this forum to estimate the effort. Perhaps everything is already finished (the rib has already been taken out ) to implement it right in one day.

We are not counting about effort in development! That is of course an argument, but if a suggestion is good enough it was always so, that it was implemented.

You have made it?

You finished your first post? If it is good, maybe nobody will say anything. If not, the forum will discuss it. Or the other way around... don't care about it! Keep positive thinking! The forum is quite fair and a controversy discussion is a good sign, that you "might found something interesting".

Previous version: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=14702

[ssilk]

I made some changes to the former post, added especially a list of where to post which kind of suggestion. Thanks to Mathematics7 for this idea.