Share ideas how to use community more in new card design

I challenge the OP to demonstrate that using the community in card design is somehow more desirable.

Ashur wrote:

I do not agree. You keep on using this word 'populist' and it don´t seem like you understand the meaning of the word,

Ashur, I use the word populist in the way it is most commonly used in politics.

As far as I know, based on its common usage, Populist:
- A derogatory implication that decisions are made by pandering/sucking up to the noisiest groups to shut them up and not neccessarily based on any merit (Money tends to be noisier than actual votes)
- Implies that people as a group will choose the things which benefit them the most, often at the cost of the wider community

I base my experience of 'populist' on the otherwise frustrating situation in politics in Australia. We have had a person who was clearly rejected by their political party attempt to use the population to 'blackmail' their local representatives into putting them back into power. We have also had for a number of years the problem of choosing between two parties at a state-level who are basically incompetant, disorganised, obviously pandering to businesses (such as property developers) and clearly containing corrupt individuals. So we choose the one we hate the least to run the state, rather than choosing those who would be best for the state.

So yes, I am attempting to describe the idea of running VTES development by numerous public polls as being:
1) Likely to result in cards that enhance the opinions of the noisiest
2) Likely to result in cards that are not necessarily the best for the game
3) Likely to result in cards that are not 'up to standard'

I am happy to go on record as saying that letting VTES be 'popular consensus driven' would lead to VTES being a "camel" (a horse designed by a committee).

Something I've noticed is that there's no end to people posting card ideas, which is good. The trouble is that there's a LOT of it and sorting the wheat from the chaff, plus sorting what's usable now as opposed to usable later, is presently labor-intensive. Is it possible to set up a post rating system, as a possible way to help get the better/more usable ideas to bubble up to the top? The Design Team does like the idea of the VTES community being a resource for card ideas, but harnessing that energy is the challenge.

BenPeal wrote:

Is it possible to set up a post rating system, as a possible way to help get the better/more usable ideas to bubble up to the top?

Difficult, unless you enforce people posting different ideas in different posts. Understandably, it's quite common to see people posting "Here are my ideas for a new Blood Brother Circle" and "How about we have some locations from [my country]!" in one post.

Similarly, if someone responds and says "You could make it better by doing X. Or you could make it better by doing Y." Which does the tick represent?

So you're very likely to need some sort of pre-filtering mechanism anyway, in order to make sure that each card gets its own hole.


Then you get the problem of (for example) the link saying "See the highest rated cards!" I click on it, see the top 20 cards, click on my 8 favourite, and woohoo! But that favours cards that were entered into the process early - much like most of the very highest rated entries on bash.org are old, and much of the time the highest rated comments on most news blogs are the ones that got in at the very start. (This sort of thing is gold dust to marketeers.) This can become very self re-inforcing - the most seen get more seen, the rest wither away.

Aside from the difficulties mentioned by Ben and James, I don't see how votes and polls would give us better cards/sets.

What would it add that a smaller, dedicated group couldn't create? There is already a subforum where card ideas can be posted, and I'm assuming the ones who design new cards and sets will look around there for ideas.


I would rather not have sets or even single cards created based on majority votes on a forum, I doubt it would end up giving positive results for the game.

Dorrinal wrote:

I challenge the OP to demonstrate that using the community in card design is somehow more desirable.

With design perspectives it is not necessary more desirable and I never said I wanted total open playtesting. My point was more to make all players more excited and feel more involved with this whole new process. I can personally say that I don't feel excited about new PDF set because I know nothing about it and what the timetable really is and how sets are planned to be done in future. I just say there could be lot of positive things to be offered about thinking about how to make community feel more involved of the whole game.