Player <-> Developer Communication

Greetings,

it's my observation that as of lately, there seems to be some kind of disappointment about the communicational link between Players and Developers. This thread however, is not meant to complain about this more or less obvious flaw, but instead is focussed on providing potential workarounds and improvements.
Basically, people think that the several Chatlogs aren't providing enough information or information they're not looking for. This could however be as simple as that these important issues are getting flooded by several hundreds of questions concerning such things as minipets or even as funny as "what did you eat for breakfast?".

This thead is meant to improve the situation. It is meant to invent new ways of communication. It's simply there to discuss several ways of re-establishing the link between the Players and the Developers.



So to start this thread, my suggestion is as following:

a) Make the visits a regular time scheduled event. For example, one visit every two weeks. The day and hour may vary to cover many different timezones.

b) After each visit, a thread amongst the 4 largest international community boards is started. The thread posessions alternates every 2 weeks (so one talk it might be GWGuru, another one might be gwonline, whatever). It's called Question Brainstorming and people can post every important or silly question they may want to have an answer on.
After a period of 3 Days, the thread gets locked and the questions will be put up for a vote. After another period of time, the vote gets also locked and the 10 most voted questions will be placed on a "Must answer" List.
This List is then answered by the community employee during the talks. Even if the answers are as simple as "I'm sorry, thats nothing i can comment or provide information on".

Once a question has been turned down or answered, it can't be asked again for the next 4 weeks.

c) After the List has been answered, the normal style of Gaile Chats start, with everyone being free to ask questions left and right, no matter how silly those could be.

Discuss.
And keep in mind, this is not meant to bash Gaile.
In case you (the commuinity) don't like my idea, i ask you to provide another suggestion on how to improve the communication between the two sides, unless you're totally satisfied with the current mechanism that is.

If you agree with me (or another one of the suggestions) please also state why you agree and why you think it is important to change it to this or another mechanism.

Do not discuss other topics in here. No bots, no storage, no minipets, no Alliance Battles, no Elite Missions, no etc etc etc. Don't trashtalk Gaile or any other representative.

Now I may read this wrong, but...

You expect a whole district to wait patiently and listen to Gaile answering 10 questions keeping their own mouth shut? The people in those districts may not have visited an GW-fansite before, and might not know that they 'can't talk cause Gaile is asking questions'.

I think the only way to do something like you suggest, is doing it out of the game, for example on the main site of GuildWars.

I would prefer an in game option to:

Report/Suggest from a list of popular (made popular by the players, not the devs) additions/suggestions that we the players can then see reported back as feedback via a %. Similar to a forum poll if you will. I would love to see how many people asked for weapons on the mini pets or how many people requested material storage. These so called fixes came from somewhere, and I feel that showing those kind of details would go a long way into repairing the lost confidence between players and Anet.

Something I would also love to see if site mods/admins combine many of the player polls on suggestions/additions so we the players and site visitors can see some numbers and see where Anet gets some of the so called player requested fixes and balances. I mean it's one thing to balance something or change something for the sake of needing it, but another to change something and say it was based off of player feedback; and a search for that request on several sites and google brings up nothing.

I think that (like the Auction House) ANET can learn a lot from World of Warcraft concerning player/dev communication. Just make a special window, not unlike the guild announcement one, where you can post your issue. Devs would in this window see a list of people with such a "ticket". As long as your problem is unanswered, your name would be in the list of every dev. It works on WoW, why not here?

Could you explain a little bit more on how this works exactly in WoW? They have a message system where you remain as long as your question wasn't answered? Isn't this the same as spamming them mail? Don't think this is what you mean, but that's the way I understand it.

In WoW, whenever you had a problem with a quest or bug, or had any sort of question, there was an ingame ticket system for reporting/asking/etc. These tickets were almost always answered within 24 hours, and let you speak directly with a game master. I used the system 4 times during my short time there, twice with quest problems. Every time I used it, I got an immediate response, and had the quest problem resolved. Don't know if Anet can do a similar function in Guild Wars, but it was great in WoW.