[Freeciv-Dev] freeciv feedback (was: Nice article about Freeciv in O'Reilly Network)

[Jason Short <vze2zq63@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 22 Nov 2001, Miguel Farah F. wrote:

> There's a nice article about Freeciv in the O'Reilly Network. Go check
> it out:

At the end of the article it says:

"It being one of the more successful projects in the open source
community,  one would think after being in such active development for so
long that Freeciv might rival its commercially-sold counterparts in
quality and features. It does not, and similar strategy titles like
Civilization II and Alpha Centauri clearly have slicker user interfaces,
smarter AI, and generally better gameplay overall."

I think, and I believe most developers agree with me, that FreeCiv has a
much better user interface than old Civ games (certainly CivI/CivII and
arguably SMAC).  The gameplay is, AFAICT, identical.  And FreeCiv's AI
isn't that bad - it can certainly frustrate beginners.

What this paragraph made me realize is that there's another greatly
under-represented segment among developers: beginning players.  All
developers have played FreeCiv a fair amount (at least one full game, I'd
say), so we don't get much work on things that beginners would have
problems with.

What I'd suggest is a more structured in-game way for players to give
feedback to the development team.  There's probably a blurb somewhere (I
can't remember noticing it, but...) that says "send feedback to
freeciv-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx", but I don't think that's enough.  Here are some
ideas for extending it:

- Make the blurb more encouraging, and/or move it to a more prominent
place.

- At the end of a player's first (or every?) game, pop up a feedback
segment that, at a minimum, has the blurb.  It may also have more in-depth
stuff like a survey, text-box for the player to enter information without
using an external mail program, etc.

- Link to the blurb or feedback mechanism from all over.  For instance, a
beginning player will probably look at the status icons (the
unintelligible ones on the left side of the screen), and think to
themselves, "There's no way to figure out what these do".  When the user
thinks that, there should be a button somewhere on the screen that they'll
immediately think to click to submit feedback telling developers of this
problem.

- If a lot of feedback starts pouring in, it could be a problem.  It might
make sense to create a new mailing list for this traffic.

jason