Include the community in releases

Draft Proposals
1

Summary:
A working group can be placed to preview features and changes in advance. This addresses the communication problem and ensures that the development team stays aligned with the community. This is not meant to change features in fundamentals, but to reduce the risk that small balancing/design/manual flaws ruin the experience in general.

Motivation:
The last three releases were all amazing - but due to the communication and/or implementation, a lot of the “amazingness” got lost.
Sometimes when you work on a feature for months, you lose sight of some stuff that might be completely logical to you, but not at all to someone who reads stuff the first time. In each of the three releases, players found flaws or inconsistencies within minutes. They spread like a wildfire and discord was on flames.

Details:
Provide the government council two weeks ahead of any release with an abstract of the release. During the week they can decide whether they need to be involved in the release. If they do, provide them one week ahead of the release with as much information as possible and let them ask their questions and voice their doubts. All feedback can be used to rewrite release notes, postpone events or at least give the chance to notify the playerbase at release, that xyz has been brought up and the team will work on and fix it.

Downside/Risk:
That group will have information before others and could act/invest accordingly. Ways to avoid this is to try to remove information like RBW/UNIM or ingame item costs. Additionally, all government council members that want to participate in the review round would need to sign a NDA (non-discolure agreement). All council members that do not want to sign such NDA cannot partake. The NDA is between LG as the responsible party for the release and the user itself.

Upside/Benefits:
All the outrage after the last releases would not be happening. Great ideas would still be seen as great/amazing - just simply as they almost ALWAYS are! It avoids ruining them by mistakes in communication or minor design choices.

Conclution:
I believe this will bridge communication issues so I ask the community to vote in support of it

13 Likes
2

I agree with this completely. Most of the axie community have been begging them to do the same thing for a while now. To me it would make sense to be a Council job, but not a mandatory one (like submitting our votes on proposals are)

4 Likes
3

Totally agree with the topicposter
I do not understand at all, we have a Council created purely nominally? As far as I can see they are not involved in the process…
Whatever the owner (Laguna) wants, that’s what they do, with every time they bring up the DAO and that the community is involved in the process…

2 Likes
4

Hello, blackfield! This is awesome. This is totally in line with what I had in mind. I’ve discussed the idea of “working group” with the council yesterday and literally a few minutes after our conversation, you posted this.

I’ll work on an official impact report and publish it by Monday. For the time being, we’d appreciate additional input from other sRBW holders!

2 Likes
5

This sounds like a good plan of action. This would really allow team to be proactive in releasing updates and features and hopefully remove push back from community. I think a rotation of people in this role would be good as to never give anyone person to much information all the time. Possibly different people in this role could be given part of the information and not the entire picture and a few trusted people all the information to make sure control groups gave accurate feed
back.

3 Likes
6

agreed, this is needed!

1 Like
7

Agree but I think this set of people should be different than the council, we need different profile in that. And yes there is a big issue with having people getting infos earlier… specially with the change which are usually big meta shakeup, but I think we also need to stop that.

1 Like
8

Yes please, maybe we can prevent a shitshow next time this way. Morale is at all time low after SC ‘staking’.

2 Likes
9

Great initiative to become more transparent in future release.

1 Like
10

Yeah they are not involved yet. But they have some power already. This could either extend their power or we could create a new board for this task.

11

I like the idea of rotation! But I’m afraid we will slowly run out of active members to do much of a rotation. I will create a poll for that!

12
  • I want this to be part of the government council
  • I want a new council for this

0 voters

  • People in the council need to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement)
  • People in the council should not need o sign one

0 voters

Rotation of players/council:

  • Rotation after every release
  • Rotation based on a specific time (every X months)
  • No rotation needed

0 voters

2 Likes
13

Hello, @blackfield. I apologize for the delay in the getting an impact report out as we need to coordinate with everyone involved in production to fully assess the impact of this proposal. For the time being, please continue working with the community to solicit feedback and polish the content when applicable. I’ll post an impact report as soon as we can.

14

I like this. Perhaps we could start with community involvement in the biggest releases, rather than every single change.

1 Like
15

So how many people are needed in this community review group? 10, 50, 100?

16

It looks like the majority of people want it to be the government council. Therefore the same amount of people as they are (12?).

17

@lgManicUnicorn How do we make this a live proposal?

18

Actually, there’s 11 of them.

19

Once all discussions have been completed, it can be reviewed by the council on their next session. Sessions take place every 15th and 30th. However,t he proposal is still incomplete right now.

  1. As mentioned by the people in this proposal, we need to define when this applies. Right now, within LG, we’re trying to prepare an impact report where we’ll define where we can apply this proposal. (Ex. only on major releases, and then defining what major actually means)
  2. As mentioned by the people, this does not mention who will actually do it. We also think the governance council is the best people to do it. If you agree, kindly remove any indication of unsureness in your proposal.
  3. We believe that the section where you said “one week” prior needs to be discussed. Our production team is checking on the feasibility still.
  4. Your proposal doesn’t indicate a safeguard against abuse definitively. It only includes options but doesn’t say which one you really are proposing. Proposals needs to include actual implementation steps and not options/suggestions.
1 Like
20

Thanks Nanessa!

  1. Major release is for me everything that would deserve a new version number (for example 1.6.28 → 1.6.29), external features like the shadowcorn staking. How I define it doesn’t really matter though. I’d give the council the chance to decide if it is necessary to involve them by giving them an abstract of the changes. Otherwise it is up to the team again where they want to involve the council in.
  2. According to the recent poll it will be the governance council.
  3. Alright if that is the only issue that needs to be discussed, then I will move forward with:
    2 weeks ahead → abstract to the council. If during the time the council approves in wanting to be involved:
    1 week ahead → give out details so the council can give feedback.
  4. According to the poll people want a NDA. Therefore all people in the council can decide by themselves, if they want to sign it. If they do, they are included in the review process, if not, they are not.

Do I edit this in the first post? How would you like to work it?

Let’s not waste any more time. People are already dropping out and the longer we wait, the fewer people will still be there to hear about the changes. Honestly I don’t want another single release before this is included.

1 Like