Planetside 2 has opened a new feature being called the Roadmap. The feature will let players vote and decide on which features and fixes they think are most important, as well as which ones they like or dislike. Announced in part through a Reddit thread, the system won’t be entirely 1-to-1 democracy (or mob rule depending on how you view it). John Smedley explains:
It’s basically a new section in our normal forums that will be called Roadmap. In this section we will set up topics that relate to the things in our roadmap. The purpose is to have active discussion of the entire roadmap. There is a reddit style scoring system that allows people to upvote and downvote things. That’s going to give us some rough idea of how people feel about a particular roadmap idea.
Does this mean we’re changing it to “the mob rules”? absolutely not. It’s just a simple tool for us to be able to gauge sentiment about a particular topic. Remember it’s still a forum thread (although with cool nested comments) and we’ll still be reading what people are actually saying.
However if we list 5 topics for February and people highly vote 4 of those 5 and everyone hates on one of the ideas, it’s fair to say that’s going to get our attention.
This system will undoubtedly create a closer connection between the player base of Planetside 2 and the developers, getting players what they want to see and letting developers know which ideas are good and which are bad. The only major issue that could appear is that mob mentality. If a large enough, and more importantly digitally vocal enough section of the Planetside 2 community is able to bend the monthly changes to their will, it could lead to bad things in the future. I doubt these will be game-breaking, since I also doubt the monthly changes will approach anything like ” Give NCR Troops access to Nuclear missiles”.
You can check out this month’s proposals and join in the discussion on the Planetside 2 Forums.
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