Feedback February: Take part in three short surveys this month!

[Foobrother]

Regarding the latest survey about the Forum & Discord, in my opinion, the way the forum is managed could be part of the reasons why people are moving to Discord. While I find the staff very open in terms of debate, I find the way few things are managed, not very motivating to make you participate even more.

 

One thing that puzzled me very quickly when I joined this forum is that threads are very quickly closed once there is no reply for a few days. This doesn't help keeping the forum lively as you don't see many threads open and some discussions are not very developed simply because we didn't give enough time for people to participate. And one of the side effects from this mechanism is that people create new threads for questions/subject which have been discussed 20 times already. Instead of adding their view/question to the already existing thread. Many people probably get bored of these same questions and many don't even bother replying again and again.

 

Another thing which I find not very "friendly" is the suggestion section and the way it is managed. It is super moderated and doesn't give much room for discussions/exchange. Personally it doesn't motivate me to post more suggestions.

 

But I think that the main reason is just that Discord is one of the new ways for communities to communicate/exchange and generally people slowly stop using forums.

[[MCG] KDAKaiSa1317]

On 2/13/2023 at 3:41 AM, Foobrother said:

Sorry I don't understand this sentence. 

 

??? On single player by definition you play alone. Only you can go over the speed limits. And the traffic AI does respect the speed limits (and doesn't drive recklessly!). So if you want to play in a place where people respect the speed limits, single player is the only place. So I don't get your argument.

 

What you're not saying is that outside C-D area you meet a player every 10min. And if you go even further (i.e. Spain, Sweden, Bulgaria etc...) you can sometime drive for 1h without meeting anyone! So not only rare to find reckless drivers, but just any player 

Don't you really think it's rare to find reckless drivers in the other parts of the map? In fact they are all over the map, just the rate is not high as popular areas do, I've been seeing reckless and intentional maniacs that colliding, so I would just partly agree with that, and it's true sometimes it's hard to meet any player, especially those country roads which are fun to drive with.

[Jeronimο]

3 hours ago, Foobrother said:

Regarding the latest survey about the Forum & Discord, in my opinion, the way the forum is managed could be part of the reasons why people are moving to Discord. While I find the staff very open in terms of debate, I find the way few things are managed, not very motivating to make you participate even more.

 

One thing that puzzled me very quickly when I joined this forum is that threads are very quickly closed once there is no reply for a few days. This doesn't help keeping the forum lively as you don't see many threads open and some discussions are not very developed simply because we didn't give enough time for people to participate. And one of the side effects from this mechanism is that people create new threads for questions/subject which have been discussed 20 times already. Instead of adding their view/question to the already existing thread. Many people probably get bored of these same questions and many don't even bother replying again and again.

 

Any particular sections you wish to highlight?

 

3 hours ago, Foobrother said:

Another thing which I find not very "friendly" is the suggestion section and the way it is managed. It is super moderated and doesn't give much room for discussions/exchange. Personally it doesn't motivate me to post more suggestions.

 

Absolutely, and this has been on my to-do for a while. In the near future, I'll restructure the sections in status buckets (e.g., "New", "Accepted", etc.) rather than categorise them based on the topic area (e.g., "game", "web", etc.), and suggestions that are not decided upon yet will be open for discussion immediately so that others can chime in and co-create and refine ideas. 

[Foobrother]

10 hours ago, Jeronimο said:

Any particular sections you wish to highlight?

I'm 90% of the time on the "General" and "ETS2" Discussions sections of the forum. But I assume the same rule applies to at least all the "Discussion" section?

[Goiano BR]

Very good to see that tmp is trying to listen to your community about improvements.

[ALLIANCE Jean M.]

It's great to know that TruckersMP is trying to listen to your community to improve the players' experience within the game and also on their platforms. I hope we can see changes soon

 

About the forum-related comments on this topic, I'd like to say something that no one has commented on yet:

 

People can have different opinions but one thing I think about the Forum is the language sections that are partially abandoned due to not having specific and active forum moderators for each language. It's a great idea, but in my opinion, it's not being used and/or managed properly.

 

I say this for the Portuguese discussion, which was once active, but nowadays, as there is no specific "Forum Moderator" for this international section, it discourages Portuguese and Brazilians from interacting since the official content is outdated. I think this isn't an isolated case and that the same happens for other language sections.

 

Spoiler

 

In addition, when a topic is created or moved to the "Portuguese Help Section", community responses must be approved by a community moderator and precisely because there is no moderator, most times these responses take 30 days or more to be approved. An example of this is a topic I answered on December 21, 2022, and has not yet been reviewed and approved (i.e. that's been 68 days).

 

Spoiler

 

Tbh, this is not at all friendly because it discourages people from interacting and it's a super moderated section, but there aren't even moderators to take care of the topics and answers posted there

 

I imagine the same problem must happen with other international sections (e.g. Arabian, Italian, Spanish, and the like) that there are no "Forum Moderators" or higher who speak that language and can be active to moderate a specific language section.

 

Anyway, TruckersMP Upper Staff should think of new plans to solve this problem too. For me, closing the international sections isn't the solution.

 

I understand the importance of having strict requirements in any position as this is how TMP screens potential new candidates who will offer serious, quality volunteer work. However, I think that in this specific circumstance, the "Language Forum Moderator" role should be created where the requirements should be more flexible to allow people who have advanced knowledge or are fluent in a specific language (e.g. Arabian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and similar) can have this opportunity to contribute to the community without English being a priority. This means that even if the applicant has difficulties with English but manages to understand and communicate well in that language with the help of a translation tool, this shouldn't be a problem as it can be difficult to find people who speak the local language and basic English.

 

If the above idea cannot be a solution for some internal reason, then I also think that there should be something like a "Language Forum Moderator Leader" that requires knowledge in both languages so that he can make the proper reports to his Manager or higher, and that also allows recruiting new volunteers for that section without requiring English. This can work, but it must be well-planned.

 

I forgot to say these things in the website survey and I can't edit my answer there, but if TMP wants to listen to your community. So, I think it's okay to share this here

[Pakistani786]

Nice

[GPRO - Extreme]

It's great to observe that tmp is making an effort to take into account feedback from their community to enhance their services. 

[Granite]

Looks like the changes are here already, and server changes will follow shortly. Can't wait when ban evaders are back.

Why not go ahead and make §2.1 just 90 days ban as well, while you are at it and be done with permanent bans altogether.

 

[Jeronimο]

12 hours ago, Foobrother said:

I'm 90% of the time on the "General" and "ETS2" Discussions sections of the forum. But I assume the same rule applies to at least all the "Discussion" section?

 

I have shared your feedback with our community and community moderation managers

[MarkON]

On 2/26/2023 at 12:23 AM, Jeronimο said:

Absolutely, and this has been on my to-do for a while. In the near future, I'll restructure the sections in status buckets (e.g., "New", "Accepted", etc.) rather than categorise them based on the topic area (e.g., "game", "web", etc.), and suggestions that are not decided upon yet will be open for discussion immediately so that others can chime in and co-create and refine ideas. 

It looks like in the last hours it has been realized.

I was curious about the changes in the suggestions section. This section is somewhat interesting because it shows what players expect. Additionally, through the comments of the staff, you can infer the direction, possibilities and a lot of future plans of TruckersMP. Regardless of the structure, they still require your attention to a greater or lesser extent. 

 

The issues of decisions related to individual suggestions are something that can be mentioned by the way.

I remember how once in a while the Project Manager and the Developer reviewed a lot of suggestions and you could see a few comments within a few hours/days related to individual suggestions, now it's missing a bit. 

For example:
-Accepted. There will also be a dropdown list to select whether to prioritize the dot color for Steam friend over the color for VTC members or the other way around.
-Accepted. Such things are planned.
-Rejected, author realized it is not needed.
Also, from a technical point of view, it is very hard to create it. A lot of things would need to be reworked for a rather small benefit. It is either having current dev came 'distance' or unlimited like Game Moderators have.

 

Are there many projects currently in progress and you are unlikely to consider many more possibilities until it is completed or other reasons? I mean more suggestions that have been around for a long time (sometimes even years) without a decision.

[Jeronimο]

23 minutes ago, MarkON said:

Are there many projects currently in progress and you are unlikely to consider many more possibilities until it is completed or other reasons? I mean more suggestions that have been around for a long time (sometimes even years) without a decision.

 

That was one of the key areas I was aiming for when I got into this position. Add more clarity as to what we work on and what not, maybe even a little roadmap, which may sound relatively easy but is actually quite complex. As you can see in the suggestions section, there are a lot of ideas from users. On top of that, we of course also have our own ideas and vision. And not everything that we would want are feasible due to practical limitations. All in all, there are way more great ideas than we can implement, and we have limited resources; the majority of our developers are e.g. volunteers who do things in their spare time. The danger in sharing roadmaps is that our situation does not allow us to provide guarantees. In the past, features (the best known example is probably AI traffic) have been teased/announced, but have never seen the light as we would run into obstacles or other priorities. As our partner at ProMods say "It's ready when it's ready", the same principle very much applies to us, and shaping expectations may (and has) inevitably get back at us sooner or later. We should soon publish a dev blog about a major project in relation to our coding backbone that one of our game developers has been working on for over a year now, which should provide some more insight into what we have been up to. 

 

On 2/25/2023 at 9:08 PM, Foobrother said:

Another thing which I find not very "friendly" is the suggestion section and the way it is managed. It is super moderated and doesn't give much room for discussions/exchange. Personally it doesn't motivate me to post more suggestions.

 

We have made some changes to the suggestions section. Particularly in relation to your comment, new suggestions are now visible instantly (no more post approval), restrictions have been removed (users used to need a certain post count before they could submit a suggestion), and all new suggestions are "open for discussion" by default so that you can discuss and co-create with others 

[Granite]

1 hour ago, Jeronimο said:

We have made some changes to the suggestions section. Particularly in relation to your comment, new suggestions are now visible instantly (no more post approval), restrictions have been removed (users used to need a certain post count before they could submit a suggestion), and all new suggestions are "open for discussion" by default so that you can discuss and co-create with others 

New suggestions sections is kind of a mess now, everything unrelated is bundled together and there is a lot of them, really time consuming to look through all of that while looking for something you may want to add a comment to.

There are also suggestion that should be in help section instead. There should be some categories, like Add-ons, Map modifications, QoL, Website, Discord, etc.

[Ramazan[S]]

On 2/10/2023 at 5:35 PM, Jeronimο said:

Last Summer, we conducted a community survey, to which we received many responses – thank you for sharing your views! Some of the things you shared with us required additional information to interpret. In order to do that together with the community, we invited community representatives to the user panel we announced along with the survey. Some productive discussions have followed since then, including topics about game moderation and server configuration (which entails settings such as collisions and server speed limits). As we move forward, we would like to gather more insights from the wider community to refine our approach.

We are aware of dissatisfaction regarding our game moderation and have taken note of numerous complaints and concerns from within and beyond our community. Furthermore, we have received much feedback about our server configuration, particularly with regards to the server speed limits we enforce on the Simulation servers. In short, a lot of the feedback we have received has challenged the 'Road to Simulation' initiative we launched in 2019 (see blogs below).

• Road to Simulation blog 1 | July 2019
• Road to Simulation blog 2 | August 2019
• Road to Simulation blog 3 | February 2020

Announcing a series of short surveys
The feedback from the community survey provided mere indications for the most part. In order to align our practices with the community's needs, we hope you can help us by providing more specific insights. Throughout February, we will therefore be conducting short 5-minute surveys every 'long' weekend on a specific topic, with the surveys opening Friday afternoon and closing Tuesday night (UTC time zones).

Surveys will be posted on the following dates:
Feb 10-14 | Game moderation
Feb 17-21 | Server configuration (has been extended to the 28th due to high interest)
Feb 24-28 | Community Platforms: Forums and Discord

Stay updated!
Please keep an eye on the Polls & Surveys page this month if you wish to participate and voice your opinion.
You can also stay updated by joining our Discord server or following our Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Preliminary results will be shared via our Discord in March.

Thank you in advance and see you on the roads!

 

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That’s great  

[[Ekip] Kadir SAKLI]

thank you...

[Mavi~]

When will the results of the server configuration survey and related actions be announced?

[LillefixHD]

On 3/29/2023 at 12:00 AM, Mavi~ said:

When will the results of the server configuration survey and related actions be announced?

 

If you were reading the forum actively you would'v seen it.
https://forum.truckersmp.com/index.php?/topic/111663-project-update-back-to-basics/

[Mavi~]

1 hour ago, LillefixHD said:

 

If you were reading the forum actively you would'v seen it.
https://forum.truckersmp.com/index.php?/topic/111663-project-update-back-to-basics/

I'm actively reading the forum, but I guess you don't, because you should have noticed that this message you replied to was written 1 day before the topic in the link you gave. 

[LillefixHD]

Just now, Mavi~ said:

I'm actively reading the forum, but I guess you don't, because you should have noticed that this message you replied to was written 1 day before the topic in the link you gave. 

But that was the results of that survey Was that not what you were asking for, if not then i am sorry  

[Mavi~]

1 minute ago, LillefixHD said:

But that was the results of that survey Was that not what you were asking for, if not then i am sorry  

There is no problem. Thanks for your intention to inform.

[LillefixHD]

Yeah my bad, i didn't see the date of your comment, only that you were asking for the results 

Realising that my comment was completely wrong to state!

[aesthxwolf]

im thankful