Enable down-voting for SE2 feedback

Certainly possible but it would be a bit more organic to just have a way to do it without having to create additional posts to populate the already very busy Topics

Yeah, and it's a lot more work and messier to mark them as duplicates/anti-duplicates on the product management side. Y/N on the OP suggestion is just a way cleaner message for both user and product.

"under consideration" means only what it says. A lot of such feedback on SE1 made it never into the game.

And I think it is a good thing that people write their arguments why they are against an idea. I'm sure Keen will also read the comments und such topics.

If you add a downvote option the only result would be a lot of downvotes because they click directly on it without even thinking about it twice and you still have no clue why the topic got so much downvotes.

A topic for a suggestion didn't need really more positiv posts under it, it needs more critical one with arguments why it is maybe not a good idea. At that basis can grow a good discussion on it.

A discussion where only is talked about the positive sides and ignores the negative completely, that is not a useful one. And a lot of players tend to see only the positives and like to tend to ignore the negatives.

"If you add a downvote option the only result would be"

"they click directly on it without even thinking about it"

"a lot of players tend to see only the positives"

You've made several assertions of fact there. Are these actually studied, or ar these your option?

I base my options on years of experience managing SW development, support ops, and product management. IMO, downvote data is critical to gauge user sentiment properly, but that is not where it stops. For suggestions of high engagement (pro and con), the details I'm the comments become very important. The volume of comments is sometimes useful, but I see a lot of these threads that devolve into nothing but bickering, which is not particularly useful.

My experience comes from other game alphas and player suggestion stuff there and also from this forum as well. Here are also a lot of topics which are mainly positive without speaking about negative sides. I always try to see stuff from different perspectives.

My fear is that a downvote function will cause the whole thing to drift in a much more toxic direction where discussions are not possible anymore and topics with a few negative reviews are ignored by users who would normally have read them and formed an opinion themselves.

But maybe a blind downvote without showing a number would be a compromise here? So only the developer could see the numbers of downvotes.

It would probably be best if a comment was required to vote up or down. It doesn't need to be visible who voted for what, people would only get 1 vote even with multiple comments, and it would if nothing else grant a heads-up about what to expect from the comments and a level of perspective we could reference in discussion instead of relying on some arbitrary numbers someone tries some political-level acrobatics to push.

That would reduce votes a lot if users need to post something before they can vote and many would post random useless stuff that didn't help for a discussion.

Yeah, blind downvote might be the best option.

@captainbladej52 I take that as an impeachment of my honor in posting the suggestion. I honestly believe this is the best way for both devs and users to see the true sentiment of a suggestion. People that commit to the (sometimes painful) alpha/beta/early-release phase of a game tend to be more passionate and dedicated in my experience. We aren't talking about the wild west of reddit or quora here; this group is way smaller and way more on the same page of "make a great game".

@captainbladej52 Umm... no? Two things:

1. There is no need to call people trolls for wanting to be able to vote against something they don't want to see in the game. Insulting the integrity of the person posing an opposing argument is not a civil way to discuss things. It's just disrespectful. We all want a better game here, we're not trying to "troll"...

2. I don't believe that starting a thread for opposing an idea is a satisfactory solution. The only evidence necessary for this is the existence of threads with significant negative feedback, a lot of up-votes, and no apparent opposition thread. I don't believe it is a natural thought to most people to post, or search for a thread opposing another. It would be a lot more natural and easier to use if there was a down-vote option.

Wish I could downvote that comment xD

@Eddie Gonzalez: It's not you I'm concerned about specifically. Problem with this sort of thing is it will inevitably be used to essentially bury things a small handful do not like similar to some of the review and downvote bombing you see on sites like reddit, quora or elsewhere. I don't like it anymore than you do, but there are already ways for devs to tell if something is popular or not without the need for a downvote feature as even that doesn't always tell the full picture. Unpopular features and things don't get that many upvotes to start where as other popular things do. If something gets over 10k upvotes vs the thing that gets maybe 100, it's not hard to tell which one is more popular of the two.

Not only this but I can't count the number of times I've seen elsewhere that being able to downvote comments off the face of the earth leads to little more than echo chambers. Little Timmy posts something about not liking (feature here) because he thinks it's bad or cites "but muh DPS/pvp" or similar. Johnny comes on and counters Timmy's post explaining why it's not as big a deal as he thinks and how to get around the issue. Timmy gets offended so he and his buddies downvote Johnny and screw everyone over in the process. Folks are free to like/dislike whatever they like/dislike and voice their thoughts. However the problem is far too many think their way of playing is the only valid way to play and everyone else should be made to play like them, and thus would abuse the feature. I've seen it far more times than I can count.

@Star_Kindler: And who specifically did I name as a troll? Feel free to name them. Because what I actually said was "Stuff like this just stinks of wanting the ability to downvote spam something into oblivion and troll like you see on reddit and other places." Feel free to try and prove me wrong about this request.

2: If folks choose not to start an opposition thread that's on them. There's plenty of ways for devs to tell what is popular and what isn't without the need for a downvote feature. See what I said to Eddie above, I've seen far too many places and times where a downvote is abused by a small handful to bury stuff they don't like and create an echo chamber and we don't need that here. Folks are free to like/dislike what they like/dislike, but far too often the downvote is used to silence one's critics and avoid actual discussion. See above again, Timmy posts something about he thinks (feature here) is bad and so on. Johnny comes in and explains why it's not that bad and how to counter it. Timmy gets mad and gets his buddies to all downvote Johnny even though objectively speaking Johnny is correct. Then Timmy and his pals screw everyone over by giving a false impression of a feature's popularity or lack of.

If people care about something enough they'll make an opposition thread or make their voices known. Part of what a comment section is for. Downvotes aren't needed here.

Fair enough, but I will point out the feedback volume on SE / SE2 is very low in general. On the SE feedback page, the most votes is just above 1100 As far as I can see, this has been around for about 6 years. Contrast that to the same thing for Enshrouded, which has been around for about one year, and the top suggestion getting 19000 votes.

IMO the niche nature of this game keeps the community tight and focused. Yes, there are some trolls and toxic people - there are in every game - but IMO they are noise, not a force.