4. Development Tokens

Development Tokens


  • There's an expression in English: "put your money where your mouth is".

    I'm quite fond of this game and its community. So far, the only way I could financially contribute was to buy sub-tokens. Which is fine, but I feel a bit uncomfortable gaining an in-game advantage.

    What if there was a "similar" resource called dev tokens. Allow it to be traded just like sub-tokens, but dev tokens have no value in the game.

    Dev tokens could be used to help guide the game's development. Nice to have features which are not a priority in development right now could have a token cost. Once enough tokens have been contributed to a feature, that becomes a development priority.

    These tokens could also be used as a way to vote between different development options when these are presented.

    Perhaps in order to stimulate the use of these tokens, you could get one free every time you buy a sub-token or subscription. Would be a good entry point to make people more interested in the game's development.

    Perhaps if a player gets a PR accepted to solve a feature which had tokens pledged, he would earn those tokens?

    Essentially create a market for the development of the game.

    Thoughts?

  • Culture

    I think this is a great idea.

    Letting the community create small, new and fun additions to the current game seems like a great way to support the development team.

     

    I think that compensations can be implemented in different ways:

     

    I think this might result in more people actively helping in the development process.

     


  • I really like the idea as it integrates the community a lot more in actually defining priorities.

    This would also raise awareness quite a bit. Right now pull requests aren't looked at by the majority of the community.

    The main requirement for this to work though would be somewhat reliable response times on pull requests in GitHub.
    I'm quite interested in server development but the current process is fairly discouraging.


  • I still feel this is a really cool idea and would help solve the recent disconnect between community and dev team.

    So... shameless bump.


  • I think the pixel approach is a very good idea.

    That would let us spend money on screeps and thus help the dev team.

    And please let us buy custom badged. I really want one 😉


  • A game I used to play, Dwarf Fortress, had a very simple system for this sort of thing called "Eternal Suggestions Voting". It was a php script that was created by one of the players, and the dev just had to integrate. You get three votes of features you would like to see in the game. Everybody's votes count the same, and you can move your votes around at will. The most-voted-for things didn't necessarily ever get worked, it was just a handy reference of community sentiment.

    This is not as cool/useful as the original suggestion, but has the benefit of giving us a low-cost way to communicate our preferences to the developers. Note that both this and the original suggestion are especially beneficial to the more introverted sorts of players who are not vocal on the forums/slack.