[chilledsanity]

Originally Posted by squeek

There are not enough options in the poll to make the results useful at all.

Wrong. If you were to act on the results of this poll (I'm assuming it will have no impact, but just speaking hypothetically), you could assume that you should not weaken the sg any further.

Originally Posted by squeek

here should be at least 5 options, but 7 would be ideal (overpowered, somewhat overpowered, barely overpowered, balanced, barely underpowered, somewhat underpowered, underpowered).

That wouldn't be very useful. If I think it's relatively balanced against scouts and horrible against all other classes, what do I pick? What if all I play is scout? What if I never play scout? The poll wouldn't allow any consideration. You just get a mess of obfuscation on the issue and no agreement would be made.

Originally Posted by squeek

Forcing hardline stances on something so obviously nuanced is ridiculous.

Not when the changes to it have become so blunt, it's no longer something nuanced.

Squeek from posts I've seen you make, you tend to drift to the perfect solution fallacy. By that I mean you see an issue that there's not going to be a full consensus on, so rather than try to ford a solution that will compromise and please the maximum amount of people to some extent, nothing is done instead. It's sort of a variant of the Polish Parliament mentality.

Here's what I would do if I were in your shoes:

Start a thread asking the community what they think the biggest problem areas are of the game. Get as many specifics as possible. Some problems may only apply to people playing O, some may only apply to pickup CTF, some may only apply to AvD, etc. Look for trends to see if there's any overlap. Also look at the quality of the explanation. If somebody just says "x class sucks, we should get rid of it" and nothing else, that should carry almost no weight compared to someone explaining in detail why X problem is a problem, specific situations it occurs in, what can be done to fix it, etc. Once you identify some trends, ask people to propose solutions to the problems that have gotten the most attention. You can take the top solutions and make a poll out of that. For ones without a clear majority, you can either force one solution that makes the most sense or attempt a compromise between two.

Finally, I'd make all of this very public. I'm not saying make the mod completely democratic, but you can use people to determine where the problems lie and what can be changed to stop more from leaving the mod. If someone's proposed change is in a minority and/or is problematic, have a trail of evidence showing it. Don't have total clandestine development of ideas, with people left completely in the dark, thinking they have zero influence. They don't know if devs are ignoring their ideas, are even aware of them, whether their ideas are in the majority. The tracker system supposedly solves the "aware of" problem, but since we never know what happens as a result of that (whether it's ignored, devs don't want to work on it, one guy overrides the idea, etc.), it leaves us just as much in the dark. Whether it is or not, FF certainly LOOKS like a one-way street.

Originally Posted by Bridget

The point was to prove that the community can agree on some things. It would have been overcomplicated if there were that many choices. People should be supplementing their vote with an explanation that explains the degree of how badly overpowered or underpowered they see it. Even if I had added those options, you would still be reliant on an explanation of why people choose it, which ultimately reveals that same degree. Lol inference!

Yeah pretty much. The votes would have been more spread out then, thus re-enforcing the concept that nothing could be agreed on, and fueling the perfect solution fallacy further. I guess I see now why the decision making process takes a long time.