Hi everyone,
Sure, I will try to clarify some things for you. I'm not sure if it's giving everyone the answers they'd like to hear, as everyone has their own opinion, but maybe it helps to clear some things up.
First of all, it's very important to keep in mind that Elvenar as a game is still very much in active development in the relatively early phase of its life cycle. This doesn't mean it's a brand new game, but it means we're still planning to keep it going for years and years to come, developing new content et cetera. That is the good news. The bad news is that for such games the room to implement suggestions from the community is very small. A lot of things for the upcoming years are already planned and worked on, and the company has certain goals that we want to achieve, meaning our development team can't derive too much from the path that is planned. In games that are not so popular anymore, or are already very established and have transitioned from their active development stage to a retainment stage, there is a lot more room to implement community ideas (as there's not much else on the planning anymore), but Elvenar is not a game like that.
That being said, we do try to listen to our players and implement suggestions that have a big support base in some way or another. Some things are easy (and therefore not time consuming) to implement as quick improvements and other things take considerably more time and need to be planned. This is not always possible and based on the priority our game team gives to suggested ideas, can take a lot of time. It can also happen that suggestions don't get implemented in exactly the proposed way, but in an altered form or as part of a bigger overhaul.
As you probably aready noticed, we have a big worldwide player base with a lot of people and a lot of opinions/ideas. Let's say that each game market receives only 5 ideas per week, that means our game team would be bombarded with around 100 ideas per week to sort through. As this is just plain impossible, we have thought of a way to filter out the really good ideas which have a lot of support, so that the chance of the things we forward being implemented is as big as possible. Since each market and player base is different, it's up to the CM's of their markets to think of a way to filter out the best ideas to forward. Here on Beta, as you probably know, I archive the ideas of which I already know they have no chance of being implemented, and the ones that do seem feasible get a poll for 2 weeks, needing a minimum of 20 individual voters of which 80% must be in favor. You can of course debate about the minimum number of voters or the percentages, but so far I think it does its job and these numbers fit our number of active forum users. If we would announce polls ingame, the number of voters of course goes up, but that also means we'd have to raise the minimum required amount of voters, as otherwise the whole "filter system" wouldn't work anymore. With these numbers, the ideas that are really urgent or have a lot of support generally make it through the poll. Of course there are examples of polls that had a lot of positive votes but not enough voters to go through, but on the other hand some polls had over 40 voters, so I think if something is really important, it will get enough votes in these 2 weeks anyhow. You sometimes see people asking their Fellowships to help with the voting as well and that's perfectly fine. That way we are sure that the ideas that we forward are at least of high quality and supported enough to go to the next stage.
That next stage is indeed the CM voting round. Each 2 weeks all forwarded ideas are listed and each CM gets the chance to give 1, 2 or 3 points to an idea, based on how much that idea is relevant/asked for on their market. This again means that the first filtering is very important, as it's not our goal to have 50 ideas listed each 2 weeks and only give points to 3 of them. We'd rather have a list of only 4-5 ideas that really have a lot of support from our players, and choose between those. One important note here is that when an idea doesn't get enough points in this phase, the CM's are welcome to put it on the list in upcoming rounds as well if it's still relevant for their markets. So an idea is not lost forever if it doesn't get enough points in 1 round. Of course, if we put it on the list for several weeks in a row and it never gets enough points, you can ask yourself if it's worth to keep putting it on the list, as something that's very much alive on 1 market can be no issue at all in the rest of the world. We want to be sure that the changes we implement can count on a lot of support from the players.
As said, the 3 ideas with the top votes are forwarded to our game team (which means the game team basically gets 3 new ideas per game sprint to investigate, which is a lot more reasonable than the 100 mentioned before). For this number they can at least make the time to properly think them through. It doesn't automatically mean they will also be implemented, but they will at least be investigated and tested in terms of technical possibilities, are they in line with our goals, are they in line with the future we have planned for the game, is this the way we want to go et cetera. If they are and everyone is convinced it's a really good idea to implement, they will be planned either on itself or as part of a bigger change, and based on the priority and the planning that can be within a year, but also over a few years. For example: if we already know that we want to overhaul the quest system in 2023, ideas that have to do with that will probably be scheduled for that timeframe.
So tldr: There is very little room to implement (especially the more complex) ideas in this stage of the game, but we do forward the ideas that get the most support from our players over multiple markets, and the game team takes it from there.
As said, probably not everyone will be happy with the system we use and everyone will have their own opinion on it, but hopefully this explanation at least makes the process more clear and gives a bit of an idea why it is like it is.