Is PMU resilient to change?

I’m a little concerned about the game’s progress. The game is managed is by a closed staff team, who take player input into account; but progress feels very slow at times and unnecessary barriers are being created. As things stand, the only ways to implement a player idea is either by a popular player convincing one staff member about the necessity of a change or the entire playerbase complaining about it.

Now it might be the case that staff might actually want to make said change but do not have the know-how… But then maybe find someone who does? It’s staff decision to keep the game off-limits so it isn’t fair to slow down or freeze progress because of this decision. There are so many other fangames that accept help from players because obviously staff are humans and cannot do everything on their own.

Regardless, there are some really cool suggestions either here or on Discord. And obviously there are many (perhaps more) bad ideas that should be scrapped. I’m not saying we should say yes to everything; bad ideas need to be tabled. But at least get some input? Yes or no. I do not understand the radio silence from staff. Usually players don’t just express cool ideas, they are actually suggesting that this be implemented. If it’s a bad idea just say so, that’s perfectly fine. But if even staff agree “yeah that’d be nice” and then change the subject… Um… who’s going to implement that exactly?

In order to tackle these issues, we can extend the forum voting system by adding upvotes and downvotes to suggestions. If downvoted by a deadline the suggestion fails and won’t be discussed for a couple months, but if it passes it needs to be implemented. This might help implement ideas where everyone essentially agrees on, but no incentive is being taken. What do you guys think?

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This seems like a really cool idea. Would honestly like to see something like that implemented into the forums. If upvote was already implemented, I definitely would be upvoting this.

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I agree with you on a lot of this, better clarity in progress and communication especially. this isn’t me disagreeing but more of a small announcement we all have to remember that staff is a small group of people with lives and priorities of their own. They don’t get a salary for working and moderating PMU, a game with a code that is hard to work with and a UI that has aged about as good as lettuce. Basically we should all be grateful for their sacrifices and contributions but even more than that being understanding and at times more patient and methodical with how we voice suggestions. PMU has always been true to best keeping Chunsofts work on the original games so we shouldn’t press non-problems like garchomp’s family item not absorbing ice type moves and instead maybe formulate your ideas into a forum post where it is a lot easier to manage the discussion instead of 20 people piling on in discord or in global chat.

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This staff team is open to small QoL changes to make the game feel nice (refresh changes/move changes/family items etc.) , but when it comes to big changes like recruiting legendaries there seems to be a huge divide between staff team and players. I can see why though, this would take awhile to implement, but I would rather have huge changes in PMU rather than just a couple of small QoL changes getting all the attention.

That being said, the staff team is pretty small right now and “popular players” would get all the votes anyways. I agree with every staff adding input to any idea that’s well thought enough and creative.

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PMU is resistant to change by the result of several years of accumulated technical debt, not by the current staff team’s own volition. That is why it feels “slow” to you at the moment. The bigger ideas discussed will take a much greater deal of time to work out because they are dependent on handling other issues first.

The suggestions board is our second largest on the forums in number of threads. As has been said in the past, we do read all suggestions when we can, even if we can’t always reply to every individual one for various possible reasons. Asking for immediate input on every thread that comes in over the long term is asking for the impossible. There are more factors that go into these things beyond the answer to “can it be done.”

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