Most things have already been said. But here is my list of things that I noticed so far :
- People would like to know whats going on, you dont need to go into any details, just a quick heads up every few weeks of whats currently going on. If you want people to get involved and active, keep feeding information to them which they can easily access, and not just by digging the forums for single posts and reading every thread there is.
- The attitude towards people that are asking things is usually pretty hostile without the guys that are asking being offensive themselves in the first place (yes there are alot of lazy people that ask things that are already answered). If you wonder why people keep asking about a certain topic, simply make a thread or put it into irc topic so people have their question answered before even trying to ask it. Only the true moronic people will still ask then.
- Be open to suggestions, at least dont just insult people for making inappropriate suggestions. There is always a way to tell someone that his suggestion is not taken into account without being hostile towards them. People making suggestions should be seen as people that actually care for the project or they would not make any suggestion at all. If you just silence them by bans or not being at least polite, dont expect them to ever try to contribute again, or at least less than they would have tried in the first place.
With a hostile attitude you dont show any respect to people so dont expect them to trust in you guys.
Suggestions towards the gameplay and features
- About suggestions for things that might be added. Some people asked about the combat animation speed for melee players which are often too slow once your speed capped and thus look very weird. Some adjusting of that so the animation playback is adjusted to be finished after 1s incase the guy is capped. I dont know if thats possible, since I guess it should have been some parameter being sent with the packets that trigger the animation etc and might not be possible. But that could be an addition, even if its not that important to me, but to some people it has always been
- I would love to see the mission terminals giving you missions, or some basic npc/creature spawn implemented. No need for it to be spread out or seeded in any way. Just some basic routine that puts creatures on some points so you can hit them without going overt or finding someone that wants to duel. This might speed up the animation finding process a bit. A side effect would be that you could test how stable an area is running with populated npcs and lots of players.
- There is currently some force special that you can spam at every person even if not red towards you. It does no damage or effect but it creates massive lag. Getting rid of it for the time being or adjusting its time or anything would be an idea. I did not find out which special it was that was causing those massive lags but I am sure someone will know.
Thats all that I seem to think of at the moment, I will add more later. Its good to see btw that combat seems to be coming along and concentrating on it first seems to be the right thing to do. Get the hard and dynamic stuff done and then add gameplay features. Alot of naysayers always kept on saying it wont succeed they will never get combat to work anyways but at least the basics are now there, just missing out on the details so far