Petitions - Unviewed/Unanswered?

Createure wrote: I think this thread mostly requires a mods attention to answer it fully but i'm sure some players will know or at least have an idea of some of the answers. 1. I sent a bug report back in November with a screen shot of a problem with seige reports. The shot was a bad link though which SC pointed out for me... I replied to the petition but I don't think the new link I sent ever got viewed, so here it is anyways: http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/790/seige.jpg 2. I've also sent another petition more recently with an issue I've had with scouting reports that is still unanswered after several weeks, where I recieved a report which is listed as successful but in the information section of the report I simply get the message: [empty] I'm not too bothered about these problems, they do seem a little unworthy of devs attention with much larger updates on the way... but for future reference it'd be great if I could get some info on that the dev-side procedure is for handling petitions?  - Can you confirm that if people send spam petitions (or presumably good petitions too) then they can have a rating decreased (or increased) to change the prioriety of their future petitions?  - Is there a policy or general practice of trying to answer/acknowledge all petitions at this time, other than just reading them?  - If you reply to a petition 'thread' with further information does it get the same attention as the original new petition?  - Any other information we can know to further increase the players' knowledge of how petitions are handled? Thanks, C.

Hi createure,

I think this is a fair enough question, and I'm happy to give some outline answers.

As you rightly say, much of the core code of Illyriad is in flux at the moment due to the UI version 2, and many (but not all) of the fixes to outstanding Petitions will be fixed in the code roll out for UI v2.

UI v2 also brings enhancements to the Petition Handling system at our end, enabling us to do things we're not currently able to do in the existing Petition-handling system, which is essentially very basic.

Whilst you guys won't see the direct enhancements to the Petition system at our end, these enhancements include much asked for (internally) functions, such as:

• Assigning priorities to Petitions
• Recategorising (and sub-categorising) Petitions
• Assigning Petitions to internal code teams / individuals for investigation
• Assigning "post-Petition" internal ratings, so that we can quickly identify (and prioritise) those players who generally submit good/useful/accurate/important Petitions vs those players who don't
  
• Providing additional and related information alongside the Petition drawn from the backend DB, which will cut down a lot of the donkey work when we try to work out what happened. The New Notifications system (that provides a continuous log of occurrences at the Player/Town level is part of this, and will also be viewable at the Player front end)
• Automating some (currently manual) common Petition tasks such as "Closing an Account" and passing some of these abilities to the players themselves
• An ingame "self-help" system that is context-sensitive to what a Player is looking at, so some of the most common Petition questions can hopefully be self-answered
• Some Petition response Templates for us to use, rather than the GMs and Devs manually having to type every word of every response to every Petition
• At the moment all Petitions are handled by GMs/Devs as often "game" confidential information is given by players within their Petitions, but there are many types of Petitions  that could sensibly be handled by MODs instead, so we're adding a Petition "routing" sub-routine so certain types of Petitions (such as rule infringement reporting, insulting or obscene content reports etc) can be routed directly to MODs rather than GMs. 
• As a later part of the UI v2 release we also get private direct chat options; and it's often much faster for a Dev or GM to talk directly to a player online rather than use the back-and-forth asynchronicity of the current Petition system
  

This new, enhanced, Petition system as part of the UI v2 release should provide a much faster response from us to most of the common Petition topics, and therefore freeing up time to concentrate on the more involved Petitions and/or enhancing the game generally.

I hope that helps explain some of the changes that should speed up the internal handling of Petitions.

Regards,

SC



Edited by GM Stormcrow - 02 Jan 2011 at 18:54