Doorknob

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At 10 days, you earn a Day Job badge, but it doesn't boost any of the rewards associated with that Day Job (like reducing the time it takes to earn full credit towards those rewards).

At 30 days, the badge gets a star logo, and the description text is changed to say that you are a "Star Employee." This is the point when you start gaining the benefits associated with the badge. The badge's title still says you're a "Professor," it's just the flavor that's changed.

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That would only work if people would be satified with the 10-day badges. But if they weren't satified with just ignoring Day Job badges, I'm not sure why they wouldn't want to collect all star-logo badges, and then you'd be right back where you started.

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Because trying to collect them actively prevents you from playing your character. No other badge in the system does this.

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Exploration and History badges require you to find specific locations; Accomplishments require you to do specific missions; and Achievements require you to kill specific mobs or do X amount of something else. Each of those categories of badges has a different requirement, and fulfilling those requirements takes time away from doing other things.

Now, what if one player only liked doing missions to get badges. Should the devs remove the other kinds of badges? I mean, going to all those other locations and defeating X of each kind of enemy prevents him from playing his character as he wants to play it. By introducing those badges into the game, the devs are "forcing" him to waste time doing all those other activities.

Or, perhaps he should just collect the badges that fit his playstyle instead of asking the devs to design the game around how he specifically likes to collect things.

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In this game every single badge is counted. Even the ones that Positron considers "not-badges": Gladiators. At that point your argument fails. If it looks like a badge, acts like a badge, then it should follow that they are badges.

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I didn't say they weren't badges, only that they were a different kind of badge. Just as there are many different kinds of badges in the real world, there are also many different kinds of badges in the game. And different ones are obtained in different ways, with some being more collectible than others.

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Actually, it isn't. The time varies (in both extremes) from 30 days to 60 days for one day job badge as proposed. Now playing for 12 hours a day is unhealthy in the extreme. It is more likely that each Day job badge will take from 35-45 days, but there is still a variance. Variance != same for everyone.

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The out-of-game time is the same for everybody. If you spend more time per day playing a character than somebody else, you are the one introducing variance, not Day Jobs.

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There are badges that are not visible, are not counted towards the the badge count, yet functions as gatekeepers for different things. Case in point: completing the other faction's mission for the Valentines event awards one of these invisible markers.

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Why is this okay, but having the badges in a completely separate category on a separate tab not good enough? Perhaps some people want to be able to have their day job selected as a title, and the devs didn't want to waste time coding a whole new system to allow this to happen.

Just because something is called a "badge" doesn't give it the same level of collectibility as every other item called a "badge". This is true even in the real world. A badge can be a form of identification, a merit of achievement, a souvenir, an award, and a representation of membership within a collective, among other things. Just because you might like collecting some of these doesn't mean you will have equal access to all of them.

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I'm sure people would love to collect day job badges. However the length of time proposed is too much.

People collect the in game souvenirs, yet they are not visible to others so that could be a personal record. Day jobs could have been like that. Day jobs could have been a special title that you could go to a trainer or one of the "professionals" related to the day job to apply to your character. The badge system didn't need to be used visibly.

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Why does it matter how visible the colectible items are? I thought this was about collecting things, not competing with others. And if you are competing with others, then the length of time doesn't matter as long as it is the same for everyone.

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let me break down the simple math, in a game with 8 million subs, if even 75% of people were offline, you still have 2 million people playing... which is ten times MORE then if every single CoH player was online. So yeah genius, they can afford to have an offline reward system.

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NCSoft gets the same amount of money regardless of how much you play. I'm fairly certain you at least must be subscribed to the game in order to get offline rewards. And as much as I like this feature, none of the rewards come close to reaching the same amount of reward that I get from actually playing the game.

While some people might play less, my guess is that for most people, if they are at all affected by this feature, it will be only in the location where they log off.

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You can't tell people "be a collector, of some stuff." That's incompatible with the collector mindset, and a good game designer should acknowledge the target audience they are targetting. If the devs are targetting people who care enough to pursue some of the badges with no meaning beyond collection, and will happily ignore all the ones that are designed to be out of reach, they are targetting a phone booth: there aren't bound to be lots of people like that.

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Really? So stamp collectors don't collect stamps unless they can have every stamp ever made? Coin collectors don't collect coins unless they can have every coin ever made? Heck, some people like collecting junk simply because they like collecting things, and not because they want to have everything ever made in the entire world. In fact, I would think a lot of collectors would be disappointed if they ever got everything because then there would be nothing more to collect.

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No badge hunter in this thread up until your post has suggested removing the system entirely. There are those that want the times reduced and those that want the badges removed, but no one mentioned the reward system itself.

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But, as with the veteran rewards, it appears they need some kind of flag to determine who gets what, and the badge/accolade system is the easiest way to do that. Sure, they could come up with an entirely new system that duplicates exactly what we already have with badges and accolades now, but that seems like a big waste of time. Why can't badge hunters just separate "collector's badges" from "flag badges" in their minds instead of essentially asking the devs to waste development time doing the same thing?

You say that no one is against the reward system itself, but don't you think people could just as easily want to collect Day Jobs as badges? What is it about a badge that makes it different from any other reward? Just because something is called a "badge", that somehow makes it more collectible than other rewards, and requires the devs to make it relatively easy to obtain?

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I remember a time not too long ago when even selling costume parts would have been thought way beyond the line. I remember a time when someone would have been called crazy for even suggesting that it could lead to selling powers. Yet here we are.

I'm genuinely curious, now that we've moved the line from gameplay-affecting to game-breaking, where is your limit of tolerance? Is everything fair game? What if they start selling access to new zones? Selling access to new archetypes? Selling access to task force/trial rewards? Straight out selling influence/infamy/prestige for cash?

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Buying City of Villains gave players access to new archetypes, powers, zones, and bases. Although everyone now has access to it, when it first came out people had to pay extra. Paying them $15 a month does not give you unlimited access to everything they develop.

If they want to do something in the game that the $15 a month can't support, they have two options:

1. Raise the subscription fees so that everyone is forced to pay for the extra development.

2. Keep the subscription fees at $15, and only charge those who actually want the extra stuff for the extra development.

Option #2 seems the most fair to me. It allows them to expand the game beyond what the basic subscription fees can pay for, while still allowing those who can only afford the $15 / month to stay in the game.

And depending on how much money they make from the Booster Packs, I'd bet that some, if not most of that money might actually go back into making more content available to everyone. So even the people not buying the Booster Packs still benefit from this.

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I think the ability to remove and sell/trade 10 enhancements from a respec makes respecs a part of the in-game economy.

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Okay, yeah, you could technically convert real-world money to influence by doing the following:

1. Level a character to the point where you want to replace at least one enhancement.

2. Pay $9.99 for a respec.

3. Respec, and sell all enhancements that you want to replace.

Doing that gives you more influence than you otherwise would have had without the respec.

But in order for the paid respecs to affect the economy to a significant degree beyond the other respecs that are readily available, people would basically need to buy enough respecs to finance City Of 2 with full power customization, seamless zoning, vehicles, personal living quarters, and much, much more. And personally, that's a sacrifice that I'm willing to make.

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It stopped being an in-game only economy when they started advertising for shoes and burgers in the real world in this game.

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I guess it depends on how you define the "in-game economy". To me, respecs were never part of the economy. They were not a part of the core game; they were a quality-of-life feature added so that people would not need to start completely over if they wanted different power choices.

The devs added them to the market to give people an additional means of getting them, but I still don't think that makes them part of the economy any more than the advertisements. If we are going to include those, then we might as well say paying the subscription fees are part of the economy since without those one cannot have a character to participate in the first place.

IMO, the only items that should be considered part of the in-game economy are items that the characters use, including enhancements, inspirations, and temporary powers. Costume pieces are kind of iffy because on one hand they don't affect gameplay, but on the other hand the devs have tried to create an economy around some of them by only allowing you to get certain ones via recipes.

To me, the ultimate question comes down to, "Can real-world money give a character an in-game advantage such that the amount of real-world money one has becomes a deciding factor in one's gameplay?" If not, then I see no problem with offering those things for sale.

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(Obviously, I realize this is not truly a slippery slope the devs will go down; but in principle, I believe they are equivalent. This is the first thing we've seen where there is now way to acquire the exact same thing with either influence in game or real money out of game.)

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IMO, the ability to respec is more of an "out-of-game" feature than anything else in the market, so offering respecs for sale is not the same, even in principle. Yes, we do have in-game means of getting respecs, but those exist simply to allow people to have access to this out-of-game ability. People kept asking for respecs, and so the devs gave us the ability, coming up with ways to tie it into the game after the fact.

Contrast that with IO enhancements, which affect the core game mechanics and balance, and I can see a clear reason why they would never offer IOs for sale, but are fine with respecs. A good rule of thumb for what they would allow to be sold are things that would not affect the balance of the game were they to give them away free.

Those things include costume pieces, character renames, character transfers, character slots, and respecs, all things they have offered for sale and could be given away for free (many of which have). Giving away IOs for free would affect the balance of the game, and thus they would never offer them for real-world money either.

If they ever offer an in-game means of getting renames, transfers, or slots, then those would be in the same position as respecs. But again, I wouldn't consider any of those to be in the same category as everything else in the market.

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It could even sway their opinion to read "I like this because it seems to enhance the play value of the game!" It's something simple, but it shows them that you agree because of a reason -- not just that you agree.

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I admit that I'm not up to speed on everything going on in these boards, but are there a bunch of people with the habit of posting "/signed" in random threads just for the fun of it? Because that notwithstanding, I can't think of why people would post "/signed" for something unless they agreed and thought it would improve their gameplay.

Posting a longer form of "I agree" simply forces people to read more words that say essentially the same thing. Posting "/signed", on the other hand, allows people to get an idea of how popular an idea is, while at the same time being able to quickly browse to posts that expand on that idea.

Now, I do agree that expanding on an idea is better than simply agreeing with it. But if we limit posts to only those that expand on ideas, then I fear posts will be weighted toward the negative side. People tend to have much more to say when they disagree with something than when they agree with it. When things are going wrong, people like to complain. But when things are going right, people don't have much to say.

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So which would be the smarter response?

1) Allow pornography on the boards because of your meaning of art, then be sued for millions of dollars and have to go out of business OR raise fees?

2) Say no pornography and not be sued, but be accused of silencing your meaning of art?

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I don't think he's talking about posting stuff on these boards. He's talking about content on external sites that are linked to from the boards. For example, what if I linked to a thread in another forum that had no explicit images, but if someone browsed to a different thread, there might be a link in there to something? How many degrees of separation must a link have from content not allowed on these boards before the link itself is not considered to be a violation of those rules?

At some point the parents need to pay attention to the browsing habits of their children because the mods on these boards can only regulate what is on these boards. One way of doing that might be to set up their computers so that their kids could only visit these boards and other safe sites, which is the kind of thing Dark_One was talking about.

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Then instead of writing "/signed", write "hey, great idea i like it." Or maybe: "not much I can add to that; great idea!"

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Isn't that just rephrasing the same thing, though? People wouldn't "/sign" something unless they thought it was a good idea. And they would type something else unless they had nothing more to add. Thus, "/signed" implies "I like the idea exactly as stated, and have nothing more to add."

The benefit to allowing "/signed" (or any of its variants) that I see is that it helps to keep popular ideas alive instead of merely controversial ones. Controversial ideas are going to evoke more discussion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are higher in demand than other ideas that everyone might agree on. However, if threads with popular ideas die off because everyone is in agreement with nothing more to add, then that can give the perception that those ideas are less popular than they really are.

IMO, "because I want it" is a good reason for why something should be implemented when it comes to a game. NCSoft is making a game that they want people to have fun playing. If a lot of people like a certain feature, that can be a good enough reason in and of itself to implement it. Of course, that doesn't mean everyone will always get what he or she wants, nor should anyone expect that. But that doesn't mean people shouldn't be able to voice their opinions about what they want even if the only reason is, "it would improve my gaming experience".

For the people that think Champions Online + Power Customization = Doom for City Of, here's something to consider:

We, the playerbase, have little to lose by Champions Online coming out. If it is a better game, we can just switch over; if it's not, we stay here. NCSoft, on the other hand, has much to lose. And you can be certain if power customization was the key to keeping players they would be dropping everything else to focus on adding it in, even if it meant rewriting the system from the ground up.

But power customization is not the be all and end all of City Of. Don't mistake customer demand for feature priority. Even if power customization was the #1 feature on every single customer's want list, it still doesn't mean it should have the highest priority. If feature #1 would take just as much time as features #2-9, it's possible that most players would rather have #2-9 as a group than just #1, even though individually they liked #1 better.

In addition, it takes time to develop the power customization system for Champions Online too, time that is not being spent on other features. Even if Champions Online has power customization and City Of doesn't, how many features will City Of have that are lacking from Champions?

Will Champions have the power selection that City Of has? The stories? The badges? The items? The maps? The combat? Given that Cryptic is doing it, one would expect many similarities, but many of those things are more dependent on time than technology, so even with a brand new state-of-the-art engine, City Of has many more years of work that has gone into its content.

Now, more than likely (I would argue it's a statistical certainty) some players care enough about power customization that they would be willing to deal with whatever features Champions was lacking to move over. Heck, there will likely be people moving over that don't even care about power customization. But I don't think that is the make-or-break feature for the majority of the players, because if it was, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

There might come a time where power customization becomes a top priority, but by then maybe they will already be looking at a City Of 2.0.

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However, keep in mind that if you have an alt and haven't logged into it in over 90 days, it won't be showing up anyway until you do log into it. So, you only need to be concerned with characters you have logged into in the last 3 months.

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Would it be possible to default all characters to have the 90-day rule applied? That would allow people to set their characters' options as they logged in to play them rather than having to remember which characters they played in the last 3 months and logging in to each one of them simply to change the settings.

For people just browsing, it's not going to make too much difference whether there are 2000 or 200000 characters; most people aren't going to browse through that many anyway. For people that want to check out members of an SG or view a character they saw in passing, yes, I do see how having all character data could be useful. However, I don't think those uses are so useful that the success of the site hinges on them being available.

I see the primary purpose of the site being, as ChaseArcanum mentioned, a "herospace" (or "villainspace"). People will use it as a means to share their character information via the Web. Who knows, we might even get extra features like being able to write stories for our characters for those of us who want to do more than just the short character background currently available. While it will be useful as a site to lookup random characters, I see it being used more often in a much more personal fashion. So while not having all character data available by default might make the character selection initially small, I think as players start using it more for their personal reasons, that selection will continue to grow.

Sure, some characters you still won't be able to see. But not everybody has a myspace account either. However, that doesn't make the myspace accounts that do exist any less useful, nor will that be the case of the accounts for the people who want their characters seen.

That being said, if there's a global option available to make all characters of an account visible or hidden, then that would greatly reduce the issue I have with forcing people to make an effort *not* to automatically be a part of something. While I would still prefer the default to be hidden, if the devs truly believe that nobody would use the site unless the default was for all characters to be available, then having easy and visible options to make one's characters hidden would greatly soften the blow for those that would need to deal with it. Perhaps the "Hide Statistics from Web Page" option could also be available on the character selection screen as checkboxes next to each character, with one additional checkbox for setting a global option to hide all characters (across all servers). If a player wanted to set more specific web settings, only then would he or she need to log in the character to do the configuration.

In addition, all characters of inactive accounts at the time this feature goes live should have their settings set to "hidden" by default regardless of whether or not the 90-day rule applies. While I do see some use, however small, for looking up the active characters of random strangers, nobody is going to run into a character of an inactive account in the game and want to look it up. And there will likely be plenty of active characters for those just randomly browsing through the site.

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No, it is more likely that 75% won't care if their character info is displayed or not.

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And if people don't even care about their own characters, why would anybody else? Is there really that much use for the site other than for accessing information on your own or your friends' characters? Would people really be that disappointed that they couldn't view information about a bunch of random strangers' characters, even if those characters made up 75% of all those in existence?

The usefulness of the site will be in what percentage of characters that each user cares about is available for viewing, not the percentage of all characters. It doesn't matter if 50%, 75%, or 99% of all characters are hidden. All players that want to view their own characters will make their own characters visible. And if they want to see their friends' characters, they will ask their friends to make them visible. So, assuming all parties are willing, any information that users of the site care about seeing will be seen.

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The default setting needs to be on.

90% of the players DO NOT read the forums and thus have no idea what's going on here. Many of that 90% don't bother to read the MotD either.

So if the default setting is off then something like 80% - 90% of the characters won't ever show up on the site. What would be the point behind even having the site to begin with?

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I think we can safely assume that people that know about the web site will know about the options to enable their characters to be visible. At the very least, they will ask questions about how to do such a thing.

Thus, if 80% - 90% of the characters don't ever show up, then that means either most people don't know the site exists or most people don't want their information seen. If most people don't want their information seen, then NCSoft should honor their wishes by not showing that information. And if most people don't know the site exists, then that makes it even less useful than not having 80% - 90% of the characters not showing up. So I would imagine NCSoft would spend a lot of effort to promote such a site, and thus make people aware of the options to make their characters visible on it.

Nonetheless, even if only 10% - 20% of the player population utilized the site, the characters that they would care about seeing would be their and their friends' characters. And given that those that used the site would likely communicate to their friends about it, I would highly doubt they would miss the 80% - 90% of the characters that didn't show up.

So the default should be off because those that don't know about the site might not know their information was made public. However, those that know about the site will at least be aware that the options exist, if not know exactly how to enable them.

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Go ahead and enable all the options--excepting the friends list--but give us a global option to hide all of the characters on an account so we can completely ignore the built-in game system and stick with the player-designed tracking sites.

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I agree. I am very excited about this system, and even hope that there might be some way for fan pages and applications to consume this information. But there needs to be a way for people to easily opt out of this service.

I suggest that each setting be giving three options: Enabled, Disabled, and Use Global Settings. The default value of all options should be Use Global Settings.

There should then be global options created that mirror the character-specific ones, allowing players to set their preferences across all characters. I would guess most people would want the same visibility settings applied to all or most characters, so that would solve 99% of the cases. And for the others, they would only need to configure the settings for the specific characters that they wanted different than the global settings.

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If the grant is 20,000 prestige per toon, this is a pretty dumb reward. Not because the prestige isn't welcome, but because it's essentially a flat 3,000,000-per-SG gift wrapped inside a catalog of pointless busy work (creating lots of extra toons to stuff the SG roster).

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No, it's not. Sure, people could stock their SGs with filler members, but even if everybody did that to the best of their ability, it still wouldn't equal giving every SG 3 million.

With the 12 character limit, each SG needs a minimum of 13 accounts in order to be completely full. And if people are playing in multiple SGs, which I would guess is the more common case, then that further limits the number of filler characters they could create.

Giving 3 million to each SG only requires 1 character of 1 account to be a member. So instead of 1 SG needing 13 accounts, 1 account could make 12 SGs that would each get 3 million prestige.

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That's not what I'm saying. I was just criticizing the marketing b.s. that's was drolled out to calm the masses when the MUO announcement was made. There was a clear conflict of interest and contrary to what everyone was saying that one developer could develop for two competing rival publishers in the same genre that clearly is not the case. I just think that the people who raised concerns about the funding and development of CoH by Cryptic after the MUO announcement were proven right. I'm not criticizing the change, I'm just criticizing the propaganda that was played and how some players who brought up this issue were hung out to dry that our concerns were baseless.

I have high hopes for the new NCSoft branch and I think its a decent move. I believe in this iteration of the team better than the one run by Statesman.

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Oh, okay. I see what you were saying. Given what Lighthouse was responding to, I was reading it as if you were saying that this re-investment was a last ditch effort by NCSoft to save a dying game. I agree with you that there was a conflict of interest, although I do think Cryptic could have made it work. But, as evidenced by the recent decision, clearly both companies believe that they can work much better without that conflict hanging over their shoulders.

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It's because NCSoft didn't want to fund a developer that is also developing for a rival publisher. Since Cryptic was developing for both NCSoft and Microsoft, some funds would definitely go generally Cryptic in general and you couldn't account for some dollars. Also there would still be staff that would share technology, resources and expertise between the two development teams. It's not like there was a chinese wall between the two teams. NCSoft, in the end, was hesitant to provide lots of money to a developer where that money might end up helping to develop a rival game. There was a serious conflict of interest and it's clear this buyout shows it.

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This is basically what I was saying, although perhaps I shouldn't have used the term "profits". When I said "only the publisher", I didn't mean to imply that Cryptic was some gigantic corporation that hired mom & pop NCSoft to churn out copies of the game for them. I meant "only" in the sense that NCSoft used to be only the publisher, and now they are both publisher and developer. And since they are now both, they know that any investment they put into the game will go directly to the rewards they reap from the game. And the rewards aren't just monetary, but as you said, technology, resources, and expertise.

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Ok, then it begs the question: Then why wasn't this re-investment done earlier??

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Because at the time NCSoft was only the publisher, and Cryptic was the developer. Had NCSoft devoted more resources to the game, they would have wanted an increased share of the profits. And that's essentially what they did. They negotiated for complete rights to the game, and now can devote more resources to the game, while reaping all the rewards of their investment.

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When Cryptic announced the MUO I seem to remember a very positive State of Game Address by the head designer which made some very extreme promises to add huge features to the game only for such to be retracted and given the usual "not enough resources" reasoning. In addition, all the marketing copy was stating that NCSoft was still 100% behind Cryptic despite landing the MUO assignment and will greatly support expansion of the CoH.

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I think I9, I10, and the soon-to-be-released I11 did add "huge features" to the game. The fact that they can now do even more just makes things that much better, but that doesn't take away from what they have already done.

NCSoft was 100% behind Cryptic, and I'm sure would have continued to support Cryptic had the decision not been made to acquire the City Of rights from them. It's not like they stabbed Cryptic in the back and stole the rights from under them. It was a mutual agreement that both companies felt would best benefit each of them in the long run. And NCSoft is starting a whole new office and hiring more people to work on City Of. If that's not greatly supporting the expansion of City Of, I'm not sure what is.

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Now we're told this acquisition had to be done for the real re-investment. Why weren't those resources given then, when presumably Cryptic was at its strongest, with the all the legacy developers and the new hires. When there would be a sharing of expertise and skills. Now half of Cryptic has left to form a new studio under NCSoft. It just doesn't add up, sorry.

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Cryptic isn't dying. The "half of Cryptic" that left were all the City Of people (except for 1 or 2 people that stayed behind), so the rest of the people at Cryptic are going to continue what they were always doing. And not much is going to change for those who left either; they are just going to be paid by somebody else and work in a different building.

You're making is sound as if Cryptic was barely keeping City Of alive, and NCSoft swooped in, buying out Cryptic's share of City Of on the cheap, breaking apart the development team in the process, and leaving us with a skeleton crew of developers serving only to prolong the inevitable demise of the franchise. I guess I'm just not seeing it that way. All indications seem, to me at least, to show that NCSoft saw something that was good, but could be made even better.

I've purchased every edition there is (other than CoV Standard because I got the Collector's Edition; I'm not THAT crazy! ), and I'm happy that both sides are being opened up for everyone. Kudos to the City Of team for the big move, and thanks for the thank you's, even the ones that don't benefit me personally, because I know they benefit the overall community. This year has been the best year so far for City Of, and I see greater things to come.

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No, what I’m saying is I don’t want someone getting the EXACT thing I paid for free.

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The people who bought either just CoH or just CoV most likely paid more than GvE costs now. So if you don't like the fact that people can now get something that used to cost more, you should be defending NCSoft's decision to open up both sides for everyone. The people buying GvE today get not just the same thing, but more for cheaper than CoH and CoV each cost when they went live. By your logic, this isn't fair, and NCSoft is just addressing that inequity.

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Or they could of said "No. They wouldn't add anything specific to the city, and if we get unicorns, we should have the classics. White, and the rarer black. The developers like to add things with a strong classical base, and colors other than white and black don't have such."

Ever other person who would of gone /no can then quote that guy and /agree

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Sure, they could have, but the point is that the /no contributed just as much to the conversation and the other respondents. None of them were ideal answers, as all could have provided quantifiers for thier positions. But under present guildlines only /no is being vilified.

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Exactly. What if the OP had had the opposite opinion?

OP: I don't want the devs to add brightly-colored unicorns to CoH.
Responder 1: /unsigned
Responder 2: No
Responder 3: Yes

No, all of the sudden, Responder 1 and 2 need to elaborate, but 3 doesn't anymore? Should we create two threads for every idea, one for those in favor and one for those against, so that people can put "/signed" in the thread matching their opinion?

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My above post is made on the assumption the poster of the original idea made sure to say WHY they think their idea is so grand. If someone says, "lol nerf stalkers they is overpowared!" then a bunch of people simply say, "/yes" then there is indeed a problem. Why do they think this? The line isn't so clear when an agreement is concerned.

Idea: Enable polls in suggestions.. or make is so every thread is created with a yes/no poll by default. That way everyone gets their short responses and anyone that ACTUALLY feels like contributing something of worth can have a say without the clutter.

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I wrote my previous post before I saw this, but yeah, this is the key. There are two basic types of "idea threads": A poll thread in which people simply voice their taste for an idea, and a debate thread in which people discuss the merits of an idea.

My example was a poll thread, and had there been a poll feature, could have been handled that way instead. But if the mods don't want poll threads, then they can't stop at just requiring that people not post one word responses. They must also require that every idea be backed up with reasoning beyond "I like it".