Welcome to the ever popular Game Suggestions section of the forum! The following documentation provides an overview of what actions are acceptable and unacceptable within the section.
Game Suggestions Summary
Practically every person that has ever played a game has had ideas of how that game could be improved and that is the reason for this section: providing an area for members to suggest ways they think Terraria could be improved. This section has title prefixes that are broken down into eight categories, six devoted to a specific type of suggestion and two for suggestions that don't fit in one of the other six categories. Please ensure you pick the correct prefix when creating a thread.
- NPCs & Enemies: This prefix is for suggestions related to Non-Player Characters, such as town and non-town NPCs, bosses, enemy mobs, and critters.
- Weapons & Equip: This prefix is for suggestions related to various types of equipable items, such as weapons, tools, armor, accessories, and vanities.
- Items: This prefix is for suggestions related to items that aren't equipment, blocks, or decorations, such as crafting materials, mob drops, and other miscellaneous items.
- Biomes & Nature: This prefix is for suggestions related to the natural world of Terraria, such as biomes and non-interactive graphical decorations.
- Blocks & Decorations: This prefix is for suggestions related to blocks, walls, crafting stations, furniture, decorative items, and generally all placeable game items.
- Game Mechanics: This prefix is for suggestions related to the features and mechanics of the game engine, such as NPC AIs, game physics, the user interface, and the wiring system.
- Portfolios/Multi-Topic: This prefix is slightly different from the others. In addition to being for complex suggestions that span multiple suggestion types, this prefix allows members to create a thread devoted to organizing and listing all of their suggestions and related information. One can think of such a thread as their very own suggestion devoted mega-thread.
- Other: This prefix is a catchall for suggestions that simply do not fit into one of the other available areas.
Game Suggestions Rules
- Terrarian Community Rules & Culture apply to all categories, groups, sections, and threads on the forum.
- Do not plagiarize other member's suggestions. Doing so will not be tolerated.
- Do not use all UPPER CASE, leet or meme speak, or ambiguous wording when choosing a thread title. Thread titles should be clear, concise, and give a good idea of what will be suggested in the thread.
- Do not create joke or troll suggestions. Those kinds of topics are not welcome and will be locked.
- Do not make disrespectful comments. Constructive criticism and helpful suggestions for improvement are welcome. Insulting, rude, and mean-spirited comments are not.
- Do not engage with disrespectful or hostile comments. Simply report the post and then pretend it never existed. Staff will handle the situation from there. Do be aware that criticism is not the same as an attack. Please attempt to take constructive advice for what it is, an attempt to help improve the suggestion.
- Do not post duplicate suggestions. The forum has a working search feature and the community staff request that it be utilized. There is nothing wrong with similar suggestions that have their own unique take on a base idea, but simple and/or highly focused suggestions such as a popular type of new boss or a nerf to a well known weapon are unlikely to have multiple, unique avenues to support more than a single suggestion thread and these sort of redundant suggestions will be locked.
- Please avoid posting simple agreement/disagreement comments, such as "I like this!", "Good suggestion", or "This is bad". Instead, use the like button to show agreement and always give constructive feedback when posting disapproval, for example, including a useful sentence or two on why the suggestion is disagreeable.
- In addition to the built-in title prefix tags, thread creators can provide one or more text tags to help identify the content of the thread and these should be included in the text of the thread title. For example, if one was making a suggestion for a new giant carrot boss and had a mocked up sprite, then the thread could include text tags such as [Boss] and [Sprite] as in '[Boss][Sprite] New Giant Carrot NPC'.
- This sections provide a means for members to give ideas and feedback on how they think the game should evolve. To accomplish that, one must use, to the best of their ability, proper grammar, punctuation, and structure to more easily facilitate understanding of the suggestion. Well-written and structured posts are easier for the developers and members to understand than walls of text and illogical, rambling, and/or disjointed sentences.
- It is highly recommended that members utilize every tool at their disposal when presenting their suggestion to the community. One of the most important available measures is the thorough use of spell-checking, whether in-browser, through word processing software, or by the quick querying of Google. The very effort of fixing obvious, red-underlined spelling errors goes a long way. Second, don't be afraid to apply some of the available post formatting and text styling options, such as ordered/unordered lists, related links, text alignment, and judicious use of bold, underline, italic, etc. Don't get carried away with formatting, too much can be far, far worse than too little. Lastly, image mock-ups, example sprites, and any other form of relevant demonstration or artwork can be extremely helpful in gaining support for a suggestion. The inclusion of such content is strongly suggested whenever appropriate. After all, the developers could be reading the suggestion, so why not try to impress them?
- While posting each suggestion in its own thread is acceptable, members making several suggestions that are a part of an overall whole or series may want to consider creating a mega-thread with a Portfolio/Multi-Topic prefix to centralize those strongly related suggestions. Portfolio mega-threads are in no way required, but it is a useful feature to consider.
- A member may bump their own threads under the condition that there is a significant amount of information being added to the suggestion and a reasonable amount of time has passed since their last post. Bumping with little to no new information or for the purpose of raising a thread to the top of a section is strongly discouraged.
Player suggestions, by virtue of being a birthplace of ideas, are perhaps the largest hotbed of disagreements on the forum. Unfortunately, when some people disagree with an idea, they tend to say things in a manner that does not fall in line with the forum's culture. To that end, below are some guidelines to follow when sharing criticism with the author of a suggestion.
- Don't Take Suggestions Too Seriously
Very few suggestions will ever make their way into the official game, instead most often serving as 'what if' scenarios and entertainment for those that enjoy the creation involved. This is very important to keep in mind and one should never take a suggestion so seriously that they disrespect another member. - Members Don't Decide What is Unnecessary
Ultimately, only the developers decide which suggestions are or aren't necessary to the game and it is not the place of any member to tell a suggestion author that their suggestion is pointless or "unnecessary".
If a thread itself is lacking in content or otherwise violates the forum rules, then it should be reported for the community staff to handle. A suggestion being "bad" or unpopular is not a violation of the rules and is not grounds to report the thread. Similarly, posting in a suggestion thread to say that it should be locked is not constructive in any way and will not be tolerated.
A truly "bad' suggestion requires no hate or vehement argument for why it doesn't belong in the game. The developers are smart enough to make the distinction between what does and does not belong in Terraria. In addition, posting in the threads of unsalvageable suggestions accomplishes nothing more than keeping the thread active and drawing more attention to it.
Support, contribute, and 'like' the "good" suggestions, provide constructive criticism to the suggestions that need improvement, and ignore all the "bad" suggestions. - Constructive Criticism Requires Reasons
Posting in a suggestion thread simply to voice dislike for the idea is unhelpful and unneeded. Always include reasons for disagreeing with the idea or ways it could be improved. A suggestion could throw off the game balance, disrupt progression, introduce an overpowered item or mechanic, or create any of a million other problems. Provide that information so that the suggestion author might possibly agree and make the suggestion better. - If You Have Nothing Nice to Say, Don't Say Anything At All
Far too many people think that criticizing a suggestion offers a free pass to attack and incite other members. This is most certainly not the case and such behavior will not be tolerated.
Criticism is not merely a label to be slapped on displeasure in the hopes of justifying nasty words. Criticism is an art, and it consists of doing all of the above in a positive fashion. Why? Because Criticism is meant to help a person improve. Criticism is meant to be positive by nature and making it negative defeats the very purpose of the criticism. If the intention is not to contribute to an idea in any sort of positive fashion, then simply do not post at all.
- Removed "no Cthulhu suggestions" rule: 2023/08/31
- Updated section name and links: 2023/07/22
- Fixed formatting: 2023/06/24
- Fixed broken images: 2023/06/17
- Added Criticism Guidelines document group: 2014/10/14
- Published: 2014/09/17
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