Imagine for a moment that I find an interesting suggestion on the second page of suggestion thread #143. This topic intruiged me, and so I continued reading the discussion about it. How long would it take me? I'd look through 2 pages to find 3 posts about it. Then I would continue on for another 4 pages before finding a response. After that, I go through another score of pages, collecting only 6 responses to it total. Now I wish to, untold pages later, make a comment about that suggestion, perhaps one that no one had apparently made before. It would be somewhere around 440 pages since the last time anyone mentioned it. Not only that, but the original author of that psot may be long-gone. Any questions I may have had would go unanswered.

If we have an entire forum devoted to discussion said to include "Future Elder Scrolls Games", why are all such discussions shoveled together? This is like trying to implement a HOSTS file instead of DNS for a network of 10,000 computers. Not only that, but these aren't even in some kind of order.

I'm not making this thread to complain. I simply want to understand. If I spend a good deal of time writing a well-thought-out gameplay suggestion, I don't want it to fall to the end of a 2,000 page long thread. This is why forums were made in the first place, so that a thread would stay afloat based on its popularity, not because a single discussion weasled it out of 2 pages of replies, and noone would ever be interested enough to scour through 40,000 posts to find the ones they are interested in.

Because if we didn't have 40,000 posts in one thread, we'd have 40,000 threads in one forum, not only making them not really any easier to deal with but also drowning out any general TES threads that aren't suggestions.

I'd say they'd be loads easier to deal with. Imagine searching for, say, elder scrolls magic system suggestions. With a single flat thread, a search will only ever turn up individual posts from that thread. So, you have to spend an hour trying to find the first one, and then searching upwards through the other threads for the other posts, which can take just a few minutes or up to an hour.
Compare this to having individual threads, where you need only search once, and now you have a direct line of posts on the same topic, and only occasionally an off-topic one.


Also, there's a subforum feature available to you. Why not delegate suggestions to a suggestion subforum? Or have two separate subforums, one for discussion about future games, and another for discussion about general elder scrolls stuff?

You know, if you find an old suggestion you like, there's a little button named MultiQuote you can use to repost that suggestion in one of the current threads. Besides, what happens if you remember an old comment but you can't find it? Do you scan 40,000 pages for it, or do you use your knowledge of the general area of threads it was in and search 33 pages in threads 115-117?

Lord Umbrage, that doesn't solve the problem of trying to actually find the other replies to that suggestion. Besides, where did I say that that was one of the problems I have with the current system?

And of COURSE it's easier to remember the subject of a thread that you saw a comment in than it is to remember that is was in thread #68 on the last few pages. What if you forget? On top of that, you're unlikely to find people trying to find a specific post they've read before than you are to find people looking for suggestions about magic. We're talking about the difference between searching for an unorganized linear flat list and an organized list of related topics.

Do you know what a HOSTS file is? A hosts file is something that we used to rely on for resolving domain names in an TCP/IP network. The idea was that there would be a flat list of IP addresses and their host name, and if you typed in the host name instead of an IP address the computer would automatically search that host list and replace the host name with its corresponding IP address. That's fine when you have about 30 or so computers, but when it approaches the thousands or tens of thousands, it starts to get pretty unorganized and slow. So instead we came up with DNS, which allows related IP addresses and their Domain names to be stored on your computer, and if your computer doesn't have it, it will fish for it on other networks. This is THOUSANDS of times faster.

For those who aren't networking nerds, another anology would be trying to travel when you have no street names to use to navigate by. Or lets say you want to read a book series, but the library has them scattered amoungst other books by order of release, but you don't know the dates that the books were published in.

Threads have similar topics all tied together. A linear flat list has no method of sorting by contents. This is why threads were invented in the first place: to tie together similar posts. Obviously a subforum is a superior solution.

Don't question the rules. Just re-post your suggestion on the next thread.

Here's the issue:

We all want to talk about TES V. The mods realize that.

But this forum isn't for TES V. Its for The Elder Scrolls IN GENERAL. There's lots of potential things to be discussed here, and if the discussion of TES V was not kept to one (or, currently, 2) specific threads, the entire forum would be overtaken by it. Those wishing to discuss other things would be drowned out by dozens and dozens of people with most likely terribly worded and asinine suggestions. I can't tell you the number of threads that I've seen locked with 1 line suggestions.

The ugly truth is that most people don't really care at all about most of the suggestions posted.

Every now and then, a single suggestion will generate a discussion, in which case, the mods allow a special thread for it.

See: mature themes, multiplayer, quest markers and fast travel, etc.

But, the majority of suggestions will either be something small that doesn't generate discussion, like, "I want spears."

Or, they'll be a long, intricate list of every possible feature and tedious specific details on exactly how it should work. The thing is that everyone has their "ideal" TES game and it's not really the point of the forum or the suggestions thread to see what other fans think. It's more about posting it up there so that Bethesda sees it.

Generally, if no one comments on your specific suggestion it's because it was too broad or too specific and people either hated it or were indifferent. If people lke it, they usally just respond with a :thumbsup: and move on.

So, unless your suggestion is something controversial or important to a lot of people. You'll just get a thread of yay, yay, nay, nay that probably won't even last a page. It's really a waste of space when you could, instead, file all those suggestions into one thread. I mean, have you seen how log these threads get? How quickly they fill up? It would be ridiculous to allow each of those suggestions a thread of its own.

Basically, what I;m saying is that if your suggestion gets no responses, or only a couple, it's not because no one noticed it. It's because no one cares. I mean, to be perfectly frank.

I've posted suggestions that I thought were great and no one has said a thing. That's life.

This is the way it goes.

TES V has not been announced, in fact apart from speculation we don't even know if there will be one. This is the TES General Discussion forum not the TES V forum, if we allowed everyone to make a topic on whatever came to mind then the forum would be flooded with TES V threads. So we are keeping the number down by limiting them to only a few topics.

There will be no TES V forum or sub-forums until such time that it's existence is announced.

As for searching, the search for topic titles does not work very well - if at all - so by going into a topic, entering the word you are looking for in the search box at the bottom of a page and hitting enter, you will turn up the posts.

With that I am closing this as it is not going to change the way the forum is laid out and run - sorry.