Mantis or GetSatisfaction?

[x4000]

So, I do have a lot of fondness for Mantis, but some folks clearly think it's not as friendly as it could be -- which is admittedly true.  We also have the challenge of it not having any sort of built-in community voting, etc.

I just today saw that Mojang (the minecraft guys) have a new account on GetSatisfaction, which I'd never heard of before: http://getsatisfaction.com/mojang

The cost for this would be about $40 per month, whereas Mantis is free (except in terms of bandwidth, which isn't a concern on the GetSatisfaction side), and we'd have to port a bunch of stuff over, which I'm not sure how easy or hard that would really be.  But, given the number of duplicates we have in Mantis, people are clearly having trouble with searching, and that's only likely to get worse with time.

I've played around with the Mojang one a bit, including making a comments on a couple of suggestions I thought had merit (yeah, I love Minecraft too), and rating a few up.  I found it really easy to get into.

So, my question is what others think.  We could potentially do away with the current form of the community DLC poll, and use GetSatisfaction all in one place, if we wanted to.  We could also use it to have players tell us what they think the most severe bugs are, rather than us just always working off the ones that are most recently updated.  These aspects strike me as really desirable, and are probably worth $40/month.

But I'm curious what others think.

[keith.lamothe]

I've really been wanting something like Unity's feedback setup: http://feedback.unity3d.com/forums/15792-unity

An additional $40 out the door each month is undesirable, but it's not all that big and GetSatisfaction looks like it could be a much better customer experience than mantis.

As for my own purposes, mantis is fine, though I do wish there were a way of unifying the community dlc poll and the issue tracking (without writing custom stuff in mantis, which while easy enough is a rabbit trail I don't want to pursue).  It's been quite a while since I gave the dlc poll decent attention, seems like we've really been running as fast as we can for a while now

[x4000]

Yeah, I've looked at UserVoice in the past, but that seems to only be really what we'd want at closer to $90/month: http://uservoice.com/features

Plus it has the drawback of being structured in a fashion that can't handle both ideas and bug reports, and where user votes can rather stagnate if they're using all 10 of their points on some stuff that doesn't get implemented for a long time.  I was really attracted to GetSatisfaction because it solves a lot of those problems while coming at a lower price, too.

[Spikey00]

I wouldn't mind; whatever system works the most effectively.

Hey!  Welcome back too! 

[x4000]

Thanks!  Was a good, restful holiday.  And now there's a big pile of work!

[KingIsaacLinksr]

As someone who has used GetSatisfaction as a customer in the past, I do not recommend it at all.  Here is why:

Chris, unless you want to get swamped by a terrible website, don't get it.  (this is the tl;dr).

GS Suffers from several problems:

1.  If either you, Keith or Pablo or any other employee of Arcen Games responds to any thread, GS will automatically consider the thread solved.  Regardless if the problem is solved or not.  This leads to confusion at best. 

2.  It seems that the "employees" have 0 control over solving a thread or anything. 

3.  Threads are easily lost and the UI setup is terrible for a "forum".  You can easily have multiple threads about the same thing because GS doesn't always show all threads depending on what your viewing.  Whether it be "praise" or "complaints".

4.  I HATE GS.  I'm sorry, but for a support website, it is simple terrible.  Everytime I visit one, I never get my issue solved and finding another thread with a similar problem is time consuming and/or impossible. 

5.  It is easily hacked.  Leading to problems for you.  Even moderators will have a heck of a time with this. 

6.  These forums are just simply better than GS because you can sort problems into different subjects where as GS doesn't allow for sorting of issues.  This could lead to a deluge. 

While I can understand the reasoning behind changing from Mantis, GS is a subpar support site that is easily replaced by better sites.  Like our current forums.  I've noticed that only starting companies use GS to start out, and then replace it with something different and better.  Like forums or a different setup of contacting the company. 

So there you go, I recommend not getting it.  I can't say if I would use GS if you got it or not.  I supremely dislike it. 

King

[keith.lamothe]

Well, that sounds pretty conclusive to me, actually.

[x4000]

Yep, that pretty much kills that.

[Wingflier]

I am personally a fan of Mantis, I have been ever since I started using it (2 weeks ago).  I think it's awesome that you guys promote a system which allows the community and developers to interact so closely on important game topics.  

On the other hand, if Mojang makes it easier for you developers to deal with what Mantis was intended to handle, then I'm all for it.  Personally I think Mantis does a fine job, but then again there are currently 560 unassigned topics to be sorted through.  Then again, the Mojang for Minecraft shows thousands (maybe 10s of thousands) of unanswered questions, problems, and ideas that may never be seen.  Maybe it would work better for AI War with a smaller community?

Part of what you would need to consider is if that $40 would cover "support" for every game you have made and decide to make from here on out.  AI War is important, but so Tidalis, Alden Ridge, etc.  Would you have to pay an additional $40 dollars for each one of those games?