I kind of like being able to make your case for the inclusion of something. Besides, the last thing the authors need is someone feeling like they’re entitled to the entire Muse discography because they registered enough accounts to make it number one. They’re doing this because they enjoy the music, not because there’s a business case for it.

Harmonix had a reason to filter or to channel requests: they wanted to see community’s interest on artists and songs so that they could work on stuff people would want to buy. We do things different: we do songs we love, not songs that need to net us a profit. And it’s gonna be really rare that an author wants to devote a week end (more or less) of his time to do a song he doesn’t know or love. However, requests are fun: sharing a passion about something is good and you may never know, someone can actually see something that interests him enough to pitch in. But still, requests serve 3 purposes:

1) They let us give you some hint of what’s coming (see the prog thread, in example)

2) They guide our scheduling a bit: if we have a song in the pipeline that’s been requested, we may focus testing on that one to have it out earlier

3) Something we used to love but forgot about may spark a renewed interest and make us work on it

So, I say: keep ’em coming, no points system or anything. Just, pretty pretty please, don’t expect too much because authoring a single song is a time consuming process and it’s very stressing, so it’s more a matter of finding out if something you like is being worked on or of influencing our schedule rather than a matter of having what you like done.

My only wish is that people focused more on artist- or genre-specific threads, since that helps us narrow our focus and get a better idea of interest without having to sift through the one giant request thread. That being said, if people have random samplings of stuff they’d like to see I’m not going to begrudge them posting in that thread.

Agreed. A more formulaic method of posting topics would be beneficial, IMO. I was annoyed to see a massive requests thread popup as it feels essentially useless and “good” requests are going unnoticed. Organizationally it makes more sense to make threads relating to a single artist or several similar artists and people can +1 it or add related suggestions. If a thread has more replies, the main topic of the thread is clearly a popular request and would potentially warrant more attention from authors, whereas a topic that is made and ignored pretty clearly doesn’t have much interest from the community. Then the authors can just comb the song requests forum for hot threads when looking for requests and they’ll know exactly what is popular. They can’t tell which requests from that massive thread are the popular ones, just that the random requests thread is popular.

Also, if an author has a forte or preference (prog, for example), they can focus on the prog thread for ideas instead of having to read a ton of completely irrelevant replies from the random thread. This makes it easier for the author and is therefore a more effective way of making requests.

And finally, this is stated pretty clearly in the Board Rules/Details. So it has already been established that artist/genre-specific threads are the preferred method of receiving requests from the authors themselves, so why would you post in any other way? And of course, the first thing to popup and most popular thread in the channel is exactly what the creators asked not to do. Sigh. I honestly hope they ignore that entire thread on principle, and to dissuade users from creating threads like that.

Be a dick move to delete it, though I might lock it in the near future.

It did irk me to see that pop up as the first thread on a forum titled “Requests”, though. The rules thread explicitly requests separate threads, but I only got around to posting it later on. ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_cheeky.001.gif”>

Whatever, I think they were all up after I woke up. ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_wink.gif”>