Community Spotlight Feedback Thread

Hey guys,

As I mentioned in the earlier nomination thread, this month's Community Spotlight - I'll be sending Bernardozomer his questions within the next couple of days - is potentially the last. Below is a relevant quote from when I first introduced the idea of the Community Spotlight:
This thread will facilitate the discussion which I referred to in that quote.

Rather than just asking all of you to vote on the - very straightforward - poll, however, there are a few specific elements of the Community Spotlight which I would like your feedback on. Assuming that the majority of the votes on this poll are positive, my aim is to implement changes based on your feedback starting in July.

• Nomination/Voting/Questions: The first point I'd like to talk about is the basic three step process which is repeated at the start of every month. My reasoning behind creating new threads for these steps every month is simply to keep you guys involved, to "force" you to think about who else you'd like to know more about on a regular basis. Limiting nominations to three per person is also (a small) part of this, because it means more people have to post in order to get all the interesting people nominated. However, I'm sure there are plenty of other (and potentially better) ways to set this up, so my first question is simple: would you guys prefer a different approach to any of these three steps? If so, what would you change?
  
  
• Interview Length & Sections: The first five interviews have all had exactly 15 questions (this of course will also be the case for nr. 6). These questions were separated into three groups: five about SMITEFire, five about SMITE and five about the interviewee's personal life. While the exact length of an interview obviously also depends on the length of the answers (which can vary a lot depending on the interviewee), the first question should be obvious: how do you feel about the current length of the Community Spotlights? Are they too long/short? Also, how do you feel about the three current sections, should any be added or removed?
  
  Some more thoughts assuming the length/sections are fine the way they are: In some question threads, I noticed that there were (way) more questions about SMITE than about someone's time on the site or personal life, which raises two more questions:
  
  
  • Should the number of questions per section be more "fluid"? To clarify, say ~20% of the questions in the question thread are about the site, ~50% are about SMITE and ~30% of the questions in the question thread are about the interviewee's personal life, does that mean the first section of the interview should contain 3 questions, the second 7 and the last one 5?
    
    
  • Regardless of potential fluidity, what do you feel is "most important" to learn about someone who is up for an interview? Is it more about them as a person, more about their SMITE knowledge, their time or the site or are all of them (equally) important? If you had to rank the three from 1 to 3, which would you say is the most and least important to you?
  
  
• Question Variety / Repetitiveness: Alongside the difference in the amount of questions asked per category, there are also a few questions which are often repeated, in particular the ones in the "SMITEFire related" section. When/why did you join, who did you first interact with, why that name/avatar...Sound familiar? :P
  
  I do my best to keep up the variety between interviews, but figured this would still be worth asking: is repetitiveness a problem or do some questions remain interesting simply because it's someone else answering them every time?
  
  
• Anything Else: This post is already way too long (sorry), but I'm sure I'm forgetting other aspects I should talk about, so here we are. Is there anything else which you feel can be improved? The banner art (I'm not a GIMP expert just yet), my paraphrasing of submitted questions, the level of "seriousness" of the interviews...?

Thanks in advance for your feedback! :)

I think the general nomination and voting process is fine. I also like the interview length and separate sections. I think everything is plenty fluid there, and I like that the people can follow up with additional questions that can be answered on the side.

Ranking in importance, I think the general focus on SMITE aspects (their own opinions and whatnot) is most important, but that personal questions are a good balance. I think the "related" section could just be solidified into standard questions if we continue to do these.

I wouldn't mind holding off on the interview process for a few months. The same few people are nominated over and over, and eventually we're going to run out (is what it feels like). I know the whole process is meant to get people more involved, and that's cool, but maybe as we go along, we can just sort of choose a specific person (like Stuke who really seemed to want to win that interview, like we want to know anything about him XD) if it makes sense...and that would allow us to space out interviews more too.

If anything, I think it would be sort of fun to refocus these efforts into something a bit different. Maybe once a month, see if we can work to get enough people together to form a team to play a bit, and do custom matches or whatever. Host a more pointed Q&A type thing on Discord text or chat for people to ask SMITE related questions. Something different.

I think they should continue, I like them a lot. And I actually think personal questions are the most interesting, followed by SF questions. But yeah, maybe we could use that Discord server for something interesting.

I think the interviews should continue, since I like hearing things about people's personal life. If they don't, it would still be nice to continue them on Discord.

Sorry for the somewhat late reply to this, but I'm curious as to what others think about this. The reason we stopped doing Community Spotlights on MOBAFire a while back was because of this exact reason, so I'm curious: how long do you guys think interviews would stay interesting if we were to continue?

Given the current score on the poll (4-2, my own vote was just so I could see results) I'm not yet convinced that we definitely should or definitely should not continue, will get back to you guys on that soon.

Hey guys,

Following the release of the June Community Spotlight (sorry for it being a bit late), I figured I'd post here to let you know that I've decided to put the Community Spotlights on hold until further notice.

I had fun working on them and I'm glad that they were generally well-received, but at the same time I felt like it was almost impossible not to ask the same questions to each member who ended up being interviewed (especially for the site-related part) and I'm worried that by continuing the series now it might grow stale very quickly.

With that said, I did like the idea of having a set "event" occurring on a regular basis and I want to look into Bran's suggestion of coming up with ideas for other fun stuff which we can do/organize in the near future (i.e. "something different"), so any suggestions on that would be more than welcome.