Thank you all for the response after your initial reply. We acknowledge we missed the mark with our initial reply and it didn't properly address the real concerns. The reason why we declined the idea was because we do not believe the addition of housepoints will be a motivator for a more active suggestion forum, and neither will it result in faster response times from our side. We will not completely say no to this idea forever, but we feel it is better to first tackle the fundamental problems.
We know we can improve the forums a lot, and we have been working behind the scenes on 2 things; first, investigating ways to improve response time; second, we are looking into opening a suggestion forum on the discord.
For improving our response times, we'd first like to explain what exactly makes it take so long. When a suggestion is first made, we often give it some time for players to reply before we handle it ourselves. Once that week is over, the poltergeist will discuss internally and make an advice based on their own knowledge and the player responses. This can again take a week. From there on, it is passed to the appropriate leadership who will then give the final decision. And finally a response is formed. There are a lot of steps along the way, and not every step is as fast as we'd like. Once the rework of the discord bot is done, we'll also be working on some tools for poltergeist to make this process a bit more efficient without losing quality.
Now for the discord forums, we understand people are more active on Discord than on the website. With the introduction of Discord Forum channels, we've been trialling these under staff to see how well they work, and if they can be used to fit other purposes, such as a player suggestion forum. The experiments have gone quite well, and we are now working on the actual details of how this will work. We aim for a release in the first quarter of the new year.
We hope that these improvements will more adequately address your concerns. If not, we are not fully closing the door for housepoints and we will reconsider it in the future if need be.