Grepolis Player Council – Summary of the first term & outlook

Dear Community,

The first term of the Grepolis Player council is coming to an end. We would like to take some time to summarize our experience with the project so far and outline some of the changes we would like to propose for the project, after gathering feedback from the current members of the Player Council. In their final call summary, the Player Council members themselves will also get the chance to touch on their experience with the project, so stay tuned for their minutes from our last call to learn more!

Let’s start off with some data & facts around the project:

• From October 2017 up until now we collaborated directly with a total of 24 members of the Inner Council.
• Players from 13 different markets joined the Inner Council forums and came into contact with members of the Grepolis team (Game Design, Product Management, Lead Community Management and the Lead Development).
• In the first month, we accounted for a total of 21 members participating actively. However, this number declined over the course of the project up until the point of having 7 active members left in the last month of the first term.
• On the Inner Council forums, 27 discussion topics were created, yielding a total of 64 unique suggestions for the game and providing feedback on questions by the development team and current in-game events.
  Inner Council members created about 2/3 of all discussion topics and posts, with 1/3 of the comments and topics coming from Grepolis’ Game Design and Community Management members.
• As special events, we hosted 3 Skype calls with 3-5 Inner Council members participating and the results of the call being shared on the DevBlog.
  The calls focused on the main discussion topics of the Player Council during the first term:
  • General player suggestions
  • New endgame
  • Mobile improvements
  • Game Performance
  • Casual worlds
• Out of the 64 unique suggestions proposed by the Player Council. A number of those suggestions was ruled out due to technical limitations or for not fitting either our strategy or the game’s theme. However, ~14% are ready for implementation or have already been implemented at this point, ~23% have been scheduled for future implementation and ~25% require more research but are definitely worth looking into.

As you can see, the project was quite productive albeit being driven mainly by a small group of dedicated members sticking with us until the end of their term.
Especially after the bumpy start of the project during which we faced some opposition from the player base and confusion about the implications of the privacy policy, the discussions became more and more fruitful over the months, which is something we appreciate dearly and would like to thank all members for. Still, we also see some potential for future improvement, especially in regards to the retention of members, but also in the distribution of tasks and information.

These are some of the areas for improvement which we identified in cooperation with Inner Council:

• Some players voiced concerns about candidates listed first in the election window getting more votes based on the visibility of their introduction rather than their ideas for the project.
  We will therefore shuffle the order of candidates listed in the election menu, creating a new order whenever it gets opened by any player.
• Communication between Local Council and Inner Council members was hard to achieve due to restrictions imposed by the privacy policy.
  For the next term, we want to offer Local Council members the optional possibility to sign the privacy policy in order to view select restricted content shared by the Inner Council
• High fluctuation and increasing amount of inactive members over time.
  On Inner Council level, we want to offer more frequent activity checks to nominate successors in case of members becoming inactive over the course of a month.
• Long time to learn the processes within the project (i.e. approval for external communication).
  We would like to keep some experienced members on board. Therefore the Council Advisory Board will be reworked to offer experienced members of former terms the chance to act as advisors for new members and to remain in conact with InnoGames to secure ongoing feedback processes. Members of the Council Advisory Board will be selected by InnoGames on a per-term basis.

With all these changes in mind, we will soon inform all players about the upcoming elections for the second term of the Grepolis Player Council. Due to the the aforementioned changes and the required development work for some of them, we will not achieve a 100% seemless transition between the end of the term and the candidacy period, but will start the call for candidates as soon as everything is ready to be rolled out.

Please keep your eyes peeled to the forums to stay informed about all upcoming dates and deadlines for the second term of the Grepolis Player Council.