I was looking over the roadmap today and it struck me that one problem with things like this, is that you get a lot of “votes” for the shiny stuff, or the stuff everybody wants to clone or copy, but not many votes for the simple everyday usability things that make a developers life better. Worse still, you get a lot of votes from people who don’t even know the implications of the features they are voting on, or simply do not understand and vote anyway.
I’m sure that Epic guys aren’t daft and will filter some of this themselves, so in a way the roadmap is more of an epic worklog than a thing that the community drives (outside of the tutorials and documentation and maybe templates at least). But it is a really nice idea to offer people the chance to participate in saying what they think is important. So I guess my problem is more with how to filter the community input than the input itself. How do you rate community feedback is quite a big question I suppose. But being able to choose which parts of the community to actually listen to is important going forward.
I’ve noticed that things like StackOverflow use a reputation based system, with more active community members becoming more influential as they take part AND provide well accepted answers. This might be something longer term for Epic to look at, having a community of developers at wildly different skill levels.