I have a basic engine for an online RPG, and am thinking about trying to have the public submit ideas for which features should be implemented next. It would be done in an Agile way, where the number of suggestions for a certain feature would determine it's priority. My question is this - has anyone tried this for a new(ish) project? Do you think it could work? Thanks for your responses! -Shane

It could work, plenty of people around with ideas to throw towards a project. Maybe help by giving an example of what your engine is capable of to begin with so you don't get flooded with ideas that are just far too out of reach.

An alternative might be creating a toolset with scripting capability to allow the community to create the features and then upload them to a community database. Once uploaded the community can browse and download. The more popular features could then be rolled into the core game.

How would you go about getting enough people interested so that there were a good amount of suggestions to work with?

The issue with something like that is that you'll get people with next to no idea about game design/development saying "Oh! This will be a GREAT feature! It will make the game so cool, and it will be easy to put in, and completely balanced!",...

But it will be a horrible feature, a pain to program, and totally unbalance the rest of the game.

Case in point, see Wurm Online's suggestion forum.

lol @ Talroth's peoples quote ^^ that is what ends up happening though.

Your best bet to get people, and keep people interested is through staying active with your information. Even if you don't have much to tell fans and followers they always like news coming from the Developers.

If your wanting ideas then prepare for some wild ones but the best thing you can do if you can't implement something or feel its not worth the time to do is explain your reasons why. The more everyone learns about your engine the better help they can be.

I've been collecting lots of ideas from the community for my quake4 mod, but it isn't as easy as just doing what they want.

You'll have to listen, what they want, then estimate yourself whether it could work or not, maybe modify it so it could work.
Community Ideas are explosive, they could either be very good, or very bad for your game.

Also you need to keep in mind, the more you open your game for the communities ideas,
the more the community will demand things, the faster the community will get pissed
for small bugs or gameplay imbalance (which their ideas have caused), etc.
I found it to be useful to listen to the community, but never promise to include any of the ideas.

The community is also very good testing balance of weapons(,spells,etc..)
But when the community complains about something, most of the time,
they say something completely different than what they actually want.
You need to analyze those complains, get the source of the problem, and find your own way to fix it.

I made it this way: I collected a few ideas from the community, some from other game designers, some of my own, and included them voteable into the game.
I created a few separate(!) testing teams, telling them to try these different ideas, and report what they like about them and what not.
Then I took out the ideas that didn't work at all, and polished the ones that worked better, and did another test and collect feedback.
I repeated this until I found the values that where mostly accepted.

This approach worked so good, that most of my results have been included into the official quake4 1.3 patch.
But remember the most important part: never trust what the community says, but rather try to figure out what they really want/need.