In response to Flame Sage
Flame Sage wrote:
I think Tom should form a group of people to "test" the new website piece by piece, that way the community can get some input.

Yes, we do have a group for that. And we'll try it out and see how it goes, and pull it if it doesn't work. Undoubtedly, people will complain and call us morons, but it's pretty much a no-win situation for us.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
Make one more condescending post, Falacy. Let's see how it goes. This time I won't just ban you from the forums.

Why am I being threatened for submitting ideas?
In response to Falacy
Falacy wrote:
Why am I being threatened for submitting ideas?

You can submit ideas without being a dick. I would be glad to take you seriously if every other sentence wasn't an insult. People often complain that we don't interact with the community for feedback as much as we used to, and this is one reason.

I would prefer to keep you in the community because you have shown that you can make games that cater to the players here, and you are in a unique position to give us feedback on games that get a lot of playtime. You also make good bug reports and have a lot of ideas. We have spent many, many hours working on things you've reported so it is not really fair to say you are being ignored. There are a lot of reasons we don't implement every suggestion that comes across. Sometimes, it's technical. Sometimes we have conflicting ideas that don't work out. If you ran a community like this, you too, would see that is the case.

What I will not stand is to be insulted on my own site. You obviously enjoy BYOND (or else you are a masochist) since you spend so much time with it. Yet at the same time, you appear to hate the software, the developers, and the community. I can only assume that this is because you think it has potential and want to make things better. If that is the case, then that's fine, just don't be a dick about it If it isn't, I don't know why you are here. Surely a person of your genius and business acumen can just make a game like Minecraft and make millions.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
> Well, the way to solve that is to only list games in the current official guilds + anything else we find / people point out. And members can then submit their existing games if they think they qualify.

I've always been for fully free either fully P2P content - no hidden fees or etc. So there's one problem: only members can submit their games, this leaves everyone else aside, lost in all rips.


Tom wrote:
> Undoubtedly, people will complain and call us morons, but it's pretty much a no-win situation for us.

No change ever went through smoothly, there's always someone who complains.



But I still think it would be better to have some dedicated team to identify rips, and move them into "Unpublished" either "Rips" category. I agree it would be very huge pain in the butt. But first step could be to remove old entries, which weren't live for like 6 months or so. Then simply start inspecting live games.
But it's just my opinion in the end. Maybe you will think of something better. I just really hope original developers won't be left behind.
In response to Ripiz
Ripiz wrote:
I've always been for fully free either fully P2P content - no hidden fees or etc. So there's one problem: only members can submit their games, this leaves everyone else aside, lost in all rips.

My thinking is that if you invest the time to make a decent game, then you might want to pay $18 as a sort of "advertising fee" to get more players. Or a player of your game could even sponsor you. It's really not a lot of money and, you know, we kind of need it.

But I still think it would be better to have some dedicated team to identify rips, and move them into "Unpublished" either "Rips" category.

I'm not sure why we'd want to continue promoting these things. I thought the whole point was that they are a plague on our community.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
My thinking is that if you invest the time to make a decent game, then you might want to pay $18 as a sort of "advertising fee" to get more players.

But what if someone isn't able to pay? Personally I don't have credit card nor PayPal to pay. Neither I work to get some money.


Tom wrote:
I'm not sure why we'd want to continue promoting these things. I thought the whole point was that they are a plague on our community.

If removing them is the only solution - then let it be. Most likely not much work will be lost anyways. But still there's a problem to identify them properly.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
> You can submit ideas without being a dick.
You'd think that, and I usually do for that matter. But after submitting the same idea 3 times, my posts tend to get abrasive.

> I would be glad to take you seriously if every other sentence wasn't an insult.
As I said, the first few times, things tend to be fine. By the 10th, I'm a bit annoyed at having to repost/restate/reexplain myself, and insulting you is the only way to get any kind of response, even if it is usually just a ban.

> People often complain that we don't interact with the community for feedback as much as we used to, and this is one reason.
You should do it more often, then it might be less of a problem. I've found with HU2, that working closely with the community on updates for the game has been the best process, even if I do hate everyone =P

> We have spent many, many hours working on things you've reported so it is not really fair to say you are being ignored.
Most bugs do tend to be resolved, which is appreciated, but for every bug report that's acknowledged, it seems just as many feature requests are ignored. Most of them never even get a response or simple status change.

> If you ran a community like this, you too, would see that is the case.
I have that same community to deal with. The same members from this one applying specifically to my issues. Bug reports and feature requests just as often, if not moreso than on the tracker, general issues, and the same community bickering as here. Even if it is just a 5 to 10 times smaller portion of your own. Not to mention, I'm pretty involved in this community, even if I'm not the one running it.

> You obviously enjoy BYOND (or else you are a masochist) since you spend so much time with it. Surely a person of your genius and business acumen can just make a game like Minecraft and make millions.
I have often wondered about such things myself
In response to Falacy
Falacy wrote:
Tom wrote:
> You can submit ideas without being a dick.
You'd think that, and I usually do for that matter. But after submitting the same idea 3 times, my posts tend to get abrasive.

Ok, just don't be that way. I apologize if some of your stuff gets ignored. You aren't the only one. But insulting us is not helping. Even if it gets our attention (which is really my mistake for buying into the game), it just adds to the disharmony to the community and makes me want to work on this even less. And it gets you banned.

> If you ran a community like this, you too, would see that is the case.
I have that same community to deal with.

Right, but it's not the same project. A platform is one of the most difficult things to maintain because it is so open-ended. Everyone thinks they know what is best when the truth is that no one really knows because it hasn't been done before.

Anyway, let's not derail this further. I am really trying to work with you here. All I ask (and have been asking) is to be polite about it.
In response to Tom
I actually like the idea of allowing only published games to show up in searches and the listings. $18.00 isn't really all that much to be had. It's not even considered pocket change to me. I usually spend more than that on lunch once you factor in the tip. And, like it's been said...if your game is worth it, I'm sure someone will gift you a membership. That, and it's not like people don't have access to free website's to advertise their own hub that you can directly link to. "If you build it, they will come." =)
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
Hiro the Dragon King wrote:
"Fame" is not the correct word. "Recognition" is. The fact that someone else's name will be on the game is kind of a let down. You seem to be missing the point. Putting up games under another's hub will be extremely disorganized, not to mention you would no longer have any control over it. It would simply mimic the AMV situation on YouTube.

My proposal is to keep hubs, but only allow members to submit their games for listing/search, and those games themselves will undergo some minor approval criteria to try to weed out rips (and possibly reroute fangames, if we go in that direction).

Longer-term, that could be an idea, but right now if the idea is to build a solid core that isn't based around anime/fangames, anything that puts any sort of barrier in the way of that should probably be avoided.

Some things for possible member incentives (specific to developers) instead:
- Ads removed from their hub listing (the ones in overview/Play now).
- Members games get listed in the advertisement rotation (sort of like featured games now).
- Custom subdomain/redirect (blah.byond.com or byond.com/blah (rather than byond.com/games/blah/blah)
- FTP access to their member files (and combined with the above possibly allow them to properly host a small site for their games using the member file space).
- Allow publishing directly from Dream Maker to their BYOND Member files.
- Bug/Feature request tracker like BYOND has, but for their game (with built-in procs to submit to the site from within their game).
- Some more customization for their BYOND forums, forum icons, layout (custom forum CSS), etc.
- Possibly allow database space as part of their allowed storage to use for SQL saves.
- More detailed statistics about their game/hub (Something like this for their hub page for example).
In response to Xioden
Now those are some features!!
In response to Tom
My suggestion would be to have hub creation members-only, though hosting could remain free and unlisted games would just appear again in an "Unpublished Games" category. Then for the new user, you still have the option to freely develop and host your game in a complete try-before-you-buy experience, but then that membership would allow you to list that game on the hub and put it up for download.

As for what to do after an expired membership, no idea.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
My proposal is to keep hubs, but only allow members to submit their games for listing/search, and those games themselves will undergo some minor approval criteria to try to weed out rips (and possibly reroute fangames, if we go in that direction).

I -highly- disagree with treating fangames any different than original games as far as listings. They can be just as good and just as important for the community. "Rerouting" them or anything isn't going to change the fact that fangames will always exist and are a big part of -ANY- game-making community.
In response to Tom
I think forcing a submission for the game to show up in the search is the complete wrong way to go about this. Just hiding non-member hubs alone will get rid of 80% of the rips and garbage people complain about so much. It's completely idiotic to think you can stop all rips and trashy games and still keep your sanity and employ a decent method of doing so.
In response to Fugsnarf
Fugsnarf wrote:
I think forcing a submission for the game to show up in the search is the complete wrong way to go about this. Just hiding non-member hubs alone will get rid of 80% of the rips and garbage people complain about so much. It's completely idiotic to think you can stop all rips and trashy games and still keep your sanity and employ a decent method of doing so.

So you're suggesting that no non-members have hubs worth showing? That kills anything from say, DDT.
In response to Tiberath
Tiberath wrote:
So you're suggesting that no non-members have hubs worth showing? That kills anything from say, DDT.

If the consensus is that non-members can submit content, I have no problems. If even members have to, then I have a problem.
In response to Fugsnarf
Non-members can't submit content to the guilds now, so any changes in that field are relatively low if non-existent.

The fact of the matter is, there has to be a very large incentive for people to buy memberships, an incentive that's seemingly missing at the moment. Sacrifices must be made to ensure BYOND's profitability and by extension, existence.

It's the way of business and the way of life.
In response to Fugsnarf
Fugsnarf wrote:
I think forcing a submission for the game to show up in the search is the complete wrong way to go about this. Just hiding non-member hubs alone will get rid of 80% of the rips and garbage people complain about so much. It's completely idiotic to think you can stop all rips and trashy games and still keep your sanity and employ a decent method of doing so.

There seems to be some confusion here. The proposal is very similar to hiding non-member hubs, since non-members won't be able to get their games listed. I don't have a problem with giving them private hubs for their own purposes (or for use when they later become members and want to submit content).

I contend that the number of games being submitted by members will be low enough to moderate. If we really are getting dozens of submissions per day, then it should be fairly obvious that we're looking at rips.

We can "seed" the listing initially by just taking existing top-5 guild games and adding anything else that looks reasonable. Member can then submit their existing games if they aren't already listed.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
We can "seed" the listing initially by just taking existing top-5 guild games and adding anything else that looks reasonable. Member can then submit their existing games if they aren't already listed.

lol so you're basically just going to turn the entire BYOND into another (anime) guild? Why not just use the ones already in place if that's the case?
In response to Falacy
Falacy wrote:
Tom wrote:
We can "seed" the listing initially by just taking existing top-5 guild games and adding anything else that looks reasonable. Member can then submit their existing games if they aren't already listed.

lol so you're basically just going to turn the entire BYOND into another (anime) guild? Why not just use the ones already in place if that's the case?

I'm not following you. The top-5 guilds are essentially games that have been pre-approved already, so they are a logical seed for a listing. We still have to figure out what we want to do with fangames, so we may want to move those Anime listings to another section or delist them completely (which would make the initial listings somewhat useless for the current community but would set a better precedent for the future).
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