Stephen001 wrote:

Of course, everyone's "awesome original game that's just round the corner, but isn't worth spending a couple of foot-long subs on". Incidentally, that's a couple of foot-long subs to cover all of your BYOND website needs for a whole year.

It seems like we're all waiting for some flood gate to open and for good developers to start pouring in to save the hub from its current state. If this where to happen, the membership cost would scare a lot of them off if membership was required to make a hub entry. It's easy to say that a feature should be a membership perk because you know what a membership gets you, you understand how BYOND works, and you've decided that a membership is worth the money. You have to think about this like a new user would - they don't know BYOND and don't know why the $18 is worth it.

To solution to this problem ([link]), if it is much of a problem, is to have better searching or keywords. It doesn't look like much of a problem. Searching for "pokemon" does bring up Dragonball Sanctuary (which blatantly stuck "Naruto, Pokemon, Bleach" in its dscription) but it's 20th on the list and follows 19 pokemon games.

Flame Sage wrote:

I personally think you should have to pay to become a BYOND Member to use any of the developer tools, while it's free to play the games themselves.

Most original games wouldn't exist either.
I'd prefer more to fully ban ripping, rather than limit tools.

Why pay for BYOND, if we can get XNA for same price, which is way better too?

Flame Sage wrote:

I personally think you should have to pay to become a BYOND Member to use any of the developer tools, while it's free to play the games themselves.

But perhaps it would be good enough to purge the community and perhaps attempt to bring in a new crowd, one that would benefit BYOND more.

The knock on BYOND is that the engine is not capable to create a quality game. Until a game of quality is released, why would anyone pay to use the engine? It is very easy to sit here and say we would pay, many of us have been a part of this community for years and realize BYONDs capabilities. But if an aspiring developer came across BYOND, heard about its supposed limits, and see the lack of quality in majority of the games on this site, why would they fork up cash to use it when they can use a free, though limited, and more praised version of Game Maker and Unity?

I believe this engine needs a better reputation and a wide display of quality games before you start selling it.

Flame Sage wrote:

People keep on saying that all it takes is a great game to get BYOND on it's feet again, but we've been waiting for one of those for years now.

We are all too busy being upset about "anime games ruining BYOND". Whether that notion is true or not, if we were to mind our own business and create games, everything would be fine. I should listen to my own advice.

Any original game that gets created gets pushed to the wayside for another DBZ / Naruto / Bleach game.

It's fairly easy to get your game noticed if you have a game that is fun. As of right now, it is clear that the BYOND community would not be your target audience if you are about to release a non-anime/fan-game. But there are numerous communities that are devoted to indie games. From what I have experienced, they are willing to try our games out if those games are not the usual trash we see around here.

I tend to believe that we are too spoiled. We have a great engine to work with, for free, and a place to quickly advertise our game. But we still complain, while those who do not use this engine actually have to work to advertise their game. They explore many forums, perhaps create their own website, and try to get the word around. How much does BYOND actually have to do for us to make you happy?

I think there could be a few changes to the BYOND website to encourage and highlight these original games.

Of course. But as I said before, I believe going the route of making users pay to use the developer tools would accomplish nothing positive at the moment. Lets build up a library of quality games to provide people a reason to try BYOND out.

Falacy wrote:

Here's what should happen: The 'Add a new game/demo/library' links should be removed from non-members, and replaced with 'Become a Member to add a new game/demo/library'. No other changes should take place at this time, pending the results.

This will leave actual developers with several options:

• Buy themselves a membership

Have somebody gift them a membership

Have somebody with a membership post their game

Don't have a BYOND hub, just advertise elsewhere

Post on the forums about any of the above

This will rid us of vast majority of the noob rippers that put up 10 new hubs a day, then the next day those 10 games are all dead and 10 new ones are up to replace them.
Stop considering it, and just do it. Its a simple change that should only take a few minutes. It will either be a massive improvement, or a massive fail. If its a massive fail, then it will only take another few minutes to undo.




This. My God please this -.-.

BYOND is dying as is, no reason to let it continue as is.

We need to cut things in at the gut. We need to cut down the blatant stupidity.

A LOT of communities that I've seen/heard of ignore BYOND simply because "it's nothing but rips".

Cut those freaking rips out and let people with an IQ over 40 in on BYOND at last.

Forum_account wrote:

The problem is not that the hub is dominated by anime games and rips. The problem is that the hub is dominated by the most popular games.

Almost every popular/populated game is an anime/fan-game. And 99% of the unpopular ones are rips.

Purging undesirable content is not the solution.
We can think about two reasons why content should be displayed:
1. The content is new and people should check it out.

If you don't purge the undesirable content, 99.9% of the new hubs listed would be rip hubs.

2. The content is popular or high-quality.

This is already how it works...

The default game listing does a great job of displaying original games. That doesn't mean that any of them are good, worth playing, popular, or have any players online.

Forum_account wrote:

Simple methods for figuring out what the site should display are not sufficient.

They're displayed based on a (somewhat unfair) player based ranking system. I don't know if there's a better solution?

Forum_account wrote:

You'd have to consider the reasons why a user might be interested in a game (mentioned in [link]) and create a system that accommodates the user's needs.

http://www.byond.com/games/?command=view_recommended_games ?

I would support this. Non-members can still advertise on the forums around here anyways. It would also get rid of most of the garbage people complain about and push it under the rug. It'd still be there, it just wouldn't show up in searches and the makers would need to find another way to advertise it. There's tons of other great sites to advertise games on either way, so it'd be a double plus since more people would get the word of BYOND out there.

I do think that the completely hidden hubs would need to be shown on sites that they're favorited on at least, so that they could get in the "big five" guilds, as I like to call them.

It's possible, but it's a potential problem even now. It's why there are moderators.