I miss them a lot to be honest, I used to love when games could receive reviews from guilds, like the Anime Guild, you'd be proud if your game was listed by any of those... now it's sad IMO :S

I don't miss guilds or player-owned forums. I'd prefer that they don't come back, but that's just me. I didn't really use them in the past, so I hardly see any benefit in adding them back.

Regarding reviews; those were constantly abused and eventually became mocked due to only being used for:

• Giving rips 0/10 due to being banned.
• Giving rips 10/10 since they were given GM.
• Containing one or two poorly constructed statements as to why the game is awesome/horrible, as opposed to a detailed review. Examples being: "i liek dis gaem cuz bankai" and "sux owner ban me cause i spam w/e".

If you'd like to review a game, then just post on the games hub or in off-topic. It's a poor alternative, but if reviews are that important, maybe we can set up a "team" of reviewers to give information about some games. Although, I'd imagine people would play the game for themselves since they're not forced to pay to play, as opposed to reading a review on a free to play game.

I also can't imagine that people would go to our forum to check for the reviews, so it might be best to just post the review on the games hub as originally suggested. The only downside is if they don't like it, they can remove it.

Xirre wrote:

That method of reviews really is a poor alternative. However, what about giving certain people the ability to review? Respectable veterans of BYOND.

This was an idea at one point, but I couldn't find any volunteers. If we can get people interested, then I'd imagine we could give it another shot.

Well, from a legality point of view, just having the content on the site is enough of an issue, so it doesn't make much odds if you had it in a tag, a guild, or just in the general mix.

I am however, pleased that some people do enjoy and value BYOND Anime still. I think it served a very good role in bridging a lot of the non-member Anime developers and players who didn't ordinarily participate in BYOND's website, with the more 'core' community. There was certainly, a good sense of community there in the last year or so before the guilds was scrapped. I felt it was a testament to the guild that BYOND Anime's own listing guidelines basically made up the guidelines BYOND moderators used for fangames for a good 2 years after the guilds went, and were widely accepted as such.

Tom would probably want to plan things out a bit, before considering bringing some form of sub-community / guild mechanism back. Particularly as it's effort on the website, not on the actual platform, and would take some volunteer skills to bring to life in a positive way for BYOND instead of just flopping.

There were two major failings, as I see if, with the guilds. as they were.

One was a division of content. That is, having say ... 5 or so main guilds covering the relatively few new original submissions we had, made forming actual communities around these genres rather difficult. Content was naturally so, and so, it took concerted effort by a guildmaster of one such genre to get their place looking lively.

The second was essentially volunteer skills / direction. We had perhaps 3 or so natural 'leaders' as it were, but 6+ guilds. Naturally, making all the guilds grow under such circumstances is very difficult. Similarly, there was some disagreement on whether an official guild was merely a vessel to contain listings, or an entire sub-community. So some guilds were also never actively grown.

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I suspect, if defined and understood well, you'd get a lot of value and increased game activity out of having 2 or 3 official guilds back. You would not necessarily require blogs to do this, but certainly, reviews posted from the official guilds, and listings going through those guilds, would be a big plus.

I didn't like guilds, the members front page, and reviews.

But I did like the custom pages members could have (had a real myspace vibe, not that that's something to be proud of these days :P). And I liked the personal forums.

I vote no.

I dunno if I would agree with that assessment, really. I was handling BYOND Anime until it's end, and it had become a fairly rewarding and development-minded community. Took a bit of weeding to manage that, but that's fine I think.

As I recall, BYOND Anime was the only guild that actually had any semblance of an active community. BYOND RPG was pretty much dead, BYOND Action had a weak pulse, BYOND Strategy was a ghost town, and I don't even remember what the fifth one was at this point.

Quiet, I'd say, if we're discussing the official guilds. member guilds were a bit like the wild west, though.

The issue of guilds other than BYOND Anime rings back a little to leadership. Between them, those guilds had good leadership, capability for good competitions, active participation etc. You had BYOND Action's group play sessions, BYOND Strategy had ACWraith's tireless promotional aspect etc etc. But apart like that, each struggled to net a lot of traction, as the genre division was not really how people approached games.

This is mostly why I say you need a fleshed out kind of plan, with a clear sense of what said guilds of sub-communities are for, trying to achieve, tools required etc, before you could bring back a notion like that.

Before the present system was brought in, there was a bit of a private talk (and plan proposed by ACWraith) for a 2/3 official guild set-up. Essentially Games, Fangames. I would've liked to see that at the time, as the Fangames bit was essentially taking on BYOND Anime's existing structures, which I think was fine for everyone involved there, and the Games bit would've taken the amalgamation of volunteers and community members from elsewhere, with would've sorted out the division of focus issue.

I guess that's part of the debate, whether you'd seek to axe (or move) what we traditionally called the developer forums. Axing definitely would be madness, and moving ... I suspect, would end up a little iffy. Looking over the current top 5's, I don't particular see many people who were big in the guilds previously. Which is not to say they wouldn't want to be in a future arrangement, but I suspect they'd probably stick to what they enjoy over in dev help etc, so maybe you'd not really 'drain' that pool. For a fangame section for example, if ran as before, I'd choose to source volunteers who are passionate about that area, and probably have differing skill-sets to your top 5 helper-folk.

We are somewhat missing, though, is a good leader type or two, that's gaming focused. You really need that before you coud make a sub-community system work. It might just be that given a lack of venue to express themselves currently, we already have someone who'd step up to that plate but hasn't made themselves felt so far.