Feels like a rant but please don't take it as such, this is my personal opinion of BYOND's state, sorry it took so long but here it is.
Where to start, over the years I've noticed something off about how BYOND is being handled when it comes to its current owner and staff, (1)from the lack of knowing what it wants to be when it comes to either fully moderating games or not right now this is a complete mess and it can be seen from a mile away, because 1 game gets removed for "A" reasons, but other stay up for "?" reasons, the usual staff quote"We don't moderate games, we are not responsible for what people make, next day games get moderated", this is invalid because theres so much abstract moderating going around this website that makes it so unprofessional on so many levels, decide what exactly kind of engine,website and community you want to be, and do it properly, right now it feels like developers or any kind of game maker hobbyist are limited by "whatever the owner/staff feels like its ok to make". (2)Developers(Myself in this case and few others i spoke to) have a hard time even acknowledge the BYOND engine to others, when people ask what engine you use for your project, I have a hard time coming up with an answer because i then in my mind start listing all the wrong reasons why no one would ever touch this engine and its not pretty. (3) A Owner(LUMMMOX) Problem, oh boy this becomes very obvious from the years I've watched how lummox handles this website and its community, theres a pattern that shows his mindset on things. First from the outside looking inside it feels like his in a bubble, all his doing is stalling as long as he can with donation meters and membership incentives and the window ads that literally destroy any chance of players ever joining and making communities, no other engine ever does this, his lack of website and quality of life improvements are of the chart, his lack of actually developing tools for developers to make money(such as steam implementations among other things), right now it feels like his only doing things for himself and not for the developers to whom he should be supporting 100%, instead we keep adding to the not feasible list that has piled up for over the years and to the "Never got any answers to the concerns of where byond is heading and what's the future here" that has been piled up for years.
Why does BYOND feel so anti consumer and anti developer? Theres a lot of reasons for this,(1)Lummox not wanting to let go of people he wants everyone to use and spam those donations/memberships and ads window, (2)making people having to install all these nonsense programs consumers should never have to, such as the BYOND pager that no one ever uses even lummox doesn't, because of how truly bad this piece of software is, (3)the popup Ads that btw its completely broken and anti consumer, it lags, you can't mute the ad at all you can't pause the ad at all, you can't turn down the volume at all it will use 100% Volume, you have to manually go to your volume mixer each time and mute that specific page each time you want to enter a game, this is completely unacceptable and has been a thing since this was implemented, (4)trying to get someone to play a byond game is a full time job, how can this be? Theres few times it took hours to get someone who has never touched byond, get him into byond, issues with installing BYOND, issues with the pagers, issues with the windows ads that would get stuck over and over, issues with the PLAY Button that only works 10% of the time on the Websites, its literally a full time job and developers shouldn't have this burner on themselves to having to take care of each individual person, because of how bad this website is presented to people.
What i want to see from Lummox is a Complete 5 years plan. I want to see where this Engine is going, is there any future, where exactly are we headed and what's the plan, do you have any plans, or you just plan to continually make small updates with no incentive to ever expand in any direction, because right now it just feels like a milking factory, and the cows will run out sooner or later, its just a matter of time.
ID:2343201
 Feb 4 2018, 3:22 pm
|
|
Okay several things are wrong with this.
1. Lummox is the best thing to happen to BYOND. He's done nothing but exponentially expand the engine's capabilities and performance. Since he took over, BYOND has made more substantial progress than Tom made in a decade. Blaming Lummox is shortsighted and ignorant. If anybody was just about milking BYOND for money, it'd be Tom(and still that wasn't the case). 2. If you don't like the ads then pay the paltry sum for a membership to get around them. BYOND depends on that ad revenue -- i don't think people like you realize just how close BYOND has come to going under. If it weren't for those ads you wouldn't have an engine to be erroneously complaining about right now. Count your blessings. 3. A lot of your issues with BYOND could be remedied by moving onto a more viable engine. It's been said dozens, if not hundreds of times in the past that BYOND isn't perfect and if it's not up to snuff for what you need to do, then you should move on. BYOND is archaic and it's flaws are deeply rooted. You're never going to see sweeping reforms/overhauls with BYOND because the sheer amount of work wouldn't be worthwhile for a single dev working on a shoestring budget (a budget you arrogantly and paradoxically shit on). Do you expect changes when BYOND's income is essentially barely even keeping the lights on? 4. Grow up. Really. BYOND is a fantastic engine for what it does and holds your hand so much more than you know. To be honest, 99% of the kids like you who bitch and whine about BYOND being too shitty, aren't even remotely beginning to push the limits of the engine. Most of the issues you probably encounter are caused by your own shitty code and design process. Have you even made anything with the engine? BYOND is entirely capable of impressive, quality games with a little bit of determination and know-how. Yes, BYOND does have a low ceiling but if you understand how the engine works and what it does behind the scenes, it's very easy to work around, or work with that low ceiling. At your level (which i do not mean as slight), you're probably tripping on your own feet and then immediately bursting to blame BYOND for all your problems because "GOD FORBID I, A NOVICE PROGRAMMER, MADE MISTAKES!". 5. If games are getting removed; it's for a reason. For BYOND to remove a game it's got to at least be pushing the envelope on what an original game is. If your game is "Ninja [x]", "Pirate [y]", or even has characters clearly based on anime characters; you wouldn't even have your game up in the first place if it were up to me. You can't be lazy and rip off other people's IPs and then complain when you're taken down for infringement. Your entire argument here is poorly thought out and reflects your blatant ignorance of the engine/subject. Yes, you pissed me off with this. Yes, i'm telling you off right now because you're so deluded that you don't have an iota of how arrogant and moronic you sound right now. I won't be replying back to you, but I hope you take this to heart. /triggered | |
Do you really want to know where we went wrong? We didn't. We're still here after twenty years, and that's a huge success. BYOND has outlived the Java Applet, and people were certain that thing was going to change the world. Flash is deprecated, and BYOND is still being actively developed. I saw Space Station 13 reach 900+ players the other day. I've never seen a BYOND game do that.
BYOND does have some problems. It IS incredibly hard to get new people to play a BYOND game, but let's not ignore how that's true about adoption rates for anything computer or game related. We all want BYOND to be more popular and we all see how hard it is to get the word out, but have you taken a look at independent games in general? It's a tough, saturated market. So when we look at BYOND's problems, let's take our time and judge BYOND fairly, because it's much too easy to blame BYOND for all the problems you encounter when making and marketing a game. I think we all wonder why BYOND never became the next big thing. We all see the ways BYOND was different from other products and, in hindsight, the choices made seem so obviously stupid. But BYOND made smart choices, and you don't reach market dominance through smart choices, but through money. I was in a startup accelerator, and one of my cohort members was a DIY game dev product. They made their tech, they sought funding, they didn't make their goals, they disbanded. That's how modern tech businesses work. The "smart" move for BYOND would have been to disband back in the year 2000 when they didn't make it big in the late '90s tech boom. BYOND survived because it was focused on community and not money. That's what's special about BYOND as a game engine, and why it's survived even now. BYOND has challenges, and the full screen ads suck. They keep people out of the games, it's true. But they're also currently necessary to keep BYOND functioning. Removing them now will result in no BYOND, and no players. Want to see BYOND turn a new page and the ads disappear? Focus on it's opportunities. I'm sure LummoxJR didn't want to add full screen ads, but was forced to in order to keep the project afloat. I'm sure he's spent a lot of time thinking of ways to remove them and improve the software and community. I'm sure berating him for his donated time doesn't help. | |
The way its currently trying to survive it hurts it more in the long run, because theres no growth it will not grow at all, and in due time things will turn for the worst if its not starting to do something about how we recieve new members, even existent members have a tought time navigating the forums, hubs and pager, its the real obstacles to get any sort of progress going, and I still think the Windows ads is unnaceptable in its current state because of how its delivered you can't control any aspect of it, and theres ads that SHOUT at you and think how that sounds when said ads window uses 100% volume and you can't do anything about it.
| |
Quit monetizing other peoples' IP and you won't have to whine about your game getting taken down.
Some other points were valid. But most of it comes from a position of complaining that BYOND has to keep reminding you guys that what you are doing is illegal and keeps getting nastygrams e-mailed to them from IP holders because of your own actions. | |
Your last response makes it seem like you want to have a conversation about BYOND's long term prospects and strategy. That conversation isn't possible when you come from a position of: 1) not understanding its history, 2) not understanding the financial realities of software development (and even accussing Lummox of improperly milking money from BYOND), 3) Devoting most of your criticism to moderation policies based on legal considerations you don't understand, 4) being extremely critical to your benefactor, 5) demanding work be done to satisfy you (the 5 year plan thing).
Maybe you didn't think you were being negative, unfair, accusatory, and demanding, but that's my point. You walked into a situation you don't understand and started to make demands and throw shade. If you want BYOND to have a bright future and be a part of it, learn to be a better community member. In fact, that's my advice to all of BYOND. If you want to see BYOND grow, be a community that people want to join. That starts with how you talk to and talk about other community members. | |
I've been here since 2001, and yes my intention wasn't to be negative or accusatory or demanding, just my perspective of how i feel about Byond in its current state. And your last line i tottaly agree with it.
| |
This last month I've been thinking about how BYOND can "go right" (to mirror the topic of this post). Communities are built through small deliberate actions over a long period of time, and large successes are made from lots of small positive steps.
I've had an idea for a small positive step, so I posted it over here: ID:2343253 Let me know what you think. | |
When you say the term fullwindow ads, is that exactly what im describing? Because i've never seen youtube or twitch or any other platform ever do what byond currently does with this so called fullwindow ads. Where it completly restricts players from doing anything about the volume, time, the content inside it, the manner in which is delivered.
| |
S10Games wrote:
I've been here since 2001, and yes my intention wasn't to be negative or accusatory or demanding, just my perspective of how i feel about Byond in its current state. And your last line i tottaly agree with it. If you were here since 2001, you would have never made the original post. It's pretty much a baseless attack post and only really illustrates how, if anything, BYOND has always had a very light hand with moderation. Which lead to the proliferation of fan games, and in turn a host of other issues. But these are problems with the cruddy user/player base, not the development of BYOND itself. IainPeregrine and Kumorii gave way more thought out and eloquent responses than this thread deserved. Currently, there is nothing stopping someone who makes a halfway decent game with BYOND from thriving. If you don't want to mention the tools you use, that probably indicates more about you than the tools. | |
You people are really stupid. Moderating games is part of what killed BYOND. And you want more of it? Not letting players play what they want killed BYOND. You hide all the most popular games, show only published by default, sort by "popular" by default (whatever THAT means) instead of "active" so it shows what people are actually playing.
No one can find what they want to play. And you hide all the anime games even though that is what most people want to play and what made BYOND popular in the first place. | |
There's no vendetta, it's called the law. Copyright holders ultimately get to decide, but BYOND's stance is to promote original games to lessen legal issues, there's no personal feelings at play.
| |
#2 the ads before playing a game really helped kill BYOND. I bet if you had a chart of when ads were added compared to the population decline you would see a correlation.
| |
Nadrew wrote:
There's no vendetta, it's called the law. Copyright holders ultimately get to decide, but BYOND's stance is to promote original games to lessen legal issues, there's no personal feelings at play.I know that, that's not what I meant. I just mean the anime games the majority come here for are pretty hidden. Every flash/html5 game website has anime games and nothing ever seems to happen to them. If I had the capability I would make my own website with an unfiltered list of all games on BYOND sorted by player count. I've seen a website that did that before except it was for just 1 game. You could register your game on the site by just pasting your byond.com hub link and it would relay the server list and player counts etc to that website. Adult games should be allowed but in a separate section. | |
They have to be pretty hidden, that's my point.
As for the population, you might be surprised to hear, but the population has actually steadily increased over the years, not declined. The community has declined, sure, but that was more of an intentional step back from heavily focusing on that part. There's quite a lot of people online at any given time in quite a few games, even if said games aren't highly visible. | |
In my opinion, there are plenty of problems with BYOND, but not quite what the OP here has indicated. Here are my thoughts.
There are any number of developers here with ample C++ experience that would gladly contribute to the code-base, whether it was open-source or whether Lummox hand-picked a couple and imposed non-disclosure agreements. While they might not submit 40+ hours a week to development, they also could contribute for free. Many of his arguments against requisitioning help seem silly to me. Usually it amounts to "the code is ugly and you couldn't possibly comprehend it," or "if we had 10,000 people contributing it would take longer to review than to just develop alone." Here's my recommendation to Lummox: Create a private Github repo or two. Add 3-5 trusted contributors (after they sign an NDA of course), and don't give them write access to master. Let them reason about the source code on their own time and motivation. When they decide to contribute, they can submit Pull Requests. These will likely be infrequent enough that they add value without over-burdening you with review time. Likewise, code that you write could be pull-requested before merging, giving the other contributors a chance to double-check your work. | |
You hit the nail on the Hiead.
| |
A HUGE FRIGGIN LONG TIME.
It doesn't look like you understand why that's important, or how it limits the choices that can be made today. The governing paradigm of how people find, play, and organize around games on the internet has changed fundamentally several times since DUNG first went online.
BYOND carries with it the infrastructure needed, at the time, to function within those paradigms. The hub, pager, forums, etc., might look backwards to you, but they were necessary at some crucial point in BYOND's history. And they can't be removed without a giant overhaul of the entire software suite. In fact, it would be easier to create a new product entirely than to fundamentally change BYOND's direction. Any such endeaver would require hundreds of thousands of dollars. The fact that LummoxJR chooses to spend their time here instead of in a much more lucrative activity shows how much they care for the community.
Then there's the issue of moderation. For legal reasons, the moderators can't act as copyright "gate keepers", so they have to keep a hands off policy when it comes to fan games. However, that stops as soon as they receive notification from a copyright holder. Then they're FORCED to remove copyright content. See how their hands are tied? They can't allow games on the hub that contain materials explicitely forbidden in the notices they've received, but they can't take down other games from other Animes because they haven't received a notice yet. Sounds complicated, right? Isn't it crazy that BYOND is the only game engine doing this? Ever considered that Unity doesn't have a "Hub" where any twelve year old can post a game?
Don't like ads? Yeah, I agree. We should dismantle capitalism and remove the barbaric systems necessary to maintain artificial scarcity. Then artists and entrepreneurs would be free to create the better worlds we envision, instead of trying to sell you tastey Tide Pods. No one likes full screen ads, but even the NY Times website & Youtube uses them. Your fans see them every time they watch DB Super on Crunchyroll.
Ads are necessary.
They're necessary because it's an important source of income with no easy alternative.
There's no easy alternative because of the way BYOND is structured.
BYOND is structured the way it is because it is a survivor of the ancient internet.
BYOND is a survivor because people like LummoxJR love it and donate their highly valuable time to it.
If you want a 5 year plan, pay LummoxJR the 20k necessary to draft it. (Completely ignoring the business aspect) What you're asking for is high level software design, which is something you pay senior developers lots of money for. You don't even realize that, in your "milking factory" metaphore, LummoxJR is the cow. BYOND is getting a lot of work from them without paying properly for it, and we shouldn't expect that to continue. The fact that it has is amazing, and something I'm thankful for.