Deathguard wrote:
The tone of your posts implies you want everyone to commit to doing what you say, right now, and have it done by tomorrow. I don't see the problem with this. It's not like you guys have lives or anything. Chop chop, I want Flash client by midnight tops. Then make your points once, in a single post, from now on, and don't constantly bring them back up after someone has acknowledged your post. No. Our plan is to nag you every waking moment for the rest of your lives until you meet our demands. | |
Deathguard wrote:
'Closure' happens in 6 months time, when all of the changes being planned now actually happen. The tone of your posts implies you want everyone to commit to doing what you say, right now, and have it done by tomorrow. I'm not saying that these changes have to be made immediately. Given the responses I've seen here, it doesn't look like most of these issues will ever be addressed. It's not that these issues have to be fixed immediately but that they can at least be recognized and identified now. Here's a quote from comment #135: Forum_account wrote: These problems aren't a big deal - none of them would take more than a week or two to fix. What is a big deal is that BYOND's not on a course to fix any of these things (and if it is, that's kept a secret). There's no reason why things have to take so long to be changed. BYOND's development process is unnecessarily slow and you probably assume that's just how things have to be. That makes it seem like I'm overstating the immediacy of the situation by saying that changes should take a couple of weeks but I'm not. Deathguard wrote: Then make your points once, in a single post, from now on, and don't constantly bring them back up after someone has acknowledged your post. They've read it, it's cool. You don't need to say it over and over in case they forget. 1. They've read it, but did they understand it? When I say something, there's a pretty good chance it wasn't understood exactly as I meant it. Either side could be at fault and I usually assume it was that I didn't explain things well enough. It's inevitable that I'll try to explain something again when I seem to be misunderstood. All of the complaints about negativity in my posts (which doesn't actually exist) is only going to make me think that I'm still being misunderstood. 2. I'm not saying the exact same things over and over. We're discussing the same topics and are working with the same ideas about how to improve BYOND. Not every post is going to contain 100%, all new information. That's just how discussions work. Repeating an idea doesn't mean that someone is hostile. This is the same kind of fear of discussions that makes people label any back-and-forth exchange an "argument" or "flame war". | |
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#143 Jun 20 2012, 11:42 am
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The BYOND website is easy to navigate and looks inviting; therefore it does its job well. There will always things to nitpick and differences of opinion about the design, but the argument that the site is currently structured so poorly that it drives away new developers is bizarre.
Also, claiming that the BYOND Staff doesn't listen to feedback is incredibly ignorant. One of the defining features of BYOND is that its development is driven by feedback from its user base. Heck, I'd even say that they put too much weight on the opinions of their users. Again and again you've proven yourself to be incredibly negative and hostile while ignoring 90% of everything that Tom says to you, so the fact that he chooses to respond to you at all anymore is a miracle. Forum_account wrote: There's no reason why things have to take so long to be changed. BYOND's development process is unnecessarily slow and you probably assume that's just how things have to be. I suppose that you have access to Tom and Lummox's schedule? It's amazing to me how people who obviously have tons of extra time on their hands are always the fastest to criticize what genuinely busy people do with theirs. Whatever BYOND has done, it's been enough to keep you around this site for the better part of three years. If the dev team is half as clueless as you claim they are, then you must place absolutely no value on your own time... otherwise why spend so much of it here? ****** It's not that you shouldn't be critical of stuff, it's that your means of doing so completely overshadows any valid points that you may make. I'm not sure what you do for a living or what makes you an expert at all of this, but you certainly haven't made the case for why you're in a position to be talking down to Tom. Let's forget about BYOND for a moment and look at your own work. You've created some great games that no one plays, and excellent libraries that no other developer has yet put to good use. Whatever it is that you're seeking to accomplish on BYOND, you are failing at it because you are thus far incapable of properly promoting your own work and drawing people in. Ironically, that is exactly the same thing that you are criticizing BYOND for in this thread. | |
SilkWizard wrote:
Also, claiming that the BYOND Staff doesn't listen to feedback is incredibly ignorant. One of the defining features of BYOND is that its development is driven by feedback from its user base. They might listen to the requests but they rarely implement them. There's no way to tell. It might be that they read every feature request, add it to the list of things to add, and just don't tell people they're working on it. Then, because of the slow development pace, the feature never gets implemented. It's not that they're not listening to feedback at all, but that most feedback doesn't get used. I suppose that you have access to Tom and Lummox's schedule? It's amazing to me how people who obviously have tons of extra time on their hands are always the fastest to criticize what genuinely busy people do with theirs. Aren't Tom and Lummox working on BYOND full time? I can't recall a stretch of more than two weeks where it seemed like BYOND was receiving constant work and attention from them. Most BYOND users don't know any better because they don't have much real programming experience - they'll just accept that this is how long it takes to work on a project like BYOND. It's also hard to defend BYOND's development schedule when most BYOND users have full-time jobs or are full-time students and still find ways to make more progress on their own projects. Average users who haven't been managing the same project for 10+ years are able to update their games in a timely manner, stay up to date with posts on their game's forum, and post previews of the updates they're working on. Let's forget about BYOND for a moment and look at your own work. You've created some ... excellent libraries that no other developer has yet put to good use. Epic uses a few of my libraries and it's one spot behind NEStalgia in popularity rankings (and it's never been promoted externally). Whatever it is that you're seeking to accomplish on BYOND, you are failing at it because you are thus far incapable of properly promoting your own work and drawing people in. Ironically, that is exactly the same thing that you are criticizing BYOND for in this thread. The difference between is that I'm not trying to make a living from this, it's just what I do in my spare time. | |
What are you possibly hoping to accomplish here?
There exists a meager hope that this thread is still remotely useful for those in charge, to actually receive some feedback on things which we all seem to think are quite (if to varying degrees) important. And it dies a bit more every time it becomes a contest to display how no one understands what you mean and how most people are just ignorant fools. How about you flip that around instead: Lets assume Tom and Lummox know what they are doing, and that we're not all dribbling fools. And that if you suggest something that isn't immediately adopted, or even responded to, that at least its been heard and read, and thats more than you can say for a lot of other places. And if they find that its a good idea, they'll go ahead with it. Because lets face it, if they don't, its not as if calling them slow and horrible at meeting deadlines is actually going to improve your chance of getting something looked at, is it? If you're doing this 'for the users' as you say, then how about making it less about being acknowledged and agreed with, and more about providing feedback in the way they want the feedback, so that it is most useful to them? | |
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#146 Jun 20 2012, 12:53 pm
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Forum_account wrote:
Epic uses a few of my libraries and it's one spot behind NEStalgia in popularity rankings (and it's never been promoted externally). ...and I'm sure that the reason that no one is playing it right now is exactly because it hasn't been promoted externally. I'm not familiar with that game, so this isn't intended as a criticism of them: to focus on the BYOND popularity rankings is small minded. Especially in light of all of BYOND's apparent massive flaws that you're so quick to point out. Forum_account wrote: The difference between is that I'm not trying to make a living from this, it's just what I do in my spare time. You spend a *ton* of time on this site harping on Tom's every move, so acting nonchalant about it is a total cop-out. If what you do in your spare time is to relentlessly criticize the owner of a business that you claim to have no stake in, then that says a lot about you. | |
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#147 Jun 20 2012, 12:56 pm
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CAN'T WE JUST GET ALONG HERE
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I went ahead and looked at the following sites (And some more that weren't worth mentioning):
HaXe GameMaker: Studio SproutCore 52Framework I think each of those has elements that can be learned from. HaXe HaXe is delightfully simple. The huge-icon, bullet-point features are well-written and elaborative enough that they're slightly more telling than one-liners, but don't take up enough space that they're bothersome to the design. It also has a common theme we'll be seeing, namely a top menu bar with 1-click access to a few key things: Documentation, Download, Community, and Reference. GameMaker: Studio I actually don't like most of gamemakers pages, because they're very uninformative. But the Studio page has a really important more-elaborated technical view. It includes some key things: - A bullet-point longish list of features which almost anyone can understand, without prior knowledge of GameMaker. - Screenshots of good-looking games. - A list of supported operating systems - A more elaborated version of what HaXe has with the feature icon bubbles, that lets you know enough to decide whether to use GameMaker or not, solely based on this page. Collecting all of this on a single page is really key, because it lets you know: - What can I develop. How will it look. How does it look in realtime? (The showcased games have trailers) - What are the restrictions of the language (What operating systems does it support, does it require or use any key frameworks or system components?) - How does this system/language help me work effeciently towards what I want, as an indie gamer / small software house? And its very short and to the point, even though its a large page. Very few wasted words, and it never assumes what you want to do or how, it merely provides an overview. SproutCore SproutCore is an MVC JS framework for web development, not a game suite. So obviously its a bit different. But I just absolutely love the simplicity of the page you meet when you go to sproutcore.com. Again like the others, it does a similar thing: 1-click get started right in your face, a slightly elaborated visually pleasing list of key features, and some snazzy HTML5 to make you give the page an extra view. Notice the key named links at the top. Dinner calls, so I don't have time to mention much about the last site yet. But mostly more of the same :) | |
Alathon wrote:
What are you possibly hoping to accomplish here? I think that's the problem with the advice you're trying to give me. You're assuming that I'm trying to accomplish something. I'm simply putting ideas out there. I can't control how people use them and I wouldn't be dumb enough to put my hopes on it. I'd like to see BYOND improve because it's always nice to see things improve, but ultimately it doesn't impact me at all. If you're doing this 'for the users' as you say, then how about making it less about being acknowledged and agreed with, and more about providing feedback in the way they want the feedback, so that it is most useful to them? The posts in this thread are made mostly for the benefit of the staff (the libraries I create are what's done for the users). If I give them advice and they refuse to follow it because they don't like how I said it, it's their loss. If they want to make BYOND the best game development program it can be, it shouldn't matter how advice is presented (though, despite the accusations here, I've been very pleasant). If someone reported a bug in the rudest way possible, they should still fix it. It seems like they want to think I'm hostile so they can disregard the advice and not have to make any changes. | |
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#151 Jun 20 2012, 1:08 pm
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I don't know what makes you an expert Alathon. I've never seen you market anything. Your wall of text is rendered invalid. Good day to you sir.
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#152 Jun 20 2012, 1:22 pm
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Alathon, that is some excellent information! I'm sure it would be really useful when making some mockups. Businesses borrow ideas from other businesses all the time. That's a part of competition. You should probably start a new thread though, with a more productive atmosphere, since this one has clearly devolved into a battlefield.
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#153 Jun 20 2012, 1:31 pm
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Indeed. No one's interested in suggestions at this point. It's basically just 4 or 5 people yelling "y u negative?" at FA.
inb4 thread lock. | |
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#154 Jun 20 2012, 1:35 pm
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#155 Jun 20 2012, 1:37 pm
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Every thread Forum_account participates in degenerates into the same contrarian nonsense, and I'm ashamed to have fallen for his trolling once again. For the rest of you:
BYOND has a lot of flaws. Some are fundamental to the way we initially designed things, and some can be corrected over time. The list of things to correct is enormous, and it is up to me to decide which things we should focus on. If people think we are choosing the wrong things or that the pace of progress isn't up to their liking, I can't really say anything because it is what it is. We're doing what we can given the time and budget we have. A large percentage of the stuff we work on isn't even directly related to the software or the website-- boring things like PCI compliance and maintaining database archives. These are things you never even anticipate when you start a software project. Threads like these can be constructive for both us and our users. If we look at this and say, "hey, we really do need a bullet-point list of features for prospective devs to see", then we'll note the idea and get around to it. We're not going to drop everything we're working on to jump to an unrelated project (and while it may sound like "one little thing", these website features have a way of spiraling out of control). Furthermore, even when we do implement these sorts of things, they are never satisfactory for some users, and that adds an air of negativity to the community that we just don't need. Some of you need to just step back and look at the big picture. This whole system is pretty amazing, and I hope you think so too or else you wouldn't be here. I believe other users and developers would feel the same way if only they were aware of it. And that is a wholly different problem than adding some documentation or changing the layout yet again. It is a problem we must rely on our users to solve, because, ultimately, they are the ones are going to bring us traffic. Everything's amazing and nobody's happy! | |
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#156 Jun 20 2012, 2:04 pm
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Every thread Forum_account participates in degenerates into the same contrarian nonsense, and I'm ashamed to have fallen for his trolling once again. I'd have liked the leader of the project to show a little more respect to a person who... you know... contributed a shitload to the project, and spends a lot of his free time still contributing to it. Everything's amazing and nobody's happy! Unrelated to what I said above, but - well played. | |
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#157 Jun 20 2012, 2:31 pm
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@Toadfish and ET: Thanks for having a realistic view of things!
Tom wrote: Some of you need to just step back and look at the big picture. This whole system is pretty amazing, and I hope you think so too or else you wouldn't be here. I agree completely, which is what makes it a shame that other people won't see how amazing it is when they look at BYOND (because the site and software don't convey it - it's there (mostly), they just don't convey it). When you ignore 99% of what I've said here, the previous sentence should be in that 1% =) SilkWizard wrote: Forum_account wrote: That's not a cop out. If you were going to evaluate someone's cooking and you knew they were trying to become a professional chef, you'd evaluate them a certain way. If they, instead, only cooked three times a week to make dinner for themselves, you'd evaluate their cooking differently. That's just how these things work. Because of the BYOND staff's position they're held to a different standard. It happens to not work out in their favor here, but that doesn't make it unfair or untrue. | |
Toadfish wrote:
I'd have liked the leader of the project to show a little more respect to a person who... you know... contributed a shitload to the project, and spends a lot of his free time still contributing to it. Tom has done nothing but show respect for Forum_account in the face of being disrespected by him at every turn. You'd think that a frequent user of a free system like this would show a little more respect to a person who... you know... created it. Although Tom has acknowledged Forum_account's contributions on many occasions, whatever he has contributed is completely outweighed by his ceaseless negativity and vitriol. It's insane to pretend as if Forum_account has sacrificed his free time to be here on some sort of altruistic crusade for the benefit BYOND. He uses BYOND because he enjoys it, and he criticizes the system every chance he gets because he enjoys that even more. Forum_account wrote: That's just how these things work. Because of the BYOND staff's position they're held to a different standard. Your standards = the standards of a guy who spends an inordinate amount of his free time using a system that he calls worthless and inferior every chance he gets. Your "advice" is not intended to help, it is intended to demean. To use your cooking analogy, it would be like going back to a restaurant every single night that you claim sucks and never improves. You're not actually there for the food: in reality you just go back because you like the attention you get from raising such a fuss. You're only allowed back in every night because the chef is uncommonly kind and is willing to put up with you. You enjoy the attention. Hopefully the BYOND Devs won't give you anymore of it; I'm certainly not going to. | |
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#159 Jun 20 2012, 3:05 pm
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Silk: What I'm annoyed at is the implication Forum_account is somehow trolling in this thread. Maybe he's had a bad attitude, maybe you find his argument style somehow wrong or annoying (although I don't think it is, myself), but he definitely is not deliberately trying to piss people off. As the project leader, Tom represents, you know, BYOND. He shoulders extra responsibility to come off as respectful and mature in these discussions. It doesn't sit well with me that he's falsely accusing someone like FA, who, let's face it, has done /a lot/ for this project, of being a troll.
Now, maybe you don't mind this sort of attitude from Tom, don't see things my way, or whatever. That's fine - I'm simply voicing my own negative impression here, not forcing it on someone else. I think FA is a nice individual, who is also quite talented and knowledgeable, and who for some reason garners an awfully bad response in these forums. I really don't see why myself - maybe you do, but I don't. In any case, whatever you might think of him, I believe we would all like him to stick around, given his constant contributions. And for this reason I'm disappointed when people don't show him more respect. If you don't like his style of argumentation, you can just... ignore, you know? | |
'Closure' happens in 6 months time, when all of the changes being planned now actually happen. The tone of your posts implies you want everyone to commit to doing what you say, right now, and have it done by tomorrow.
Then make your points once, in a single post, from now on, and don't constantly bring them back up after someone has acknowledged your post. They've read it, it's cool. You don't need to say it over and over in case they forget.