Pager Upgrade: Friends List Icons in Feature Requests

ID:280114
 
Feb 7 2012, 8:01 pm (Edited on Feb 7 2012, 8:14 pm)
Applies to:BYOND Pager
Status: Open
Issue hasn't been assigned a status value.
The friends list on the pager should show players profile icons next to their names. This would be another good selling point, and identifying user's with their profile pictures is a common/useful/beneficial feature.
As this feature will probably result in a general change to pager formatting, it could also be applied to the Games tab, displaying the hub icon for the games next to their names.

The pager should also show your own profile icon and username somewhere, to give you a more involved feeling, and informative feedback of who you're logged in as.

* Steam provides an excellent example for game distribution mediums.
#1 Feb 7 2012, 8:08 pm
+

I swear you have brilliant ideas, Falacy.
The pager has needed an upgrade for a few years now. Unfortunately I doubt we'll ever get it anytime soon.
#2 Feb 7 2012, 8:14 pm
A lot of your requests would be a lot easier to accomplish by just having the pager be a page on our website, since that way we don't need multiple protocols (the pager protocol being pretty archaic and difficult to maintain). In fact, we basically implemented it this way last year (it was in one of the 2011 goals), but it had a few issues with older browsers.

As we are moving this project towards a web medium, this methodology makes even more sense; and we've tried to make the pager/conversation system on the website fairly flexible. What we could do, though, is embed some of that functionality into the software pager by just having it be an embedded browser. Or we could try to lose the software pager altogether and have messaging take place on the website.
#3 Feb 7 2012, 8:22 pm
Having a software "pager" running is essential IMO. Primarily for timely updates. The pager is the lifeline from the community to its users. Instead of having to load up their internet browser, go to www.BYOND.com, and navigate around to find various things (especially new updates), the pager presents all this information to them instantly in a streamlined utility. Which brings me to this.

Leaving Firefox running 24/7, just so I can have it idled on the BYOND website, to constantly/manually refresh my account page for the possibility of new posts hardly seems like a viable alternative.

No offense (offense may or may not be intended!), but the pager doesn't seem all that robust. Would it not be feasible to simply wipe our the current version, and build a massively improved one from the ground up?
#4 Feb 7 2012, 8:27 pm
What I'm saying is that we can just take our new website features and embed them in a "mini" view that can be used for the "software" pager. This is actually what we did last year or maybe the year before, but it had a bunch of issues with IE 6 (which was not quite outdated then). But I think it'd be easier now.

If we get a lot of people playing Flash games, presumably they'll be on the website already.
#5 Feb 7 2012, 8:36 pm (Edited on Feb 7 2012, 9:02 pm)
In response to Tom (#4)
Tom wrote:
If we get a lot of people playing Flash games, presumably they'll be on the website already.
Perhaps, but: A. That Flash client is imaginary and will never be released. B. Even if people are on the site playing games, they most likely won't be refreshing the page every 5 seconds, and the site doesn't dynamically update when you receive new content. C. I think improving the messenger should be your primary concern at this point:

Currently, BYOND feels like a worthless hassle of a middle-man that connects you to games. There is no overall community involvement, there is no real reason to chat with or add friends to the pager, when you can do that more effectively in-game. By making BYOND itself a primary means of communication, people would realize; "Hey, I'm playing a BYOND game, I can chat with my BYOND friends." instead of "Why do I have to log into this stupid pager, so I can chat with my friends in GAME X?". Also, as I have been mentioning, such BYOND based communication could provide major selling points for a ton of features. 90% of the "popular" games on BYOND boil down to chat-rooms, something that you should take a hint from, and capitalize on.

If BYOND implemented a high quality enough messenger, people may start using it as their default. This could bring in unprecedented new people. Then, installing some hassle of a middle-man to join some random game wouldn't be as much of an issue; because they would be installing BYOND for the chat features that BYOND itself actually provides. This is something that seems to get overlooked: BYOND itself provides next to nothing to its primary user-base. Once a user downloads BYOND, and joins a game, BYOND itself becomes an afterthought; they are now getting everything from the game that they joined. To them, BYOND is just some hassle that they had to go through in order to join Zeta rip #30,000.