Jaredoggy's site

Good riddance to the blogs

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:27:44 +0000

When I bought my first BYOND membership in early 2006 I was happy to help financially support BYOND in that small way. But after I had made a few blog posts where I had the audacity to express my opinion on certain things (guilds and front page moderation...so things that subsequently got scrapped/fixed :P), I noticed that the members page was only serving to roll out a welcome wagon for trolls.

There was never a worse time in the history of BYOND to be a member of the community than in 2005-2007. People were absolute monsters on here. Things reached a head for me on September 11, 2006 when there were a few posts on the front page making fun of the people that died on the planes that went down in 2001.

I made a post saying that we shouldn't be disrespectful towards people who died in a really horrible way, and I got endlessly trolled for it. People even offensively photoshopped real pictures of me and were able to put those posts on the front page as well.

I called for front page moderation, and all I got in response was a "People can post whatever they want since they paid for a membership." It's all well and good that front page moderation is in place today. But it should have started right there and then. Instead it didn't happen for years after that. Freaking ridiculous.

I demanded a refund from Tom at that point for the membership that I had bought in advance, and got it. I didn't show my face on BYOND again after that until 2009 when NEStalgia was in alpha. Since then I haven't really had the heart to blog very much either.

I feel that these blogs did nothing really except to turn BYOND into a social wasteland. For that I feel that Tom/BYOND completely deserved the mass exodus of original game developers as well as the influx of anime kiddies that has taken place.

The only reason things have been better the last couple of years is the work of Stephen001 (and other mods) for their work with front page moderation. It took the wind out of the sails of that horrible little crew of creepy obsessive/stalker trolls who came from god knows where, and did nothing but hurt the community by their incessant trolling. Most of them have now left because of that (or had their posts permanently hidden).

Anyways. That's my experience with these blogs. Hated them since 2006, and I'm glad to see them go. But they also made me so jaded against the project and Tom, that I'm not sure if I'll ever actually buy another membership again or not.

On some level, for the sake of NEStalgia, I want to see BYOND succeed. But for the most part I could care less. I also don't think that upping membership prices while taking away member features really makes sense as a business plan. But we'll see.

LOSING MEMBERSHIP IN 205 DAYS

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:56:16 +0000

I'm worried about how I'm going to pay for my membership in 205 days guys.

I only have a couple thousand dollars in the bank right now :(. And also renewing is hard work. It takes so much effort to rummage through my wallet, pull out my credit card, then type in ALL those numbers.

Can somebody please help me and just buy my membership for me? I promise I won't do anything productive with it!

Happy Easter from NEStalgia!

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 02:34:36 +0000

The King has successfully defeated the dreaded Ether Bunny. But was the price he had to pay too high?

I encourage everyone to come by and check out the holiday festivities over on NEStalgia. They will be ending soon, so don't miss out! And a special bonus for this Easter event only we'll be giving non-subscriber players a chance to experience subscription bonuses.

Also- don't forget about our great weekend sale on subscriptions! It will only last through Monday:

Misplaced rage perhaps?

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 04:05:16 +0000

Take a good long look at Silks blog post about calling a number to turn in fangames that sell subscriptions.

http://www.byond.com/members/ SilkWizard?command=view_post&post=110915
http://files.byondhome.com/SilkWizard/realinternet2.png

Now maybe I'm confused but I'm pretty sure silk referenced calling a phone number to speak with NAMCO BANDAI. Not FUNimation.

The most you can say about Silk is that he might have influenced PerfectGoku's decision to email Funimation. And even that is likely stretching it.

If we REALLY want to play the "blame game," wouldn't it make more sense to point the finger at the fangame hubs who sold subscriptions? Maybe that requires a bit too much rational thought for people to handle, but you need to realize that the only reason an IP holder would care about fan content to this extent would be if illegal profits were being made off of their property.

And if we REALLY REALLY want to point fingers. It's Tom's fault for not suppressing those hub entries sooner (much much sooner).

I mean go right ahead and continue to spam NEStalgia for the rest of the night with your weirdly misplaced rage. But you really should know the facts before hand.

Fall of the Lich King

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:42:29 +0000

Any other Warcraft players stoked for this WoW patch?

I just checked out the new realm-wide LFG system with a 19 Twink in RFC. A few months ago if I wanted to run that place it could take up to an hour to find a group, but I got into a group in literally 20 seconds today. Crazy stuff.

Plus you get teleported directly into instances now, so pretty good news for Horde players who want to do Deadmines or Stockades, or Alliance who want to do RFC or Wailing Caverns. Or really any other instance that is far away from any capital cities.

I'm going to wait about a week before I try to tackle the new 80 content though, I like to let them work out any kinks right after big content patches are released. Plus the lag will be a nightmare.

NEStalgia: Exploits of an alpha tester

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:01:43 +0000

As most of you probably know, the newest Silkgames project "NEStalgia" has been in development for several months now with a couple of rounds of private tests already completed. So I'd like to divulge my thoughts concerning how I think the game is shaping up. Mostly in relation to how the tests have gone, how it relates to other games I've played, and the impact on the BYOND community that I hope that this game brings.

My job as a tester is to basically play through the game and say "hey this isn't working" when bugs crop up and post a little message describing the problem. With a handful of people doing a really good job of thoroughly testing the games' systems in this method, bug fixes and updated versions came out faster than in any other Silkgames project I've worked on before. But the real thrill for me is the progress that has been made in game mechanics. I probably spend more time nit-picking Silk about balance issues with spells and stats than anything else. And these were resolved just as fast as the general bug fixes had been.

It is rare for a game to get a stamp of approval from me when it comes to balance, but this definitely does. Being that the whole concept is about the game playing like an oldschool NES RPG, it's done a pretty fantastic job of achieving that. The four current classes (Soldier, Ranger, Cleric, Wizard) all are incredibly well balanced, with each possessing equal amounts of strengths and weaknesses. Then the strength of monsters and bosses are so far perfectly tooled to just skirt the edge from being neither a cakewalk, nor a grind-fest. A rare trait on any BYOND RPG, including Silk's previous titles.

I've been a big fan of classic console RPG's for most of my life, particularly the Dragon Warrior series, and to a lesser extent the Final Fantasy's. And while this game borrows concepts from the former (my all time favorite series), you can easily see aspects from numerous other titles as well. As I played this I would actually forget that I was playing a game on BYOND instead of an emulator, or even my old NES. But this is better because there is multiplayer! I hadn't actually had that retro feeling while playing a BYOND game since DWO. And while that was a fangame, this is all completely original, which impresses me all the more.

Now lately I've noticed a lack of good new BYOND games, I don't doubt that they exist, but they're few and far between. My favorite retort several years ago when people first started obsessing over Naruto fangames/rips was "wtf is a Naruto?" And that still kind of holds true today (concerning both the obsession of Naruto and my lack of knowledge about what the heck it's about). I don't care if people enjoy this or that anime fangame rip. But back in the days when that community was shoved aside in it's own niche, the system was ripe with far more lively and fun original games and even fangames that weren't based on rips or anime's.

My hope with NEStalgia is that it helps to provide a new (and old) standard for games that are worth being both developed and played in this community. That said, I hope to see a great showing when the game is finally released publicly!

We still have a bit more content to test out privately in the mean time though, so perhaps I'll make another post in the future about how things are progressing.

Favorite RPG series?

Mon, 11 May 2009 07:45:09 +0000

Curious as to what RPG series people prefer out of the NES/SNES era of gaming.

I pretty much picked all the big names I could think of from the NES, SNES and Sega Genesis that either I've played or I've heard are good from other people. So let me know if you think I left out any major names- I'm always up for being introduced to more clssic RPG's!

Back for another year

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:54 +0000

Well I've just bought my third membership so far on this account. I've pretty thoroughly disassociated myself from the BYOND community as a whole for the last few years. But with the ball rolling for the new Silk Games title "NEStalgia" I'm thinking it would be convenient to be a member again.

I likely won't be updating this blog very often, unless it's concerning progress on NEStalgia. I also hope to eventually use my members page as a forum for current and future Balzackians (my in-game guild members).

Yikes it looks like I need to spruce up my page a bit too.

Safeguard for Member file downloads

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 21:43:15 +0000

I don't think this is probably a very feasible request, but if there were some way to prevent people from sabotaging other users BYOND Member bandwidth from mass downloading files, it might be something to look into.

I say this because Silkwizard's "Silkgames" account had a copy of Dragon Warrior Online up for download on his site (linked to in the HUB) and was downloaded nearly 8000 times in the course of a few days, thus exceeding his bandwidth by nearly 200 megs.

I'm not tech savvy enough to know if there's anything that could be done to prevent things like that from happening, but just throwing it out there that it could be a potential problem. It's not a problem for us to put the game up for download somewhere else or anything, but it is a little bit distressing to see what looks to be either an inadvertant or planned sabotage of his member account.

Inappropriate Game Names

Sat, 06 Sep 2003 04:10:22 +0000

Lately I've noticed that about half of the "Chatterz" games on byond (I've never figured out the point of those games) are offering Hentai. Then today I was browsing the unpublished games, and came upon a game called "PornStarGuru, **** your way to the top" by Inutracy. I'm just curious as to how far people are allowed to go with these games which are only appropriate for people aged 18 and up? Where is the line drawn? One time somebody even changed the world name of their game to make a very lewd insult directly at me. I'd paste it, but its way too inappropriate.

Anyways, I just think its kind of a problem thats seeming to deteriorate gradually. Maybe if there were some way to screen this sort of thing? Idunno...I'm no coder. I just play the games.

That's my two cents..thanks for reading.