Writing A New One wrote:

I just remember back when GOA was a popular game (~200 players on average), I'd look at list of people logged in, and a good portion of them were members. The only incentive was a BYOND store with a few unique items, iirc. So hopefully a popular SS13 branch, if they decide to add membership perks, will bring in consistent income. It would obviously take a lot more than just that to close the gap though, but it would be a positive change regardless.

Thanks, that was the incentive. Most of the smaller servers use TGcode or Baystationcode as a base (with Bay originating from TGcode and generally being awesome so I suspect they'll adopt something similar). I was sorta hoping those would spread into other branches.

It's just really difficult because it's an open-source project anyway and we're really restricted on what we can add. Nothing can influence gameplay significantly, but everything is tied into everything...so that doesn't really leave many options.

Even giving members bonus hairstyles requires recoding dna for all mobs, and then there's issues of people using knowledge that only members can have those hairstyles to identify antagonists and hence, grief. Which is extremely hard to police as an admin :<

Plus there's those whom decry any attempt to incentivize membership as making their game pay2win, no matter how trivial ._.

That being said, right after the trial member-perks were added, I was surprised to see how many people were already members. Which is nice :)

Judging by the amount I would say that most of the more recent ones have been 6 month and 1 year memberships.

It showed my purchases which were all memberships, so that can't be correct.

Why don't the engine developers who better undestand BYOND's learning curve start making some ground breaking games to prove BYOND's capabilities? I've seen what popular anime games can do. But it hardly shows anything ground breaking for the 2D byond engine. Am I supporting the wrong software?

Besides, do you really want them taking the time to make a game, when they could be fixing bugs or adding new features to the engine?

So you want them to develop an engine, be active in the community, make ends meet for said engine, have full time jobs, other personal responsibilities AND develop games as well as maintain those games' respective communities as well?

Alternatively why can't you make a ground breaking game?

To add onto that, one can know how to program in DM but not know how to design good games.
(Not directed to anyone specifically.)

I'm sure we'll be seeing some updates on all of that soon. We can only hope that the funding keeps up so that Tom can justify that kind of work.

SSjGOTEN12 wrote:

One thing that could help is if there was a way for mac users to play the games... (without the whole bootcamp jazz) and yes i am a mac user and yes i understand the reasoning haha. but ive been a byonder since 2003 and just hit my 10 year anniversary just hit back in late june. and i am too cheap in getting the whole bootcamp thing going. But it could open up a whole new flood of gamers to the community and more money...

I don't actually know anyone (in my immediate circle of real life friends) who has a PC aside from 1 or 2 people period. They all have macbooks! BYOND really does need a mac client. But I have a feeling the devs will just say "flash is coming and mac users can just use that".

Flash client != BYOND client

Pretty sure Macs aren't made for games anyway, supposed to be a professional computer.