The following is a request, to anyone who can get my game published.
My game, Z Fighters Reborn, does not appear on any categorical listing on Byond.com, not even Games>All. It appears in no search results unless the user clicks on Advanced Search and essentially tells it to 'Include Trash Games' which is what your calling my game. Almost nobody looks at that section, maybe 1% or less of people who view Games>All even know about the unpublished section, and even less look at it.
No one can find my game.
My players are constantly complaining that they can't find my game on byond.com, I get 30 players a day at peak, and would get double or triple if it actually showed with the other games. (Games which mine is actually better than. I'm not the only one who thinks so. It may not be the best, but it's better than 70% of the published games.)
I don't care that much about being in a guild, it'd be good, but all I care about right now is appearing on Games>All in the published section (If that means I must be in a guild then that's fine). All the rest is secondary.
So can anyone mark my game as published (Or however it's done)?
Hub: http://www.byond.com/games/Aegon/1?tab=live
Aegon wrote:
I'm told my game needs to be in at least 1 guild before it will appear in any search results or categorical listings. Technically that's not the case. This is the distinction between published and unpublished games: A game may be marked with an "always published" or "unpublished" flag by an admin, which overrides all other settings. In the absence of either flag, a game is considered published if it appears in the top 10 favorites of any active BYOND Members and therefore has an overall BYOND rank. If a gmae is unpublished, but not outright hidden, you can still find it by going to the advanced search. There is also an availability requirement for the default search. Games that are not downloadable and have not been recently hosted (i.e., no one can play them or necessarily expect to play them in the near future) don't show up unless you're looking in the advanced search which can include unavailable games by request. However, Tom and I have recognized that the current games search does fall short in some areas, and one of the projects I've been working on (when not bombarded with software issues) is improving the searches on the site. Among my notes is that if you're searching in the main games search and can't find anything, it should tell you if there are results in a advanced search, such as games that are unpublished or unavailable. Long story short: We're working on it. However bear in mind there is an intentional divide between the ease of finding published games and the ease of finding unpublished games, and for standard searches we do intend to keep that. Hopefully our search changes will improve the existing balance though, and give everyone more satisfactory results. Lummox JR | |
So my game was marked unpublished by an admin because it 'falls short' somehow.
How has it fallen short? There's nothing wrong with it, it's very polished. It's hosted 24/7 on a stable fast server. Players love the game. I could list 100 more reasons. Can you give me more information? At this point I've essentially been told my game will be trash forever and there is nothing I can do. I'm sure my game is (probably) favorited by at least 10 members but you just said that doesn't matter because an admin 'flagged' it as 'always unpublished'. It was flagged based on misconceptions. I'm as sure as I can be about that. Seems like I should have recieved a notice or some input on this before Byond decides it's going to lock my game in a dungeon and throw away the key. This is a game that gets 30 players at once despite no one being able to find it. If it appeared in Games>All, I'm as sure as I can be that within a month it'd have 100+ players. | |
Your game is listed in 0 member's guilds, therefore it cannot be "favorited by at least 10 members." Your game will be published when a BYOND member favorites your game, and then puts it his top 10 favorites. How you about advertising your game to accomplish this is your decision.
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Aegon wrote:
So my game was marked unpublished by an admin because it 'falls short' somehow. I never said your game falls short; I said our search falls short in some ways and we'd like to improve it. Please take more time to read what people say before replying to them, because it is impossible to have meaningful communication without clarity. Can you give me more information? At this point I've essentially been told my game will be trash forever and there is nothing I can do. I did not say that. I said either condition--being marked unpublished by an admin (which is basically only done for rips) or not being in any Members' favorites--would make a game unpublished. I did not specify which one applied to your game because I didn't know which game it was. I finally looked up your game (for the future, it would be preferable if you could provide a link to the game) and my admin display tells me this: "This game is not in any members' top 10 favorites, so it will not automatically show up in searches." If the game had been marked as deliberately unpublished, it would have said so in my panel, so that isn't the case. No one flagged your game; it just isn't in any Members' top 10 favorites as you thought. Like I said, we do want to improve on the current search because it is lacking in some ways. However, we still do want to preserve some kind of distinction between published and unpublished games so the latter take more effort to find, since this will both punish rips and encourage users to make their games stand out for Members. Lummox JR | |
Aegon wrote:
(Games which mine is actually better than. I'm not the only one who thinks so. It may not be the best, but it's better than 70% of the published games.) Sorry, but, not at all. At best, your game is <= all of the other zeta rips. Just from the short time I played the game: I would never bother playing it again, wouldn't recommend it to a friend, and would be pretty sure that it was yet another zeta rip. For starters, your character creation is all over the place, and unless the player is putting forth some effort, they'll never even make it through that process. At least the base zeta rips just throw a bunch of popups at you in a row. Yours involves clicking through multiple mismatched windows, and then at one point you have to manually change over tabs in a stat panel to pick a race icon, it really couldn't get much worse. After this, you log in to an empty room, with nothing visible to do, no instructions on what to do, and you walk slow as crap - horribly implemented by using movement delays. Assuming there was nothing to do, because that's what I was presented with, I proceeded to slowly waddle my way around the map to find an empty forest area, and then gave up. | |
Lummox JR wrote:
I finally looked up your game (for the future, it would be preferable if you could provide a link to the game) and my admin display tells me this: I suggest this message be displayed regardless of admin status. It would really help clear up this issue with a lot of people. | |
If at all, this information is only relevant to the person(s) who can administrate the hub entry, so it should be only displayed to these (the hub owner and everybody who can edit the entry), in which case it might be neat if one could access a little statistic on the game and it's web appearance.
I don't know if people would like to access information such as amount of visits, downloads, unique logins per day/week/month, amount of and average place of favourites, listed in guilds,... though, so I hesitate to suggest it in the feature tracker. | |
I see further down in this topic, there is some debate about game origin. This may come as a shock to some, but my personal perogative is not to care unless the game being debated sports some disrespectful us of other people's work (for profit use, use without permission where the artist requires it, anything that wouldn't be deemed fair use etc). A new players on BYOND won't tell the difference, so I don't either when reviewing.
I just want good games, so that's what I review for. Pretty simple concept, no? I'm not sure I can stress this enough. The BYOND Anime post touches on my idea of 'good' in this context. We have a communal thing about for profit fan-games also, which I personally disagree with, but majority rules there.