Your discussion of accountability has essentially nothing to do with game developers though. They are accountable primarily to themselves, and to whomever they decide they would like to be accountable to, like say ... a target market.

SSGX's point, and I agree with, is that if a developer decides their game simply just has to conform to how they want to design it, or to the design conventions a group of 12 year olds would like to see, but such a design is very poor, ill considered etc, then ... ultimately, that's their choice and there's nothing anyone else can do about that.

That's the premise. For many developers on BYOND, they are young, they are accountable to their young (and sadly often not entirely formed yet) conceptions of how their game should be, and accountable to their target market of other young people, who's conceptions come from what comes before, regardless of the intrinsic quality of those games.

SSGX Wrote:

I just understand that virtually none of it can be fixed through BYOND staff intervention, which is what you always come across as suggesting.

Largely, I agree with you SSGX. I think the majority of the problems with BYOND can be solved through actions the developers can choose to take themselves.

1) Avoid advertising your game to BYOND's existing audience; attract your own from the wider internet. (This means make a game that makes sense to the general gaming community, and doesn't follow what other BYOND games do.)

2) Completely ignore excessively negative behavior. We can learn a lot from Phil Fish. A lot of the posts I linked earlier in the thread had dual purposes. Take a look at my "buck up cowboy" lectures about dealing with criticism, and the difference between "negativity" and "trolling".

At some point, BYOND users are going to have to learn to put on their big boy britches if they want to develop games. There will be a lot of needless hate directed at them that they just need to learn to deal with, ignore, or come out the better for.

This community-wide "I need an adult" behavior, every time someone criticizes you or your idea, I think is endemic of the neutering of children in my age group, personally, living in a society where a schoolyard fight or bullying results in legal charges. People of my age group and below have rarely been taught to deal with interpersonal situations on their own, and have always been told to go tell someone else immediately. What happens when this generation are grown-ass adults? Who do we go run and tell to protect us from the rest of the world?


There are dozens of other things that I agree need to change, but I think if the community were to have a little bit more of a "stiff upper lip", and try to pander not to the existing audience, but target an outside audience to GROW the BYOND community instead of just take advantage of it, we'd be moving in the right direction.

Aaronland wrote:

The Magic Man wrote:

And this game, with all this effort put into it, has no one playing it at my time of posting this. And is beaten in popularity by 2 other games that don't put in a fraction of the effort shown in this game.

Well then, this hurts mentally. :(

I think, to respond to the Magic Man's commentary on what the BYOND community expects out of the game, is to ignore what BYOND wants and find a target community outside of BYOND to attract to your game, and not necessarily to make games for the people already here.

Two games that found success outside of BYOND: SS13, and NEStalgia

All three avoided use of verb panels for the most part. They avoided what the majority of BYOND games do. AND they were advertised outside of the BYOND community. (which is rare)

It didn't matter that the community surrounding them within BYOND utterly HATED the developers of these games, and the playerbase of these games. They were still quite successful.

Largely, they were successful because of the majority of the existing BYOND player community completely rejecting them and belittling their creators on the forums.

Let's be honest here, we can call your baby pretty all we want to. It's still going to be an ugly baby. The problem with BYOND's audience is that it is here because of free, bad games, where they can get the highest score easily, due to the low number of players, and due to the low playerbase, be a "known" player in their private little "MMO". This is where a lot of the negativity comes from --the fact that many people are just plain pandering to the wrong audience.

If you community spends all of it's time fighting each other, nothing gets done. If the community spends all of it's time bickering, and staying divided, or arguing- when people approach said community they leave.

@Dariuc: We're not bickering right now. We're all just discussing why BYOND games are the way they are. We just all have differing opinions on what the root cause is. You feel like the negativity is needless and stifles the good games. We feel like the negativity is based in the fact that developers pander to the wrong crowd, which largely needs to be excised by refusing to accommodate their backwardness.

What he's discussed, is the fact that what is done, is of questionable quality. That has nothing to do with negativity or hatred, and a lot to do with the developer's design decisions. Like the design decision to use a means of displaying actions in a UI that reminds me of accounting software.

That kind of decision, has nothing to do with the community, and everything to do with the developer's design choices. Most developers don't spazz out and throw away a game in alpha because a person said a mean thing.

They leave it in alpha because it's reached the "workable" threshold, of literally just about working, and their expectations of what follows is not realistic ("Why is no-one playing it?"), they have worn interest in the idea ("Can't be bothered to do the next bit"), their scope was too large in the first place ("I'm going to make an MMO / Open world RPG with complex systems" brings very high failure rates in all indie development communities, but is a favoured genre choice on BYOND) yadda yadda yadda.

A person saying a mean thing about their game is very low on the ordering, and a person saying a mean thing to them unrelated to their game at all on these forums, lower still. Sufficiently, that it's a whole other topic of discussion, unrelated to why the games we have on the hub are bad.

Check out the unity community.

This is a great example, actually, Dariuc, one I thought of just after leaving my last post to go have a cigarette.

Largely, it's because Unity's community is there to support the tool. BYOND's community is hopelessly interlinked with the tool.

This can, however, be circumvented, merely by using as little of the community as possible, and making solid games.

Notice how Unity games tend to conform to modern gameplay expectations of what a mainstream playerbase actually wants?

Nearly everyone I've come across there completely friendly, and helpful.

I participate in the Unity community. I know C#, Boo, and Uscript, and I know CG, HLSL and GLSL. I enjoy the community as well, but largely, the community doesn't try to be self-contained, and advertises to a wider, more mainstream userbase, so the constant infighting isn't a problem. People come in, people leave. If we had a more mainstream developer audience, and a more viable platform with which to get some of the air circulating in here, I'm sure this would be the case with BYOND.

But you'll also notice the average age of the Unity community is in the 30s. Here, it's half that. --You have in the past ripped on people for being "too old" to be here, and that's part of the problem.

Or maybe, perhaps, advertising good games outside of BYOND will bring in more people, who want to make games. An influx like that is bound to make a positive impression on the community itself.

I haven't said that you should stop talking or that you don't know what you are talking about. I addressed your point - and it is a valid one - but I stated that I don't see it at the top of the priorities list. I'm not attacking you.

Doohl wrote:

I mean, hell, the creator of DayZ hosts his own SS13 server, but we don't see that kind of activity here on the site.

I don't think that's a problem. at all. We just need a couple more games to have playerbases that aren't a part of the community so that Tom and Lummox can justify monetizing the BYONDexe or Flash Client, or some type of micropayment tie-in.

Pretty much Ter13 I think once more quality games come from this site, BYOND will flourish.

Kidpaddle45 wrote:

SSX and Ter 13 are both right!
This is also the reason why I'll stick up with how the game currently is and won't change any of the formulas nor the battle.

If you look outside of BYOND, the number of Pokemon MMORPG isn't that high. I know of 2 and both follow the exact GBA story-line. I'm sure many people would love to see a new pokemon mmo with a new story-line and more generations in 1 game.

i didn't even post anything here besides for "drugz"
wat