24% (7)
3% (1)
3% (1)
3% (1)
37% (11)
24% (7)
0% (0)
3% (1)
0% (0)Below I have written a list of what I would like to see happen with BYOND. Hate if you want, I'm writing what I believe to be good ideas. Not everyone will agree, but that's fine by me.
Blogs - Bring them back. People crying about people making CSS posts got them removed from what I saw. People paid for the blog, they should post what they wanted. And instead of a "homepage" for the blog posts, why not only show posts from members that are following your page? This should solve all the complaining. Those people complaining need to remember, people paid to post those posts, it was free to read them, the people paying should of had priority in that battle. The blogs where a great way for non-website developers to have a "website" for their game/production team to.
Hub Creation - Without a membership, you can't create a hub at all for your game (Library & Demo listings should be free). I believe this to be a good idea simply because it gives BYOND memberships a meaning, and people won't create hubs for the sake of it.
Hub Limits - I believe members should be limited to a max amount of 5 hubs.
Social Network integration - You should be allowed to create an account with Facebook or twitter & allow BYOND to access your Facebook wall to post stuff (And invite friends to games through Facebook). I know there's been a topic about this, I think it's a good idea. Worth the gamble in my opinion.
Better Website - A revamp of the website to make it look more like a gaming website. If I was good enough at graphics I'd create a design myself and offer it up to BYOND.
Remove rips completely - For a lot of rips it's obviously a rip, remove their hubs. I'm not really a "hater" of rips, they don't have any effect on me at all (But that'll be because I've never had a game source stolen from me). I just think BYOND will get a better name for itself if this happened (And no BYOND wouldn't get a better name if it removed anime, anime has a massive fan base, whether the games are good or not as long as they're made from scratch I don't see a problem (Until the legal side hits)).
More bloggers - Things like BYOND Journalism, Along the tech tree, etc.. I think these were incredibly interesting and should come back (Nothing to do with BYOND development, but to its members).
Cleanup - A clean hub would be much nicer to look at. First cleanup suggestion is remove all hubs that have been inactive for over 12 months (And make an automatic deletion system to get rid of hubs automatically after 12 months of being inactive.
BYOND youtube submissions - Being able to submit video tutorials to a central youtube channel for all of BYOND. I believe there's a lot of people out there that hate reading, and would prefer to watch a video tutorial on how to do things, and/or would learn easier from seeing how things are done instead of reading a few paragraphs.
I've made this a poll for my personal interest to see what suggestion out of my list you like the best (if any, don't vote if you don't like any?).
Let the convocation & bashing begin!
ID:1488282
 Feb 3 2014, 5:13 am
|
|||||||||||||||||||
Poll: Your favorite Suggestion
Login to vote.
| |||||||||||||||||||
I don't mind the website, I just believe that it should look more like it's for games and more "catchy" to draw people in who are randomly searching the internet for games/development.
| |
You won't find games unless you explicitly look for them. Maybe some byond ads can be for recent trending games; updated once in a week or so.
| |
By RIPs you mean games that are using sources from another game, or do you also include in that list any fan-game? If so, I have to highly disagree. I know fan-games don't directly contribute with BYOND because they can't have subscriptions, but let's be honest, most of us found BYOND because we were looking for a nice anime game to play.
There are very few "full original" games at the moment that are still online, NEStalgia, Space Station 13, Eternia, The Last Conflict, Rise Of The Pirates, and some others... You can't really attract developers/gamers to <10 online games that are rarely advertised outside. I started on BYOND because I liked a Pokemon Game, if it wasn't for that anime game, BYOND would have not received like $40 from me (I know this is nothing compared to what some people have donated, but if you include the rest of players who began here with an Anime game, you'd probably get a good amount of money. That being said, I do support the "Better Website" idea, the front page has never looked like a good place for telling people what good games are made on BYOND. But I honestly doubt things like Blogs would help, they existed once, but it's not like we were getting attention from people on any other forum from that. | |
By rips I mean stolen sources from other games. I think fan games should stay, they have a massive fan base.
| |
Howey wrote:
By rips I mean stolen sources from other games. I think fan games should stay, they have a massive fan base. Then I agree. I have previously contacted Tom to report some HUBs that were using stolen sources. I'm afraid they allow most of them now. | |
Didn't vote because there's no option for: None of the above.
I know it's all been said before, but I really don't think that there's a lot we can do with the website to bring BYOND around. Ultimately, the sites and blogs really only highlighted the problems with the community that we had, and the minute we pulled them back in 2010/2011, the drama and immaturity created a tidal wave on the forums. The moderators were overwhelmed with people basically throwing tantrums and in general just being meanspirited and hateful. There were good communities, yes. But they took active management and didn't materialize on their own out of the wild-west of the blog world. I just don't really think a "better website" with more user-generated content is going to better represent BYOND. As it stands, the representation that we do have is in poorly put together games based around IPs that we frankly can't advertise, and a few solid games that for some reason nobody likes or plays. And then there's Eternia, Teridal, and a handful of others that have survived relatively well, and provide a fair showing of what BYOND is. Unfortunately, though, it seems that any action on the part of the website is a bit too little too late, because the people that were capable of representing BYOND well on the site pretty much faded away as the groups that have represented it poorly have taken prominence. I'm not dishing on the fangame community, but I will say that it's absolutely undeniable that having potential C&D material representing your brand is not a very good image to have. BYOND needs a hard core of solid, knowledgable developers that are willing to teach and grow the community, but unless people are willing to listen, and to take sage advice where it is given, it's not going to do a thing. That said, there's always these hare-brained schemes the community cooks up that they claim will bring in money by the droves. When the developers listen, and put them in... That money just doesn't seem to ever show up. We're always chasing the white rabbit. But you know what's historically brought the most users to BYOND? People who make games. People who make games and don't blame the website or the software for the lack of players brought to their doorstep. As a personal aside, I'd like to point out that there is a game right now that has a Kickstarter up, that if advertised properly, and hyped right, could bring in thousands of potential users. Unfortunately, there's a distinct lack of social engineering going on for that kickstarter, which is resulting in <$200 being raised at the time of writing, despite being 10% of the way through their allotted time to reach their >20K goal. People aren't just going to find you on their own. People aren't going to find your product, and people won't find BYOND unless you give them a reason to come and enjoy themselves. It's not enough to put a hub up, or make a forum post. You have to market a viable product to a mainstream audience. It's not enough to be the best on BYOND. You have to compare to commercial games, with actual mechanics, and a cohesive narrative/style. You have to appeal to peoples' likes and wants, and you have to attack a niche that is not only trending, but unique enough in some way to attract people to a game that was made using an engine they don't know, and an engine that isn't capable of quite as much as many other modern game engines out there. Tom and Lummox, in my opinion, are doing a fantastic job, despite the lack of income. The updates that have been done, and what I've read regarding what's to come have been completely beyond the expectations I had during the leadup to 497-500. It's made polished, pretty games easier, and it's really opened up new doors to potential scalability for larger servers with more players. That's not something to be shaking sticks at. | |
Amen, amen, and amen.
| |
To alleviate any confusion, I believe that at least
Hub clean up also already happens (As far as I know) to inactive hub pages after some span of time. An inactive hub page is one which doesn’t have any recent server activity, or doesn’t provide a download link (The catch being that hub pages with a broken download link get to play fraud with the automatic clean up). The page doesn’t get deleted, but does get tucked away until it becomes active again. Aside from this, Ter13 has better covered anything I had thought about posting. | |
Howey wrote:
Blogs - Bring them back. People crying about people making CSS posts got them removed from what I saw. People paid for the blog, they should post what they wanted. And instead of a "homepage" for the blog posts, why not only show posts from members that are following your page? This should solve all the complaining. Those people complaining need to remember, people paid to post those posts, it was free to read them, the people paying should of had priority in that battle. The blogs where a great way for non-website developers to have a "website" for their game/production team to. As a user, I liked blogs because I was able to edit the CSS to advertise games that I was working on, even if their hubs weren't under my key. As it stands now, that's not possible. Hub Creation - Without a membership, you can't create a hub at all for your game (Library & Demo listings should be free). I believe this to be a good idea simply because it gives BYOND memberships a meaning, and people won't create hubs for the sake of it. We tried this already. It led to non-members flooding the forum with "This isn't fair!" posts. Hub Limits - I believe members should be limited to a max amount of 5 hubs. I see no benefit to this whatsoever. This would just create an increase on users having alternate keys. Sounds a bit silly. This is just an example of someone whose "net dream" would be severely crippled by such limitation: Kaiochao went out of his way recently to make 7 or so mini-games within a week. Oasiscircle is another example of a user that has made several games during his stay here. Neither of these users would be able to make as many small and fun games as they'd like as hobbyists if this limitation were implemented. Social Network integration - You should be allowed to create an account with Facebook or twitter & allow BYOND to access your Facebook wall to post stuff (And invite friends to games through Facebook). I know there's been a topic about this, I think it's a good idea. Worth the gamble in my opinion. I think we had some integration when we had blogs, it just allowed us to share blog posts on Facebook. Despite the fact that I wouldn't use a social network to log into BYOND ( I prefer to not mix my social life with other communities I'm part of ), this might be nice for some users. Better Website - A revamp of the website to make it look more like a gaming website. If I was good enough at graphics I'd create a design myself and offer it up to BYOND. There are programs you can use to create mockup designs for a revamped website. I'd recommend trying it out and presenting it considering Tom and Lummox are relatively busy with feature requests and bug reports. They may not have the time to come up with a design for the website, so going the "extra mile" might be worth it. Remove rips completely - For a lot of rips it's obviously a rip, remove their hubs. I'm not really a "hater" of rips, they don't have any effect on me at all (But that'll be because I've never had a game source stolen from me). I just think BYOND will get a better name for itself if this happened (And no BYOND wouldn't get a better name if it removed anime, anime has a massive fan base, whether the games are good or not as long as they're made from scratch I don't see a problem (Until the legal side hits)). We tried this before. Didn't end well and was very time consuming. It led to people contacting support and ranting/raving that it's not fair. Not to mention the "verbal" abuse we had to deal with while handling rips. On that note, it's very hard to get rid of rips. It's not like we can clean everybody's computers of ripped material and enforce that they don't download the source again from another website. Not to mention the amount of hours we'd have to spend moderating every new hub created ( assuming we're to be notified of a newly created hub ), as well as having to stay logged in to every server being hosted so we know they're not hosting ripped material ( all while avoiding an in-game ban since we're not immune to those ). More bloggers - Things like BYOND Journalism, Along the tech tree, etc.. I think these were incredibly interesting and should come back (Nothing to do with BYOND development, but to its members). For me, the only posts I cared for were of BYOND and Within. Maybe we can look into someone doing this on their own. I liked reading about the activity of our developers in one large post due to sometimes being inactive for days at a time. Cleanup - A clean hub would be much nicer to look at. First cleanup suggestion is remove all hubs that have been inactive for over 12 months (And make an automatic deletion system to get rid of hubs automatically after 12 months of being inactive. Maybe just hiding them as we did before ( and I think we continue to do? Not sure. ) after a set duration of inactivity would be better than just deleting the hub itself. Some people take breaks from communities, and sometime game updates take a long time ( some people even develop other games before deciding they want to update an old game ) -- so in rare cases, deleting a hub would end in frustration. BYOND youtube submissions - Being able to submit video tutorials to a central youtube channel for all of BYOND. I believe there's a lot of people out there that hate reading, and would prefer to watch a video tutorial on how to do things, and/or would learn easier from seeing how things are done instead of reading a few paragraphs. Albro1 started something like this once upon a time. I don't think he got very far ( probably had other things going on at the time ). I'm not sure if anyone took interest in his videos, but I'm certain anyone could volunteer to do this if he's no longer interested. | |
Lige wrote:
Albro1 started something like this once upon a time. I don't think he got very far ( probably had other things going on at the time ). I'm not sure if anyone took interest in his videos, but I'm certain anyone could volunteer to do this if he's no longer interested. I don't currently have access to my headset with a mic and I'm in a dorm room which isn't the best of places to be recording in, unfortunately. I got quite a bit of interest from the videos (48 subscribers, even) and have gotten lots of comments asking for more, and I wish I could continue. I do intend to pick it up again at some point. | |
http://www.byond.com/forum/?post=52872&hl=byondtube
Lummox JR wrote: When it's all set, you can upload to YouTube under your own account. Don't forget to put the URL for your game on the video description so people can come play it! Once you've uploaded the video, you can edit your hub entry to use the YouTube video you've created, and you can submit the video to the BYONDtube group.The group is gone, but this is the official-looking channel with the demonstration of NEStalgia in the Flash client: http://www.youtube.com/user/BYONDtube | |
I think better website will do.
| |
Falcon lazorz wrote:
A fan game that has created all of its own resources is just as respectable as any other game other than not requiring as much effort put into its advertising campaign. The main point here is the legality of stealing and how BYOND treats this. Legally speaking, this isn't quite true. Any use of intellectual property you don't own, and simultaneously doesn't fall under fair use doctrine, is a risk for any established brand. I'm just arguing that the majority of our games being fangames does help our audience, but at the same time, it hurts BYOND as a brand due to the possibility of C&D letters essentially removing significant portions of the content that does represent BYOND to the front-facing public. We can't advertise BYOND with fangames, and we can't monetize BYOND through fangames, so without a solid linkback from the fangames to the rest of our community portal, you wind up with the money-siphoning issue that you are talking about. The legal status of developing a fangame is kind of beyond my point in general, though. My entire point was that basically all of the suggestions depend on Tom/Lummox doing quite a lot of work to put themselves in legal peril over some genuinely poor quality fangames that are notorious for illegal use of copyrighted material and trademarks. By featuring what we currently have prominently on the website, we're putting effort into representing things that could either get BYOND a big C&D, or a lot of effort featuring games that nobody plays, or a lot of effort into featuring games that the community that plays them wants nothing to do with our portal/site/engine (Looking at you, SS13). | |
Fixing the website so it doesnt look like a fragment of 2003 that got shot forward in time would probably be a good start
| |
Better to look like '03 than to look like shiny "web 2.0" crap, or "white is the new web 2.0"
At least the site looks decent as it is. | |
Topkasa wrote:
Better to look like '03 than to look like shiny "web 2.0" crap, or "white is the new web 2.0" You shut your blasphemous design oriented mouth. please. | |
I honestly can't tell whether you're serious or sarcastic there.
Bravo. | |
Howey wrote:
Social Network integration - You should be allowed to create an account with Facebook or twitter & allow BYOND to access your Facebook wall to post stuff (And invite friends to games through Facebook). I know there's been a topic about this, I think it's a good idea. Worth the gamble in my opinion. This is the only thing worthwhile I took from this. It would be very interesting to see support for the Facebook API once the Flash client is public, but I don't know how far off into the future that is. | |
Assuming this includes software, the Flash support would be nice.