Okay, let's not beat around the bush here. Of all the thing BYOND does right, there's one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb. Its it's way of sorting it's listings. It is absolutely awful. Right now it supports three different weights: Popular, Active, and Newest. Except everybody that uses this website only uses one, because the other two are completely garbage - and that's Active.
So, as it stands, the only reliable way to ensure your game has the most exposure on the website is to consistently have a high number of players online. Without that, you drop to the fourth, fifth, sixth page on the front page and your visits drop dramatically. This screws over single player games. It creates a website that is geared more towards multiplayer communities, and less about single player, leaving all the wonderful single-player games, like Regressia, dusty and underplayed.
If you sort entries by 'Popular,' it sorts by recent user favorites. I don't think this is even remotely useful in locating games. Popularity should be indicative of unique page visits, plays, AND recent favorites among other things; not just how many people have added your game to their favorites in the last couple days. Sure, people can navigate through categories to eventually find the style of video game they'd like to play, but the question is, how many are going to? When navigating a website becomes a chore, players tend to look elsewhere to find what they want.
What I'd like to purpose is a better rating system similar to the style of websites like Kongregate. Users should be able to up-vote or down-vote entries based on quality to influence their rating on the overall website. It's simple, it's effective, and it rids away with all the unnecessary clutter that prevents players from finding video games that they want to play, or just don't know about.
ID:1635307
 Jul 23 2014, 4:30 am (Edited on Jul 23 2014, 4:37 am)
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That might be true, but I think it's a lot better than what we have now. Already fan games are excluded from the front page, so all that would happen is that they would be competing amongst each other in their own categories. If as long as there is proper (or any) enforcement to monitor vote manipulation, I think it might be an overall plus that could breed more healthy competition among games and breathe some life into games that have been buried under the current sorting method.
It might even be better to do top games of the month/week/year to allow for better navigation. It might alleviate any wrongly reported votes, and give games that have been hit hard by one community or the other the opportunity to recover and shine at the top of the page. | |
You hit the nail on the head as to why this can't work: enforcement against vote manipulation. A system that requires active monitoring has two strikes against it already.
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Is there any hope for an easier way to discover games? Even if you were to scratch the idea of ratings out, the popular tab could use a bit of work and it might be helpful to have top games of the month/week/year.
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Like I said, every time we've revisited the ranking concept it's been a bear. I'm open-minded to new ideas, but unless an idea is relatively simple to implement, uses data we already track (and track well: all-time and recent friends are good metrics), and preferably avoids Frankenqueries, it's probably not worth the time.
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In the past the games could be reviewed, I think it'd be nice to bring them back and let them appear in visible places, only the most recent ones though. Now you see some Recent Posts, however, they are rarely related to any game, and I find it quite pointless to display the Recent Members.
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The review system was tied too much to the blogs. Bringing that back wouldn't work; too much has been simplified since then. But when we had the review system, it wasn't giving us any kind of viable data for ratings anyway.
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You could use BYOND's subreddit. The only problem with that is that no one actually does, but there lies a working up/downvoting system and the potential for active moderation by volunteers. BYOND shouldn't have to do everything, since community has always been a big part of everything. It would be nice to get some links from here to like, the Facebook and reddit and Twitter etc. pages that exist.
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I am thinking of moving away from the game featuring / listing / ranking and going with a basic search box (might need some other stuff to fill out the page or else we'll look very Googley lol). That way we don't need to involve the moderators to do any sort of filtering, and people will be more forced to advertise their games off-site. Seems simpler, and our traffic numbers show that people aren't using the front-page much anyway. It might make sense when we roll out the web game stuff since that is largely going to be off-site anyway.
But it's something I'm thinking about for sure. | |
As much as I'd hate for you guys to spend a large amount of time redesigning the website yet again, perhaps the website could be more focused on creating games and providing information about the engine aimed at developers. This has most likely already been discussed in the past, but I want to see how you're thinking now. Certainly what you've mentioned here is a big step towards that already.
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Well, the fundamental issue is that if we want to keep this project going, we have to bring in revenue. Since the tools are free (and always will be), we need to market towards players and having a website that gets traffic is really the only way to do that when you have an otherwise freemium model.
However, with the advent of the webclient, people can take their games off-site and still bring us revenue (if they don't try to skirt around the pre-roll ads or otherwise pay us something to disable them). If this becomes the common way things work-- eg, a game exploding through an embedded link on a facebook page (do kids use facebook still?)-- then that will be great for us and wouldn't require us to really worry about direct traffic to the site. Then we could, as you say, focus on advertising it more as a developer toolkit. | |
I understand. Things like this really do involve several trade-offs no matter how they're approached. I do have a few questions regarding the ads, which I've posted here to avoid derailing this topic.
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Tom wrote:
I am thinking of moving away from the game featuring / listing / ranking and going with a basic search box (might need some other stuff to fill out the page or else we'll look very Googley lol). That way we don't need to involve the moderators to do any sort of filtering, and people will be more forced to advertise their games off-site. Seems simpler, and our traffic numbers show that people aren't using the front-page much anyway. It might make sense when we roll out the web game stuff since that is largely going to be off-site anyway. If you do this please bring back blogs so every post I make doesn't go to the front page. | |
Fan games are why byond is still alive.Js
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Also, consider what an up-down vote would mean for the variety of games: it would disappear under a mountain of anime. (And any game that garnered enough of an organized hate base, even for frivolous or invalid reasons, would get clobbered.) People don't vote on quality; they vote on fun. The fan system is effectively an upvote anyway.