BYOND Rant:

I recently go banned for, "Hostile attitude towards BYOND and its players". My only remark on that by itself is that I write with passion and if you want to consider that passion hostile, that's on you. That said, I was offered an ultimatum. "Cease hostility" or be permanently banned. I'm not going to go over how I was never hostile to begin with. What I do want to address is all of my "negativity" towards BYOND. Since the mod told me that justified criticism is okay, I'll operate under the assumption that this post won't be deleted (but it probably will be deleted). Anyway, on to my incomplete list of why BYOND is vastly inferior, along with suggestions (that will no doubt be ignored) to fix it.

The Website
There are a lot of problems in this area and I'm not quite sure how to classify all of these issues so I'll try to address them as they come in logical fashion. My first concern is that BYOND tried to do too much at its inception, perhaps spreading itself thin. When BYOND started it had several features. It had member blogs, it had community forums, BYOND Dimes, Development tools, naturally it had the software download, and the game hub. I'm probably forgetting features but these are the significant ones. Now most of the changes that have been implemented have been done in the name of "improving the site". Things like rip moderation (lel, that was a fail), making fan-games hide in the corner, removing player blogs, removing BYOND dimes... the list goes on. Falacy has already covered many of these things on his Box Zombies forum, I highly recommend checking those out if you want to know these shortcomings. I'm not here to address the why as much as I am here to address the how.

First, the player blogs. This is probably the first thing people think of (certainly the first thing I think of) when we think of BYOND features we loved and missed. For those unaware (like anyone that reads this forum would be unaware), you used to be able to control the CSS of your personal member site, IF you were a BYOND member. So if you wanted to leave a remark for your friend on BYOND when he wasn't online and for some reason you hadn't exchanged email addresses (early 2000's, I guess they weren't "hip" yet) you could go to their member page (as you can still do now) and leave them a message in the shoutbox. I don't believe at that time you could do what you probably do now and send a message on pager and they'll get it in their pager when they next log in (certainly not through the website) but if you could have, I forgot. My bad, this was a long time ago. Anyway, you'd hop onto their member page and (if they were a member) you'd see a vast amount of personalization. For instance, mine (I believe D-Cire did it for me, wonderful job) had a sparkling ocean background at night with the moon high in the sky. Many "programming teams" (they didn't make much) used page as an intro to their site. But the buck didn't stop as customization. A feature available to ALL members (BYOND subscribers and non) was the ability to make blog posts. These could be referenced to the forums, but they acted independent of the forums for the most part. I personally used them as a rants box about the quality of games on BYOND and the community of the games I frequented.

EDIT: Nadrew has informed that it was a moderation issue. I could probably craft an argument for the moderation but as I say later on, my emotional investment is gone. Not to mention everything was probably covered when the change happened, it's history. But I wanted to add this as well as the link to his explanation. The reason for my misinformation was my experience with other sites which apparently use outdated FTP practices.

This feature was removed. I don't remember the rationale. It couldn't have been to save money on Tom's part because the address to the member pages is still the same, and editing your page was REALLY just editing the HTML file that was "your" page. And those are all text files! So they're absolutely miniscule! And the editing was member only so you had to drop some cash to access these features. So you kinda paid for it yourself. But that's beginning to go on a tangent. The point is: we had this feature at one point and when it was removed the only thing people who supported the change had to say was, "This is a gaming site, not a blog site. Go to tumblr or wordpress if you want a blog". And you know, it was kind of right. For people like me that used the blog just to rant about how bad the games on BYOND were, we really could just take it to the new forums. We could take it to outside blogs (but no one outside of BYOND really knew what BYOND was... so we'd be preaching to the choir). The development teams could leave a blog URL on their game's hub page, fine. But what this really marked was a decrease in member individuality on BYOND. Because despite having the forums, we didn't have signatures. We had an avatar sure, but that is BYOND member only. So unless you pay BYOND, you're just one of the faceless masses. But like I said, that by itself isn't too big of an issue. Let's continue on our journey through BYOND.

The development tools available through BYOND. Well, they've improved over the years. But not quite to what I would consider to be "good enough". BYOND was trying to market itself as a serious development platform. As far as the language goes, it's really easy to pick up even for a beginner to computer logic. Its integrated help files are very useful to getting to know the language. Dream Maker is a language geared towards people who have no idea on how to make a game, giving them all of the tools to make their game. However, it does have its drawbacks. Granted, there are many drawbacks inside the language itself in the line of overhead, but Falacy covered some of this already and I'm not going to beat a dead horse. However I will attack the developer resources part of the forum. See this is where BYOND's second issue comes into play: It's a wikipedia without true moderation.

Oh the site has moderation, obviously. That's how I got banned in the first place. Someone decided that the truth hurts and the only way to go on is to cover their eyes and ears and yell, "BLAH, BLAH, BLAH" really loudly. But what doesn't have moderation and really needs it are the resources and libraries. As long as I remember, anyone has been able to upload a demo/library and "poof", it'd go through. (Except in one case where my SwapMob demo or whatever I called it got removed because "it was something anyone could figure out"). There are actually a few Naruto rips floating around in libraries if you know where to look. From a professional standpoint, this cannot fly. There are a few reasons for this, but I'll just address the most important point: quality control. This is Steam's issue right now with Greenlight and Early Access. Fortunately, we don't have to pay money to use these resources so if we get a bad one we can simply uninstall it. But that's the issue to begin with. When it comes to resources, you shouldn't ever "uninstall" a resource because it's bad, only because it's not useful to you. There needs to be quality control. Granted, there are probably very few active programmers and artists on this site with the capability to provide high quality resources and references. But it's a quality - not quantity issue. I would rather tread through a shallow 100 resources for the one I need, knowing that I'll get something that works the first time I use it, than tread through the vast oceans of OVER NINE THOUSAND resources, knowing that what I get will be a gamble on quality. Maybe I'm alone on this sentiment, but I'd wager I'm not. Time is a resource just like any other, and spending it efficiently is of great import. So what was the point of all that? Without quality control, developer resources is a swamp of resources that either you're good enough to program what's there already or you have no idea how to pick out what you need.

The Community

I considered putting this as part of the site but then I realized there's a difference between a bar you hang out at and the people that hang out at that bar. There's not too much difference, since you all frequent the same bar for various personal reasons which likely align somewhere down the line, but a difference all the same. So here's the gist of it. The forums are dead.

You know, I was rather upset by Tom's decision to take down the forums (to be implemented at a later date) but the more I think about it, there's really not much going on IN the forums. So I can understand how he reached that conclusion. But just because you have a hammer in your toolbox that you haven't used since '09, you don't throw away a perfectly good hammer without having a replacement hammer to fill its place. And that's the issue with the forums. Just because they're full of trolls and jokes, it doesn't mean that it doesn't have the potential to be something great. The forums are a watering hole where we all go eventually and how we have ideas flow. How many of the rippers in developer help would grow as an individual to make their own games instead of reading off a copied source if their only interaction was through developer help? As they grew familiar with the language, sure they might start to make their own steps, but at a vastly slower rate than if they were to talk to people outside their sphere of influence. The only people playing the rip wouldn't care either way, and if the rip is being played then what incentive do they have to branch out on their own? The long and short of it is: the forums offer a venue through which we can influence each other and grow as a community. Removing them only hinders the community's growth because new members will either have to get all of their communication in game and add people to pager (pager restrictions, remember?) or off-site (off of BYOND).

You know, I've flopped sides on the fan-game issue several times in my years on BYOND, but since I was either actively playing fan-games or not actively playing fan-games, I was likely biased. Since I'm now playing no games on BYOND, I think my biases are probably out of the way when I say this. Fan-games aren't a problem. Sure, people will criticise them for being unoriginal, but, shoot, there are websites dedicated to fan-fiction. There are websites dedicated drawing art from someone else's intellectual property. So I guess what I don't get is, why is this being used as an insult? Why should you be shamed for bringing life to something you're passionate about? And I've yet to hear a satisfactory response to this. People will complain about BYOND getting in trouble with legal issues, and to be fair, BYOND should've known better that to advertise games that were direct IP violations. We're obviously still doing it. Dragon-Ki, a game at the time of writing is still on the front page of games, borrows IP from FUNimation and Toei Animation. And that could become legal issues down the line. So BYOND shot itself in the foot there.

I seem to have gotten a bit off-track, so to return to where I was heading with my point, the community's outcry against anyone that wants to make a fan-game is rather off-putting. The site itself is Build YOUR Own Net Dream. The 'your' applies to the individual. What you make is up to you. If you want to make fanfiction RPG, fanfiction cross-over RTS, or just a generic roguelike, that decision is up to you and you alone. It may seem hard to believe that someone could care about their ideas when they pose them for all to see, but they do. Otherwise, they probably wouldn't put themselves out there with them. And they're going to need thick skin to shrug off all of the abuse they will receive just for posing a fan-game idea. And if they do manage to shrug it off, they're not going to have a very positive impression of the community they had planned to make it on. Perhaps they'll change platforms, go to one with a less abrasive community.

And I'm not suggesting that we should say, "Go get 'em champ" no matter what. Critique is a very important part of the development process. But more often than not the way the critique is posed is "Your idea sucks. Make an original IP game". Aside from the fact that that line of logic is completely incorrect to begin with, it's not critiquing the correct way. I'm certainly guilty of this myself, but I certainly try to keep it in mind when I post. But you should have an "I'm going to make you aware of this" instead of a "This is bad" mentality. Posing the remarks as information instead of insults goes a long way. There's a facebook post that keeps going around that sums up this community neatly. Short story - There's a bunch of bananas placed atop a ladder. When the experimental primates go up to get the bananas they are shocked. Eventually this happens enough that the monkeys don't even try anymore. When a new primate is introduced, should they attempt to get the bananas, the other monkeys will hold them down. That's BYOND community in a nutshell. This community is so willing to hold back games just because they don't fit your societal standards.

Let's quickly touch base on inconsistent moderation. At the time of writing, as noted, I'm currently banned. However, there are several posts which serve only to "witch hunt" which have users that may remain unbanned. Am I salty? No, I was a little at first, but then I realized that this isn't the type of community I should emotionally invest myself in. This post is probably my last "emotional investment". There are individuals that post only to troll or derail (purely to troll or derail) that receive no penalty. Accidental derails do happen, and sometimes post content is misconstrued as trolling; however rest assured, the individuals I speak of (perhaps you know them) post to intentionally troll or derail with the occasional intelligent post. However, if you mark the faults of the platform (as Falacy has done) you get banned. Personally, I would love to have people fault my platform because then I can figure out what I need to improve it. I do this with games like how Valkyria Chronicle would be a pretty good game if it paused after combat to give you the option to do as the computer does and end the unit's turn without getting shot at a few more times. How in Mass Effect 2 I missed the rubber buggy baby bumper you used to ride around in.

Even with the inconsistent moderation, the only tools that mods seem to have are delete or ban. These aren't enough tools. Many forums have a feature known as mod preview, and the mods can even edit the users posts (while providing a reason, of course). Mod preview is a mechanic in which a user submits a post but the post doesn't go through until a mod presses the approve button on that post. I've had to use it a few times, and I've only ever had to edit out a few racist posts in my time. The system works.

The Games
Let's briefly touch on the games as well. BYOND has never really had a game standard. And that's fine, when it comes to user controlled content like YouTube, Reddit, and Kongregate, the only times the site itself ever steps in to moderate is when they're trying to avoid legal issues or to prevent harassment and the like. But these sites all have things BYOND doesn't have. The ability to push favourable content towards the top and unfavourable content towards the back. Right now BYOND has this in the form of the "Fan" system. So we can thumbs-up, but we can't thumbs-down. This means that the only thing you really need to keep a game near the top is to be around for a long time, aggregating fans. How many times do you actively go in and un-fan a game after fanning it? Certainly not at all if you leave the site.

Membership
Really, there's no such thing as a true membership perk anymore. What we have now are just minor features you gain access to for donating to the site? I don't really know how to word it, but you know what it is. Back when the site changed and the blog features were removed I said I could understand it and accept it. I didn't like it, but I could understand why the action was done. But the price of membership increased at the same time. Now this struck me as rather odd. Normally when you charge more, you give more. Maybe you've been to the store at one point in your life and you've seen a sale like this:

Bananas: $1.50 each, or $2 for 3 bananas

The incentive to buying in bulk is that you pay less per unit. What you'd never see is this:

Bananas: $1 each or $3 for 2 bananas

By buying in bulk, you actually pay more per unit. No one would buy bananas priced like that because you're punished for buying more.

Business with BYOND goes two ways. We spend money and BYOND provides a service. But when BYOND ceases to support features, while at the same time asking for more money it creates the issue I've demonstrated above. You're being given less incentives but at a higher price so the cost/unit ratio continues to increase. This means less subscriptions for BYOND. I'll state this again later, but at this point, BYOND is just asking for money.

Overall
Overall, BYOND has decreased in quality since the time I joined. When we're at the point where people are legitimately rage-quitting BYOND, or people are being told by many members of the community that they should leave, that's the sign of a bad community (See: League of Legends). When people are discouraged from making their games, that makes them not want to make games. People have always said BYOND needs good games, but pushing away inquiring developers doesn't benefit anyone. The mandatory RP games are supersaturated, a lot of games are clones (or rips), and we're just not looking at high quality games. There are incidents of prominent developers asking for money and then not delivering their product. The moderation is inconsistent, and there's no sense of quality control. Not to mention the dichotomy of the forum users and those that just play games. Extra Credits is always saying this, "Don't ever split your community". It's good advice for a reason.

Solutions
So I've posed a bunch of problems with BYOND and even slightly discussed their solutions, but I'm going to recap. First, to address the BYOND member perks, actually provide meaningful perks. Bring back the blogs or something. Give people a reason to donate to BYOND. The key to a good business model is making people happy to give their money to you which is why I would never suggest bringing back the "members only hub creation". I know why you did it, but as a customer, it felt like you were saying "pony up". Seriously. Even if you just bring back member blogs until you can find other perks to provide it would be something, a reason to donate to BYOND. As it stands now, BYOND is just asking for money... that's it. For those of you that watch Shark Tank, the comment the sharks often use that applies to this situation is, "You wasted all of your money, now you want to waste mine". Don't be that guy, BYOND.

As for the community, well... a community has to fix itself by being a better community. There's nothing BYOND can do to achieve that end. The ban stick is not one to be handled lightly (See: Twitch Plays Pokemon) and removing contentious views (See: Me) from the community doesn't make it a better community. You guys have all played Bioshock Infinite, right? The utopian society where everyone loves each other and stuff? Not only is it a farce, I'm sure those of you that played it probably thought that the utopian Columbia was rather... dull (EXCEPT FOR THE ACAPELLA BEACH BOYS. THAT WAS FABULOUS). Individualism allows for the rapid improvement of a community. This is not speculation - this is a key aspect in some parts of network theory. Mr. President said it himself. "If two men agree on everything, then one of them is not thinking" (LBJ). Contentious views exist for a reason and if there were no skeptics we'd still be sitting in caves waiting for lightning to strike for us to cook our meats. Or, (if you need a more contemporary example), we'd still be putting Einstein under house arrest for daring to contest Newtonian gravity. The mindset is still there, people that search for an alternative to dark matter/energy are ridiculed in some scientific circles. I'm not asking you to give up on BYOND, I'm asking you to stop telling other people to give up on their net dream, and to stop having blind faith in BYOND. I've seen this cycle of blind faith in a website bouncing back if just this one thing were added (See: Free Allegiance). "Once the flash/webclient comes in every thing will be fine". Okay, that's still in the process. Let's try something else. "Once someone makes a major hit game and puts it on Steam, everything will be fine". That happened (See: NEStalgia). The reason that didn't really work is because the dichotomy is still there. It didn't really bring traffic to BYOND.

In short: We have to be a better community, be a smarter community, and figure out an issue to the forums/games split.

For the games, give us the ability to vote a game down,adopt a 5 star rating system or something that allows users to say "this game is good, that game is bad". I don't expect this to change much of anything in terms of the front page, but it will give context to games further down the line. It also provides a way for people to actively push games that they perceive as poor games down the line. Next, the resources. Good news is, the resources can go a long way with the current Unity model. Make an asset store. Then, moderate the content that may be put on the store. Then users can make money by selling their work to others within the community (I imagine the artists will really like this idea), and BYOND can pocket a little of the change along the way. Or resources can be uploaded for free, IF they are quality resources. And even if a resource is rejected, giving the user feedback on why it was rejected gives them ways to improve.

Naturally, there are problems of manpower, but even a slow first step is better than no first step at all. Sure it creates more work for the BYOND mods but it's not like there's a deadline or anything. And BYOND mods being slow to act is nothing new. I once submitted my game (back when the slushpile was a thing) like 2 weeks ahead of other games that were getting approved with no mod to tell me why and only after raising the point did my game get listed.

I fully expect this post to be deleted, so I'm going to post it in the forums to one of my games: Do You Even Lift. Could be deleted from there too. Who knows. If it doesn't get deleted, thanks to you that have made it to the end. Only counts if you didn't skip anything.