The second quote supports what I was saying. Tom isn't in this to make a salary.

Ah; then you must not have understood what I was saying (which is totally to be expected, as I now see that I never actually articulated it): while it's obvious that they aren't in this for the money, that doesn't mean they want to be losing money (I say "they" here because I'm not sure exactly who's paying the server costs -- whether it's Tom alone or the whole BYOND staff or others). I really should have boldened or otherwise emphasized this part of the quote:

But since maintaining the community and the medium for development takes a lot of our time and money, we do have to figure out a way to realistically make a profit.

(Sorry for being unclear!)

RealQMark wrote:

Its to measure quality of a game. Many people tend to confuse the two with coinciding with each other. A show only goes as far as how many viewers it gets. The less viewers it gets, the more chances it has of being canceled. Sadly, there is no such thing on BYOND of a game being canceled because that would not only be wrong to the players but developer as well. But you get my basic point.

I understand what you're saying, but I disagree. To me, my show has already been a success. I fought an uphill battle to get it made, and now I have a nearly finished product ready to go. I am happy with the way it turned out, and I am proud of the workk that I did. My show is a complete success. I don't need an audience telling me that it is good for me to know that it is good. I really hope that it does well and that I can make episodes for years to come... but not because I need assurance from someone else.

BYOND Games are the same way. Hundreds of people liking my games doesn't mean that they're good. Either they're good or they aren't; the majority doesn't morph reality. A lot of times, the majority is not a very good indicator of quality at all.

Anyway, my point is that the ranking system is a popularity system, and says absolutely nothing about the quality of a game. It just illustrates how many people like the game.

Bwgmon wrote:

Perhaps have the hub entry deleted and the person warned in pager and email, and if they keep putting it up, THEN ban them.

I agree... but with those types of people there is usually little hope for improvement. I'd personally just ban them to save time, because they'd probably ban evade anyway.

Bwgmon wrote:

No, it just shows who does the most bribery/threats.

Haha, good point.

That last point isn't true. What I said was it wasn't my dream to get rich off BYOND, that it was more important for me to see it be successful than to see it make tons of cash (for most companies those are the same thing).

However, I also pointed out that if we wanted this project to grow (or even sustain itself), ultimately it would have to generate enough income to offset the maintainance costs-- of which the servers, at ~$500/month (actually about $300 now), is negligeable. The main cost is hiring people to do the work, duh!

You complain that we release incomplete stuff; the difference between that and the completed version is time, and money = time, and memberships = money, and pulling the pager = memberships, and so forth.

I think you have some good ideas and a lot of passion, but absolutely no concept of the amount of labor this project entails nor a basic understanding that we have to do things to make money, and some of those things might not be popular with our users. This project may not seem to you to be as great as in the heyday of 2002 when we had 1000 users total, but back then we had two people working on this thing full-time for free. I know in fantasyland that could last forever, but something had to change.

Maybe from your end, things are worse now, and you are free to leave if you never see that changing. From my end, they are better, because we are finally generating enough that I can consider hiring people to get some of the multitude of tasks done around here. And that means a better BYOND for everyone.

Tom, that's pretty much what I said hours ago. It's good to see the Big Wigs share my opinion on this ^_^.

-D. Puppy

I could write a long response detailing why I choose not to spend my time policing rips. I could describe how we plan to use guilds-- when they are finally ready-- to handle this problem and more. I could outline every reason why the old BYOND commerce system was a complete disaster and ditching it was the best thing we ever did.

But I won't. Instead, I'll make the same request I made last time we engaged in debate, which is that you'll just have to have to trust that the plans we have made-- some quite long term-- will take this project in a good direction, and that the limiting factor IS time, and that the money we are generating now will help us buy that time in the near future.

Actually, it doesn't really matter if you believe me or not, because I believe me, and like you said, that's all that really matters, right?

Well, quite a bit to digest here, but I'll give a shot at addressing some of this.

First, let's discuss the ranking system. Yeah, it's not working at its best right now; there are several reasons for that, but there are reasons it's important to keep it. One of those is that we actually want new users to be able to find popular games quickly. I'd personally like to nail the ones that abuse this system, but... eh. It's not so bad. Right now Last Robot Standing is at #1, a spot it has earned, and other top-ranked games are among the most consistently played ones.

The pager: Indeed, it wasn't removed for non-members solely because of server stress. One of the reasons was that it was a source of widespread problems including users harassing and phishing other users, not to mention the spam and the then-recent phenomenon of chain pages. It was a choice between restricting the pager and hunting down and killing 90% of the user base. Clearly the pager thing would solve many more problems than it would possibly cause, and to date history has borne that out.

Reevaluating published games--and also some libraries and demos--is a good idea and one that's overdue. Problem is, the reviewer set is kind of scattered and no one really has time to get to it. (I'll address this more shortly.)

About guilds, I understand your frustration that they're incomplete and not serving their intended purpose. You asked Tom why he needs to release new features that are incomplete, and the simple answer is that the alternative is stagnation. It's often been easier to release something than wait forever for a completed feature that isn't ready. After all, the attitude of wait-till-it's-perfect is basically what put BYOND 4.0 in such a stall in the first place. Many of the features in the 307-323 round of betas were incomplete at the time, yet they still needed to be done and they pushed development further. You have a point about many things not being properly conceptualized--but then, you should know that it's not an easy process to come up with any of these things, and we don't get nearly as much constructive input as we'd like.

Replacing blogs? I like the blogs, but I'd definitely like to see some improvements to those. More of a Webspace solution would be great too. Upgrading this isn't as feasible as you'd think because of staffing--again I'll get back to that. But any changes to those, or to the main member listing which I know you don't like, or anything else would necessarily be released as half-baked incomplete features; yet it seems it's either that or get trashed for doing nothing at all.

The moderator gripe is a fun one. I can actually agree with you on part of it; I think Tom is too lenient by half, yet I follow the line he sets. Personally I'd just like to be able to ban someone as needed and be done with it, not have to constantly review or have to cave to people like Phoenix Man. Still, I find it hilarious that you'd think something like moderator guidelines could be defined clearly, let alone in a way that can give users an idea of exactly where the line is. The problem with that is that the only way to manage it is with hyper-legalism, which ends up fueling the very worst kinds of trolls--the ones who know how to step exactly within the bounds of the line without tripping it, yet cause as much trouble as possible in the process.

Classified Ads--well, moderator approval wouldn't work. I gather you can't imagine just how much work that'd take for moderators to approve each and every thread, let alone every post!

As for rips, we used to try to take down each of those, but very quickly you reach a point where you can't tell who made the original and who made the rip. In general it wasn't too horrible trying to keep up with those, with several admins spending larges blocks of time on it for about two or three months, but it did cause further problems and didn't net us much. I personally wouldn't mind returning to that system, but it's an uphill battle and there'd be limited time at best for anyone to fight it.

It's amusing that you complained about elitism right after mentioning the rip problem. If rips are slashed, what's left? The work of the so-called elitists, that's who; that's what the DBZers who get their rips removed will say. And to get more moderators active on removing those rips, unpublishing entries from the official channels, etc., they too would be considered the elitists. Heck, most of the features (or restrictions, as in the case of the pager) you want to abolish would ruin most of the benefits of the member system.

But all that said, I don't get where you think the infinite manpower would come from to implement any of your proposed changes, even just the good ideas. Most of the BYOND staff have full-time jobs or other demands on their time, which is everyone except in part for Tom. Ron has been on hiatus for a while, Mike has been in and out, Guy has made contact fairly sporadically lately, Shadowdarke has been extremely busy with his own life, and I'm in the middle of a job search. Much of what we all do as developers requires the active cooperation of each other, and extensive discussion to make sure features come out at least half-baked instead of wholly raw or never at all. You like to complain about things that haven't changed yet you want changes to be perfect on the first try; or else you complain about things that have changed without offering viable alternatives or strong reasons why they should have stayed the same. In every case the things you mention wouldn't be doable by just one person, and even with several of us working together it takes time--when we have it. Heck, I don't see how you think the current problems have more to do with decisions than with time; obviously all our availability has been stretched thin--and that affects the ability to plan and decide as well, but mostly it means there's just no time to get stuff done.

Man I wish we all had time to make BYOND absolutely perfect. Under those circumstances maybe we could even lure Dan back. But it's the real world, where none of us is being paid to work on BYOND and we all have to pay the bills. Shredding the member system certainly won't help that. We do have other ideas to improve some of the problems you've noticed, but I could probably finance Christmas betting you'll be the first to complain about them. The thing is: Your ideas aren't at all tenable. Some problems exist, and they need creative solutions that will work. Restricting the pager was one such solution to several problems we once had; that's not going back to the way it was, ever, and thank God for it. Your constructive suggestions are certainly always welcome, but they do have to be in some way workable.

Lummox JR wrote:

JESUS GOD FREAKING HELL!

O.o' That's alotta typing.

Lummox JR wrote:

The pager: Indeed, it wasn't removed for non-members solely because of server stress. One of the reasons was that it was a source of widespread problems including users harassing and phishing other users, not to mention the spam and the then-recent phenomenon of chain pages. It was a choice between restricting the pager and hunting down and killing 90% of the user base. Clearly the pager thing would solve many more problems than it would possibly cause, and to date history has borne that out.

I really really wish you were the one dealing with community concerns about the Pager way back when it was ousted. I found it mildly offensive when any complaints about losing the pager were met with the whole "The pager is costing too much money" spin that people like Xooxer were throwing out.

That was when I first started being disenlightened by the BYOND Staff, pretty much only based on the tenant that I always appreciate the truth over made up facts thrown out to shut up complainers.