ACWraith wrote:

While there will probably be guilds of questionable quality, I'm still under the impression that the main guilds will be delegated like the channels were.

Yeah... I guess that I'm just not seeing much of a difference between this and the current channel system. The staff already delegates reviewing power to respected users, so what's changed?

I can't picture BYOND being divided into sub-communities either. First of all, it's not big enough, and more importantly there are not enough quality games to support sub-communities.

SilkWizard wrote:

I can't picture BYOND being divided into sub-communities either. First of all, it's not big enough, and more importantly there are not enough quality games to support sub-communities.

171 Games Live! (1874 players)

At a guess, maybe 2 of those games would qualify under your definition of quality games, accounting for maybe 15 of those players. So, uh, what exactly do you suppose those other 1859 players are doing in the remaining 169 games?

It's understandable, of course, that you're not really aware of all these other people on BYOND. After all, they move in different sub-communities than you.

Agreed that the "official guilds" concept does have a certain quixotic air, although it certainly ranks as an improvement (if only because it is implied that the official genre guilds will be receiving some maintenance, whereas for a couple years the official genre channels generally have not).

At the same time, though, the guilds system as a whole holds promise as a means of de-emphasizing the importance of the centralized "official" guilds. I'd prefer to see more work on expanding the functionality of user guilds to make them more effective substitutes (or at least supplements) for the central hub rather than this attempt to centralize decentralized subcommunities, but meh. With any luck there will be some new functionality from the official guilds system trickling down to user guilds.

Very good! I laughed out loud at the cartoon... although why am I wearing a beret?

I actually do believe that there are plenty of good BYOND games to sustain these sub-communities. It is more a matter of finding players for them. Back in the early days of BYOND, a bunch of us would get together and have a blast spending a few hours trying out games like Tanks and Lexiconomy and Search Engine Wars and so forth. Now these games go unplayed because they are dwarfed in the masses of RPGs and fangames. They need their own space, and that's what we're trying to do with guilds.

No two people will agree upon the game categories (or channels or guilds or whatever you want to call them). Ron's informal poll showed that. I personally am in favor of making groups based on types of gamer-- the "party/casual" and "strategy" is a pretty close fit among our chosen categories. I don't see a tremendous amount of overlap, although certainly some people will be fans of multiple guilds.

Ultimately, the hope is these will merely be "seed" guilds, and that user-created categories (my initial hope) will become more widely used in BYOND. When we rollout the front-page guilds, we'll be simultaneously be introducing some new features for guilds in general that we hope will make them more useful.

As for the original premise that guilds are just a rehash of channels-- you are partly correct. In a private discussion I actually made the distinction, so I'll just repost that here for public perusal:


The existing channel system was created with the same intention of these guilds-- to organize games both with a visible, staff-selected front-page, and also with user-created sub-categories. Yet the channels have been a complete failure. The games on the front-page are hardly played and very few user channels have been created (and those that have aren't used).

We have to ask ourselves, then, what went wrong, and are we taking the measures to do it right this time? These measures are largely a matter of guidelines for the guilds, so we must address them now.

I think that the single biggest problem with the front-page games is that, while they may meet our criteria as decent games that fit the genre, no effort is made to have them played. Since the majority of BYOND games require at least a handful of players to get going, they are difficult to launch without some pre-planning. How many times do we see multi-player games with only a single player waiting to get it started, eventually losing motivation and logging out?

The advantage guilds have over channels is that they attach a community to the games, and a community is capable of acquiring the critical mass of players needed to get the ball rolling on these otherwise unplayed games. I believe that guilds-- at least these front-page guilds-- must have a formal system to ensure that the accepted games get played, not only when they are first created but also down the line. The most direct way of doing this is to host different games throughout the week. The blog should be used to constantly promote these events and ensure that the games get traffic. The way I see it, if a game is listed within a guild and never gets played, it either doesn't belong there or the guild is failing to do its job. The standards-- for both the guild and the accepted games-- should be THAT strict.

There may be technical measures we can take to encourage this behavior (for example: having different sortable tags on blog posts such as "review" or "event"). While we are somewhat rushing to get these guilds out (at least as a first run), I do welcome any suggestions. This is a critical component of the community-- I want to get it right this time.

Tom wrote:

Very good! I laughed out loud at the cartoon... although why am I wearing a beret?

Hey, it's a bike helmet! Isn't it great? I spent like two hours doing the shading on your upper lip.


Tom wrote:

The advantage guilds have over channels is that they attach a community to the games, and a community is capable of acquiring the critical mass of players needed to get the ball rolling on these otherwise unplayed games.

Your description has made me a bit more optimistic about the prospect of guilds... and given me a much better understanding of how it will work. I'm especially sold on the concept of much stricter standards.

Yea, it's called the unpublished games section.Naruto and DBZ have managed to take it from 1-2 pages to a daily high of 3-4.They can just hop from game to game to interact.If they have a guild they should have a pager...working pager to help them along.

Oh, thanks you for the information, but now for all of the benefactors.I bet Aaiko is not happy about this change.