Hub isn't an acronym. I'll never understand where the trend of capitalizing it started.

Ah, right. Sorry, it's a bit of a habit of mine. I can't recall if it is from the people I was around, or if it's because I capitalize BYOND most of the time; like just now. Either way, habit.

The fact HUD is usually capitalized does not help either, haha.

Actually I think it's a bit sad the moment BYOND is living at the moment, it's not the program's fault, nor Tom's or Lummox's. It's just that BYOND has tons of RIPs.

When we used to join BYOND, we played games made from scratch, they probably didn't have many features (at least in my case, when I started playing many years ago I played few pokemon games which barely had stuff, but they were nothing like the games seen nowadays, with "Return Pokemon", "Train Pokemon", etc... And the map was much smaller!

What's the problem with BYOND for now?
- Many "popular games" are rips, then we get into this:
1) People who've played the original version dislike the ripped version (most of them)
2) They mostly have wars between theirselves for getting the best RIP. (GOA RIPs, NNG RIPs)
3) They -rarely- manage to create another game from the knowledge they've gotten by those sources they've barely edited.
4) The people don't like the RIPs, maybe somebody does! But it doesn't feel good... Imagine you've cheated in an exam and you've gotten an A, you'd feel good for some seconds, but you won't feel good in the future for wasting your time making something that hasn't been done by "yourself".

What should be done?
- Maybe more creativity, I'm not saying to remove the anime games, but they could get new ideas (I'm not forcing anybody to make another game, haha, just saying if any anime game's owner is reading this). I'm really tired of the games which only use a single verb to train, too easy to get into something, or too hard to get into something, both sides are bad, because they don't require your "interaction" in the game.

It's easy, the games would be more attractive if they had more dialogues, missions, things to do when you're bored and you want to get into something. I know not many people like playing alone, but if there are NPCs and a story-line, they can still have fun (:

Anyway, a lot of BYOND Players've got a bad point, they think every Game's Objective is to be the best, they think they can do everything from playing that game for hours without even exploring the "place" after the "academy".

It's a problem because we can't solve that, those "anime-players" should encourage more those aspects which has been lost in the games, and stop spending their time on repetitive games.

(Sorry if I didn't explain it well, my native language isn't English :3 xD)

At this point rips don't really pose too much of a problem. We have ample methods to suppress them completely and we've made a lot of headway in rejecting most of the ones that do crop up from time to time. This still doesn't solve the lack of original, creative intellectual properties that can benefit BYOND though.

Eternal_Memories wrote:

Actually I think it's a bit sad the moment BYOND is living at the moment, it's not the program's fault, nor Tom's or Lummox's. It's just that BYOND has tons of RIPs.

When we used to join BYOND, we played games made from scratch, they probably didn't have many features (at least in my case, when I started playing many years ago I played few pokemon games which barely had stuff, but they were nothing like the games seen nowadays, with "Return Pokemon", "Train Pokemon", etc... And the map was much smaller!

What's the problem with BYOND for now?
- Many "popular games" are rips, then we get into this:
1) People who've played the original version dislike the ripped version (most of them)
2) They mostly have wars between theirselves for getting the best RIP. (GOA RIPs, NNG RIPs)
3) They -rarely- manage to create another game from the knowledge they've gotten by those sources they've barely edited.
4) The people don't like the RIPs, maybe somebody does! But it doesn't feel good... Imagine you've cheated in an exam and you've gotten an A, you'd feel good for some seconds, but you won't feel good in the future for wasting your time making something that hasn't been done by "yourself".

What should be done?
- Maybe more creativity, I'm not saying to remove the anime games, but they could get new ideas (I'm not forcing anybody to make another game, haha, just saying if any anime game's owner is reading this). I'm really tired of the games which only use a single verb to train, too easy to get into something, or too hard to get into something, both sides are bad, because they don't require your "interaction" in the game.

It's easy, the games would be more attractive if they had more dialogues, missions, things to do when you're bored and you want to get into something. I know not many people like playing alone, but if there are NPCs and a story-line, they can still have fun (:

Anyway, a lot of BYOND Players've got a bad point, they think every Game's Objective is to be the best, they think they can do everything from playing that game for hours without even exploring the "place" after the "academy".

It's a problem because we can't solve that, those "anime-players" should encourage more those aspects which has been lost in the games, and stop spending their time on repetitive games.

(Sorry if I didn't explain it well, my native language isn't English :3 xD)

The problem you're referring too is neither "those anime players", nor rips. Many of "those anime games" have inventive and entertaining features compared to bog standard MMO's or other generic games. Which, believe it or not, is largely the reason why people still continue to play them. Rips are currently also policed heavily to ensure they don't stick around long, as others pointed out to you too.

The problem is the problem of exposure. Quite a few of the games that are heavily populated have largely been shoved off into a corner. A few of them have died as a result, as well. This includes some pretty big original projects that were in development or were struggling before recent events happened.

This all coincided with a much stricter outlook on rips (Which had started to get out of control at the time.), the Funi copyright claim (In contradiction to their stance on it quite a bit before that claim was made.) killing off a ton of original and not-so-original games, and most importantly, the service pushing people not to make fan-games through web-site UI changes that make it hard to get proper exposure for them within the service itself.

Like it or not, one of, if not the biggest source of Byond's player intake has always been on the anime games front. In fact you could, and still can find on average a greater percentage of highly populated games in that category then you can in the "default" category when using a population filter. I should also add that this isn't exactly something to be ashamed of. It's not like Byond is the first service to get their feet off of that.


Anyways, hiding a large number of highly populated games that were an eye-catcher can have a cumulative effect over time. This is because the web-site is currently not very UI friendly in terms of alerting the players that these games exist now.

In fact, you have to know to search by a specific term or click a specific button (Wedged in amongst many other pre-set terms.) in order to begin bringing them up.

Complicating things further, the hub itself no longer lists these games either. Nor does it even makes references to their existence.

The games you see when first going into the site are inferred to be the games that exist as a whole. It's a bit deceptive. There's no announcement or allusion to a hidden list, and the presentation of the hub doesn't hint to the existence of the filter system for the search engine having an alternative purpose for the Internet savvy. Filters are typically used to remove games from an existing list. Not as a sort of routing method to open up entirely new lists altogether.

Arguably, pushing them off of the hub, it seems, has made the service seem a bit more dead. You may not be losing the die-hard players and developers that have been here for years, but speaking from what i've personally seen, like it or not, a lot of the talent that attracted people to Byond came about as a result of that specific genre.

In fact, as some players often lament (Missing the entire point of their complaint when coupling it with claims to population issues.) fan-games were one of the things that originally attracted quite a few people to give the service a shot.

By the way, speaking as someone who has a had a game moved temporarily to that category, i've gotten a lot of angry MSN messages from people thinking I was messing with them having a game on the service. A few of them, having played the game before looking at the hub (Apparently not knowing about the logged games feature on the pager.) assumed the web-site was a buggy mess. The lack of visibility and/or accessibility is a "thing" when it comes to public perception, despite what some people have claimed.

So less people coming in, overall, no matter why they originally came to the service, inevitably means less people giving other, different games a try. Which has a linked effect that leads to less activity, less people trying to get their feet wet with the development aspect of things, and less players to go around for everyone with games on the service over time.

This in turn can easily lead to stagnation, since less people means less ideas, less shake-ups in the community, and less original games being made. Stagnation leads to less players as current ones get bored and leave the service, and either the service holding relatively constantly steady or having slight fluctuations in population over time.


To my knowledge, nothing has actually been done to increase exposure of the Byond service to the world at large since the hub/site change-over, so it's a bit unreasonable to expect the service to suddenly catapult forwards in terms of population. A slow slide downwards would be possible if existing players were turned off of the service, or changes were made to actively keep players away.

Likewise, small fluctuations in the population over time as it holds relatively steady (Though most services of all types tend to have a steady decline over time without improvements or something to keep interest. See literally every MMO and content provider ever for instances of that.) is more likely to be the norm. You aren't going to see the service have a steady up-turn in players without a cause to go with the effect, however.

On a side note, it's something i've noticed on a few hidden games too, now. Relatively speaking, the more solid ones tend to keep an even line in terms of population.

They aren't increasing by quite a bit when they do something good, like release an original update. As the intake of players through normal exposure is much lower for them now. Most of the players involved are people who have pre-existing knowledge of the list. Not new players. Some of them are compensating for this by artificially boosting their hub population through having a large number of servers.


Couple all that with services like Desura making it very easy for indie developers to make a commercial profit off of their game, and you cut down on the intake of developers too. Even Steam is getting in on this now, sometimes picking up "best selling" indie games like Terraria. It's quickly becoming very appealing to go this route, even if you're doing game design just for fun.

People talk about advertising your game outside of the service as being a requisite to knowing what you're doing/being competent/whatever, but that's just it. These services essentially do that for you by virtue of their own accessibility, ease of use, and popularity. Most developers don't troll forums and other forms of media to get players. They spend money to get exposure, or liaise with other sites and companies. These services offer an optimized means of doing that.

Unfortunately, they are also often picky in terms of how the game interacts with their respective service (Steam is somewhat notorious for this, for instance.), which means games on indie services like Byond would be difficult to adapt to them, if it's possible at all. I am almost certain that Steam would for instance, on the off chance a Byond game "hit it big" and wanted to increase their exposure, have a big problem with routing through another game distribution service or their related client to get to the game itself.

Convenience is the mother of necessity, and any intelligent game designer is going to go for the method that costs them less money, time, and frustration, when given the choice. Which is a point against Byond when prospective developers, hobbyist or otherwise, look at the service.

So that limits the intake of developers strictly to hobbyists who have a direct interest in Byond itself (Not a very large demographic in the grand scheme of things. Especially since it doesn't have much well known and reliable exposure.), programmers who stumble on the web-site and take a fairly large leap of faith, or people who are new to programming and hope it's easier to use Byond to get started.



It's a bit of an incestuous problem. You need active, popular (Outside the site.) games to reliably bring people in off of word of mouth, either on the developer or player front. In order to get active, popular games to reliably bring people in off of word of mouth, you either need an indie developer with a heart of gold to make a game to do this, have Byond spend money on advertising for exposure during a period where existing games are operating at their "peak", or essentially "luck out", and have a popular game be developed consistently on the service that receives outside exposure.

Only one of those things is potentially viable in terms of controlling the do-ability of it, as the others are primarily reliant on the popularity or state of the service itself. And that method would require Byond to spend money.

The games that used to do this (Many of which are left are not rips.) for the service are largely hidden from new players unless they know the magic word to bring them up for viewing, keeping said word of mouth from occurring. Alternatively: They're dead, since the hub change-over and Funi thing lead to a bunch of people just throwing up their hands in frustration and quitting.

Some of the people i've talked to seem to be hoping a big, paradigm shifting game comes along that somehow opens up the service to a bunch of people through a shift in perception, as opposed to the steady amounts of folks that were coming in and out before. Which at the risk of sounding a bit sarcastic, is a bit like hoping you'll win the lottery every time the opportunity to get a ticket comes up.


Edit: If it isn't evident from my post, i'm firmly in the category of believing that the service is not exactly doing good. It's doing, for lack of a better word, steady. It seems to be neither losing nor gaining players in the short term. With a possible drop off in overall activity from what i've seen over a longer period of time. This is, as stated, just what i've personally seen, however.

I don't think that's good. It's usually, in terms of products that aren't dominating their demographic, like Steam, not a good sign. It means a product is not intriguing people anymore. That it's not inciting people to give it a shot. It also usually means that it's only one large slip up, or a new and equally competent competitor coming around, away from having things quickly spiral into a downwards turn in terms of the user-base over time.

I'm not sure what the fix to that is, but going all "civil war" on games or players that are within the community, as I see quite a few posters intermittently infer, is not the answer. If nothing else, speaking on a general basis, cutting "content" is almost never something likely to pique the interests of potential users, be they developer or otherwise.