There are great games on BYOND. It's just people never host them, but when they are hosted they get ignored. I think it would be nice if we created a BYOND Classics type of guild (like I did a while ago). But this time, the community gets involved with playing the weekly sessions, post on the forums, and even have a open source development team? We'd stay in our little circle while the anime people will stay in theirs.
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SG2.
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Its obvious why, anime games bring people to byond, the lack of other genre games keeps new people who are interested in those games from joining. If you feel so strongly make a popular other category game, you could see the RP,action or whatever guild explode over a few months if you made ONE good game that the mainstream appreciate.
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I could be mistaken, unless you have an older key, your key was registered in 2004. I hate to disappoint you, but the anime games were running rampant in 2003 and 2004 as well. They just weren't all locked away in a Guild that no one forces you to visit.
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Masterdan wrote:
Its obvious why, anime games bring people to byond, the lack of other genre games keeps new people who are interested in those games from joining. If you feel so strongly make a popular other category game, you could see the RP,action or whatever guild explode over a few months if you made ONE good game that the mainstream appreciate. But you are missing the whole point. There is no one around to make a great game for any of these other guilds, because the anime community has chased them away. Without games these guilds cannot attract people, but without people these games cannot be made. (If you don't believe me that there is no people to make these games then go and look at the action guild. I think the forums there got their first post this year about a month ago, and have had no posts since then.) Also, like I said. The anime community gives BYOND a bad reputation. Sure anime games might attract people to BYOND, but it attracts annoying little kids who will probably just release another rip or annoy the rest of BYOND with stupid questions. But at the same time, the anime community is repelling people too, the sort of person who would come to BYOND, probably make a game or two (possibly good ones) and in the future possibly be an asset to the BYOND community as a whole. | |
The Magic Man wrote:
Masterdan wrote: Ahem. Mobius Evalon Tiberath Lummox JR Popisfizzy Hiead Xooxer Nadrew Mikau Audeuro JackGuy Koil They're all the devs I know that I can think of off hand. But they weren't chased away by BYOND Anime. They either have personal issues or school is conflicting them. Never-the-less, they all have the ability to do the job. And no doubt, one day, will. I know I'm currently working on an RPG, Mobius has one in the works at the moment as well. Fizzy has been talking about doing one for a long time now, and probably is doing something with that too. | |
listen to tiberath, how has the anime guild chased anybody away when they are segregated into their own community? Its a bad argument, your using the anime guild to scapegoat the fact that the quality bar on byond isnt much higher in other guilds either. The truth is the Anime guild at current funds byond more than any other guild and even though thats true, and they are segregated away, your trying to tell me that its the anime guilds fault that the other guilds have little attention paid?
Come on now, your argument is less than sensible. The truth is that nobody is being attracted to byond for non-anime games simply because there has been very few quality non-anime games made in the last few years, and non-anime games get very low player counts because of poor user friendliness. It may suck that poor quality games get people because they are simple, however games like SS13, murder mansion, mafia etc are confusing to new people. Not only that but many byond games in other guilds are doing things better suited to be done as simple flash games instead of using byonds robust and yet under-appreciated strengths. If you want to solve the problem of boring game-development on byond, your gonna have to make a popular game! Thats really the bottom line, nobodys running from byond because some kids in the anime guild scared them off. The demographic of byond is as such because nobodys making any new games for the other guilds, or at least not nearly as frequently or with as much development as is needed to rejuvenate byond. One other point, what i consider one of the largest problems in maintaining communities in the other guilds, action/RP/stratagy games made in byond are almost always created with the intention of playing small round based games. This is fun and all, but when trying to focus on retention, you need larger scale and persistant content with motivation to keep playing. The lack of an addictive feature in most quality non-anime games on byond is what keeps them from remaining jammed packed. Thats not to say they dont have long lasting charm, its to say that the average person wont be retained, and its easy to explain the playercounts in each guild when you look at the main games in the guild and the design in terms of retention factor. | |
Tiberath wrote:
Ahem.11 People, of which half probably aren't active, most haven't made a game in the past year and even less are probably working on a game right now. Fair enough, those people probably are skilled enough to make a decent game. But if they are not putting that skill to use then it is a moot point really. Fact of the matter is simple, he only games being released right now are anime games, and most of those are crappy rips. listen to tiberath, how has the anime guild chased anybody away when they are segregated into their own community? Its a bad argument, your using the anime guild to scapegoat the fact that the quality bar on byond isnt much higher in other guilds either. The truth is the Anime guild at current funds byond more than any other guild and even though thats true, and they are segregated away, your trying to tell me that its the anime guilds fault that the other guilds have little attention paid? I'll admit that there isn't that many good games on BYOND, but the ones that are good rarely (if ever) get the attention they deserve. Even if the BYOND anime community is seperated from the rest of BYOND that doesn't stop them from effecting other parts of BYOND. I know and have seen people who have opted out of using the BYOND website to advertise their games made with BYOND because they don't want it to be in anyway related to the bad image the BYOND community has. Come on now, your argument is less than sensible. The truth is that nobody is being attracted to byond for non-anime games simply because there has been very few quality non-anime games made in the last few years, and non-anime games get very low player counts because of poor user friendliness. It may suck that poor quality games get people because they are simple, however games like SS13, murder mansion, mafia etc are confusing to new people. Not only that but many byond games in other guilds are doing things better suited to be done as simple flash games instead of using byonds robust and yet under-appreciated strengths. If you want to solve the problem of boring game-development on byond, your gonna have to make a popular game! Thats really the bottom line, nobodys running from byond because some kids in the anime guild scared them off. The demographic of byond is as such because nobodys making any new games for the other guilds, or at least not nearly as frequently or with as much development as is needed to rejuvenate byond. Wrong. I have seen a lot of people show interest in BYOND and who have wanted to make multiplayer games. Very few of them actually did so because of the negative image they have of BYOND, or have been told of BYOND. Some of these people were very skilled too, more skilled than most people on BYOND and the sort of people the BYOND community could have done with. But they didn't use BYOND and went on to use something else less suited to what they wanted to do than BYOND simply because hey either saw the bad side of BYOND, or they were told about it. A lot of the time what they were told wasn't true, such as BYOND is a poor program and can't make good games, or that anything you do make will be stolen, or than the BYOND community is full of retarded anime fan kids (Narutards you call them?), among other things. True enough, these statements contain some elements of truth, but they were blown way out of proportion and they turned potential new BYOND members towards other programs. Try and say what you want about the BYOND anime community. I have seen it and experienced it for myself, it does have a negative impact on BYOND as a whole, it does and has driven people away from BYOND or turned off potential new BYOND members because I have seen it for myself, a lot at that. Seriously. I dare you people to go out and TRY to advertise BYOND on a website that would show any interest, such as an amateur game development website. I bet you that anything you say or do will be met with "BYOND = STEAL ANIMU GAME = SHIT GAMES = BYOND IS SHIT" or something to that effect. But whatever, I will play along and make a game that is not an anime game but is worth playing. Ten greens says that it isn't even given a second look, nor will it get played often and it wont attract any new people to BYOND. (In the likely even that I do not finish the game I will instead release the source code, though at the moment it is playable, it just doesn't have much of anything to do in it.) | |
Bad image crap. The BYOND Anime group is segregated nicely. I only ever see them in BYOND Members, Classified Ads, occasionally Developer-How To and BYOND Help. That doesn't cover "The BYOND Community" in my mind.
Last I looked, the community is spread out upon a vast array of games, not all of which are anime. I find myself in Icon Ultima and/or Chatters every day I'm online. And to be honest, I don't see anything wrong there. There is nothing wrong with the community. They are just young. And to be blunt, young people aren't bright. You can't sit there and call them stupid because they aren't old enough to know better. Get over it. To be honest, BYOND Anime doesn't bother me at all. I never have to deal with them, I never have to see them, if it wasn't for the fact I know of it's existence, I wouldn't know of it's existence. Instead of bitching and moaning that there is no good games, pull your finger out and make one yourself. It's far more productive. | |
The problem with byond is the perceived low quality due to reproduction of two bad games, aka Zeta(in a less than complete form) and WOTS. Having these games reproduced a million times with minor tweaks creates an illusion of a majority of low quality games. The reality is that if you were to remove all wots/zeta rips from the listings, the quality is in large part redeemed, or at least the reputation byond has would be cleansed. The issue is with leniency towards property theft here, not with Anime games. The distinction is important, BLN, GOA, DBTC, Naruto Kousen Myou, and Duel monsters online are actually competent games. And there are a few more in active development. The problem is TWO bad anime games have been reproduced soo many times that it waters down the guild. This issue is a byond quality issue, and relates to the handling of ripped or otherwise stolen or poor content. In my opinion byond should look to opt in to a you get listing in official places such as the main page only if your accepted by a moderator, and otherwise you get put in a "in development" or otherwise incomplete or not ready to show category which people searching for games have to opt in to. Ripped or stolen or blatantly incompetantly created or run games would be stuck in this category until such time as they are redeemed, such as Naruto Online or BSOC (which were both WOTS rips and end up reaching toleratable quality). The issue is in having an overly liberal listing policy with having byond be a all and everything listing index instead of treating itself like some sort of profit seeking reputation valuing game engine that maybe it should try to be. Byond however right now has a decent attitude, and its in its name, build your own net dream. The idea is do what you want to do but havnt been able to on more difficult platforms, make the game you want to make. With that philosophy in the name BYOND is an accept all place, and due to that its reputation cannot expect to be strong because it is an introductory game making engine with no rules as to hinder property theft and a widely distributed resource extractor exists.
My proposed solution? member settings that let you aggregate the content shown on the site in a way you enjoy, strong search algorithms and hubs being tagged with something akin to a gold star to simply show some form of staff approval as to quality and integrety, and then a co-feature to allow people to easily configure their profile to only let them see games that have passed this designation. If you want to make a post that more accurately relates to the problems byond has, go for it. However byonds quality problem exists because two anime games were leaked by trolls looking to laugh at the bloating of bad games caused on byond. It is in no way the fault of BYONDAnime, it is the fault of the trolls and the perhaps overly-liberal and unkind to original content making developers policies of BYOND. Its a long argument that needs to be made, and trying to say its byond games that are based on a comic published in japan... well thats scapegoating based on ignoring underlying causes. Not a healthy way of presenting arguments for positive change. | |
Tiberath wrote:
There is nothing wrong with the community. They are just young. And to be blunt, young people aren't bright. You can't sit there and call them stupid because they aren't old enough to know better. Get over it. When I joined BYOND in 2002 I was no older than most of those young members. Yet I didn't go around acting immature, or stealing/releasing ripped games and whatever else those people get upto. I made a decent attempt at making my own game, from scratch. Sure, I never finished it, and I still have the effort saved on disk (and it is a laughably poor game that is coded even worse), and I even attempted to contribute to the BYOND community by helping people and releasing a demo or two. Sure, I might not have been the best or most helpful member around, but at least I tried to do something good. And Masterdan, that is exactly what I have been trying to say. Regardless of how good or bad BYOND is it has a bad image associated with it, mainly due to these rips, which originate from the anime community. I wasn't trying to say that the entire anime community was bad, but the majority of these badly made and ripped games on BYOND ARE part of the anime guild and this image effects all of BYOND in a negative way. Though you could place some of the blame for this on the BYOND staff for not having any sort of rules related to this activity of stealing you can't entirely blame them. No one is forcing these people to steal other peoples works and release lots of badly made games, they are doing it themselves, and they should be the ones to blame for doing so. It is also not just the work of a few trolls, I have seen a lot these people causing shit storms on their own, stealing the source code of other ripped games and releasing/trading them and what not. The original problem might have been down to a few people, but now-a-days it is a problem that is wide spread, especially among the anime guild. (Like I previously said, I have had people from the anime guild trying to steal things I have been working on, and you cannot blame that one anyone but the people who tried to do so). And I'd agree. BYOND needs some better systems (and even rules) that make it easier to stop or ignore these things. | |
Just because you were more mature at that age, doesn't mean everyone else was. In my opinion, my maturity hasn't changed from when I was a kid. I never got a detention, hell I never got my name on the board. That doesn't mean others in my class didn't.
Fact of the matter is, young people are dense enough for light to bend around them. And it'll take time for them to grow up. This big problem with BYOND everyone is ohh so concerned about, will fix itself in time. | |
Just remember, while it may be a problem isolated to the anime guild, if a game in a different guild ever got as popular as Zeta or WOTS and subsequently leaked by somebody, we would face the same problem. Then people would sit back and go, oh my, i guess the correlation to the anime guild was a mistake, it was a correlation to popularity! Aha, genius. Regardless it is a downside that is attributed to the current policy of byond, hub listings are given equal status apon inception, the only hickup being getting added to a guild which we are instructed to let any game that fits the genre in. So with rank benefit abuse you see all sorts of crap get too much attention. Its like when dealing with say, the homeless problem, some people may start arguing that killing them all is the best solution, while solutions to the underlying problem, say drugs or unaffordable housing is the real way to solve it permanently. This is the situation we are in today, the topic is how do we cut down on low quality, does change to the policies such as "you dont get listed until somebody accepts your application to be listed" solve it? or do you keep it the way it is, perhaps BYOND is more profitable because its biggest customer are young kids making crappy anime rips. Under this way of thinking and get watered down with garbage and possibly lose future opportunities of growth. The alternative comes up, should they implement new filtering criteria? or do you do something similar to newgrounds and create a rating system with automatic filtering of games that receive very low average ratings (not conceivable on byond due to far to small a population which causes too serious of bias, but a future possibility if byond ever got serious exposure.)
Sorry if im not making any sense, my senses are falling apart as its 4:30 in the morning and im multitasking cramming and for some reason talking on here. | |
I agree with Masterdan's first two sentences(sorry dude, didn't want to read it all). So, perhaps in order to realive BYOND from this Anime chrisis(poor spelling, get over it :p) we could start releasing sources of other games that are non-anime? Im defiently going to do that. I have about three sources on mind that I could do better than, and never mess with...
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Oddly enough, pretty much every 12-year-old I knew when I was younger and online was leaps and bound ahead on the maturity scale to most of the "narutards" and "DBZers". I retain my belief that anime lowers your IQ.
Anyway, I personally am in favor of everyone being able to vote yay or nay on each game, so that we can get some balanced ratings and make them searchable. Reviews seemed like a good idea at the time but it seems like they're mostly getting abused as far as games go. If every member can rate a game, then it might be a little easier to determine a game's actual quality. Of course, that won't change the fact that there's a slew of idiots on the forums asking for help editing their rip or demanding that others build their game for them. | |
You're also forgetting the fact that for there is about 10000% more anime children parading about than there is non-anime.
The yay or nay system won't really work seeing how someone who thinks a game is crap(and probably is right) will nay the game, then 40 narutards come along and yay the game because they get to hit a bag, get 5000 levels, and GM for doing it. | |
Ss4toby wrote:
I agree with Masterdan's first two sentences(sorry dude, didn't want to read it all). So, perhaps in order to realive BYOND from this Anime chrisis(poor spelling, get over it :p) we could start releasing sources of other games that are non-anime? Im defiently going to do that. I have about three sources on mind that I could do better than, and never mess with... How would releasing the sources of original games help stop the “crisis”? I personally believe it would be more of a catastrophe. The real problem isn’t that there are too many anime games on BYOND. The real problem is there are a lot of the members within the community who would rather take a source code, change it up a bit, and then claim it as something totally new. Releasing an original game’s source would only hurt the process of trying to make this a non rip community. Think about it, we want to attract members to BYOND who are knowledgeable who eventually can teach us something. Why would someone with commonsense want to join BYOND with a bunch of anime copies and non anime copies of games running around? I’m all in for teaching the new, but the new needs to teach themselves how to program. | |
Mikau wrote:
You're also forgetting the fact that for there is about 10000% more anime children parading about than there is non-anime. On the other hand, if a decent quality non-anime game comes along which really deserves a lot of yays, the anime-fans won't care enough to vote it down so it will get high ratings. I figure the anime folks might even things out if they hate each other and have little yay/nay wars. | |
172.16.0.1 wrote:
How would releasing the sources of original games help stop the ?crisis?? I personally believe it would be more of a catastrophe. The real problem isn?t that there are too many anime games on BYOND. The real problem is there are a lot of the members within the community who would rather take a source code, change it up a bit, and then claim it as something totally new. Well, you see. When I first started BYOND at the age of twelve I had no ideal how to code. I remember I thought the term code ment a game cheat code. Anywho, I also was very lazy and did not feel like reading about it. So, in order to code I became a ripper. I downloaded a Dragon Ball Z game source, edited what I could, then would host it in hopes of people playing it. This continued for about 2 years. So, in my opinion ripping games is just fine and dandy if the creature allows it. Because we all have to start somewhere. Therefor, if you release more of a variaty of source we wont have NOTHING but anime games. You will never be able to stop the rips... | |
Am I supposed to be happy that BYOND Strategy is not mentioned or discouraged by the blanket "no good games" line of thinking?