So, someone want to explain to me what has happened to BYOND in the past 3 or so months I've been kind of inactive and busy with other stuff?
Half a year ago, BYOND users were gagging for new games. When one was released, people jumped on it, they were played a lot and people were happy.
In the past 2 weeks I have seen 5+ games been posted (the majority of them Game in a day entries, but one or two were not), and totally ignored.
In the mean time, useless posts made by even more useless kids are getting tens, or even hundreds of replies. (http://www.byond.com/members/ WillyKiller?command=view_comments&post=81936#comments example here)
I don't get it. BYOND use to be about making, and playing games (made with BYOND). What exactly happened in the 3 or so months I was gone that caused BYOND to degrade into a little kids playground?
Maybe it is about time BYOND was renamed?
Either BYOAD (Build Your Own Anime Dream) or PFCFLK (Poo Flinging Contest For Little Kids) would be good choices for a new name.
Or maybe BYOND could just do with harsher, more active moderators?
ID:81969
 Sep 14 2009, 9:43 am
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I know it has always been bad. But the point I was trying to make is it has recently got a whole lot worse.
At the beginning of this year/end of last, when Efencea was released. People cared about it, they talked about it, and played it. A few days ago a game called Flesh and Drone was released. It got a blog post (two actually) and a forum post... http://www.byond.com/members/ ACWraith?command=view_post&post=81688 http://www.byond.com/members/ BYONDStrategy?command=view_post&post=81736 http://www.byond.com/developer/forum/?id=718289 No one cares about or talks about it. This is the problem I am talking about. Seriously, why are people going to stick around and keep using BYOND to make games, when any games they do make are totally ignored now? It use to be bad enough when your game was lucky to get 10 players, and some cruddy anime game for 100. But now your game doesn't even get looked at, let alone players. I seriously don't know what else to say, other than BYOND has probably reached the point where you may as well call it dead. | |
Strategy games are always like that. Just look at most things ACWraith has made, most of them have been blanked. I think you have to go back to 2003 or so to get strategy games that were at least talked about when released.
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It is still pretty sad when games get ignored in favour of... Well useless spam really.
Like I said, sure is no games in here. | |
I think that people need to make more stupid and rather pointless games. Sometimes I'll find myself stumbling upon some random game hidden inside of BYOND which I just love! It's those dumb games that you never would have thought of that should make up a bigger bulk of BYOND. Everyone goes for the big projects. What happened to running around trying to find cheese for the rat?
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It is harder for original games, such as those made by ACWraith, to get noticed. There is a semi-good reason for this as well. Anime games get quite the number of players due to its popularity that spans worldwide. Along with that, if you liked Naruto Game 1, you would most likely enjoy Naruto Game 245.
Now with Flesh and Drone, people have no clue what this game is nor do they bother in finding out. They see an empty hub and assume the game is no good. I do the same when I find indie online games with one or two people playing it. Why waste time by downloading this game, I will not be able to fully enjoy it with its lack of players. Now to tie this in with your comment of how there are no good games. If you can see the trend, you can spend hundreds of hours on perfecting your game, but you will get no players. This obviously will drive off plenty of potential developers. I have always like BYOND because you basically have an immediate community for your game once you release it, once the majority of the community has strayed away from original games, you feel as if it is quite pointless to still develop games here. | |
To be fair, it doesn't just "feel" pointless to develop games here, it is pointless.
Seriously, why make games with BYOND when people are going to ignore it and never play it? There are other, similar programs to BYOND out there, with bigger, better and better communities, and these communities accept a larger variety of games, and are not simply waiting for the next naruto rip to be released. Like I said, BYOND is for all intents and purposes dead. Why do people even bother coming here, or using BYOND anymore? | |
Why do you? You mind as well leave if you feel this way.
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The Magic Man wrote:
To be fair, it doesn't just "feel" pointless to develop games here, it is pointless. This is why we need to support games which are just starting off. From what I can see, we tend to ignore newer games created by the "not so well known" people of this community. You clearly are not the only one who feels that this situation has decreased their motivation in making games with BYOND. I had a recent contemplation about splitting the community. Obviously right now, newer games are hidden with the clutter on the forums and blog. With this guild system, perhaps there could be a guild for original developers only. The forums would be similar to Game Makers, where users can post snippets, show their work in progress, post their classified ads for artist and musicians, and so on. You would have to submit an application in order to be accepted to the guild. That way the minority, the original game developers, can easily point out which games are new and help support the developer. There are other, similar programs to BYOND out there, with bigger, better and better communities, and these communities accept a larger variety of games, and are not simply waiting for the next naruto rip to be released. Of course, such as Game Maker. But people tend to like BYOND because it has networking built in(which GM has libs for) along with a potential "immediate community". But as you can see, people are slowly moving away from BYOND (more or less, the older community). Like I said, BYOND is for all intents and purposes dead. I wouldn't say BYOND is dead, just on a hiatus for original games. But with the recent sneak peak Lummox JR provided us, I believe we will see a month or two of new games. | |
Fugsnarf wrote:
Why do you? You mind as well leave if you feel this way. Because no one told me is why. This is why we need to support games which are just starting off. From what I can see, we tend to ignore newer games created by the "not so well known" people of this community. You clearly are not the only one who feels that this situation has decreased their motivation in making games with BYOND. I had a recent contemplation about splitting the community. Obviously right now, newer games are hidden with the clutter on the forums and blog. With this guild system, perhaps there could be a guild for original developers only. The forums would be similar to Game Makers, where users can post snippets, show their work in progress, post their classified ads for artist and musicians, and so on. You would have to submit an application in order to be accepted to the guild. That way the minority, the original game developers, can easily point out which games are new and help support the developer. Actually, I'd agree. Something like this should be done. Wasn't the whole point of guilds that if you wanted to make RPGs, you had a RPG guild to go to, if you wanted action games you had a guild there and so on. And wasn't another point of guild to keep anime games, and the anime community seperate from other areas? At the moment, guilds are doing neither of those. All the guilds but the anime guild are inactive. If they had any activity in the past 3 months that is pretty amazing. Something should be done about trying to bring these guilds back to life. Also, anime has leaked outside of the anime guild and has been doing so for a long time now. There should be stricter rules in place for things like this. If you want to talk about anime, do it in the anime guild, and nowhere else would be a good one. | |
All the problems with the community can be summed up in one sentence: The guild system does not work.
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The Magic Man wrote:
Actually, I'd agree. Something like this should be done. I think the guilds are doing their job. If you want to play a RPG, you can easily find them in the RPG Guild. I believe we, the community, should create our own guild for the separation I previously recommended. Get a trustworthy person to create a key, perhaps named Developer Central, have them elect forum/blog moderators and application checkers, and hopefully there will be a steady amount of people joining this guild. It would also be nice if this guild had a weekly post, similar to ACWraith's Techtree, which discussed the current information within this smaller community. Now, if this were to happen, I would gladly offer to be a weekly blog writer or perhaps, an application checker. At the moment, guilds are doing neither of those. It's quite a simple answer. Remove the guild leaders who are too busy and replace them with those who have free time. Clearly, the current leaders, besides ACWraith, are not fit to be the leaders right now. | |
Oldbie wrote:
I think the guilds are doing their job. If you want to play a RPG, you can easily find them in the RPG Guild. I believe we, the community, should create our own guild for the separation I previously recommended. Get a trustworthy person to create a key, perhaps named Developer Central, have them elect forum/blog moderators and application checkers, and hopefully there will be a steady amount of people joining this guild. It would also be nice if this guild had a weekly post, similar to ACWraith's Techtree, which discussed the current information within this smaller community. I wasn't talking about guilds not doing there job as in it being hard to find games. More of, the developers side of things are not doing their job. These guilds should have things like discussions, tutorials, debates, reviews and more about whatever genre of game they cover. At the moment they don't. They are a place for putting your game and nothing more. But the problem with that is the horrible community BYOND has in general. You need people to do stuff like this, which BYOND obviously does not have. But at the same time, you need things like this to attract people. It is some kind of rubbish circle, you need stuff to attract new people, but you need people to make the stuff that attracts people. While BYOND is stuck in this cycle, it may as well be dead. And to be honest, I do not think there is a lot that can be done about this anymore. There is no one on BYOND who can, or is willing to break this cycle, or even attempt to. They all left, or were driven away a long time ago. | |
byonds went down hill 3 years ago when generation x came along with tons of flame and rip festing out the ass
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One yourself, Tac.
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There is no new game because of the lack of motivation for Game Devolopers. This is a big issue when your doing very good on a game and working very progressively they make a post...No reply.
I've also seen some games (even mine) being dead or abandoned because lack of team progression. If you have a team you need to know how to keep it active, I've had a lot of issues where I had a game concept, ideas, and a good looking team. But my team was inactive a lot and it caused chaos when there is no work done. So, I did everything for nothing, I hyped the BYOND crowd with one post about my game with screenshots...But unfortunately my attempt to make a exceptional game failed. But if you are so anxious for games (which many are), Why don't you join an active team? That's what I ask a lot of Pixel Artist and Devolopers. People (like you) tend to create games by themselfs which can usually lead to it being dead. It really would help you tried to join an active team or maybe multiple team(s). | |
It's not as bad as the PS3.
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The Magic Man wrote:
A few days ago a game called Flesh and Drone was released. Thanks for reminding me! I've been waiting for him to release it, but I was so wrapped up in GIAD I never got a chance to try it. | |
Troy1121 wrote:
But if you are so anxious for games (which many are), Why don't you join an active team? That's what I ask a lot of Pixel Artist and Devolopers. People (like you) tend to create games by themselfs which can usually lead to it being dead. It really would help you tried to join an active team or maybe multiple team(s). From experience, I'd say teams in general fail a lot more often that a single person. There is just so many more reasons for a team to fail, people have (conflicting) opinions, lack of organization, and all the problems working solo has (lack of motivation and so on). Also, to be fair, it is not hard to make a game in BYOND, and definately not as time consuming as most make it out to be. It should not take more than 2-3 months to make any game in BYOND (excluding content from games like RPGs). If you are smart and have been using BYOND for a while you can probably reuse parts of old projects and drastically reduce that time. Hell, just recently I made effectively a full game in BYOND in 2 weeks. If you cut out all the content then it was closer to half a day. I don't have any problem at all making games. I just grown less and less interested in it largely due to the lack of interest the BYOND community shows. Seriously, why waste my time making a game, when no one is even going to bother playing it? | |
As for moderation, you get what BYOND picks and they work with the tools BYOND makes. As I understand it, only 3 people can moderate comments on blog posts. The owner, Tom and Lummox. Forum moderators can hide stuff from the front page, but have no capability for blanket banning repeat offenders. Not that they would, because the people who use the front page functionality have no guidelines and worry about setting precedents. I set one with handling Anime classified ads, and later had it thrown back at me. Poo flinging isn't just for little kids see, fun for all ages.