Topic: Nice Job With The Site! (Read 656 times)

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ahahaha 10 YEARS OF G&D HISTORY. oh no!!!! also i think i missed out on the amazing depth and diversity of the rpg maker community, was this before or after cactus squid games got buried with like 3 replies while advert topics for final fantasy 7 menu system recreations stretched to seven pages long

actually i feel gross getting snide about rpg maker stuff like two years after this discussion might have been relevant at all and i would like for gw to be more active especially regarding gamemaking or just general creativity but even if the only choice is between a dead forum posting and the ~olden days~ of absolutely terrible people hyping their absolutely terrible games and never being interesting or worthwhile on any level at all then i'd still go for the former. maybe this is because i still make games and post them here more regularly than any of the rpg maker oldbies and i don't particularly miss having actual completed content being buried below six pages of anime game advert topics?? we may never know..
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I think theres a 99.9% chance that theres no site being worked on. Let's all just go to GGZ.
Oh man, no. You'd think that the people at GGZ would have eventually grown out of their close-minded and juvenile ways of dealing with, well, anything.. But uh.. I think anyone who has any interest in the RPG Makers is better off going to any other site, and this includes GW in it's current "fragmented" state. When I was last at GGZ, there was so much uneasiness and paranoia of the "outside world" (meaning all other game making-centric communities).

Hell, GW is an infinitely better place to be and I say this solely because the GW community isn't so damn messed up. The people here are actually cool and, uh, normal.
Last Edit: November 19, 2010, 08:22:40 pm by UPRC
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Also most of the old irc channels probably are empty but #gamingw isn't
What the??

#gamemaker is completely empty! This community is DEAD
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i don't particularly miss having actual completed content being buried below six pages of anime game advert topics?? we may never know..

this more or less sums up my feelings towards g&d
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The best part is the movement of completely alienating the entire RM scene by talking down on it (Mods across the board) and promoting "Indie Games".

Congrats, the RM community left and what's left? Where are all the Indie Game Makers?
by the time this movement you refer to as "promoting indie games" took place there were already very few developers here. most of them already left to other communities in the several year period GW had no site. the few developers left here were being talked down to, but it was because they wanted GW to only be a RPG maker community while the majority of the community wanted it to be more open. it's pretty simple, the majority won out.

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You want a cool post modern Indie Game Making community? The staff actually have to be involved in the process. And no, Barkley hitting the magazines isn't Indie the game was full of rips and GZ worked his ass off programming a joke game.
i wasn't even staff at that time. i might have been a moderator, but i was only a moderator because i used to look after the GM forum during GW's "golden age" and didn't actively do anything for GW for years. i had nothing to do with GW until many months after.

you are probably looking for the word amateur instead of indie. i'm not really sure why you make a distinction though. are you mad that the game was popular? something like barkley only helped GW attract more people, but nothing was done to capitalize on this during that time.

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There were some stellar artists and talented people here but anyone who ever wanted to be someone moved on for obvious reasons. 90% of the staff here aren't even remotely Indie per se. Congrats on killing a major community with a pseudo attempt at taking the site to a brighter future.
anyone who wanted to be someone likely left the rpg maker scene, not just GW. again, GW had a 90% rpg maker community, and when it was dead it did nothing to promote any kind of development. this means any developers it did have were already gone by that time. all efforts made in the phase to expand GW's horizons was at a point when GW's development community was already dead. it had nothing to do with the death, expanding GW was an effort to resurrect it.

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I'm just very annoyed that the former staff members endlessly down talked people in G&D and did nothing to save it.
there were numerous efforts made but none of it worked. i can list a bunch of things i was personally involved with:

- games database:

http://gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=7058.0

now out of order, it was dedicated hosting that carried many classic and hard to find RPG maker games. it was essentially a centralized way to download and find games quickly, and was based on this topic:

http://gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=7766.0

no one really cared about the games DB because hardly anyone is looking for classics / rare games. in the once in a blue moon chance you are, the rare games topic made the most sense because likely the games DB did not carry the game you wanted (there are tens of thousands of rpg maker games). this was something anyone in the community could have contributed to but no one wanted to.

- sprite database. i don't have a link for this because it doesn't exist anymore, but GW had a database system that was more robust than charas-project.net . the problem? we needed people to fill the database with resources. there were 500 resources to begin with and we needed the community and staff members to add to it. either no one cared or no one wanted to do this, because the database stagnated.

- "gw6":

http://easycaptures.com/fs/uploaded/365/9096160933.png (this is the best picture i can find of the site, this is the beta version)

this site died about 6 months after going live, because of lack of interest. the site had reviews, articles, tutorials, and many of the old articles from the original blog were on there. the problem? no one in the community wanted to write any kind of article. that includes game reviews and articles about games. the new site direction had to do with changing with the interests of GW members, and that included broadening the development tools and topics covered. the site catered to that, but very few people gave a shit about the site.

there were other efforts as well, such as the constant restructuring of G&D, contests, etc.

these things came too late. as UPRC stated, rpgrevolutution and rpgmaker already did this, but had an established rpg maker community. in addition, the idea of "indie games" never took off because we have almost no developers, and the ones that are present come to GW for the discussion, not game development. without any admin, staff member, or mod saying anything, the community made this shift gradually on it's own.

i think GW, as it is right now, is a community that doesn't need a website. there are no developers here and the other members that do come here aren't content producing (not interested in writing for a site). there is nothing wrong with that, it's just a forum for people to talk.

it sounds to me like you are complaining about rpg maker not being popular enough, or the rpg maker community not being what you want it to be. what does GW have to do with that? the only legitimate complaint i see is pubaccess being down if you paid, but something like keeping 10 years of post archives is pretty ridiculous.
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Troll harder.
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I think Ice Manual 5580 might be this "anon" I've been hearing so much about.
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i think im getting dossed (i think thats what its called..) i hear this is what they do like when the did it to metallica and gene simmons, can anyone confirm? y/n
yes coulombs are "germaine", did you learn that word at talk like a dick school?
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/n

and when did you become a fallen hero.
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I see this site as a place to get some minor feedback: almost always entirely negative and rarely constructive.

Some of the "veterans" of GW are the people that really drag what community there was down. Not to mention any names *cough* 12683 posts joined Feb 13, 2004 *cough*

This site stopped being fun for me a long, long time ago. Again I frequent it for the odd feedback.

I think the main page should just be taken down and instead be directly linked to the forums. That makes 100% sense to me. Keeping a broken page that deters new comers seems pretty stupid. For most of the time I've been a member (and this is my second account) there has not been a working main page.

I was a member here when I was 13. That was 13 years ago. I've been in and out of there the whole time and I do not remember any "golden age."

There are a few nice people here and I see the odd nice looking game (even if most aren't finished). This gives me some inspiration to keep going on my projects, and this is the reason I keep coming back.

That is my two cents.
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no one in the community wanted to write any kind of article

Just a quick mention on this: I wrote several articles and tutorials. I spent time on each and they were done quite well. They needed to be approved before being added to the site. So either no one was doing any approving or the site did not allow these articles to get properly submitted (I suspect this). I messaged a couple people (mods or admins, I can't remember) back then to see if this could be resolved. I never did get any answers and nothing I wrote was ever added to the site.

Any successful forum/website needs active leadership, primarily active admin(s). I.M.O. the staff are the cause of the "downfall" of GW.
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I was a member here when I was 13. That was 13 years ago.
Not to ignore anything else you said because you made some decent points, but I think your calculations are off a tiny bit! GW is only like nine years old, I'm pretty certain.
Last Edit: November 20, 2010, 05:36:00 am by UPRC
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Nice post GZ,

and yes I was refering more to amateur games in general. Like, I understand that RM should only be used as a starting point. You can make great games for sure that are fun, and with the newer engines you can make polished games in general if you put work into it to do custom work... However, like you admitted yourself there aren't many amateur developers (who don't use RM) on this site so I don't understand why there was such a huge push to create a community catering to said individuals. What majority? Are you refering to people from the general forums? If anything there was a huge disconnect between G&D and the rest of the forum. As for the changes, you admitted yourself they came way too late. Half the community left and the great amateur developers all moved on to better and bigger things.

Really one of the best thing GW did was hire Ocean Dream. Someone who actually produced things and gave back to the community. I honestly think most of the forum staff should be required to be able to give back otherwise the titles are superficial.

I wasn't dissing Barkley either btw. I just noticed the whole amateur game movement came shortly after the release of that game. As for the resource engine? The staff should lead by example and submit things. Games, resources, and much more. Think of it as a stimilus. You can talk all you want but if you don't lead by example then why should anyone feel the need to upload things that would probably just be taken for granted? There is no community if the staffs aren't involved. Barkley was something new and the game was actually polished, it also promoted stepping outside RM for a moment which is a good thing by all means. But I don't think that was really enough.

I just didn't like RM being called "Bad" when it really isn't. It's a starter tool for sure and many have actually gone further on into high levels of development after initially using RM. So hearing a whole bunch of General Forum Mods talk crap about a subforum (G&D) they had NOTHING to do with was retarded. That's a huge reason why everyone left.

@Catamines

Yeah that sucks. I appreciate custom games really. As for adverts, there was literally NO FEEDBACK system in place. No one got any real feedback on anything they posted unless they stuffed their topics with a million polished pictures, videos, etc. This got out of hand and people literally just started competing for epeen with no real games actually being in development. This is the fault of the community but also the negative image RM had. Anyone could just post an MS paint doodle of AMATEUR CUSTOM GAME and get 5 pages of feedback instantly. You are asking a lot from normal people to create completely custom games, some people just can not do that. That's where RM comes into place and it was a hobby/starting point for many. There's nothing wrong with RM, the forum staffs just had too high of an expectation. They wanted to see flashy custom games but this community does nothing to promote it, just all talk and rhetoric (aside from a few really good guys out there).

Last Edit: November 20, 2010, 04:52:19 am by The Ghost
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UPRC: I should be pretty close. Perhaps I was a little older when I first joined. I know I was on this site when I was 15 for sure. I'm 26 now (just turned 26).
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the members outside of G&D outnumbered the G&D members, which means they were the majority. i'm saying there were more non-developers than developers. this is why the shift happened to begin with, the majority of the community didn't have as much interest in game development, which is why the site was going to be more broad. there was no way GW would have ever been just a RPG maker site, and it was illogical to do that because those sites already existed and were doing a better job than GW (rpgmaker.net).

think for a second here, who are the staff? they are members of the community. are you aware that anyone can be staff? staff is just another word for people who contribute to GW. on a whim, me and panda decided to do the website. i didn't have to jump through any hoops, everyone was in favour of it. after spending an immense amount of time setting up the site, porting over articles to the new site, and working on content, we quickly found out very few people wanted to produce content or help manage the site. i was spending all of my time on the technical aspects and panda was spending all of his time getting staff members and organizing content. i don't doubt some people were willing to help (like renegade) but there wasn't enough people. i was there when it happened, i can tell you that we had to struggle on a daily basis to get anyone to do anything. i don't mean that in a bad way either, GW just isn't a content producing community. it's shifted into a community that mostly just wants to talk, which is pretty normal.

my efforts may have come too late, but nothing stopped anyone from doing something earlier. the staff comes from the community, and no on in the community felt GW was worth it, otherwise they would have done something. the amount of people who were staff changed constantly, many people made attempts to try and get GW on it's feet but either the effort wasn't good enough or it didn't work. so i would say the fact GW never reclaimed it's status as a game development site is because not enough people cared, that means the community as a whole.
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I would like to help bring this website back to it's "golden age" as I spent a lot of time on here as a kid. I'd hate to see it rot away when it can become useful for the newer generation of indie game makers out there.
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*cough* 12683 posts joined Feb 13, 2004 *cough*

hi if you wanna call me out just do it (use names) but i'm not gonna apologize for calling your website ad incredibly sketchy because it was so don't do shit like this ya big baby :welp:

i contributed to gw6, i had a few more things planned but that was when it all got deleted in order to be replaced by the thing that's (sort of) up there now.  i think the big problem was that the submission process wasn't very clear and you never really knew who to send things to or if they were being looked at.  the newer blog seemed to only be focused on indie games which i wasn't really interested in writing about, so i never contributed to that and i think that this might have been the same for other people because if you think about the articles we did have on gw6 a lot of them were about whatever anyone felt passionate about!  and they made for interesting reading i thought.  if there's a revival of a mainsite i'd gladly contribute to it again as long as it's not 100% indie games related.  but at the same time i think that it's hard to get people to contribute when they're unsure of whether their articles will get posted or, like before, deleted without warning one day.  i feel like in order to get people to contribute, a handful of people have to contribute for a little while.  people don't want to contribute to an empty site.  i don't know, maybe i'm just HOPEFUL but i feel like if given enough time a mainsite could get people contributing as long as there are a handful of people who are willing to KEEP IT UP for a bit

but i guess at this point we need to do something.  i'm not sure what, i don't even know what the current plans for gw are beyond fixing registration asap.  we have no new topics ever.  i'm not sure if it's because the current userbase would rather chat in irc or what but there's almost nothing new posted on the forums outside of a small number of topics (which i mean i'm glad that there's posts there but something new needs to be introduced because we are stagnating on the forum).  but maybe fixing registration will help since we can get some new people and new ideas in here?
Last Edit: November 20, 2010, 01:34:52 pm by Vellfire
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and yes I was refering more to amateur games in general. Like, I understand that RM should only be used as a starting point. You can make great games for sure that are fun, and with the newer engines you can make polished games in general if you put work into it to do custom work... However, like you admitted yourself there aren't many amateur developers (who don't use RM) on this site so I don't understand why there was such a huge push to create a community catering to said individuals. What majority? Are you refering to people from the general forums? If anything there was a huge disconnect between G&D and the rest of the forum. As for the changes, you admitted yourself they came way too late. Half the community left and the great amateur developers all moved on to better and bigger things.
Oh, hey, I wonder why there was such a huge disconnect between G&D and the rest of the forum? Maybe it was because every goddamn time something unique or interesting came out of G&D (Lazrael's games, cactus squid games, et cetera), they got buried by the RPG Maker circlejerkbot 5000 and eventually every single person creating things that were more than just LOL SECRET OF MANA SPRITES CUSTOM BATTLE SYSTEM left G&D and just started hanging out with the rest of the forum members on the rest of the forum and IRC, leaving G&D to get progressively more and more inbred and terrible. Did you ever think that maybe the disconnect happened because G&D saw the forums progressing and just decided to hole up in a corner and become a quivering mess?


I wasn't dissing Barkley either btw. I just noticed the whole amateur game movement came shortly after the release of that game. As for the resource engine? The staff should lead by example and submit things. Games, resources, and much more. Think of it as a stimilus. You can talk all you want but if you don't lead by example then why should anyone feel the need to upload things that would probably just be taken for granted? There is no community if the staffs aren't involved. Barkley was something new and the game was actually polished, it also promoted stepping outside RM for a moment which is a good thing by all means. But I don't think that was really enough.
The staff uploaded FIVE HUNDRED DIFFERENT RESOURCES at the beginning and nobody in G&D used it because they DIDN'T WANT ANYTHING TO CHANGE. The entire problem with the G&D community here has been that every time anybody holds out an olive branch to them they retreat further into the cesspool.

I just didn't like RM being called "Bad" when it really isn't. It's a starter tool for sure and many have actually gone further on into high levels of development after initially using RM. So hearing a whole bunch of General Forum Mods talk crap about a subforum (G&D) they had NOTHING to do with was retarded. That's a huge reason why everyone left.
No, RM really is bad. Or was bad. Maybe it's better now. Even if it isn't, the community surrounding it has, by and large, historically been asocial bottom feeders who would rather rehash the same discussions over and over and promote mediocre games than strive for actual innovation, new concepts, or even just GAMES WITHOUT RIPPED CONTENT. The fact that they don't aspire for anything more than maybe a custom battle system and custom menu system is EXACTLY why every single member of it fights against the claims that it is bad, because for a vast majority of the "golden days," there was a pretty solid ceiling for RM games. And it was pretty low.

Yeah that sucks. I appreciate custom games really. As for adverts, there was literally NO FEEDBACK system in place. No one got any real feedback on anything they posted unless they stuffed their topics with a million polished pictures, videos, etc. This got out of hand and people literally just started competing for epeen with no real games actually being in development. This is the fault of the community but also the negative image RM had. Anyone could just post an MS paint doodle of AMATEUR CUSTOM GAME and get 5 pages of feedback instantly. You are asking a lot from normal people to create completely custom games, some people just can not do that. That's where RM comes into place and it was a hobby/starting point for many. There's nothing wrong with RM, the forum staffs just had too high of an expectation. They wanted to see flashy custom games but this community does nothing to promote it, just all talk and rhetoric (aside from a few really good guys out there).
Whoa, we agree here. Sort of. You just completely admitted that G&D sucks and the vast majority of the site doesn't care about it any more because G&D has a shitty community.

EDIT: I guess Laz might not be a good example because somehow he still manages to put up with you guys.
Last Edit: November 20, 2010, 03:42:06 pm by Iaman
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No, RM really is bad. Or was bad. Maybe it's better now. Even if it isn't, the community surrounding it has, by and large, historically been asocial bottom feeders who would rather rehash the same discussions over and over and promote mediocre games than strive for actual innovation, new concepts, or even just GAMES WITHOUT RIPPED CONTENT. The fact that they don't aspire for anything more than maybe a custom battle system and custom menu system is EXACTLY why every single member of it fights against the claims that it is bad, because for a vast majority of the "golden days," there was a pretty solid ceiling for RM games. And it was pretty low.

RM is not bad. A lot can be done with it. The point of the program was to make classic RPG's, which is what most people used it for. It was meant to be fun, although most people forget that games in RM are usually being made for the maker and not the GW audience. So the 12yr old kid who started using it for fun gets crapped on for making a shitty game that was only supposed to be for fun and suddenly the maker and the G&D community are bottom feeders?

Asocial bottom feeders? Not really. G&D is content specific. I don't come here for general discussion or to see peoples drawings. I come here because I enjoy amateur games. It's not asocial to visit the board that interests me or to not go on IRC because I don't have a lot of time for this stuff. (I'd rather be working on my game.) Perhaps some of these discussions were being rehashed because G&D attracted NEW members who hadn't seen those discussions before? Well, at least we shouldn't have to worry about that anymore.

Strive for actual innovation: Some people are making these games for fun and WANT to stick to the classic idea. They are not spending hours upon hours of their life for YOU to approve the game. It's for them. Meanwhile some people do come up with innovation, as much as the program can allow. In the past there were even contests that specifically aimed at going beyond the limits of the maker.

New concepts: I see these all the time. Again, this isn't really what the maker was designed for either but new concepts are constantly coming in even now when the site is dead.
Games without ripped content: Anyone that is TRULY striving for an original game and perhaps one to make others happy instead of themselves, or one to make money, won't be using RM. They will learn how to use a more sophisticated program and make all the graphics from scratch. I'm one of those people that works a full-time job and finds it difficult to spend the extra hours on original graphics that will eventually lead to the game never being complete because I simply won't have enough time. Not to mention not everyone is a pixel artist.


If you don't like the games then don't play them. If you don't like amateur games than stay out of G&D, because that's what it is. This isn't really a community of breath-taking games. Many of the users are young teens that have just discovered where to download RM2k3. Get over yourself and let these kids have some fun.
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