Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

[yo man im awesome]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

No.

Hell no.

heh. eheheheheh. hehehehehehehehe.....

[Xx{Midnight}xX]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

Yeah it's True, I don't want that version of Speedcore back in the game.

(Unless I can fix it. I'd rather have it troll people by being hilariously precise. Synthlight charts take care of inaccurate trolling :3)

[hi19hi19]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

Drawing new members is less of a problem than retaining them. We have nearly 1.8 million users and yet only a few thousand are active, and of those active only a few hundred post on the forums. Even considering the fact many are alt accounts and the site's downtime, that's an absolutely dismal retention rate.

One of the reasons the site grew so fast when Tass was in charge was that he and the administration at the time were constantly making changes and moving the site forward. Obviously not all updates were good, but I'll take moving forward erratically over regression any day. Nearly all of this growth originated with an active staff that was committed to keeping the site alive. And that's what we are lacking now.

Updates need to happen more frequently if this community is going to grow. The staff needs to grow as well, to accommodate this:

- We can start with appointing another FFR game manager. bmah is an ideal candidate for this, assuming he is willing to accept. He's been basically acting in that role for a long time anyway. JX needs someone to help him keep organized; just take a look at bmah's posts in the Postponed Files thread.

- Next we need to remove the current staff that aren't doing anything. Take a look at this page- some people literally don't even go on the site anymore. scottish's last activity was in January, and MalReynolds hasn't visited the site since 2011. Someone high up needs to take a good look at that page, cut out the inactives, and fill in the gaps with active, respected members that are willing to help the community grow.

- We need more people coding and doing back-end work. Velocity complains all the time that he is the only one doing anything to FFR's code, yet we've refused to allow anyone else access. That makes a ton of sense! It's been what like, a year since qqwref came up with the code to update the Token Levelranks page? Nice to see that's been implemented since then... oh wait no, all we've managed to do is take a skilled coder and convince him to leave the community entirely. Bravo.

- The staff needs to learn how to communicate. With each other, and with the users. For example I love how Zageron has been working on a video chat since forever now, yet the great majority of the userbase doesn't even know what the goals for the project are or why it's taking so long. Great communication there, mind making a post every few months explaining? It would do a lot to ease tension and reassure people that progress is still being made.
I also found it hilarious how much the other staff members complained about how the 6th Official Tournament was run, or specifically how little control anyone but Kayla had on what was going on. We have lots of staff members- game managers, event managers, moderators... definitely makes sense that a site-wide event would be run by just one person who refuses to yield any control to anyone else!

- The site as a whole needs to be more willing to accept change. For example, nearly every player on the site agrees the legacy files are pretty stupid for scoring purposes, yet they have been on BOTH the normal and token levelranks for years now. Hello? Get off your asses and change that, it would take a few minutes to remedy and would help the community a lot by clarifying where the legacy files should be considered with regards to scoring and average rank. There's only been like dozens of threads on this topic, why does it never change.

- I made this post last year (sorry non-vets it's in the veteran forum) and it's nice to see that nearly nothing that I touched on with regards to how FFR is going to grow has been fixed or addressed seriously yet. Great work guys.

- Anyone notice how this post is getting more and more sarcastic/snide as it goes on? That's because the more I think about it, the more annoyed I get with the state of the staff on this forum.

tl;dr The community cannot do anything to help the site when it is dying from the top down. Change the staff for the better, and the site changes with them.
There's plenty of people willing to help, but the current community and administration collectively seem extremely effective at ignoring them or pushing them aside whenever they offer to do so.

FFR should not be a homogenous group of users! Diversity within a community ought to be embraced.

Honestly? Not all diversity is worth the time and effort.
Members themselves have to be willing to function properly as part of the community before the community can reach out to accept them.

[Plan_Bsk81127]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

FFR: A community run site where the community has no say in changes on the site.


gg

[Reincarnate]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

I don't think you can really improve FFR's success in a vacuum much. TS is a pretty obvious example.

FFR's success was very strongly correlated with the mainstream, such as the highly active DDR era of the early 2000's and the 2005+ ITG movement, followed by Guitar Hero/Rock Band, etc. But all these games have since died off, really.

[dAnceguy117]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

Honestly? Not all diversity is worth the time and effort.
Members themselves have to be willing to function properly as part of the community before the community can reach out to accept them.

For sure. I didn't mean to use "diversity" as an excuse for antisocial behavior. I just think the community should be accepting of anyone who is willing to try to get along.

edit:

I don't think you can really improve FFR's success in a vacuum much. TS is a pretty obvious example.

FFR's success was very strongly correlated with the mainstream, such as the highly active DDR era of the early 2000's and the 2005+ ITG movement, followed by Guitar Hero/Rock Band, etc. But all these games have since died off, really.

I agree for the most part. If FFR only has a thousand or a few hundred active members, though, I think there's room for growth. There are still people out there who play DDR and Guitar Hero, as well as people who are still discovering those games. I'm sure some of those people would be quite happy to find a pretty sizable community with like-minded individuals and an expansive, free rhythm game or two.

[hi19hi19]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

I don't think you can really improve FFR's success in a vacuum much. TS is a pretty obvious example.

FFR's success was very strongly correlated with the mainstream, such as the highly active DDR era of the early 2000's and the 2005+ ITG movement, followed by Guitar Hero/Rock Band, etc. But all these games have since died off, really.

While I agree with this, it's still no excuse for the state of the site now. Just because it's not as popular doesn't mean there's not an existing community that enjoys the game still. Growing the site might be harder, but not impossible.

[noname219]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

What about releasing a FFR app?

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

Introduce more games to the site to grow it idea? I approve.

Use spin it up or tower defense games as those games? Hell no! Spin it up has its own problems (major lag being one, pixel-perfect precision required to play being another) and tower defense is just not any fun. No RTS, catapult/cannon launch, "dating" sims, prepare-the-food, or spot-the-differences type games either. Why? They aren't fun - that's why.

Almost any other types of games will do though. Remakes of arcade classics? Great idea!
Shoot-em-up? Great idea, provided it's done right (very tricky to do right in Flash though)
Platformers? Excellent! Puzzles? Very yes. Maze-like games? Sure. Racing games? If done well, absolutely. RPGs? Yes. You get the idea.

Also credits should be cumulative across all the games -- earn credits from any of the games -- also spend credits to unlock courses, levels, etc.. in any of the games. Maybe you have to earn some achievement in one game to unlock a particular thing in another, etc... And each game could have its own essentially token/unlock system.

But its important to choose games and game genres that every player will like. Also it would be a lot of work and could take a lot of time to do. I understand this. And in the end it may not be worth the effort -- I also understand this.

TL;DR Diversify the site to grow it! Instead of just FFR it could be grown to become a general Flash gaming site, like Kongregate or Newgrounds. Retain quality in all things added, and try to inter-link them as well.

[yo man im awesome]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

Introduce more games to the site to grow it idea? I approve.

Use spin it up or tower defense games as those games? Hell no! Spin it up has its own problems (major lag being one, pixel-perfect precision required to play being another) and tower defense is just not any fun. No RTS, catapult/cannon launch, "dating" sims, prepare-the-food, or spot-the-differences type games either. Why? They aren't fun - that's why.

Almost any other types of games will do though. Remakes of arcade classics? Great idea!
Shoot-em-up? Great idea, provided it's done right (very tricky to do right in Flash though)
Platformers? Excellent! Puzzles? Very yes. Maze-like games? Sure. Racing games? If done well, absolutely. RPGs? Yes. You get the idea.

Also credits should be cumulative across all the games -- earn credits from any of the games -- also spend credits to unlock courses, levels, etc.. in any of the games. Maybe you have to earn some achievement in one game to unlock a particular thing in another, etc... And each game could have its own essentially token/unlock system.

But its important to choose games and game genres that every player will like. Also it would be a lot of work and could take a lot of time to do. I understand this. And in the end it may not be worth the effort -- I also understand this.

That's the thing; (while I don't know this as fact) things like catapult/launch games are mainstream and what people are looking for. Look at something like Angry Birds for example, that game is huge and people would probably play our version if we did it correctly. We can't go on personal preference. yay mainstream~

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

Well what I'm saying is choose game genres which everyone likes though. Figure out which game genres just aren't fun for some people and just don't include those. If every genre chosen is a genre people like? ... Sounds really good to me then.

And if some genre I listed is a hated genre for someone, then scratch that one out, etc... Include only what will be enjoyable for all.

[Xx{Midnight}xX]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

Hi19 saying Kayla didn't want help with the official is completely wrong, No offense dude, but stop the blind hate wagon now please. That's completely inaccurate.

If Kayla REALLY wanted to do everything herself, why didn't she do her own batch for the official charts as she does the DF Custom Tourneys but with FFR's judging standards? Why did she ask me to help out with the placements?

Why the hell would she run that tourney in the first place if all she wanted was to be controlling as all living shit? That's the wrong event or thing on this site to run if you're that way.

She didn't go all out control freak on the tourney as you just implied, sorry.

[Jake Ferguson]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

Sorry if this post sounds dickish in any way, but why would people come to this site to play other games when they could do the same on kongregate or newgrounds? Those sites even have rhythm games too. That would also defeat the purpose of this entire site and even the name of flash flash revolution if there are other types of games other than rhythm on it.

I honestly don't think people should be worried about getting new members to join as there are a fair amount of new members each week. As for keeping them interested and actually staying with the game, I think we just need to introduce more events. The events like the valentine's and st patricks day spon cons were a good idea because everybody can do them, not just the people that have been here a while and are pro at the game. There may even be a chance that the newer members that decide its fun and actually want to stay will try and get others interested to. Just my opinion.

[Plan_Bsk81127]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

Trying to make FFR into a site like kongregate is a retarded idea.

[UserNameGoesHere]

Re: Ideas for Events and for Drawing New Members (& a brief message)

I don't know about you, but I play games on Kongregate, Newgrounds, ArmorGames, and Miniclip and I don't decide not to play games on one because I play them on others. Simply, they each offer a different selection of games even though there is some overlap. More variety = good. If I knew about other good Flash portal game type sites I'd go to them too in addition to the ones I already check.

I don't think you can really have too many Flash games type sites. Quality is important to retain though.