FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

The point of this thread is to shed light to ideas like this. It's why I created the thread. The FFR team will have a lot of points to go to from here. :P A lot of ideas that aren't in the suggestion thread are here.

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

Well let's hope it doesn't get brushed aside this time. We have:
-lots of good ideas, BUT
-relatively few who know or have the ability or spare time to implement these ideas

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

It's been posted in threads like these before. What you don't understand is these threads constantly happen, this isn't some revolutionary thing you've done here.

There have been people with the capabilities to do coding and stuff that were either not brought on or were brought on and immediately pushed out with how things were being run. But that's a whole nother topic that's been yelled about a bunch of times.

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

ok good work people that's a wrap

see you all next thread

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

Bleh. having to do well on low-level songs to unlock the other levels would have deterred me from sticking around. Mashing Vertex, Flight of the Bumblebee (lol), Death Piano etc. was actually one of the best parts of FFR, far more fun than gettin frustrated at BF'ing a level 1 (old system) on the last note.

Plus, all my friends were better than me, so they talked a lot about harder songs, and of course I would want to try and compete with them.

I just can't see the appeal in locking certain content from new users. It would also be a massive change after so many years.

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

Maybe this is indicative something. Just a thought.

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

We should just emulate pretty much everything osu! does.

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

Don't aim this at me, I have no control in staff and I've voiced problems a million and one times. I've been on ground level with all the members fighting for things for years on end.

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

lol there should definitely just a big button on the top of the page that just says PLAY GAME, the way it is done now is pretty bad. just, imo

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

i think a problem is that ffr has been constantly adding incremental features over like ten years and none of it really makes any sense at all to people except people who have already been on the site for like ages. whuch is homely in that sort of "overcomplicated mom and pop restaurant filled with stuff the owners thought might be ~cool~, but gordon ramsay would probably get mad at in kitchen nightmares" sort of way

ok

TOKEN PAGE

- tokens should have a clear page with a rectangular grid for each one; greyed out for not attained, filled in for attained. put the pictures nice and big, maybe with overlay text

HOME PAGE

- the home page should basically have not much on it; there should be one big one for PLAY GAME, one for TOURNAMENT (if its on, given like a glinty look to differentiate it from the rest), LEADERBOARD and FORUM
- the homepage looks incoherent due to have nothing about the game at all; it doesn't say, for example, THIS IS FLASHFLASHREVOLUTION, A GAME WHERE YOU CAN PLAY DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION ONLINE. IT IS SUPER POPULAR AND A COOL COMMUNITY AND HAS 69420911 USERS and all that, with its logo. as a result nobody knows what the site is about if they look at it. they think "oh, an inexplicable complicated website that has been around for a while", rather than a lively thing they can participate in
- news feed being on the home page for like updates is ok. but don't put too much on, just have like the most recent update in an aesthetically nice way and have a "read more" on the bottom if ppl rly wanna look at all the old news updates for some reason. when u have one news update on the page, people will look at the whole thing change, and feel super excited, knowing that there is a new piece of news on the page. you only need one to attain this effect
- tiny-ass dropdown menus on webpages is like 2003-core, but it'd be okay if the stuff under the PLAY FFR stuff was organised properly. if u want to do away with the dropdowns (you quite easily could), you could have what would be under a drop down on different pages, or dot them around *if and where they are appropriate*; SONG LIST might be a good thing to have on the PLAY GAME page, for example.
- remove stuff that has no relevance to logged out users. nobody needs to know what a CREDIT SHOP or a CHANGELOG is when they are logged out

USER BIT IN THE TOP RIGHT

- this is woefully underused and people look to this to look for all the user-related stuff. put all the user-related stuff in the top right; this involves:
- SETTINGS. this can be as simple as like a little gear next to the name, and song submissions isn't really necessary to new people; it seems
- CREDIT SHOP: you could go very minimalist here, while still making it navigable; for example, "CREDIT SHOP" could be a hyperlink for CREDITS. LEADERBOARD could be four separate hyperlinks on "grand total", "ffr rank", "level", and "games played", with a different rank order depending on which you click

PROFILE CHAT

- don't make this a direct link to an swf file; my browser's mime type for SWF is set to auto-download, and thats the *last* thing i'd expect; just have it on a page somewhere, or maybe at the bottom of every page near the footer. who knows, you might even get guests if you let them chat!

FRONT PAGE'S WEIRD SIDEBURNS

- don't have these. complicates text way too hard; have a single centre but for the news of the day and then just have segmented bits for each thing u want, like forum posts/live channels would work great here. cheevos/recently played could fade in at the tops, updating with ajax if we want that sort of functionality

WAIT HOLD ON LET ME JUST GO THRU ALL THE DROPDOWN BITS ONE BY ONE

songlist

- easy mode: put the song list on the play ffr button
- radical mode: scrap the ffr button; have PLAY FFR link to the song list page, and then let *that* be your onsite navigation. the "individual song pages" will just be instances of the client that will let you play the song as if it was selected in-client, by which u can continue playing, or back out to the song list to play something else

changelog

- unnecessary, just put this in a footer

credit shop

- put this by the user bar if and when they are logged in. like a coin symbol will do if u want, or hyperlink "credits"

skill tokens

- also unnecessary to logged out users, just have tokens on the user bar with TOKENS 4/86 SKILL TOKENS 0/86 when they are logged in. a lot of this stuff would be simplified if u replaced the words w/ recognisable images (token for token, token on... idk, on fire for skill token. do what u want here guys)

daily statistics

- theres a "arrows smashed today" thing in the top bar (if this is your site pitch this REALLY needs to be accentuated in the way i described earlier), but if you want that can just be a hyperlink to more general site stats

ffr wiki

- just have this as a separate button alongside PLAY/TOURNAMENT/LEADERBOARD/FORUM

wiki news/wiki faq

- ??? just have this on the wiki. if and when it is clicked

standalone guide

- unnecessary, just have a big button that has a DOWNLOAD CLIENT for ffr somewhere. it could be on the PLAY FFR page, or literally on the "pitch" part of the homepage, since its pretty important. could have two big buttons that say PLAY (ONLINE) or PLAY (DOWNLOAD CLIENT) w/ little fuss


ok


LEADERBOARD

- update ranks

update... the whole of the ranks for... the entire site??? or just the individual user...? either way, this really isn't something you should give to individual users, just run this as like a cron job or something.
- also this makes zero sense but i know my lovely pronsunk coded it so i will give it a nod and smile
- the rest of this seems largely well-sorted. could just be buttons on the leaderboard page tho. contrary to belief, you *don't* need to be able to access every single page on the website from the homepage, organisation is key here

COMMUNITY

forums/profiles (??)

- the distinction between "forums" and "profiles" feels semantically weird here. just have community go to forums and then have a user search bar on the right for like user searches
- forums is redundant, bc community just links here anyway

profile chat

- profile chat, like i said, definitely should not just link to a swf. link it to a page at minimum, perhaps have it in the top right for X USERS ONLINE IN FFR CHATROOM (to distinguish it from forum)

the heck is all this

- i don't see any purpose for any of these. suggestions should just be something u see when u click COMMUNITY, as is REPORT A BUG, as is API, as is FFR TEAM. if u rly want the api or w/e to be visible, put "oh, and we also have... an a p i !!!" hyperlinked in the sales pitch part of the homepage, or "meet our moderators" as a hyperlink there too. is there really a distinction between random thoughts and forums? this could arguably be phased out into a "RANDOM THOUGHTS" part of the forum, since it serves really the same purpose. pictures doesnt need to be a page except some weird vestigial url, unless ppl r e a l ly want to browse it

SONG SUBMISSION

- unecessary, confusing for newbs. just collapse it into furum

SETTINGS

- have as bar on user page, subsettings as hyperlinks from settings page. no need to have all of these browsable from homepage

BILL'S PROFILE (shows up on random thoughts page, profile)

- this shows up on the random thoughts page and is weird. unless its necessary, get rid of it
- PM s1rnight shows up on my own profile. if you insist...? (get rid of this)
- none of this needs to exist either. either collapse it into the user bar on th top right, or just have this stuff on the profile page (ALL POSTS/THREADS is quite rightly hyperlinked to ALL POSTS, u could do a thread here thing too if u rly wanted. but its unnecessary)
- top 50/token/blah can be condensed easy into the user bar on top right

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

another main problem (touched on in my wordz,) is that ffr seems... almost pathologically quite *enthusiastically* set on letting u browse absolutely every page on the website from absolutely every page on the website, which feels confusing. your pages need to be properly organised, with main information up front, and subsets of said information within those bits of information. having for example, each individual aspect of "settings" be on a settings page that is just a single click will not lose any traffic

ALSO

if anyone has access to who browses where and how (pr0nskunk~) it should be very easy for you to see which pages people are most often browsing, and which pages are being browsed where, to where. if nobody is clicking "wiki news" from the top bar, that is unimportant. if *tons* of people are clicking thru tons of pages just to find a basic thing that is also on the top bar, this needs to be forefronted way more

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

also i'm heartily for reposting this client back on kongregate, it seems rather absurd that this hasnt been suggested until now; even ppl who do not visit the site help to popularise FFR memetically. there is really no downside there, even if the upside ranges from good to small

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

kong makes profits

putting ffr on kong helps kong make profit and idk

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

oh, that; is it really a breach of non-profit? :X *we're* not making any money off of it after all

(if it was already *on* kongregate i can't rly see that being an issue, unless the "non-profit" clause is new)

Re: FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

I definitely agree with not making the Song Submission menu a thing. It certainly wasn't my idea, and I was sort of alarmed when I first saw that appear. Technically speaking, the process of submitting a file for FFR is background work; it's not a feature, and it's certainly not something that most people would care about. It's a menu that solely conveniences the few who actually contribute to FFR The Game, and the menu was probably created out of that narrow train of thought.

tl;dr the inner workings of the site should not be prominently in view...it's unprofessional and irrelevant to most users