What's happening in here?

[Mister_Raccoon]

Re: What's happening in here?

I think touching up on worthy points during those plans would be satisfactory with everyone; just so we know that effort and progress is being made and I would assume those who would like to help would be more motivated to take the initiative on certain things.

This.
I don't need to know everything because I'm not going to assume it's my business. But some updates on progress would be awesome. I'm pretty sure any negativity that may arise from any meetings will likely just get aired out on the forums anyway.

And to further mirror our buddy Zen here let me know if I can help in any way. /deadhorsebeating

[ShurykaN]

Re: What's happening in here?

[Charmoeleon]

Re: What's happening in here?

Like a couple of other posts I've seen in this thread as I've read through it, I've tried writing this post several times but can't find the right words. So for now, I guess I'll just say that I love FFR, despite the fact that it's very clear that there are multiple problems with the site and staff, and would hate to see it go.

I doubt I can do much, but if there's even a slight chance I can help in some way, don't hesitate to ask.

Also I feel like this post by sickufully pretty much sums up everything in this thread perfectly (except regarding the more recent HTML5 conversion talk): http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/...&postcount=213

[TheRapingDragon]

Re: What's happening in here?

There was a time years ago when I was actively trying to find new artists and songs for FFR. I thought my taste in music was different enough from what I was seeing so the bands I would go for would provide more variety. I got a few permissions from bands who were going to give songs to us for free.

I made a thread so the staff could speak to the relevant contacts and make it all legal and...nothing happened. The songs were never secured. For me, that pretty much summed up what was going on with FFR. It was a site with so much potential that was just sitting there treading water.

I'm glad there's now talk of getting away from all that and moving forward.

The realist in me says that FFR has missed the boat. You just have to look at the ~6,500 active users gained after 13 years to see how little has been done with the resources on offer. Even looking at Alexa shows that people spend less than 5 minutes here, which is barely 1-2 songs when playing the game.

That makes me think that this place needs a complete overhaul. Everything from the site, forum, game and the structure of everything, how it all integrates together.

But in truth I want this place to succeed. I wouldn't keep coming back if I didn't enjoy it and want to see it grow. So regardless of what's happened before, regardless of the inactivity and stagnation, if there is honestly talk of salvaging this place and turning it around then I'm all for it and I'd be happy to help.

There needs to be more integration between the game and the forum and ways to increase competitiveness. If people come here and they get a score on a song and are then told 'look at how close you were to others' or 'here's a link to the forum to post this awesome score' or 'how about playing this song in multiplayer?' or any number of things then it would keep them on the site and seamlessly lead them to other sections of the site.

The profile sections need completely removed. The best thing would be to try to integrate socially with Facebook or Twitter. Have people get scores on the game then have a button that will instantly upload their status to those sites, meaning all their friends hear about FFR.

The forum needs truncated. There are too many sections that are either barely visited or could be merged together to make it look as if they are more active. There are also sections such as The Werewolf Game that, to outsiders, would be completely impossible to penetrate (even the sticky for beginners was last edited in 2007 and was stated to be a 'rough 1st draft'). It would be like me trying to enter a D&D forum without guidance, of course I'd leave after a few minutes. These should either be sub-forums or sections you apply to join, then simply have a sticky that explains what it is, how to play, who to contact for more help and so forth. Have yourself a Werewolf Game point of contact who can take a new person through it.

Then you have The Garbage Bin. It's pretty much a place for people to shit-post. This site needs to have a unified goal of who it wants to aim itself at and what kind of demographic it wants to gain. Once that's known, fix the forum to meet this demographic. If that means getting rid of shit-posting for the sake of improving the site then that's great. If it means turning into a site like 4chan or reddit where you get all sorts of madness then that's great too, but either way there needs to be a clear aim of saying 'Who do I want FFR to be for?'

[rushyrulz]

Re: What's happening in here?

I spent an hour on a post and said "nevermind" lol

In a nice, short, non essay, I would like to exclaim that I think if staff applications were open at all times, and staff applications constantly reviewed, and consensus on said reviewed applications was reached with a (subject to change) time minimum of one month of contemplation about said applicant being reviewed, it might be a good idea. I also agree that what's going on should be expressed in some way, or at least a more effective system be put in place which allows ALL staff and possibly all users to know what's going on with EVERYTHING.

In fact, someone tell all staff about this thread please, this is a well past due "what is happening" thread

I know I'm a little late to the party, but I just have a comment about this.

It's not a bad idea to have applications out, but I know, at least on the Events side, that when we need somebody else, we already have a few candidates in mind. This is how badman got brought on. He was showing an aptitude for community engagement, he was online a lot, active, for the most part, liked on the forums.

I can't really speak for the other teams' hiring processes though. Someone's skill as a developer or simfile judge is probably less apparent than somebody's aptitude to run community events.. so they might need to have actual applications with tests and shit.

--

There has been a noticeable degradation in content on this site in the recent past, and I often find myself blaming a lot of it on myself, even though that's probably not the case. I did leave the site and game for a decent chunk of time (about 3 months), only returning to do what little responsibilities I had left with the Trading Card Game. To be honest, I had lost interest in the game, which I periodically do. I tend to overplay games, get bored of them, move onto something else, and come back to the original game after a while. The only difference is that this time, I had a staff position to uphold. I know it's probably just a coincidence, but there weren't many official events held in my absence.

Often times, when coming up with events, it's difficult. We will end up recycling old events, which I realize gets boring after a while. We find ourselves grasping for something new. New content to base events on, new types of rewards to use other than credits and tokens which have been used since the dawn of time.. that's fully 100% what inspired the takeover of the TCG. We saw something new and decided to pounce on it since it was an opportunity for new, unique rewards and it already seemed to be popular with a lot of users. We were able to create a new token unlocking mechanism that wasn't purely reward based (from an official event). I'm happy that the TCG is still going and a lot of people are having fun participating, even though it's gone through a couple regimes already (TSR is completely gone, and I've had a foot out the door for a while).

I'm honestly not sure who to blame at this point for the site's general decline, but I would attribute at least a part of it to everybody (staff AND community) getting a bit jaded and irritable about this constant feud happening between us. Slack wasn't a bad idea. I was on board with it all the way. The problem was that nobody else was, but at least it was a slight change of scenery for a while. I feel like I had a better connection to the rest of FFR staff in Slack that we didn't have in our secluded Skype groups, but for one reason or another it just didn't work. It was refreshing to at least see an attempt at trying to get the site together, and now everyone's just pissing down Zag's throat because it didn't go as planned.

I could ramble a ton more about other shit, but this post is long enough. I only read up to Rapta's post that I quoted, so sorry if I'm repeating stuff. I'll most likely be reading the rest of this thread throughout the rest of the day.

[Frank Munoz]

Re: What's happening in here?

From what I understand, HTML5 is vastly more compatible with mobile web browsers than Flash. Is that a motivating factor? If the intent is to turn FFR into a viable game for phones and tablets, wouldn't a mobile app make more sense? Not to mention, I think most would agree that the input style of this game isn't particularly suited to touch screens.

i agree FFR's style is not really suited for mobile play, but you know what is?
SIU
I mean, if going mobile is something we wanna do(which i do, ffr pro-chats on the go? count me in)

but instead of keeping it with the current 4 90degree angles to hit we make it into iono... 360(or 90, anything more than just 4 precise angles to make the game flow better). Meaning there would need to be a unique chart editor just for this mobile game.

This just creates another rework for a whole different engine, and that's alota work.

There are many other things to consider into this but that's only if anyone really wants to go that way.
I'm down for creating some layouts for a portable SIU, though there are most likely way better people to handle it I will probably make some anyways just for funsies.

There were other things I want to touch on, like this

Feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong here but you guys seem WAY tooo focused on the smallest possible demographic here and because of that you are over complicating everything. You are taking the 80/20 business rule and have squeezed that into a 99/1 rule. 99% of your planning and effort appeals to 1% of the general visitors of the site. Continuing to obsess over song ratings, steps and selections has absolutely nothing to do with the health of the site. It's like being rich and thinking that if we only had more yacht races, more people would come to a polluted beach. In the process you are making a shitload of work for yourselves with a constantly diminishing return. Based upon what I am seeing, this is elitism and feels like a private club.

Would you guys disagree? I don't mean to sound so harsh but what kind of effort has gone into making new visitors or players comfortable? Are there specific examples? If I come to this site new to the game, new to the community. Why would I stay? If everyone that volunteers spent their time welcoming new visitors or drawing them to the site, it would be way more beneficial than everything else going on.

Everything else needs to be put on the backburner. Through this we can significantly drop all the overhead. The more I learn about what is going on, the clearer it is that this is self sabotage in many ways.

Both of my kids (one of them in highschool now) look at this site in confusion and want nothing to do with it. That's an important queue and we should be doing everything we can to change that.

But what I wanted to say was already said pretty much

The batch is part of what generates new content for the site and impacts its inner workings as well as the interaction between staff and the community - all problems that have said needs to be tackled in this discussion. This type of judgment process should alleviate efforts given by the staff in the long term. Not to mention rewarding the whole playerbase for their active gameplay and gives a sense of it mutating. This is a tangible suggestion that doesn't need much manpower and can be done with already developed/implemented tools. Could be done even without integration.

Edit: "Focusing on the smallest possible demographic" doesn't hold a lick of sense. Our strategy is basically expanding the batch process to a larger demographic. "[...] what kind of effort has gone into making new visitors or players comfortable?" is also going to get Velocity on your bad side. Think of raw scoring implementation: the event that rallied the whole site into an unrecorded score hunting extravaganza? The lobby and the forum interface even? That kind of shut down thinking is unnecessary.

The other thing I'm thinking about now is this

Yeah, I agree. I think this all comes back to a leadership issue. It's sort of this floating raft and we are just kind of finding what we can at sea to eat. This is a great chance for us to all be vocal and real. We know how to crack that coconut when we get to the island, we just have to figure out how to get there.

Though there is discussion going on privately between synth and other moderators about the possible change into HTML5(from what i've read), was the "leadership issue" ever solved? Being that half the posts in this thread were pertaining to this, as well as communication problems which go hand-in-hand with each other, I believe it's reasonable to want to know if this is no longer a concern.
Though, from here it seems like it has been smoothed out.


@rushy: u rule

[Crazyjayde]

Re: What's happening in here?

I don't think we will ever remove the Flash aspect. At the very least we are looking at legacy and nostalgic reasons down the road.

FlashFlashRevolution as in gotta go fast. See? No need of rebranding when players will still be doing the same in the future. :P

Mozilla's threat on Adobe Flash has made of its support an escalating debacle and a legitimized concern for everyone. It's awesome to hear undergoing development.

There needs to be more integration between the game and the forum and ways to increase competitiveness. If people come here and they get a score on a song and are then told 'look at how close you were to others' or 'here's a link to the forum to post this awesome score' or 'how about playing this song in multiplayer?' or any number of things then it would keep them on the site and seamlessly lead them to other sections of the site.

This is a good point. It's not that there's only a need of interrelationship between the forums and the game but there's a need of continuity. Most of the exchanges are part of the forums and there's seemingly few inducement spawning from the game itself. Events are a natural response to that but they're not implemented and accessible through the engine. Think of the moments you were on FFR before your involvement on the forums and what encouraged you to be part of it. I personnally didn't for a long time as it felt like a seperate entity and still didn't feel much acclimated to it for another lapse of time.

[justin_ator]

Re: What's happening in here?

The best thing would be to try to integrate socially with Facebook or Twitter. Have people get scores on the game then have a button that will instantly upload their status to those sites, meaning all their friends hear about FFR.

I have been advocating for this HARD for years. It's LONG overdue. We utilize the Facebook page rarely, there's no way to share your scores over Facebook (Facebook API has tons of documentation... it's fairly simple to set up the engine to use the API to send a screenshot of your score through to your profile wall...), and you can't log in to the engine using Facebook (which would also generate more sign-ups and in my opinion, help with retention of brand new members).

We are missing a HUGE platform opportunity here and always have been, and it makes me sad to have to say this same thing along with others over and over and over and over and over and over again.

I've said it a number of times already - if FFR needs someone to do Facebook media promotion, I'm more than happy to volunteer on that. Twitter updates were integrated to post when the change-log was updated, which is even better than no social media presence at all, which is what the Facebook page had for the longest time.

[PhantomPuppy]

Re: What's happening in here?

im just patiently waiting for a version of the game that doesnt use flash player. i would totally be down for donating towards a completion of one.

[Poison-]

Re: What's happening in here?

Another possible source of income could be Patreon. Would that work for FFR? Come up with rewards for contributing set amounts of money per month. Idk, just a suggestion.

[Izzy]

Re: What's happening in here?

I'd subscrube to an FFR patreon if it helped everyone continue developing the site. I don't even play ffr anymore, but it would be nice to see things happen.

[shenjoku]

Re: What's happening in here?

I'd subscrube to an FFR patreon if it helped everyone continue developing the site. I don't even play ffr anymore, but it would be nice to see things happen.

^ Ditto on this.

[Rapta]

Re: What's happening in here?

^ Ditto on this.

I would as well.

Frank Munoz

ffr pro-chats on the go

YESS

[Reincarnate]

Re: What's happening in here?

Maybe I am just too cynical, but I see threads like this every year or so, and it's always the same stuff that gets brought up. People focus too much on the minutiae and not enough on what would actually fix things overall.

[Rapta]

Re: What's happening in here?

Maybe I am just too cynical, but I see threads like this every year or so, and it's always the same stuff that gets brought up. People focus too much on the minutia and not enough on what would actually fix things overall.

Actually it's different stuff this time