It is damned clear that this place ain't as active as it used to be. With easy tokens having 10,000, 20,000, even 190,000 gets, it's damned clear that this site has not grown. I can understand why people are leaving. They don't know the site exists. They thought it was immediately shut down 2009. That is what killed this place into being a remnant of what it used to be. Even saying that 1 million of the users were bots/dupes, that means that we still have less than 0.001 percent of people active on the sight at any given time. I haven't seen 750 users active since I was on 3 years ago.
So I decided to do this. I decided to take it upon myself to ask two of my friends to "try" this website. Not only to just play the game, but to also the actual website. And the results were... startling. The organization is bad, and it only takes simple fixes. I don't know if the staff have access to make new web pages, but these wouldn't be hard at all to make. I, someone who only knows the bare minimum, could probably figure out how to make most of these changes onto the website, because I'm aware that it is not easy to make massive overhauls. It's hard to simply "revamp" a site out of no where. There needs to be funding for it, and so on. However, from a new user perspective, here is what I found out. Simple things that could be changed to simply make the user experience better.
So. Ready for Overly exaggerated section titles? No? Well I don't care, lets get into it.
Point one: WHERE DA FAQ IS DEH GAME?!
So. Immediately, for a new person, this may be THE most damning thing. When I first show them
www.flashflashrevolution.com the two people I used as testers did this: Play FFR-> Song List. Then they clicked the song and went. "What?" The drop down is confusing. One of them eventually figured out that you have to actually click "Play FFR" instead of look through the drop down. When I pointed it out, the person said "That's stupid. There should be a big button that simply says "Play FFR" nice and big." Conveniently, I thought of a place
HERE (Hyperlinked because big picture). Now, obviously, it doesn't have to be, but it should be obvious where to go to play the game. Like, brain dead. Like. PRESS THIS RED BUTTON brain dead. Obviously, people aren't going to stick around if they can't find the game, and while us vets take it for granted, we're used to it. We've lived in this place longer than a high school drop out lives in their mom's basement, so of course it's easy for us to find.
Point Two: WTF IS A FC?!?!
So
HERE (again large picture) is the automated message that Prawnskunk puts out that immediately on account make. Now, there is good news and bad news. These messages were found right away. The bad news is that there is little to no actual information on the website in these automatic messages. When I showed my profile, one person knew what a FC was, the other didn't. Neither knew what the tier points or AAA bar was. They wouldn't know what a SDG, or anything. This dictionary
here is a start. But this needs to get to new users. How? Why not through the automated message?
Here are some other things that could and probably should be introduced, since all we touch are forums in this intro post.
- Skill Tokens
- Normal Tokens (soon to be revamped I hope!)
- FFR Events Forum
- Tier Points
- Leaderboards
The two people didn't even know tokens were a thing until I mentioned them. That is horrid. Token achievements is the one thing that drew me over to here from stepmania. It gave the sense of game progression, something that many other popular games lack. It was the SELLING point. These take up the most part of a profile. If you have all of them people, especially the new ones, think you're a fuckin' boss. That is the gold chain in the mudda fuckin' hood yo. Even spit a challenge in their face. Give 'em their first token. Pass Free Space. Flaunt what you got. First impressions matter, and this isn't just a forum. It's a game. The entirety of it. Show off your features, because right now, new people can't even find 'em.
Point Three: I DUNNO WHAT TOKEN TO DO!!!!
Here I will be blunt. The organization of the tokens right now suck. It is ass. Ass. So much ass. I asked each user which token would you want to, and both of them said "I don't know". I asked, "Well, what kind of achievement would you go for?" and the reply was simple. And easy one. Then I asked which ones are easy. They struggled to find them, and they went by the number of people who have beaten them. Logically it is sound, after all. Pity it took them both five minutes to figure out how to do it.
Then I explained that there are even "token chains", so certain tokens they couldn't even start on until they beat that song.
Here are logs that some it up as simple as possible.
[3:52]Xenorosth: Can you tell if any of the tokens have flow?
[3:53]Xenorosth: IE, unlock one to get the next challenge?
[3:55]Charkol: Flow as in one --> next?
[3:55]Charkol: As a user, I really, really wouldn't want to figure it out if it's not laid out for me.
[3:55]Charkol: I'd much rather like to be able to sort the tokens by song, especially if I'm trying to Achievement-complete a specific song.
As there is a massive "achievement whoring" community in gaming, I think that these should have a bit more ease of use attached. Solutions? Make a few subcategories of tokens. Show are these tokens in chains? How hard are they? How many people have done it?
In my opinion, there should not only be an ability to sort out these tokens by difficulty, which are easy, which are hardest, ect. There also should be something to show how many tokens you have on the page, and there should be a way to filter out the ones you have finished to see the ones you haven't done yet. Or vice versa if you want to stroke your own ego. Categories should be: Easy, Medium, Hard, Insane. Perhaps even sort out the PA accuracy ones from the anti PA ones.
******************************************************************
From here on out, while there are many more minor things that bugged them, those were the top major flaws. Here, I'm going to be stating a few suggestions that may, or many not be possible. So. Here we go. And yes. More exaggerated bitchy titles.
Suggestion one: I WANT MY OLD FRIENDS BACK 
A lot of people left. A lot. Some were duplicate accounts, some weren't. But how many people came back after the crash? How many even remember this place? Well, it's time to remind them. I suggest sending an email to every account on FFR to acknowledge that this place still exists. I don't know how hard that will be, but simply put, I think even if it's a 0.01% return of users, that still will double community size.
Suggestion two: FFR ISN'T THE ONLY PLACE
I'm not going to lie. I didn't find FFR by googling online dance dance revolution. I learned about it on a site known as kongregate, a site with a MASSIVE amount of games. Placing your games here would generate a lot of exposure.
So why not spread the game? I know it's not done. Hell it is done
HERE under a false name. I'm fairly sure they're hijacking it and trying to call it their own. But that's another thing.
Since the game was down, Kongregate has taken their version off. I suggest the staff, or someone, put the new R^3 engine.
Suggestion three: WE WANNA HELP TOO
Make a donation button. It's as simple as that. This place gains no funds. It's non profit. Not only is it non profit. It's debt inducing. You'd be surprised that if there was a simple small donation area that you guys could get funding for some of the real upgrades. We all know that this site needs updates. Badly. So let us, the community, make our community better, or even just lessen the burden on the great people who make the site. Make a terms of agreement when they donate, and it is as simple as that.
For now I am done. This is what I, personally think about users leaving, and secondly, how two people who have no previous relation to this site view it. However, I have more ideas, including an entire reformatting of how tokens are displayed on the token page. An admin can contact me for details about a set up, and a rough draft of it if they are interested.