After reading every post, this is what I've gathered. Probably missed a few issues or suggestions but these seem to be the main points. I did this exact thing in the 'What's happening in here' thread which I personally think this thread kinda ties into. That post can be found
here. Not all points in that post are relevant to this thread but a lot of them are similar or exactly what we are discussing here.
Summary of Issues
- New players not sticking around
- New players being bombarded with info
- New players not posting on forums
- New players posting questions to a redundant account (Synth's acc page)
- Suggestions being noticed but not acted upon
- Suggestions that are acted upon, are not significant
- Updates are frequent but are small and not adequate for reeling in new players
- Token system revamp (this is supposedly happening already)
- Restoring the userbase via emails (already touched on, not going to happen)
- FFR introduction removed (
this)
- Permissions of songs
- No clear button that states where to 'Play FFR'
- Site layout very unappealing (has barely changed in over 5 years)
- Homepage is confusing (refer to above point)
- Navigation on forums is confusing
- Not enough staff to work on updates
- FFR on Kongregate and other small gaming sites
- Donations not being allowed
- Profit vs non-profit
- Pictionary for definitions (this is already a thing, but should be more accessible)
- Terminology needs to be better explained (but not forced down throats)
- MP is split up into its respective versions with a universal option for R^3 players only
- People's opinion on the Legacy genre
- Behind-closed-doors chats (not really a huge issue here)
Suggestions/Potential Fixes
- Encourage newcomers to sign-up. Give them a reason to want to play more
- Perks for referring friends
- Lag issues and remedies addressed in the FAQ (at the top of the page)
- Completely new and simplified homepage (just a complete rework)
- Personalised homepage (can move things around, hide/show things, make it how you want it)
- All mods accessible from all game versions (obviously some are impossible)
- Live chat server up 24/7. Pro-chat updated to voice chat maybe (push to chat)
- 'Become a Stepfile Artist' section of the forums (basically a guide on everything there is to know about producing stepfiles)
- Database structure changes (halogen touched on this in
his post)
- Teasers for updates (screenshots, videos, chart previews, etc.)
- Legacy Genre removed
- Remove Legacy songs from the levelranks but keep them in game
- Add a banner or warning message to let users know that Legacy files are original but 'messy'
- FFR Welcome Page (suggested by Psychoangel
here)
- Unlock harder song difficulties as you progress through the game
- Guides for specific areas of the site/game (for offset, rates, mods, TWG, etc.)
- Rework of genres (this is my own suggestion cause I feel the genres are far too broad)
- Stickied threads should be more accessible or displayed differently
- Tokens displayed in a grid layout with different ways to sort them
- Standalone version of FFR needs to be made aware of
- Logged out users (or guests) don't need to see half of the content that registered users see (s1rnight touches on this in his post)
I dunno how many of you actually looked at this (no one provided feedback) but I feel it's a good starting points for design improvements. Good explanation for each image as well.
Gundam-Dude's post about the site homepage
Also, I think s1rnight is onto some really good suggestions here. Most of these points seem like they would be beneficial to the site.
s1rnight's suggestions
Take what you will from this post, it's supposed to just be a neutral point-of-view summary of the thread but it would be good to see some responses on what is going to come from this discussion.