FFR: The New User Perspective And New FFR Ideas

[SKG_Scintill]

make ffr great aga- no

[Xiz]

FFR is using internet copyright law based in 2008.
Osu is using internet copyright law based in 2014.

(I got legal advice for FFR a few years ago)

For FFR to update, it requires stuff from snythlight.

Synthlight is, and forever will be MIA.

No change will ever happen in regards to that.



Edit: I skimmed the thread and saw permissions. If that's not what you were talking about then rip me.

[Nullifidian]

Some of you guys are missing the point. Nobody cares how good you can navigate the site or if you think the criticism is nonsense in your point of view. If newcomers can't navigate the site you're barring new players from accessing your content. If they have comments regarding something else it's probably not without reason either. All of us have grown used to the way FFR works so we're completely biased in that regard. Instead of dismissing these criticisms for pedantic reasons, try figuring out why these criticisms are being made by people who have never used the site. New players shouldn't be confused about anything surface level of a game.

[Xenorosth]

I'm going to be blunt here. The transparency sucks. It's hard to get information on what is being worked on, and it's an embarrassing roadblock to hit when a user suggests something that seems new, and... it's being worked on already. As another suggestion, there needs to be a point where new goals of FFR are constantly being updated. I wouldn't suggest making this a simple thread. I'd make this an actual page. Say, the patch notes of FFR. It'd

Originally Posted by Xiz

FFR is using internet copyright law based in 2008.
Osu is using internet copyright law based in 2014.

(I got legal advice for FFR a few years ago)

For FFR to update, it requires stuff from snythlight.

Synthlight is, and forever will be MIA.

No change will ever happen in regards to that.



Edit: I skimmed the thread and saw permissions. If that's not what you were talking about then rip me.

You might wanna read the whole thing. It's kinda more massive than that.

[rushyrulz]

[psychoangel691]

Originally Posted by Nullifidian

Some of you guys are missing the point. Nobody cares how good you can navigate the site or if you think the criticism is nonsense in your point of view. If newcomers can't navigate the site you're barring new players from accessing your content. If they have comments regarding something else it's probably not without reason either. All of us have grown used to the way FFR works so we're completely biased in that regard. Instead of dismissing these criticisms for pedantic reasons, try figuring out why these criticisms are being made by people who have never used the site. New players shouldn't be confused about anything surface level of a game.

The point of the site navigation has been brought up time and time again, it's a known problem. I've also asked a million times as to what happened to the new site design with the newer VB that we got forever ago I never get a straight answer to that. Would sure be nice to have that considering the site has looked this way since?????

[blanky!]

Well, maybe we could get a whole Dossar group going like the batch system did. It's possible to do, and us contributors don't even have to change code -- we just build over the old interface (and maybe change some of the stuff that makes levelranks slow)

[XelNya]

Originally Posted by Xiz

Edit: I skimmed the thread and saw permissions. If that's not what you were talking about then rip me.

Yeah I was referring to us taking the simfile database down whereas osu pretty much has one

and that the maker of osu uses the donations for the site / the "sub" service and he technically makes a profit off it

and he doesn't have permissions for anything

This is last I checked. Someone a while ago was talking to me about it and I think that was the jist of it

[psychoangel691]

Originally Posted by XelNya

Yeah I was referring to us taking the simfile database down whereas osu pretty much has one

and that the maker of osu uses the donations for the site / the "sub" service and he technically makes a profit off it

and he doesn't have permissions for anything

This is last I checked. Someone a while ago was talking to me about it and I think that was the jist of it

There's also constantly content being removed because of DMCA's and it's honestly super obnoxious imo. There's been times I wanted to play something but nope, gone.

[Xiz]

Originally Posted by psychoangel691

There's also constantly content being removed because of DMCA's and it's honestly super obnoxious imo. There's been times I wanted to play something but nope, gone.

Creating legal jumbo like "we are not responsible for our users content" = gg

But there a very strong chance nobody wants to deal with lawyers on this website who sends C&D's, since nobody active here has a legal background.

[psychoangel691]

Originally Posted by Xiz

Creating legal jumbo like "we are not responsible for our users content" = gg

But there a very strong chance nobody wants to deal with lawyers on this website who sends C&D's, since nobody active here has a legal background.

Yeah didn't even totally read this right. But yeah, even with that clause we'd have to deal with content removal.

[StrangerInDanger]

should synthlights bot message not be replaced by one from prawn or someone else? i've looked through his page looking all all the people who are new and not realizing that its just a bot message. many, many, many unanswered questions from new players having legitimate questions.

[psychoangel691]

Originally Posted by StrangerInDanger

should synthlights bot message not be replaced by one from prawn or someone else? i've looked through his page looking all all the people who are new and not realizing that its just a bot message. many, many, many unanswered questions from new players having legitimate questions.

Yeah this should definitely be altered to at least direct towards other staff members that can help with questions. That's what I'd probably do, introduce a few of the staff members that are really well versed and active in the welcome PM and can help the newer users.

[TC_Halogen]

Before going on, let it be known that a good majority of everything being suggested here seems like nothing more than a bandaid to much more major problems, which I'll underlie in a bit. The first thing that I see in your post right off the bat is the generalization of user totals: you at least understand the fact that FFR took an absolutely nasty hit in terms of activity back at the end of 2009 due to the hardware failures that caused the site to disappear for months on end. What you're not realizing however, is that FFR's activity started dwindling even before that due to the removal to some key things that people were using, and not with minimal activity either. I'll get to that stuff later because I'd actually like to take the time to mention some actual ways that I believe in.

Point One: Difficulty in finding the game.

While I generally disagree with a good majority of the post that you have here, I will level with the fact that the game is extremely difficult to find for someone who is landing on the webpage for the first time. Anyone who has done an ounce of research in SEO (or anyone who has slightly better than average common sense) knows that the trick to preventing bounces from your page is user engagement. The FFR homepage does exactly the opposite of that, as there's no clear indication above the fold as to where the game is. This used to be something that FFR did better than even current rhythm games now, because they had this neat little flash that was very attention grabbing, and even told users to engage with it. New people who have never seen the site can easily find the game, the forums, and they could even register by clicking the button on that point of engagement. I'll get to a more technical discussion regarding this later, as we can use this as more than a simple, attractive thing to look at.

Point Two: Game terminologies.

It's certainly good to have information documented, but with the insane number of terminologies that are thrown in place, you absolutely do not want to simply throw it immediately in a welcome post. I vehemently disagree with that. Rhythm games are incredibly notorious for having terminologies that are specific to their game, and introducing players to something like that right off of the bat before they've taken the time to even play the game and at least understand what it is at the core that they are doing is just not good. Much like how user engagement can be influenced positively (concise but simple to understand and visually appealing), users engagement can easily be influenced negativity with information overload. There is a very key reason why the concept tl;dr exists -- information that can be provided can usually be put in a manner that is much more summarized. And unfortunately, with regards to that point: FFR's terminologies simply can't be summarized. A skillful player will quickly see icons for full combos and perfect scores as FCs and AAAs in the engine and wonder what those are -- then as they progress into actual play, they'll wonder if (insert visually notable pattern here) is something that you see often, and if there's tips to get better at them, etc. As crazy as it is to say this, the FFR Wiki FAQ, which is intimidating in its own right, doesn't entirely cover a lot of the terms that you would see thrown around in the forums. Players should take the time to learn what all of these things means to improve their experience. Linking to the FAQ found in the wiki is a great start, because it not only has a respectable amount of information, it also links off to other Wiki entries and/or areas of the site that will continue to bring you down a relevant path of information.

Point Three: Tokens

The amount of weight that you're putting into the concept of tokens really bothers me, and there's two key reasons why: a.) you're noting something as a problem that really isn't one by stating that the tokens lack progression, when the fact of the matter is they are not intended to have any sort of progression. They are simply intended to be unlockables chained to single songs, and b.) there are actually tokens that promote unlockables, or "achievements" as you are saying. The notion that tokens don't tell you exactly what you do is actually not true, especially for newcomers who are playing for the game for the first time and using the R^3 engine - Skill Tokens tell you exactly what you need to do to unlock them. The regular tokens, well... they are cryptic, but they are found by the means of solving puzzles. They're not performance-based at all. So, I suppose a lack of flow can be correct with regards to regular tokens. You're also asking for subjective difficulty markers for the tokens, which is not as simple as you say, as it would require more database work for all of the songs labeled as tokens (and is not the most scalable with that same regard I'd like to think), as you would need to assign a difficulty that is also easily changeable. Skill tokens also should teach players to think for themselves - when they run into a token that has a specific objective or specific set of counts, they shouldn't automatically be tipped off that they have to do something special. Half of the fun in getting some of the anti-skill tokens involves figuring out the methods required.

RESPONSE - Suggestion one: Restoring the userbase

User counts are massively inflated between alternate accounts, repeat accounts, and bot accounts. We have to consider that out the (comparatively) huge amount of players that were even around before the site crash compared to the total number of users was likely still under .1% of users even accounted for. Basing anything off of those "millions of users" that we have/had is just ridiculous and not even worth it. We don't want to lump in users who only played a single game and left, or played only a handful of games before finding out that this game wasn't for them. The site is not going to grow by people finding the game and bouncing. You could try to send an e-mail to all of the users that were around with x or greater games to let them know that the site is still around, but you have to remember something: the amount of time from the FFR crash and now is substantial, and this will likely prove ineffective. Yes, anything is worth a try, but when the amount of effort required doesn't equate to a generally positive net result, then well... I feel like it's not worth it. You would be better off finding a way to generate new users, than you would trying to retain old ones that left a while ago. As mentioned before, a huge amount of time has passed and any users who were gone between late-2010 (post-restoration) and now are not going to return because they already knew of the site's existence.

RESPONSE - Suggestion two: Other sites/other platforms

Yes, there are other sites out there that FFR could easily use to get exposure out. In addition to Kongregate, there are still some old-school casual sites that harbor tens of thousands of flash games (AddictingGames/OneMoreLevel come to mind immediately). However, I get this feeling that it wouldn’t be as easy as simply slapping an engine that communicates domain-to-domain with FFR due to issues with permissions and song artists. FFR is its own entity, but permissions for the might not apply for something like that. This is why widgets were, and are, a very powerful and now unutilized entity that FFR had/could have. I know that there was an association with widgets and paid content, but who says that it has to be that way? Simply receiving traffic from sources that we have widgets made for could yield a ton of benefits. With how R^3 handles XMLs, how hard would it be to ship an engine and internally load a XML file that has only songs of a specific artist? This would also work well with sites like the ones mentioned above: you could create playlists containing songs that are found on websites whose terms of service for content upload include the addition of a CC-NC license. These are the kinds of thoughts that the staff should be trying to figure out. New features for the website are cool, but it does nothing to increase the overall traffic if staff is fixated on doing nothing but catering to forum users. Sorry guys, I love most of you - but with regards to the site’s growth, you guys don’t matter as much as newer users do.

RESPONSE - Suggestion three: Donations

Concepts involving money and FFR are something that have been thrown around for years, and what we can and can’t do have always been behind some sort of gray area, especially when you look at other websites who actually manage their content and still can handle donations. As mentioned earlier in this thread, osu! is actually a good example of this - they get subscriptions and manage to elude permissions, only taking action when given DMCA threats. And even then, users continue to upload content that violates those previously issued DMCAs. I don’t know what the legal risk is for something like that with regards to FFR. However, there has always been a concern that any sort of cash flow into the site that can potentially be considered to be outside of operational costs is a no-no. This is the kind of thing that really requires clarification from a much higher power (and no, i’m not talking about the administrators, I’m talking about Synth) -- there needs to be a structure in place that tells users and staff what they can and cannot do not only with regards to money. FFR used to make money in the past with subscriptions, but after the site’s collapse, that money was (mostly? entirely?) returned and those who had subscriptions turned into “veterans”. Additionally, users meeting a certain requirement fell into that group as well.

Anyway…

Moving onto the part of the post that doesn’t involve me responding to someone else: FFR’s issues with growth have never had issues to do with game content. The game has had new content constantly. Tokens are not a relevant point for new users -- they have thousands of songs that they can get into, and new players are not going to fixate themselves on unlocking content when there’s a ridiculous amount of playable content to begin with. Your two friends, in my opinion, are outlying users. In fact, the genre of rhythm gaming itself is quite a bit more niche than any other kind of game that users will often spend a tremendous amount of time simply gathering their bearings on the most basic foundations of gameplay that they’ll be too focused trying to find extremely easy content (and thankfully, FFR does have that). Game content is prevalent - so much so that even if the website were to stop putting in game content for a long time, brand new users would never be affected; the amount of content they would have to plow through and master to notice that there was ever a deficit in gameplay far supersedes the amount of time a player would be spending before they were no longer considered “new.”

The fact of the matter is that FFR is not gaining users is because well… FFR’s not trying. These little, dinky site updates to the engine and the leaderboards and… whatever, mean absolutely nothing for site growth. I’ll repeat the (hopefully) obvious point that everyone needs to realize -- all of the things that are being done to appease the forum users are doing nothing to make the site grow. In fact, when you think about it logically: the users who have been on this site for an extended period may slowly be losing interest in the website and putting updates in an effort to please them is going to eventually not work, and more and more users will slowly fade away until the site ceases to have an active community of players. This is the thing that should be aimed to stop.

I’m not sure who was responsible for removing that awesome Flash that was on the front page, but shame on them for doing so. For those of you who are designer/programmer-oriented; yes, it is arguably ill-advised to use a Flash element like that, but when you look at the overall antiquated appearance of FFR, the last thing that should be worried about in an effort to increase user activity is semantic design, especially when there had been hints of a new website appearance in the past. To tell you guys the truth, I don’t even know if any of the active developers have an idea of the funnel of traffic from the homepage, which is a bit of a problem given that there was a recent UI change that “consolidated” a huge amount of the forum links into a smaller space -- how do you even know if that was a good change?

I mean… this is just a small piece of the things running through my head -- there are a number of other ways to bring new users into the community, like… there are a ton of users who play the game without posting in the forums: how are you ever going to get their input?

[blanky!]

Ok so from the looks of it we just have to change up how the website looks. Now...what's stopping the higher-ups (along with all of us) from taking action?

EDIT: +1 to a splash page. simple, quick

[MinaciousGrace]

what stops anyone from doing anything?

the prospect of having to do it

[psychoangel691]

Just want to put this here because I was talking to Max about some other things with the site then priority of things got mentioned and it made me think about what I'd do about the non user friendly navigation.
[5:02:50 PM] Azlyn (Kayla): I think FFR needs a welcome page (aka splash page) that more easily navigates people to the most integral parts of the site
[5:03:05 PM] Azlyn (Kayla): like a link to the game, link to the forums and then link to profile and FAQ
[5:03:22 PM] Azlyn (Kayla): that way the new user isn't bombarded with a million links and no idea where to start
[5:03:27 PM] Azlyn (Kayla): just 4 key simple things in their face

This is something that's simple to do and can relieve the problem quickly without having to redesign everything right away.

[PhantomPuppy]

Originally Posted by psychoangel691

Just want to put this here because I was talking to Max about some other things with the site then priority of things got mentioned and it made me think about what I'd do about the non user friendly navigation.
[5:02:50 PM] Azlyn (Kayla): I think FFR needs a welcome page (aka splash page) that more easily navigates people to the most integral parts of the site
[5:03:05 PM] Azlyn (Kayla): like a link to the game, link to the forums and then link to profile and FAQ
[5:03:22 PM] Azlyn (Kayla): that way the new user isn't bombarded with a million links and no idea where to start
[5:03:27 PM] Azlyn (Kayla): just 4 key simple things in their face

This is something that's simple to do and can relieve the problem quickly without having to redesign everything right away.

I like this idea (along with halogen's). Makes it a nice and simple fix.

[TC_Halogen]

Originally Posted by blanky!

Ok so from the looks of it we just have to change up how the website looks. Now...what's stopping the higher-ups (along with all of us) from taking action?

It goes beyond that, but I decided to not add it to my post in an effort to not make it even longer than it was.

- Restoring the old video chat would probably be a great way to retain users; players can show themselves playing the game, they can chat with friends, and interact with newer people as well.

- Creating a managed database similar to resonance would help things as well -- the keyword being "managed" -- create a list of artists that we have permission for (or more specifically, update the one in the back-end of FMAP) and tie it to that database so that users cannot upload songs unless they are tagged with an artist that we have permissions to. Anyone abusing these privileges could have their accesses revoked. Players can more immediately receive critique from their charts, and because it's managed in a way where we have permission for the content, content might flow into the game a bit more quickly (why just send it to the database and keep it unscored when you can put it back in game and have people fight for ranks and whatnot?).

- Fixing the multiplayer so that everyone automatically converges in a single spot rather than universal/legacy multiplayer is a huge thing, that way everyone can communicate/engage in a single area.

- Tying in profile chat + multiplayer allows users to mingle in multiple places. Having multiple groups of people able to talk with multiple groups of people increases the number of active users in a given place, and those spectating from the home page or somewhere else outside of those areas might feel inclined to pop in if there's a large number users online.

- Unrelated, but potentially neat if restored: what happened to MeTrivia?

[psychoangel691]

Actually since this is focused around new user experience there's another thing I've talked about for a long time.

The amount of files in game is super crazy over whelming to a new person. My thought for solving this would also basically be more achievements which it seems xeno talks about a lot and that's to have levels of songs separated and unlockable. Basically a new person starts with the lower level stuff (rather than everything in their face) let's just say 1-10 for the example. They have to pass x amount of these files in this range to unlock the next level of files. (Just a quick example this could be done a bunch of ways with FCs, AAAs so on)