A new beginning for our SM community.

[Jousway]

I could also make some noteskin topic were I can help/make noteskins for new people

[Shikari]

Originally Posted by ddr_f4n

Please PLEASE make a pad part of the forum and I'm ALL in it. Pad players in the SM community needs major love too

This was already on my thoughts, haha.


Jousway, your idea is great. It'd be good, so people could make their own noteskins, and maybe find some skilled maker.


AJ, that's why I'm bringing up this idea, so we can do something to bring Stepmania back to life.

[Jousway]

Originally Posted by Shikari

Jousway, your idea is great. It'd be good, so people could make their own noteskins, and maybe find some skilled maker.

would be great if there would be more quality noteskin makers, there are so many bad noteskin out there with bugs or are inaccurate and I want there to be quality noteskins, thats why I stared USW in the first place, but no one joined oh well, I can just start some help desk/workshop on this new forum and help people, like man there are so many bugs in some noteskins its insane, also what I found interesting is that everyone that has ported the 3.9 default noteskin to ssc seem to forget this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd_qd5d17ZE in 3.9 when you finish an hold, even if your combo is under 100 it shows the bright explosion, in 3.95 and newer they removed it so I had to add an lua code to put it back, the one noteskin I have in there in ssc is a prototype btw the finished one looks like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AW7AOGcyjM

I should stop typing, I can go hours and hours on about noteskins xd

[Shikari]

A noteskin subforum seems a good idea. It'd be good to fix these bugs you mentioned, and to help other makers to make good noteskins. And it'd be another feature to bring players to the game. Why? Because they can feel like doing something useful to the game, even expanding to other areas, like step making and gameplaying.

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by Loutre

A new community is going to have the same effect as every other new community. It's going to be cool for awhile, then it's going to boil down to a couple circlejerkers posting about how bright the sun is.

The only way to revive stepmania at this point is to find an assload of new and devoted members, and I highly doubt that's going to happen.

This is exactly right.

While I think it's cool that you guys want to revive the community, how is it going to be any different than a separate community that is basically composed of everyone in this thread plus a small handful more before it undergoes the same fluctuations as places like ODI/KBO/etc? Simply making it centered around Stepmania, I think, won't be enough.

To resurge a community I feel you really, really have to focus on making it noob-friendly, and you need to give some tangible goals. Yes, creating a bunch of new files and having a SM forum will be great. But it's not going to draw a large audience and it's not going to offer anything you can't get elsewhere.

I can't speak for everyone else, but the number one thing that drew me to FFR in the first place was skill/forum tokens. It's also what draws people to sites like Kongregate and retains them. You need to always have something fun to work on / work towards. The problem is also that SM is an inherently insecure medium and so it's way too easy for people to cheat. You need to make the community less focused on raw competition (score) and more on personal achievement/fun. Newbies get discouraged if they work really hard on a song only to get compared to people who've perfected things at magnitudes far greater.

That's what's worked well for Kongregate. There are scoreboards, but nobody really cares about them. What people care about are getting mass-lists of achievements on their profile. Kongregate adds new games/achievements almost every other day, and so there's always something to come back to.

In other words, I think that it's worth figuring out a decent achievement system and somehow try to work that into the community.

Just my 1.624 Yen.

[TC_Halogen]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

Just my 1.624 Yen.

goddammit, this made me laugh way more than it should have, lol

and hey, I wouldn't mind making some sort of achievement badges and such to make the game more accessible and fun to newer players. I was considering making a achievements thread for FFR in the same style as Xiaounlimited, but making the badge images...it's a lot of work.

[Shikari]

Marcus, I already explained that to Patashu. I listed the reasons that this new forum would be good.

You talk about achievements. I talked with Stian about remaking the difficult rating system to almost all mainstream packs, from Community Keyboard Megapack to Dark/Light Chancellors Pack, so that way, we could create a tier points system to Stepmania and a decent scoreboard/ranking system, like FFR has. It's not meant to make the game so competitive that would be bring tension to the community, it's meant to be one more reason for people play the game. I do agree that achievements are a good thing to gather players, so that's why Stian is talking with the sm-ssc dev team to try to make this scores database idea happen and I gave this new difficult system idea.

We have the theory, now we need to put it into practice.

[Jousway]

Originally Posted by TC_Halogen

goddammit, this made me laugh way more than it should have, lol

and hey, I wouldn't mind making some sort of achievement badges and such to make the game more accessible and fun to newer players. I was considering making a achievements thread for FFR in the same style as Xiaounlimited, but making the badge images...it's a lot of work.

NOPE, thats easy shit, faking 3d and creating 3d pokeballs that spin in 2d thats a lot of work, 4 hours per ball, HOLY SHIT MAN that took long

Originally Posted by Shikari

that's why Stian is talking with the sm-ssc dev team to try to make this scores database idea happen and I gave this new difficult system idea.

We have the theory, now we need to put it into practice.

yeah he is really doing a lot of talking roflmao not really because it already pretty much got answered, well actually I showed it before in this thread, I also hang a lot around SSC seeing that I'm an noteskin creator.
http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/...1&postcount=56

[Shikari]

I saw this post, Jousway. Seems really hard to happen, yes, but like leonid said on first page, wouldn't hurt to try. And I don't think SM would be turned into a MMO, we would still use SMO for online gameplay and the forum/irc for communication, we don't need to fully transform Stepmania. Well, at least not in my opinion.

[ddr_f4n]

Yeah if we could get more "official" rankings like Osu! that would definitely help you.

I remember someone mentioning before a SM database. Dunno how hard or how much money that entire thing will cost you, but that would actually boost your popularity and increase of members by quite a bit. Some people here miss the FFR database, the newer players at least.

[Reincarnate]

I looked back in this thread to read your answer.

I agree that that's all fine -- I just worry that making things too centered around scores will ultimately not be enough incentive. What works well for new players is immediate perfection/gratification, and achievement systems have been great for this in practice.

Having a centralized scores DB will be a good start -- and having a decent difficulty-ranking system will be ever better (I recommend using a shifting, Bayesian-weighted system. In other words, a market-force type of ranking metric). But I think what'll really get things going is having a good incentive system that will make players actually care about coming back over and over again.

[Jousway]

*Jousway facepalms*

omg I just realized a ****ing mistake I made in some of my ssc noteskins.
like it didnt show the upleft and upright receptors in sm because of an error I made like you have _UpLeft Receptor Go 2x1.png which is defined in UpLeft Receptor.lua but I used
Texture=NOTESKIN:GetPath( '_upleft', 'Go Receptor' );
instead of
Texture=NOTESKIN:GetPath( '_upleft', 'Receptor Go' );
so it didnt find the texture

I'm so ****ing stupid

[ddr_f4n]

I can start making achievement tokens/badges or whatever you guys are gonna use for my touhou pad packs :3

*goes off to make a Jehovah's YaHVeH badge*

[Shikari]

So, Marcus, with a new rating system, we could come up with an achievements/tier points system, so people can play more and more to achieve more and more reqs. AJ said he'd help with badges, and since he's a great player, he could help with a tasks list, so people can earn this badges.

And this new forum idea wouldn't be only centered in scores. Seeing from the QED thread, people are worried the stepmaking methods nowadays. With a new place to go, these step authors could discuss solutions to this kind of problem, produce new packs and try new ideas, like leonid's single song pack.

[Patashu]

idea: packs can only be started up on XX new forum if full difficulties are mandatory

similarly, any pack thread should be clearly organized into 'packs for beginners of any kind' 'packs for pad players' 'packs for keyboard players' 'packs for solo players' 'misc'

try and think of another community that tailors community content only towards experts

[Shikari]

Originally Posted by Patashu

idea: packs can only be started up on XX new forum if full difficulties are mandatory

similarly, any pack thread should be clearly organized into 'packs for beginners of any kind' 'packs for pad players' 'packs for keyboard players' 'packs for solo players' 'misc'

Sounds good, like using tags on thread's title like [BEG], [KB], [6K], [PAD] to tell people what kind of pack it will be.

[AsphyxZero]

I'm all for making beginner charts. This post is also very informative and helpful.

[ddr_f4n]

I'll make beginner kb charts then I guess. Gotta do more kb charts in general :V

[moches]

damnit why am I always late to these innovation circlejerks

I 100% support this idea, and I have one of my own: Xiao created a 6-key achievements thread that rewarded people points for achieving set goals. what if we combined that idea w/the credit system from FFR? new users could gain incentive to get better and we could use the merchandise sold as a means to raise money for bigger servers, more features, etc.

[AsphyxZero]

Originally Posted by ddr_f4n

I'll make beginner kb charts then I guess. Gotta do more kb charts in general :V

less touhou plz lol