I know many people feel TDC is not what it used to be. Of course there never was and never will be a peaceful place, but it sure has been better (thinking 2003-2005 here). I do realise I am not the right person to complain about that, but I do worry about it a bit, I think we are destroying creative spark.
I obviously think something needs to be done regarding administration - it's kind of difficult to decide on what should be worthy of a "ban" and what shouldn't, and/or whether people should be banned at all. Like regarding the Phizzy thing - lots think he should have been banned and lots think he shouldn't have been, and it's kind of difficult to come to any conclusion.
No idea what can be done, but a new set of rules needs creating for sure.
I don't really want this topic to become another "ban/unban phizzy" thing, I personally believe he is not a problem for the whole community at all.
When you look at what this community site is for exactly I think the main purpose is to help people to improve at the different aspects of creating games. Now when I compare this site to another site with the same kind of purpose (but more specific), the pixelation boards, I see a huge difference. I think I posted about 3 works on pixelation in my whole life and I learned a lot. I have been on this site almost since the beginning, what did I learn? I learned I don't want to make games for fellow clickers, now that's useful.
It all comes down to a small difference in attitude towards the hobby and the people in the community, the difference between "well, do this and this and it will be fine" and "meh it's ok but not really fun". This attitude can be reached by rules/guidelines and the actions of the admins, just look at pixelation.
The future of TDC doesn't have anything to do with banning phizzy or not. Thats utterly besides the point; we have almost no new users, and we have had almost no new users for 5+ years. We are a deteriorating community because we cannot court new programmers into clickteam software. MMF2 is nowhere near as mainstream as klik&play because, which is rather sad considering the architecture.
Its not a question of community bonds. We are bound to lose the older members eventually, but if we can't get any new ones, we just shrivel up. Me and Tigerworks were both about the same age when we started, iirc, and now we're some of the longest remaining members.
What we need is two-pronged; not just recruiting new people to click-ware, but incorporating new members into the community better. How many of us simply ignore that new breakout clone in the downloads section, when its someones first program ever? We can't count on older members and prodigies.
I think if construct is a success, we might have some serious revitalization. Whatever we do, don't shun the people that use construct like we do with game-maker people (something we shouldn't be doing in the first place).
Yeh I agree..
I don't know if there is much we can do regarding the whole community - I mean, I think Clickteam should advertise more and try to get their products into shops and things rather than aiming towards their current set of customers. I'm not sure what the problem with TDC is - I know some people aren't happy with the admins (then again we can't make everyone happy) and a lot of regulars here haven't made games for years. Maybe regular competitions and things would solve that? I don't know..
This, btw, does not mean the admins should start a shadowcasterlike nazi regime. Being an admin is about being a spokesperson of the sane part of the community. The "I am the big admin so I do whatever the fuck I want and I am not gonna listen to you little standard users" attitude is WRONG and will cause people to whine about nazism.
Hayo you don't think we're doing that now do you?
I couldn't tell whether or not you thought we were like that or whether you just don't want us to turn like that. Either way I've always tried to listen to users whenever they have something to say. Just I got a bit sick of all the users telling me to ban somebody.
Yeah I am not talking about this phizzy thing, nor about how the admins behave now, but people could take my previous rant as "the admins should beat more people harder".
About getting people off their lazy ass, I think a more positive attitude would solve a lot of that. Speaking for myself I know I didn't get lazy but I just can't be arsed to post anything here anymore. I know that can change.
Edit: btw, we still have our built-in putdowners on the downloads page, we should get rid of that.
Well I've been planning a rehault of the moderation side of the site for a while - I don't want to make things stricter just make them a bit more organised and make decisions more consistent, starting with re-writing the rules. Obviously everyone here is welcome to help us with that - that is if you think it should be done.
I'm still not sure what exactly we could do to get people making games again.. If we found a use for DC points, we could maybe give them out for writing reviews (which could tempt people to download most games submitted as most games only get around 10-15 downloads). And maybe having monthly competitions or something (as we currently only have the xmas competition each year).
Some things we've discussed before are the thumbs up/down system, reviews system and the DC points system. I'll need to get in touch with Clubby over some final decisions about them as I'm not sure what he wants to do with them. Obviously we'll check everything over with you guys first.
I think those are very good ideas. Maybe all sane DC members should write the new rules together? Or you post a list of new rules and people can discuss and add things?
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