CIEL FINALLY BITES AND MAKES A TOPIC

author=YDS
I still don't think you'd get much more than one anyways. Plus you'd have to reorganize the main page to do that, etc. We already have problems finding one worthwhile game per month.

Of course there are problems finding worthwhile games; no one ever plays the ones that get completed. That's not a problem with the system, it's a problem with the community.

I don't understand your post.

from Ciel
People ARE watching RMN. There are consequences to what is done with the front page. I visit French and German RM sites, and they occasionally discuss what is happening here. Lately the consensus re: this site has not been so good. They are similarly baffled by the choice of features as many here have been and, as human beings are wont to do, make generalizations about the 'strange/bad tastes' of the community as a whole. It's troubling to see comments dismissing this site as silly or of poor standards from external sources who are not familiar with any of the individual personalities involved here. It makes one wonder how RMN is perceived by those whose thoughts we don't get insight to - the individual looking for a community to invest his creativity into, whose primary measure of this site's worth is the game it chose to feature, and more to the point, the overall potency of its front page content.

Whether these people play the games we feature or not, they're apparently dissatisfied. My knowledge of the unfortunate superficiality of the human race suggests to me that they're baffled on merits of appearance alone. I can't prove it either way, but the fact remains, a site outsider isn't going to be impressed by a featured game if it doesn't look appealing, and the chances of their curiosity being piqued are likely lower than those of them dismissing this site as juvenile/weird/whatever. This is only what I suspect, though.

Following this conversation is interesting, as I have had to consider marketing in my recent pursuits. What I've learned is that the general populace at large is unaware of what signals their interest in a game (or whatever is on the internet) and are mostly driven by the instincts inspired by what they see/hear in the first few tiny moments. Things we take into account, such as uniqueness, cool systems, custom resources... mean practically nothing to the people at large. Therefore, it is rather difficult to assign arbitrary traits that would determine which featured game would reflect best on the RM community. Though, if one were to do so, they would probably be best in deciding that that arbitrary trait is beautiful screenshots and a catchy title.

from Craze
In my opinion, a good game has to have good design, presentation and execution... but apparently, that's just me.

Define 'good.'

author=Lennon
It shouldn't be that hard to see when a game is good.

I have a hard time believing anything as subjective as "good" and "bad" could ever be brushed off as some sort of fact.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN OTHER PEOPLE HAVE OPINIONS?!! WELL SCREW THEM!

Hey, guys. MOG said stop the stupid debate. Drop it.

author=Craze
Hey, guys. MOG said stop the stupid debate. Drop it.

there is no debate. did you not understand my post.

I have seen a troubling level of defensiveness and self righteousness from some of the current staff when questioned,

When you are facing an angry mob of internet ragequitters who only repeatedly chant that LL is crap and completely misunderstand the point of FG, it's hard to make a constructive comeback.

From what I've seen though, the staff has been more than hospitable in answering the criticism of the community. Keep in mind that refusing to follow the community's wishes does not neccesarily equate to bad governing.

The featured game is a very very powerful tool. Why? Because it occupies the most significant portion of RMN's most valuable resource: the front page. It is RMN's primary avenue of content delivery and communication with its users, whether they be first time visitors or long time members. I honestly can't understand how this isn't immediately obvious to everyone involved, but you are going about this all wrong - there is such unrest over the featured game because of a disconnect between the staff's intent and the public's perceived importance and significance of that particular venue. Bad news for the staff; the public is correct about the featured game's importance due to the reasons I have described.

Absolutely no one has denied the weight and power that the Featured Games hold. I am humbly wondering where you got that impression.

An extremely successful UCC site will tend to communicate with its users via the front page in a meaningful, relevant, and invigorating fashion that fosters a sense of creativity, activity, and community.
The key to engaging and productive interaction between a site's staff and userbase is that any content (articles, features) released on the front page should generate POSITIVE ACTION. That's two words - it should generate an action of some sort (discussion resulting in the birth of new ideas, perspectives, or products) and this action should be positive (healthy for the user base and by extension content generation). Articles, interviews, and features are all tools that can and should provide insight, perspective, and inspiration.
...
More than that, being featured should absolutely be something users aspire to - an achievement and honor one can work towards by improving the quality of their work. It may sound 'shallow' to those who strictly advocate making games for oneself, but the prestige factor within a community that is respected can be a big motivational boost. (Thinking about how cool it'll be when everyone likes the game you're working on is an oasis on the horizon in the scorching desert of development.) These sorts of things generate 'positive action'. Putting an obscure game that you, as a select few staff members think 'deserves' exposure in that venerable position on the main page is like jamming a square peg in a round hole - it creates NEGATIVE action. Due to the disconnect in perception i have described, many users are merely bewildered by your choices. Rather than generating inspiration, perspective, and discussion tending towards the ultimate goal of - more videogames, better videogames - it causes doubt, questioning, bitterness, etc.

The featuring of Legendary Legends did not in anyway prohibit "positive action". For all we know, we could've taken the chance to constructively debate exactly how and why the writing wasn't what it was made out to be (and why some other people found the writing great). It was the community and its love for incessant bickering that destroyed any chances for "positive action", not the game (LL), not the system (FG), and not the staff.

Featured games should be representative of the community's finest work and a sign post to the outside world - 'Hey, look at the amazing things we make here, you should come and make amazing things with us!'.

It amazes me that people still either misunderstand what RMN's Featured Games is about or insist their flawed understanding is the one and only truth. The staff has made it clear their intention for Featured Games and that they won't change this any time soon. Rather than cry on in futility, can't we turn the wheel to something more constructive?

If you want to spoon-feed your userbase your favorite games that they have heretofore passed over due to indifference or ignorance, it is best that you do so in a more subtle fashion. Write a thorough article about it once a month or create a new section of the site dedicated to 'staff picks'. A thoughtful opinion article on the merits of an obscure title by a member of the staff will be more likely to generate positive interaction in the form of analytical discussion and academic debate over design strengths and weaknesses.

I do agree with you that the objective that Featured Games is trying to accomplish can be done in a less misunderstanding way. I do not know whether subtlety should be strived for, though: Weren't the games overlooked because they were presented subtlely and never captured the attention they deserved?

Believe you me, this is a huge thing. I have had discussions with people both inside and outside this community who find it staggering that the staff here have passed over titles that were celebrated on numerous other sites in favor of games whose merits are, at best, difficult to grasp.

Again, the aforementioned misunderstanding. If a game is already being publicized in a variety of places or is in any other fashion already largely popular, why shouldn't RMN say "hey, we can do something interesting and unique with our real estate and time!"? Why can't we go "hey, did you know this <game> is around too?" and showcase something different from the masses?

The featured game is important - so important that it should not even be changed if there is no suitable successor. If it must be changed and there are no candidates, hold a game making contest and feature the winner.

A static Featured Game implies that creativity is slow, if not non-existant, in the community. Hosting contests specifically to create FG winners serves to only further push that point.

Eyes Without a Face, a recent contest entry, was actually a wonderful candidate for a feature for several reasons. It utilized REFMAP graphics in RMVX, which is not often (if ever) done and could potentially expand the palette of VX users who hadn't previously considered graphics conversion, let alone using anything other than RTP.

With all due respect, VX games other than EWAF have utilized REFMAP graphics. The choice is there within easy reach of even the most unskilled of RMVX users. If there was potential to expand the pallete of chips used by most VX users it'd have expanded by now.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is: Your presented praise of EWAF is unfair towards other games. Utilizing REFMAP graphics is nothing special.

Think back to the year 2000! Playing innovative RM games opened possibilities and presented new ideas to us. Seeing the innumerable tricks people used to achieve various effects was what gradually raised our standards. Anyone else have their world blown open after playing Kindred Saga?
...
I like to think of a successful UCC site as an 'engine for inspiration'. Rather than being a very static, even stagnant, dumping ground for people's work, it helps generate a snowball effect wherein people are inspired to create better and better work by observing the creations and perspectives of others in the same field. For those of you who have been in the RM scene for a long, long while, when you hear people talking about the 'good old days' at GW or whatever their personal RM alma mater is, they always mention how INSPIRING it was to log in and look at all the cool games and projects people were working on. There is a distinct lack of that nowadays in the English-speaking community, and that is in part because there are no longer any effective, structured UCC sites.

Agreed, the golden age of RM2K(3) games was great and very inspirational. I, for one, am honored to have been a witness of such times.

Sadly, there's a lot of factors at play here influencing the decline of inspiring new games. To name a few:
* The general preference to go the easy way and use ready-made scripts rather than create scripts (or event systems, in the good ol' days) by yourself. This results in games looking and/or behaving extremely similar to each other even with "custom" systems. I'd honestly rather play an RM2K(3) RTP adventure.
* The general preference to lock your project down. I have a decryptor to counter this, but this really puts a slamming-the-breaks halt to the "open source" nature we've been nurturing since the age of RM2K(3).
* Most users never wanting to improve themselves. See a system that interests them? Create your own rendition of the system!Grab that script! Don't know how to do something? Inspect and examine the system and the way it was created!Ask someone to script for you!

Really, RMN featuring games that "aren't up to the standards" of most of the people crying over LL isn't even the tip of the iceberg.

I'll also state that the basic general structure of the community, a user-content driven forum and an accompanying site, has never gone away. RMN is special in that the site is more fleshed out than most. What has gone away is the people and their willingness to be creative and endure effort.

But not as long as the staff continue along the seemingly narrow minded, self righteous, and ultimately self destructive path they are on now.

The community (you and myself included) is just as much to blame for the pitiful state of this community just as much as the staff is, if not more.

People ARE watching RMN. There are consequences to what is done with the front page. I visit French and German RM sites, and they occasionally discuss what is happening here. Lately the consensus re: this site has not been so good. They are similarly baffled by the choice of features as many here have been and, as human beings are wont to do, make generalizations about the 'strange/bad tastes' of the community as a whole. It's troubling to see comments dismissing this site as silly or of poor standards from external sources who are not familiar with any of the individual personalities involved here.

Why should we care, nay, why should we be bothered about how foreign RM communities are viewing us? We aren't the French or German RM communities, we are the RMN community within the larger English RM community. Let the foreign RM communities badmouth us if they want to, we're bigger than that (or at least I prefer to think we are). Besides, we have our own domestic problems to deal with: RMN makes fun of RRR and RMVX.net, RMVX.net hates us; all of this is funny to some, but detrimental to the English RM community's health as a whole.

Not to mention, RMN isn't representative of the English RM community: RMN, RRR, RMVX.net, rmrk.net, hbgames.org, Salt World, RPG Palace, Kobra's Realm, as well as others I possibly do not know of are all collectively representing the English RM community. The idea that RMN is the most prominent or its savior is, to put it simply, arrogant. I remember the days when various RM sites like Gaming World, War of the Magi, RPG Infinity, Sky Tower Games, RPG Palace, RPG2knet, and so forth were all relatively working together (it was hard to distinguish one local community from another sometimes) rather than one site in particular trying to outshine the other.

It makes one wonder how RMN is perceived by those whose thoughts we don't get insight to - the individual looking for a community to invest his creativity into, whose primary measure of this site's worth is the game it chose to feature, and more to the point, the overall potency of its front page content.

Not writing any proper reviews and being screaming jackasses about "bad" games won't give good first impressions to anyone. There are far more important problems to consider first than the Featured Games if we care about first impressions.

Also, holy shit text wall.