Unity, Thank You for Listening to us

There are probably about a dozen games in the history of the world who can say they aren't dwarfed by CoD sales, but then again look how many people bought Drake's last album despite the fact I know people who are better rappers than him.

It has every feature it needs. It doesn't lack anything. What exactly is "with the times" in inventory management anyway? Besides, how many inventory systems do you know that expose lore for their game?

I'm just talking about old NES games that were made cheaply and were really hard so that they couldn't be beat on a single rental session. But they were made hard by really crappy design and lack of conveyance, rather than by actually making a good, challenging game.

It's not perfection, but it is probably in the top 5 of games that came out during the 7th Console generation. Its one of the only games this generation where I actually felt like I accomplished something when I beat it.

 

@KnightsHouseGames: You're getting way too worked up about a throwaway comment that was clearly meant humorously, whether successfully or not

 

Bigfoot was bad but I'm assigning Lithium to "Rank ET"

 

I laughed! But if we really wanna break out the game comparisons we need to enter "slaughtering grounds" levels of being bad.

It's almost as if real human interaction can't be replaced by handing out jpgs as rewards ^^.

Maybe their service is only super expensive because that's what enstills trust in corporate level decisionmaking? "We want the best, let's just buy the most expensive service on the market". I'm still not conviced that they actually provide anything of value and are more than a corporate level scam with good marketing. Maybe the company was started as a joke between two drunk people and they just ran with it?

 

I just feel it's important to defend a good game's honor, something which is lost in a world where people make their living on Youtube trashing games regardless of their quality. And Dark Souls gets a bad rap from people on the internet just because they can't beat it in an hour like Assassin's Creed.

Yeah, at least Bigfoot resembled a game. And wasn't visually appalling.

I'm REALLY not sure what ET was supposed to be. It's not even clear what their vision was exactly. Perhaps this is more fitting.

 

Seeing their success... Wanna get drunk and start a company?

 

World's first walking simulator. Such pioneers!

 

Ooo! Pick me! I've done both a bunch -- and I have Lithium-quality graphic design skills!

 

Already got the box art ready.



Be 4! Eat that Lithium! With your lousy Be 3D.

 

You got ninjaed. I beat you to that movie snippet about 40 posts back.

 

Meh. These forums move so fast even the awesome notification tools here can't keep us all up to date!

 

Lithium would make this possible by bumping threads from a few days ago. A few months ago. And a few years ago. It was like necro heaven.

 

Saw that coming from a mile away when I noticed the recommendations box at the bottom suggesting 2 year old threads (that usually had nothing to do with the topic whatsoever by the way).

 

You misunderstand. Topic relevance was not the criteria... it was trying to make you MORE SOCIAL.

Also, possibly, 3D.

 

3D...
Despair, Depression and Desolation. Those are the three D's they mean, right? We sure saw a lot of that during the Litium incident.

 

The many D's (post-Lithium):

 

Oh so we're calling it The Lithium Incident. I like it. Rolls off the tongue like some sort of spy caper starring various hollywood has beens as bad guys.

3D showings of course.

 

Alright, thanks to those who responded.

 

Couldn't you do that just by having a sub forum called something like "Hideous Problems" or some such? Have your mods active on it to move posts that are not of a "something bad wrong with the engine" type nature and then thats your data there! All nicely packaged up for your easy reading.

Can you give us some idea how you thought Lithium was going to achieve that same outcome? You have a community here with thousands of good coders on it and as Indies probably very good problem solving minds. Use us, tell use exactly what you want, how Lithium gives you it and XenForo can't and maybe we can help advise you and we don't even charge you for the privilege.

 

Actually by using category-tags by users, we can have the forum categorise itself over time. So when people spot workflow issues, they can use the drop down box near the like button and tag it as workflow issue. Or feature issue. Or complaint. This way, you get up to a thousand users a day just naturally doing something lithium would only guess at.

Then Unity can specify a date range for workflow issues and see a big list of similar things. Or feature requests. Or complaints. I'm not saying it wouldn't need further mining, but mining is based on educated guesses, and this takes a lot of guesswork out of what it actually is you're looking for.

 

Reminds me of an old pulp magazine. Speaking of which I found a fun little cover generator the other day.

http://thrilling-tales.webomator.com/derange-o-lab/pulp-o-mizer/pulp-o-mizer.html

 

I'm glad these forums are back.

 

If I am not wrong, @aliceingameland would have a roadmap soon to communicate that for us.

Then we would finally know what Lithium has that Xenforo didn't

 

That's a bit too optimistic. Some places in this forum are like the wild west, people don't always follow the instructions because they don't read, don't care or just want to see the world burn.

For example, the thread about the Unity 5.4 Beta Sweepstakes

yet people continue to post bug reports in that thread.

 

If ain't broken, don't fix it!

 

A select group of trustworthy forum members, scattered across different time zones, should be given the administrative privilege to ban people, and they should only ever wield that power against the black magic spambot.

 

Yeah, spam(bots) are bombing the forums (once again).

 

Well, that was useful:

 

lol.

 

I don't frequent these forums often anymore, but I remember when the old forums were upgraded(the current forums you see now) and it was a mess. We were promised improvements and it'll get better(and it did, wonderfully), I thought this change was bad and oh did you prove me wrong. User bases don't like change, so I try to approach it with an objective view. I only saw the new forum because I had a really obscure Unity error and I was googling it, found one thread that someone had a similar issue but the link was broken because of the upgrade and cache doesn't work too well in China so I was completely stuck. Lithium is a completely different beast to the last upgrade, that's all I have to say on the matter.

I just have to ask...how did Unity mess this up so bad? We had similar complaints about the old forum upgrade that I saw repeated in the Lithium announcement. A sample was spacing that was obnoxious and color schemes that make you want to wear sunglasses. Aurore was around long enough to remember that mess, so I doubt she had any real power and was probably cringing more than any of us. Maybe someone just a little misguided and excited. Maybe someone who thinks they know better than anyone else. We'll never know and it's not a witch hunt(calling for people to be fired, come on man, if they've learned their lesson, they're more valuable).

We don't all want "the platform incorporates elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges, and “kudos counts.", live in San Francisco, have 40 inch screens(I have a laptop I travel with) or have the same internet you do. We come here for information, code or discussion. I couldn't see more than two posts on my screen at any one time (brings back memories, right guys?).

So you want to upgrade again eh? Okay. I get the sunken cost fallacy, we've all been there. It's going to cost you a lot more money to get what I saw to something of the same quality as we have here, but with how bad the backlash was with this upgrade, you'd be stupid to try it twice without improving upon what we have. Not sure why you green lit so early though, that's kinda weird.

I hate the idea of members being given all these badges for going to conventions etc, or because they sucked up to the right people, spent 12 hours on these forums or whatever other useless thing they've done. But it'll probably improve your numbers if that's what you're looking for in your next investor meeting, it'll just alienate the serious members a little and create divide in the community in the process.

 

Well....it is a bit weird to give badges for going to conventions. As expensive as it is, isn't the reward just going to the convention? Is there anyone that would attend a convention for the badge?

 

Oh, do you mean like this?

 

Now that is nice!

I meant virtual badges on the forums. lol

 

Probably not. In my opinion it just splits up the community into subgroups while boosting their stats(with some good intentions mixed in). Those that have been to conventions, those that have not. Those that are "Unity certified", those that are not. Those that have hosted an event maybe? Who knows how far they'll take it. They've said a little on their plans and so far it seems way too far.

 

Haha, I can feel the public opinion already changing. Next you know you're happily buying loot crates $2.50 a piece hoping you win the vaunted $400,000 Lithium-plated Riccitiello badge.

 

You've been away a long time. @Aurore is no longer a community manager and hasn't visited the forums in nearly a month.

Anyways, I agree on the topic of being careful on how far badges extend. The forums should be a place of information and discussion, not a popularity contest or place to ego-boost.

 

Seriously? That might explain it if we don't have anyone that's been around that long. Shame. I'm out of the loop

 

I am expecting these forums to become 'unstable' shortly and that necessitates the change to the 'new and improved' forums. That way Unity can look like the good guys no matter how crappy the next forums are.

 

I still don't understand the "Why" though!?

Like, why would they be so damn intent on moving the software? Have we gotten any legitimate, verifyable information on this yet?

 

I believe alice confirmed it was both general analytics and an attempt to help capture actual bug reports, though I can't imagine how anything we saw could have been helpful in that respect.

 

Thank God the old forums are restored...

Now we can all get back to doing what we do best.

Conjecturing about making games! Hurray.

 

Speak for yourself, some of us only post when things are rendering or compiling

 

Thats why I feel like that response is inadiquate, since it sounds like Xenforo can do those things as well, and Lithium can barely do things free forums could do

 

Or swapping targets or Building LightMaps or updating a project to the latest patch build. All take ages! It's 2016 these things should all be instant by now. And don't get me started on doing an IL2CPP build and deploy to IOS.

 

As someone who has spent a rather embarassingly large percentage of his adult life on bbs' or forums of various types I would have to say Unity's current forums(xenforo) are some of the best if not the best I have ever seen. I think almost anything would be a step down as far as large sweeping changes, the current ones are just that good.

 

A lot of good ideas in this thread and I don't want to be one to squash dialogue around this topic, but could we perhaps table the Lithium conversation for a few weeks?

I want to be able to provide answers and more details to some of the things mentioned here, but the truth is that we have a lot of internal discussions that will need to take place, go back to the drawing board and so on, and key decision makers are currently tied up elsewhere or on leave. And besides, we'll be taking much time and care to check, double check, triple check any progress we make. This is just a guess, but my feeling is that I won't have much new to share until August most likely. Until then, you're obviously free to continue discussing things here as you have been but I wanted to avoid this thread devolving into everyone talking in circles without any answers from us. I'll be hanging on to this thread regardless, but there will be more opportunity to suggest/discuss when we've got a clearer plan we can share.

 

Well then, I still want to discuss one of your comments before this thread sinks into a vacation haze.

Itsn't that exactly what gamification is?

Good, sounds like you've thought about preventing people gaming the system by spamming. But you still introduce an element of competition. Did you know there are cultural and gender differences in perception of competition and status? Depending on how the super user detection system is implemented, for example by aggregating the number of likes and solutions, valuable forum users with a humble, non-competitive disposition could become underserved or feel alienated, undermining Unity's efforts for increased inclusion and diversity.

That is the most offensive part. It goes against everything you said before.

You're suggesting to trade real world value for virtual vanity items. You're planning to reward real world expenses in return for items that serve no purpose but to make other people jealous.

Did you notice the reactions when I posted the photo of the Unite badge? A blush on my part (after all, I live in one of those egalitarian societies) and displays of sadness, jealousy or anger from others. Maybe in jest, but I think it serves as an indication for how it's going to turn out if you continue down the path of vanity badges.

In the end gamification has a tendency to benefit business more than the community. No wonder that Ian Bogost uses the term Exploitationware instead.

 

Make sure the community is involved in the solution. Otherwise, it's just more of the same - which we both know isn't working.

Thanks for the update.

 

I agree. I am not fond of competition especially when the rewards are titles and badges. Rewards for participation on the forums should be about community, helping because we need each other or enjoy each other. I am not interested in a forum where we all compete to have the most badges or at the top of the like list. In fact, the thought of that just feels bad to me.

I prefer Hippos idea of titles. Post count only matters because it gives people an idea of how familiar one is with the community. It is not an accurate record of one's knowledge of the subject. But neither are Likes. They are not really about liking..but about thanking. Why should one get badges for being thanked? Thanks should be enough.

gam·i·fi·ca·tion
ˌɡāmifəˈkāSHən/
noun
noun: gamification

1. the application of typical elements of game playing (e.g., point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.
   "gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun"

I am sorry Alice, but this is EXACTLY what you are saying. You do want to do this.

 

Thanks/likes as found on Internet forums are their own reward, but a post is sometimes even better (if you can think of more to say).