GxB Forum Separation (was: Post to Topic Ratio)

[sake-bento]

My suggestion is to raise the requirements of a standard, catch-all WIP forum and to create a separate forum for recruitment. We're still a fairly small group, but we're growing quickly. Both WIP forums currently sport several threads that aren't really works in progress, and more just ideas for a VN that I may or not make if I have time to do it, and does anyone know how to use Ren'py? I think the "idea" threads are adding more clutter than the GxB threads. It's just that a lot of the idea threads happen to be for GxB games. People with ideas can get feedback in the Ideas Dump thread (sticky it, perhaps?), and a separate recruitment forum can provide a good place for people looking for partners, or artists, writers, composers, voice actors, people with online VN engines, etc. to advertise themselves.

Romantic, but will fail unless you enforce very strict rules in that recruitment-only forum. I've started a couple recruitment threads myself. They turn into support/WIP threads immediately. The first damn reply: "I can't help, but I like your idea". And a recruit/WIP thread is basically similar: you're describing your game. How else are people going to be interested enough to help? Please, someone actually read this: recruitment threads are WIP idea threads. I have rarely seen them separate, ever. I hang out in the WIP forum(s) enough to see truth in it.

Most other creative forums I visit (art, manga creation, voice acting, game-making) have sections for recruitment and sections for finished products, with no place in between for works in progress. Recruitment threads don't turn into works in progress threads. Anyone who does want to update the world on progress does through via a blog or (like you're doing), a completely separate forum. Now I do like the WIP section, as it acts (in some ways) like a sort of blog aggregate for works in progress.

The reason recruitment threads turn into WIP threads here is because we've specifically labeled them as merged. I think if they were separated, fewer people would post the "I can't help, but looks good!" sort of posts you see. We often feel compelled to post those because the WIP section is meant for us to encourage whoever posts a thread there. If it's a section just for "Hey, I'm looking for an artist!" you'll get less of that.

[Samu-kun]

To get my 2 cents in, the new GxB forum has had absolutely no impact on the way I view or navigate the board, just because I always use "view active topics." I am the only person who uses that...?

I suspect this has been true. It's been three months, I think, and I'm not sure how to evaluate the results of the GxB forum experiment. I'm still somewhat ambivalent about WiP, in general - I wonder if it wouldn't be served better by aggregation of development blogs (like Planet EVN does), and having a forum where people can offer their services to projects. I'm curious as to what people get out of Planet EVN.

I actually like Planet EVN and use that as the primary place to promote my game. I guess there's a certain homely aspect of growing your own blog and watching it slowly expand. It's also a lot easier to keep things organized and write more in depth posts on a blog than on a thread. Keeping a blog is more of a long term, slow process, which I think is more appropriate for a visual novel project.

Still, I think keeping both the WIP forums and Planet EVN would be the best though, just because the barrier for setting up a blog and maintaining it is very high. It doesn't really make sense for people to have to go through the work of having a blog just to have a public dev journal of some kind.

As for why I'm developing my project mostly through Planet EVN, I don't find the board that applicable for promoting my project right now. The audience for it isn't really in this board, while my blog pretty much already has the target audience already in place. Also, my project is at the point where critiquing is absolutely inadvisable, or else it'll get stuck in the development hell of always getting redone or edited in some way to "make it better," so I don't really need more eyes than I already have aimed at trying to improve it. I'd much rather err on the side of carrying forward blindly ignoring what's wrong with it than never finish it.

At first, I avoided posting on the board because I wasn't sure if the project would be completed, but that's no longer the case now, since I need to complete the project or else I won't graduate from college. XD But since I've already built up momentum for the project on my blog, there was no need to create a separate WIP topic and start from scratch again by the time that happened!

In short, I use my blog because
1. It already has an interested audience
2. It's easier to organize posts and ideas
3. Much more in depth and longer articles are possible to publish on a blog
4. I've already invested a lot of work into building the blog, so I'm going to keep it when it pretty much does what I want it to
5. I like what my blog banner looks like a lot more than the banner on the top of the Lemmasoft Board. Sorry, Blue Lemma.

In expect similar logic to be driving most GxB WIP threads - the target audience that they are searching for is already in the board, so it's pointless and inefficient to try to attract the target audience to your personal blog. I'd say just leave things be and let things sort out themselves. Generally, people will do what's best for their project if they care about it, so there's no need for board administration to make people jump through extra hoops to get things done when things are already pretty much working out okay.

My suggestion is to raise the requirements of a standard, catch-all WIP forum and to create a separate forum for recruitment. We're still a fairly small group, but we're growing quickly. Both WIP forums current sport several threads that aren't really works in progress, and more just ideas for a VN that I may or not make if I have time to do it, and does anyone know how to use Ren'py? I think the "idea" threads are adding more clutter than the GxB threads. It's just that a lot of the idea threads happen to be for GxB games. People with ideas can get feedback in the Ideas Dump thread (sticky it, perhaps?), and a separate recruitment forum can provide a good place for people looking for partners, or artists, writers, composers, voice actors, people with online VN engines, etc. to advertise themselves.

I find this inadvisable, just because pretty much all WIP topics have a good chance of collapsing. Assuming that a solid looking WIP has a 70% chance of failing and a "rough idea" topic has a 95% of failing, I don't think that's a big enough difference to justify all the extra grief that has to be put into actually implementing that rule.

I admit, I pay attention much more to Planet EVN than the board, but I think there are enough people who post in the WIP forums to show that there's a lot of interest either way.

[Aleema]

Most other creative forums I visit (art, manga creation, voice acting, game-making) have sections for recruitment and sections for finished products, with no place in between for works in progress. Recruitment threads don't turn into works in progress threads. Anyone who does want to update the world on progress does through via a blog or (like you're doing), a completely separate forum. Now I do like the WIP section, as it acts (in some ways) like a sort of blog aggregate for works in progress.

The reason recruitment threads turn into WIP threads here is because we've specifically labeled them as merged. I think if they were separated, fewer people would post the "I can't help, but looks good!" sort of posts you see. We often feel compelled to post those because the WIP section is meant for us to encourage whoever posts a thread there. If it's a section just for "Hey, I'm looking for an artist!" you'll get less of that.

Sure, I believe you. I'm taking into account what I have seen my few years of this particular forum, not every creative forum ever. Are those sites you are referring to similar to the production of VNs?

Still, I'm not sure what doing that would solve. Or what the problem is that needs to be solved. If people are too ambitious, they're going to make a WIP thread, not thinking "oh, this might fail" or "this is only an idea because I haven't written or drawn anything" -- they probably fully expect themselves to have a playable game soon. So asking people to keep small ideas to a particular dump thread is less effective than you might think.

All that said, we can try it and find out. If it just becomes a mess of moving and deleting posts and putting more labels on people, I'll be against it. The WIP forums are working smoothly from what I see. I don't see any big confusion or demand for a recruitment forum, and this will only be doubling the amount of threads we see. So you guys no longer get the right to complain about the number of posts or relativity to the community again. Deal?

Still, I think keeping both the WIP forums and Planet EVN would be the best though, just because the barrier for setting up a blog and maintaining it is very high. It doesn't really make sense for people to have to go through the work of having a blog just to have a public dev journal of some kind.

I agree. I really don't like blogging. It takes way too much effort to do something, and even though commenting is available, it just doesn't have the same open feeling or ease of response. And it makes the blog post some godlike decree, rather than a conversation with people. Also, most blogs require you to sign up with them to comment, or jump through hoops. And the variety of blog hosts is dizzying. =P

[sake-bento]

What I'm aiming for here is to find a way to encourage people to complete more VNs.

At this point in time, I have finished a few visual novels. I also have many that are in progress. Two in progress games that don't have any hope of seeing the light of day in the near future are hanamix2 and Plat du Jour. I made WIP threads for both of those, thinking that talking about them publicly would motivate me to finish them. I plan to finish them one day (no, really!) but right now they're just floating. In fact, hanamix2 is just an idea, and a couple character images. After getting feedback about how great it all looked and how nice the idea was, I actually lost some motivation to finish it. Part of me feels satisfied that I've already done my part by talking about it, and so some of my motivation to actually complete them has dissolved.

RE:A++ never got a WIP thread because I was too busy actually working on it. It got done over the course of three months. I promised myself I wouldn't make a WIP thread for Jisei until I could see the finish line. That actually motivated me to work faster, because I really wanted to make that thread. I think that encouraging people to complete a small, but significant amount of work (like 2,000 words written or a finished sprite) will motivate them to work in order to be able to post the thread in the first place. In my own experience (that is not everyone else's), making a WIP thread has actually made me rather complacent. I know that some people DO work better with a constant flow of positive feedback, but having a small barrier to entry will give people the motivation to get a running start on their projects.

I'm not trying to stop people from posting WIPs. I'm trying to motivate people to complete more work before they do. I guess the point would be to encourage people who lose motivation from making WIPs (like me) to get a little kick start while still providing a place for feedback for those who are driven by community interaction.

[Jake]

I was refused permission to be moved back to the general forum, even when it was said that I would be allowed, if asked. So, personally, I hate it.

The part of this that I don't understand is why you were told it would be allowed. I presume you're talking about Rock Robin, and at the time, the first line of the first post of your game thread stated it was a GxB game, so it belongs in the GxB forum...

Presuming that we're going to have a GxB-specific WiP forum, leaving games which self-describe as GxB out of it is kind of self-defeating! Should we allow people to post their WiP threads in Completed Games or Game-Makers' Corner as well just because they want to be over there and not in the WiP forums for whatever reason? If so, why have forum categories at all, why not just one big category which everything goes in?

I suspect this has been true. It's been three months, I think, and I'm not sure how to evaluate the results of the GxB forum experiment.

In terms of your goals, of course! Silly. :P

If the intention was to divide the WiP population roughly in half, then you failed; it seems pretty obvious (despite the propaganda to the contrary) that the distinct majority of active WiP threads are in the GxB forum.

If the intention was to allow some non-GxB projects to still be 'current' in the forum, I guess it's a success?

I'm still somewhat ambivalent about WiP, in general - I wonder if it wouldn't be served better by aggregation of development blogs (like Planet EVN does), and having a forum where people can offer their services to projects. I'm curious as to what people get out of Planet EVN.

I don't read Planet EVN that often because it's filled with things that I have no interest in or which are irrelevant. I don't care about people's wordcount; if they wants to post some pictures or some prose I'll be more interested, but a lot of the posts are simply "I wrote another 2000 words!", which is good, but isn't particularly interesting in and of itself. There are a few people who don't discriminate between their personal-blog stuff and their VN-making stuff, so there are many posts on PEVN which aren't even remotely VN-related.... and of course, there are lots of projects on there and I'm not interested in some of them, so it ends up that there's a lot of chaff to sort through.

More to the point, though, the simple fact of the matter is that starting a forum post is a lot easier than setting up a blog or starting a forum of your own, in the same way that Ren'Py is easier to use than a lot of other options. If you want to encourage people to express themselves about their projects, then leaving a forum for them to do it in is a Good Idea, because I strongly suspect that a lot of those people just wouldn't do it otherwise.

The words "currently popular" used here seem very ... wrong. Insulting even, though I know that's not your intended purpose. It's like saying GxB games are a fad.

I think it's fair to say that GxB games have become a lot more popular on this forum than they used to be in the last year on the back of a couple of high-profile releases. And while I doubt that the people who have already joined the forum will suddenly go away if another Re:Alistair isn't released (and similarly promoted everywhere) within the next couple of months, I think it's pretty likely that:
i) If Re:Alistair hadn't been released and pushed everywhere the GxB population of the forum would probably be smaller, and
ii) If no other high-profile GxB releases are made, fewer new GxB members will join the forum.

But this is largely beside the point.

My suggestion is to raise the requirements of a standard, catch-all WIP forum and to create a separate forum for recruitment.

Romantic, but will fail unless you enforce very strict rules in that recruitment-only forum. I've started a couple recruitment threads myself. They turn into support/WIP threads immediately. The first damn reply: "I can't help, but I like your idea". And a recruit/WIP thread is basically similar: you're describing your game. How else are people going to be interested enough to help? Please, someone actually read this: recruitment threads are WIP idea threads. I have rarely seen them separate, ever. I hang out in the WIP forum(s) enough to see truth in it.

Agreed completely.

If you want to increase the 'quality' of WiP threads so they're actually 100% about game-making, there's an easy (if time-consuming) way to do it: police those threads and just delete any posts which don't meet your quality threshold. Get rid of everything which just says "looks nice" without a second thought. Remove the banter and the encouragement and leave only the posts with actual content. Brook no discussion, or the forum will turn into a why-it's-OK-to-post-mindless-encouragement forum instead of a mindless-encouragement forum. It'll be a lot of work, but most people will get the idea relatively quickly and you'll just be left mopping up the repeat offenders and the newbies. If you want to make sure that it actually sticks, start banning people from posting in that forum if they violate the rules too many times.

I suspect those measures would be rather unpopular - not least with PyTom, who's so reluctant to delete user posts he leaves responses to spam lying around! - but I also suspect that they're basically what you'd have to resort to if you want a WiP forum which is full of content.


On the other hand, a potential happy[ish]-medium:

In my own experience (that is not everyone else's), making a WIP thread has actually made me rather complacent. I know that some people DO work better with a constant flow of positive feedback, but having a small barrier to entry will give people the motivation to get a running start on their projects. I'm not trying to stop people from posting WIPs, I'm trying to motivate people to complete more work before they do.

If you want to make the WiP forums 'better', consider all the above rules, but instead of applying to everyone, just make them apply to the thread starter. They're not allowed to participate in the turning of their WiP thread into anything else (they're in a unique position to be able to keep it on-topic and about content), and they're not allowed to start a new one until they actually have something more than a collection of two-line character bios with names and blood types. I think this would go some way towards weeding out the threads which aren't so much "work in progress" as "hey guys I have an idea aren't I cool" threads, although it'd still be a fair amount of work, I suspect.

In the long run, though, I doubt the treatment or otherwise of WiP forums will really have much bearing on the number of VNs which get completed. If someone wasn't going to continue work on their project, forcing them to not post in a particular forum until they've made some progress isn't going to make most people work harder, it's just going to make them post less... or break the rules.

Two in progress games that don't have any hope of seeing the light of day in the near future are ... Plat du Jour.

*Shakes fist*

[Aleema]

The part of this that I don't understand is why you were told it would be allowed. I presume you're talking about Rock Robin, and at the time, the first line of the first post of your game thread stated it was a GxB game, so it belongs in the GxB forum...

Presuming that we're going to have a GxB-specific WiP forum, leaving games which self-describe as GxB out of it is kind of self-defeating! Should we allow people to post their WiP threads in Completed Games or Game-Makers' Corner as well just because they want to be over there and not in the WiP forums for whatever reason? If so, why have forum categories at all, why not just one big category which everything goes in?

I feel like cursing. Maybe because I'm sleepy.

How stupid of me to believe that games aren't just black and white, and that games just might've qualified for his "boderline cases" that he mention in the first post. How stupid to believe that the GxB tag doesn't mean that only a specific audience would be interested in them, or that a game could have no traces of other elements in them. How stupid of me to believe that I might know best about my own damn game to judge whether it belongs under Title A or Title B (not in an unoffered Title C). No. You're right. Someone who has looked no further at my project beyond the combination of letters "G x B" should tell me what my game manifests, represents, attracts and should be locked into, no exceptions, thanks for playing.

Really. My game only BELONGS in the GxB forum because the GxB forum was specifically created to push me and similar games away on purpose. What part of this being the reason why I'm upset aren't you getting? It's not like I labeled it GxB while there was a GxB forum and kicked up shit. And all just because I and some other developers unfortunately started a tagging trend called GxB? One that was there to help people avoid as well as find our threads, so that a complete disjointing wasn't necessay -- something that we were doing to HELP the situation -- Had we never posted the words "gxb" anywhere in our threads those months ago, where the F would your argument be now? The new forum was called OTOME at first, remember? I asked to be moved THEN. So PyTom even changed it so that there could be no argument against this blanket move applying to me, no matter what I did or said. What does that tell me? This move is just because PyTom and his friends don't like playing games as girls which date guys. That's it. That's all. I don't care, because you're allowed to have preferences, but when it means shoving me in a corner where you don't have to look at me just because I tagged it GxB? That screams "NO GIRLS ALLOWED". And I'm going to resent it. And it's not going to just go away, no matter how many rules you invent to make it seem like I "belong" there.

I'm going to go take a chill pill.
I'll see if this sounds stupid in the morning.

p.s.: The first line of my RR game says it's a management sim. Then and now. Would you ever believe that the GxB elements were completely secondary in the development of the game? I wasn't even going to do them.

[Jake]

How stupid to believe that the GxB tag doesn't mean that only a specific audience would be interested in them, or that a game could have no traces of other elements in them. How stupid of me to believe that I might know best about my own damn game to judge whether it belongs under Title A or Title B

Holy over-reaction, Batman!

Listen, it's really simple and you shouldn't have any trouble following it:

- You are writing a game where the plot features a female protagonist and lots of potential-pairing males, which makes it look, swim and quack like a duck.
- As if further confirmation was needed, you yourself describe it as a GxB game in the very first post of your game's WiP thread.

The logical conclusion that I believe anyone would draw from these two pieces of evidence is that Rock Robin is, in fact, a GxB game. There could be a game with a female protagonist and 'hot guys' who are pursuable which isn't, but even then, the creator describes it as a GxB game! It must be!

Further:

- The forum administration has decided that they want to put the WiP threads for GxB games in a separate forum from WiP threads for non-GxB games.
- Rock Robin is clearly a GxB game.

Again, the obvious, logical conclusion is that Rock Robin should go in the GxB WiP forum.





Here is another set of reasonings that follow the same pattern exactly:

- Susan has been working on a game, but she hasn't said it's finished yet, and she hasn't released it.
- Susan posts a thread about her game in which she describes it as a 'WiP'.
- The forum administration has decided that work-in-progress games should be kept separate from completed games

the equally-obvious conclusion here being that Susan's thread about her WiP game should be put in the WiP forum, not the Completed Games forum.




The point of disagreement seems to be that you just don't want your game in the GxB forum, you want it in the regular forum. Well, maybe Susan doesn't want her game in the WiP forum, maybe she thinks nobody reads WiP threads and more people will read her thread in the Completed Games forum so it's better there because she can get more feedback.

You're obviously not disagreeing that it's a GxB game, as you describe it as a GxB game yourself, so the only conclusions one can draw are the following:

- You don't respect the forum authorities and think you should be able to start whatever thread you please wherever you please
or
- You're just spoiling for a fight and being awkward on purpose.






The argument about whether the GxB forum should exist in the first place - whether the forum administration is doing a Good Thing by demanding GxB WiPs and non-GxB WiPs should be kept separate - is a completely separate argument, and I think you'll recall if you think hard enough that I also don't think the GxB WiP forum should exist. But that's not what I'm saying here at all: I'm saying that since they made that decision, and since the criteria are pretty clear, I'm not surprised at all that they put Rock Robin in the GxB forum... and if you honestly don't want it there, you're shooting yourself in the foot by continuing to describe it as a GxB game.

(And for that matter, I doubt being in the GxB forum really limits your exposure to any particular audience anyway. The only people who'll ignore your thread are people who don't want to play GxB games, and they'd probably be put off by the female protagonist and the obtainable guys anyway.)

[Aleema]

Which of these don't you understand:

1.) That I requested to be moved believing PyTom's OWN WORDS stating that he would if the developer asked
2.) That I requested to be moved when the forum was called OTOME, not GxB
3.) That I requested to be moved to one of two forums that were offered as choices, not some other random forum that makes no sense to compare this request to

You're obviously not disagreeing that it's a GxB game, as you describe it as a GxB game yourself, so the only conclusions one can draw are the following:

- You don't respect the forum authorities and think you should be able to start whatever thread you please wherever you please
or
- You're just spoiling for a fight and being awkward on purpose.

Yeah, that must be it. No other explanation. Definitely not the ones I've given, either. So I should be ignored at all costs, and every action, even if they directly affect me, go unquestioned. That means I'm a trouble maker.

I don't want to talk about MY game any more. This is about GxB games in general. I personally hate the decision. But I'm willing to overlook it for the greater good. The question is if there is a greater good.

[Jake]

Yeah, that must be it. No other explanation. Definitely not the ones I've given, either. So I should be ignored at all costs, and every action, even if they directly affect me, go unquestioned. That means I'm a trouble maker.

The reasons you've given are reasons why the GxB forum is a bad idea. I agree with you: the GxB forum is a bad idea.

But I'm not talking about whether or not the GxB forum is a bad idea; I'm talking about fitting in to the forum rules and guidelines given that they are what they are. And no, I can't see any other explanation than that you're trying to kick up a fuss because you still don't like being forced to be in the GxB forum for the reasons you've given.

If you wanted to make the case that Rock Robin shouldn't be in the GxB forum because it's a 'borderline case' and isn't really a proper GxB game, then you should really have stopped calling it a GxB game yourself. You didn't, so that can't really be your argument, surely?


The point that you're perhaps ignoring: "GxB" and "for girls" are two completely separate concepts. If a game has a female protagonist going after male love-interests, then it's a GxB game. That doesn't mean men can't enjoy it or even that it's aimed at women, it just means that it has a female protagonist and male love interests, like Rock Robin does. The fact that the forum name was changed from 'Otome' to 'GxB' should be evidence enough that this is the intention, surely?

[Aleema]

If you wanted to make the case that Rock Robin shouldn't be in the GxB forum because it's a 'borderline case' and isn't really a proper GxB game, then you would have stopped calling it a GxB game yourself. You didn't, so that can't really be your argument, surely?

Arguing that I'm shooting myself in the foot because I keep my game labeled GxB is biggest load of bullshit. Do you even read my posts? The forum was called otome when I requested the move. He shoehorned GxB and Otome together. I said "no thanks". I believed that if anyone could qualify for "boderline", it was an optional GxB game where the majority of the game was not romance. Apparently, there was no such qualifying case and PyTom was just saying it to soften blow. I guess he expected no one to actually ask or be offended. Surprise! Someone was. But let's compare her to crazy Susan who is nothing but a bother to the forum's staff because she demands unreasonable things, so we have no guilty conscious when we dismiss her.

The name of the forum was changed so that people like you could argue that the tag "GxB" is basis for segregation. I was talking to PyTom straight up in IRC. He asked me if I would be happier with the "GxB" title for the forum. I said yes. Yes, that would make me happier, because then it would at least make sense why I was shoved there. This decision was most definitely just him "cleaning out the cupboard" of the WIP forum. Which makes someone feel like dirt when they're what's cleaned. I don't like being classified as a game he doesn't like.

I'm not upset because I'm labeled GxB. I'm upset because it was used against me. I don't want to be moved to a forum that divides the audience because of that tag. You don't see me still requesting to move. I know I am GxB, and I have to be in that forum. But I don't want that forum to even exist. You're confusing my passion for this as a campaign to get my thread moved.

I'm only this frustrated right now because the feelings I had back then are coming back to life from thinking about it. I don't honestly feel this enraged all the time. It's clear I've never made peace with this decision, and the rejection by someone I very much respect hurts more than I want to say.

[Ren]

This decision was most definitely just him "cleaning out the cupboard" of the WIP forum. Which makes someone feel like dirt when they're what's cleaned. I don't like being classified as a game he doesn't like.

This thing I never understood, to be honest. I honestly have to say I also didn't agree with you (or your reasons) - I may have missed something, but where did he say he doesn't like Otome/GxB games? I don't want to sound offensive, but through the whole thing I had the impression you were reading too much into other people's words - just look at your reply to Jake here. It reads to me as way too aggressive.

To be honest, I don't make otome games myself (thought I will draw the sprites for one which can be classified as one, once I'm finished translating Koenchu sora), but I *do* play them and I still didn't see PyTom's intentions the way you seemed to.

Lately a lot of the activity in the WIP forums has been from Otome games, which seemed to "bury" the other genders for the difference in number. The way I saw it, he was just trying to organise the forums and I'd expect that if and when a new genre will be so preponderant, he'll just do the same with that.

[Aleema]

I may have missed something, but where did he say he doesn't like Otome/GxB games? I don't want to sound offensive, but through the whole thing I had the impression you were reading too much into other people's words

I can't point it out, because it was in the IRC chat. At first, yes, I was going off a hunch that he has no interest in GxB (which I can guess about any heterosexual male, really). But after speaking to him (I really hate talking about him like this), I really have no doubt that's what it was. Combine his desire to restart the WIP forum because he hated the new quality of posts, and then recognizing that the new posts were GxB posts -- surely you can put two and two together. Outside of the fact that PyTom very plainly told me:

A.) He wanted to encourage high quality posts in the WIP forum.
B.) He wanted to do so by setting an example.
C.) He wanted to make comments on projects he was interested in.
D.) It was hard to find projects he was interested in.

I assumed all of this before he even said it. It was very obvious to me, simply because of the first WIP rules change thread. But after he did and admitted it was about finding projects he likes, I can only assume I am not one of those. I feel like a daughter trying desperately for daddy to love her. =\ Oh well. Like he said, the best way to be equal is in the Completed Games forum ... though just saying that is admitting things are unfair as it is.

edit: oh wait, mIRC does logs. I can find it if you want, but that's rude I think.

-_- sorry, mysterialize, for sh*tting up your thread. I'll shut up, give up, and be quiet. I don't want to give my games a bad rep because I'm high on pain pills.

[Deji]

To get my 2 cents in, the new GxB forum has had absolutely no impact on the way I view or navigate the board, just because I always use "view active topics." I am the only person who uses that...?

I use the "View unread posts" linke exclusively when I check the forums, skim through the titles I want tor ead, and then go back and use "Mark forums read". Rinse and repeat once or twice a day.
I didn't even remember there was a GxB forum until I saw this discussion!
I guess it does matter for people coming to the forums for the first time, though.

Personally, I don't mind having a separate forum or just having tags ([GxB],[BxG], etc) for each WiP thread on just one forum. If we are going to keep the GxB category, I'd actually expect more categories (like BxG, GxG and BxB) if there was a good amount of threads on each to justify them.
To me they're just categories.

It'd be nice if we could still have the categories/sub-forums (GxB, BxG, GxG, etc) to check individually, but we could ALSO have the chance to see all of them in one category/forum (WiP), regardless of their category.
Like a post having the [WiP] Tag and [GxB] tag, another having a [WiP] and [BxG] Tag, and you could choose to see all the posts in [WiP], or all the posts in [GxB] (or in [WiP]+[GxB], if we had a [Completed] tag oposed to [WiP])...
No idea how to make that work on a forum, though >>;;

Now, about the use off Planet EVN versus WiP forums (of any kind):

Still, I think keeping both the WIP forums and Planet EVN would be the best though, just because the barrier for setting up a blog and maintaining it is very high. It doesn't really make sense for people to have to go through the work of having a blog just to have a public dev journal of some kind.

(...)

In short, I use my blog because
1. It already has an interested audience
2. It's easier to organize posts and ideas
3. Much more in depth and longer articles are possible to publish on a blog
4. I've already invested a lot of work into building the blog, so I'm going to keep it when it pretty much does what I want it to
5. I like what my blog banner looks like a lot more than the banner on the top of the Lemmasoft Board. Sorry, Blue Lemma.

More to the point, though, the simple fact of the matter is that starting a forum post is a lot easier than setting up a blog or starting a forum of your own, in the same way that Ren'Py is easier to use than a lot of other options. If you want to encourage people to express themselves about their projects, then leaving a forum for them to do it in is a Good Idea, because I strongly suspect that a lot of those people just wouldn't do it otherwise.

I've always thought keeping a blog is so easy O_o; I guess I just like keeping a blog myself >>;

I don't have a project that I'm keeping progress of particularly on my blog, but the reasons why I prefer dev blogs over forum WiP posts is majorly because of Samu-kun's points 2, 3 and 5 (I like blog layouts better than forum layouts >> ).

I'm a *terribly* lazy person, and to skim through a bunch of posts on a thread to check for what the author has posted about the game progress, it makes me go tl;dr and just go do something else... or waste a lot of time actually trying to look for the author's posts D:

When it comes to the development of a project, I like having visible and easy-to-find relevant posts and I like how in blogs you don't need to look at other people's comments unless you specifically want to, and I like how comments are assigned to each relevant post, while in a forum thread, comment/discussion-posts tend to be way less organized. I like reading each post on a discussion about a topic I find interesting, but when I only want to know about the progress on the development of a project, I'd rather have the info summarized and easy to see.

I don't read Planet EVN that often because it's filled with things that I have no interest in or which are irrelevant. (...) There are a few people who don't discriminate between their personal-blog stuff and their VN-making stuff, so there are many posts on PEVN which aren't even remotely VN-related.... (...)

This. I look at Planet EVN as often as I look at the forums and this bothers me a lot. But I guess you can't moderate what people write on their own blogs like you can moderate what it gests posted on a forum =/
Normally, if something starts with a personal, not related to a project or the creation of projects, intro, I'll just skip it and check the next post.

[PyTom]

Outside of the fact that PyTom very plainly told me:

A.) He wanted to encourage high quality posts in the WIP forum.
B.) He wanted to do so by setting an example.
C.) He wanted to make comments on projects he was interested in.
D.) It was hard to find projects he was interested in.

I assumed all of this before he even said it. It was very obvious to me, simply because of the first WIP rules change thread. But after he did and admitted it was about finding projects he likes, I can only assume I am not one of those.

Games that don't terribly interest me include:

BxB
GxB
Fate/Stay Night Clones
Higurashi Clones
Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Genius
etc.

I like the low-stakes BxG escapist romances, like kami-sama intended.*

The point here is that there are a lot of games that don't interest me here. And that's fine, because when I walk into a bookstore, the vast majority of books there don't interest me, either.

When I made the split, GxB threads comprised more than half of WiP. When you have a topic that's so prominent, it tends to crowd out the rest of the threads on the forum - which makes it hard for people to find threads about other topics. A split brings more games to the top, which makes it easier to find everything.

I'll make the point that I believe (rightfully and wrongly) the split was justified by the numbers, and that it wasn't simply a "Games I like" versus "Games I don't" motivation. If it had been, I would have tried to lump BxB in there, at the very least.

I do regret that I haven't had the time to comment in more WiP threads, which had been my goal.

I don't know if the current split has accomplished much when it comes to promoting discussion of games. GxB is incredibly healthy, and that's a good thing. I worry that much of the discussion of other genres isn't taking place here, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

* A The World God Only Knows reference, of course.

[Jake]

I use the "View unread posts" linke exclusively when I check the forums, skim through the titles I want tor ead, and then go back and use "Mark forums read". Rinse and repeat once or twice a day.

For what it's worth - I'll generally just go to the front page of the forum and click through each forum with unread posts in turn. If I'm in a hurry I'll keep to General Discussion, Game-Maker's Corner and the two Ren'Py forums - skipping WiP GxB and non-GxB alike - and if I'm just browsing but not wanting to read everything I'll be more likely to skip over the bottom three categories than anything.

(To be honest, a lot of the posts in WiP GxB don't interest me that much and I'll ignore those, but then the same goes for the non-GxB WiP as well.)

I've always thought keeping a blog is so easy O_o; I guess I just like keeping a blog myself >>;

Keeping a blog is easy, and setting a blog up isn't that difficult. But making a forum post is easier. Especially if you already come to the forum for other reasons.

(The other advantage the forum has is that you'll probably get a much greater exposure than you would if you just go and start a blog somewhere; it's a large audience.)

Normally, if something starts with a personal, not related to a project or the creation of projects, intro, I'll just skip it and check the next post.

Well, likewise - but like those bottom three categories on the forum, PEVN has discussion I find interesting less often, so I'm more likely to skip it. I've also never got around to setting up a bookmark to it, which just means I don't remember to look so often.