How can Moddb be brought back on track? Thread

Not to be the "nay-sayer", but since I joined Moddb there have been significantly less interesting discussions and rarely have there been any threads with the actual developers of mods and games, sharing their experience during production. Since Moddb's, Indiedb's and SlideDB's forums have been mashed together (so, since always), there is hardly any distinction in who commented from where and what their motivation is to surf this site. It hasn't been about mods in a long time and there is a come and go feeling now, which makes it very hard to really feel like this is still the place to be for modding games.

I'm missing the substance in a lot of discussions. The reasons why this site had worked for so long was the commitment of its staff and also of the modders themselves, who would go into the open and discuss their failure or success in an honest way. There was no beating about the bush and there were updates from projects like Killing Floor or Natural Selection that made this a really interesting site with respect to the future development of those games. The last ones I can remember that went the same road are, Primal Carnage and Chivalry. Even though in their case there was already far less discussion and in the progress, lesser excitement about the projects. However, they all started here and we watched them and discussed them and played them in their early stages. Much better than having yet another generic discussion about some stuff nobody really cares about. I also really liked the philosophy and religious thread, which is basically inactive and had nothing interesting to offer in a while. This is a shame, because I think all of these things contributed to thinking about the games at hand and about making them more unique and interesting. The community was actually helping the developers, whereas today we get a lot more flaming why something is the way it is and that Desura had an error or something like that. All of which has nothing to do with making games.

So I ask: What can be done to make Moddb an interesting site for modders once again? How can the hundreds of topics and bot-threads be distilled into a few interesting ones? And can we do this without excluding anyone, or do you think there should be some kind of leveling system which allows certain users to see more than the rest? Personally, I think the site should keep being as indiscriminate as it is. It's surprising how little moderation is actually needed in discussions, seeing how they can get emotional and pretty funky sometimes. Like it was foretold in Tron - the grid stabilises itself However it needs to be limited in its infinity, because all the threads coming from all these very distinct sites are not making Moddb a better forum for gamers or modders. Something needs to be done, or one day this great forum will be a hogwash of themes and topics that make no sense and don't blend at all.

Edited by: SinKing

IMHO there's lots of interesting stuff here, just not stuff YOU'RE interested in. Not having the focal point be mods that become retail is quite nice imho.

EDIT: bets way to get the site "interesting" and "ontrack" it to NOT keep those life-sucking threads going (like the philosophy & religion threads, which you admit have noting to do with the site) and particpate in modding threads.

Edited by: TheHappyFriar

Point me to some threads of your interest, please. I am curious.

I think plenty of good games still start out as mods, because that is one way to prototype. And not a bad one, I might add. So there is still reasons for modders to work on their projects, it just seems like everything happens in secret until there is a big release, like what Underhell did last year. I never saw any posts about the game prior to the release and it is one of the best mods/TCs I have played yet.

And I understand why there are no prior posts about it, because they would get buried in an avalanche of threads from Indiedb or Slidedb. Sometimes I find something interesting on the main page, but that is a slim choice, considering the hundreds of projects that are being worked on.

I can't cope with the broad approach Moddb has these days. The forums are useless to me. I don't follow threads, I rarely see interesting topics and I hardly see any ongoing threads that have anything to do with game or mod development. The most interesting things happen with individual users which I follow and see when their projects or image gallery updates.

Edited by: SinKing

Overdrive wrote: Perhaps part of the problem(s) you are noticing is the lower barrier of entry in recent years to not only game modification, but game creation itself. Due to low-cost easy to use engine creations, changes in monetization schedules of the industry standard software (I'm looking at you Adobe!), as well as the social internet revolution in Youtube and Reddit, less people are inclined to work on and discuss mods rather than build the game(s) they want to. Information availability is no longer a limiting factor resulting in less collaboration rather than more perhaps... although not necessarily to the betterment of the end product.

Id say that nails it.

A few things I would fix:
Have to be a member for a certain amount of time to make a post, or at least a proper spam system. <-- Mostly just this.
Get rid of guest accounts.
Force users to own a game before rating, assuming its not free.
I would also like a little more communication or events (Talks, or competitions) from the creators of moddb/indiedb/slidedb. I swear the only time they do any thing is the end of year awards, although I could just be missing it.

SinKing wrote: Point me to some threads of your interest, please. I am curious.

I don't normally hang out in threads, I read mod updates/comment/etc. "Threads" was a bad choice of words I used as I was thinking about the comment system. For the mods/games that I'm actuatly excited about playing & follow here on a regular basis: Doom One, anything by bladeghost & a game I can't remember the name of but it is on Desura.

So stay away from threads, stick to mod comments. Honestly, why would a mod author bother making a thread just to invite criticism/junk/hate from people who don't care about the mod when the mod news/comment system works perfectly.

I agree with you on stuff being buried (I'm still of the "give me an option to only show mow updates on moddb" camp), but I watch a lot of what I'm interested in, I just quickly glance the home page to see if there's anything I missed. I've found a few games/mods I wanted to track, but I never say this site as a giant forum mods to discuss specific mods but as a place to get mod info, comment and follow progress on that specifically, and to be a database of mods for download.

I've visited this site for a lot longer than my profile has been registered and I've never once looked at the forums until today.

What a mess, jesus, they have a resume-section but the entire audio/visual board, 2D Graphics board, 3D section and writing & stories section is FLOODED with people making threads "Hello please hire me" "I'm an artist looking to make a portfolio" - why aren't these in the Recruiting and Resume section?

Seriously, are there any staff on this forum? They've just allowed at least four of their boards to become flooded with personal ads which get like no replies and start no discussion. It ruins discussion and the purpose of having the boards I think, when most of the threads should belong in the Recruiting section!

I'd like to see more modding discussions and actual mods than discussions about random things considering this is a website about mods, hence the name ModDB

Yes, good points people, keep it up!

Additionally to browsing mods + indies, I am looking for a place that actually lets you find other people, who are burning to develop original games and mods. I see modding as an ideal way to prototype certain type of standalone games. And I do believe it is possible to make game development entirely virtual. So the key factor is bringing people together in one place to talk about games/mods and in another place to talk about making games/mods. Talented individuals are spread on sites, like polycount, moddb etc. and yet we all are productive, we don't cooperate.

I see mods looking for help, only because I am watching them, not because there is a vivid discussion about their state on the forum. There is no actual and ongoing discussion about these projects. We just wait for news updates. This could all be different, giving much more exposure and publicty to projects that are getting worked on. I have the following ideas to get things going:

- a new sub-site, dedicated to mod development states and linked to from Moddb's main forum; the same for indies - all on one site.

- mod states depend on update and production phases. So you can find mods that are either in: (Pre)Alpha, Beta, Gold; of course they would also be separated by genre; additionally there could be "vertical slice" and "horizontal layer" sections for quick browsing near prototypes; the main point of all this is it creates a ranking for mods/games that update and update often.

- When the mod updates, the update gets forwarded to the sub-sites front page. You click on the update and it brings you right to the mod. From there it either forwards you to the website of the game or uses Modds own forum/project system for discussions. Each mod/game also has their own "Jobs" section

- Job offers from mods/indies could be color coded and mean different depths of occupation. A team may need a modeler for only a few props, or for an entire space station. Through color codes the different job levels are sorted and can be browsed by "type" and "color" in a main jobs section that bundles all the single mods information. Jobs could also expire when there is no update or when nobody took the job in over two months time.

A lot of this would make it easier to a) browse for jobs and teams/ideas that fit you, and b) to actually find meaningful talk about development within the mod/game forums and to connect to other people that are making games. Networking is one of the things that could be emphasized more on Moddb. It often works only temporarily and on a small scale. What I am suggesting is more of a re-design of Moddb that adds a sub-forum to take care of all that. The old Moddb will still be around as usual, but it gets a new kind of organisation and book-keeping, in the background.

Edited by: SinKing

moddb is a dead place for modding only ppl want it paid work, they no longer do things for free for mods

Shrektacular wrote:
What a mess, jesus, they have a resume-section but the entire audio/visual board, 2D Graphics board, 3D section and writing & stories section is FLOODED with people making threads "Hello please hire me" "I'm an artist looking to make a portfolio" - why aren't these in the Recruiting and Resume section?

You raised a very good point, so I've worked to clean up the boards, and will work to maintain them we are AFAIK a two man team and ive not been moderating the forums use, only removing the spammers.

Modders will pay people for their work, I paid for models from turbosquid when i started, that's no different to paying a artist, difference is there's more people wanting paid work, than people looking for people to work for free, so the list seems bloated with (pay only) jobs, either way the forums arnt the best place to look for work so we will be keeping all the job threads were they belong to keep it simple.

figalot wrote: A few things I would fix:
Have to be a member for a certain amount of time to make a post, or at least a proper spam system. <-- Mostly just this.
I would also like a little more communication or events (Talks, or competitions) from the creators of moddb/indiedb/slidedb. I swear the only time they do any thing is the end of year awards, although I could just be missing it.

The anti spam systems pretty good, its also manually checked, if i miss anything, slap me silly and get in touch.

As for comps / events, we have been secretly planning some events but we arn't ready to share info on this yet, These require quite some amount of planning and time.

I like this thread, keep up the feedback.

I can't really add any suggestions to this thread, but I would like to thank SinKing for bringing this up. The last years the forums felt less and less worth checking out, because there weren't any interesting threads anymore like there used to be. Most threads seem to be 'job position' threads as mentioned before, and I honestly couldn't care less about such threads.

A lot of other threads are of the "I want to make game X this is my idea" type and I (and probably everyone who has been around for a couple of years) have learned to ignore such threads, or sometimes explain what should be improved in order to actually create a game. That doesn't change the fact that probably no-one cares about such threads. And nobody ever seems to be doing research to check if any previous, similar threads got any responses (which they usually didn't) before posting their own thread.
Bwuh, just my rambling because I would love to see a bit of the old ModDB spirit to return I guess.

I think i know what you mean about the old spirit, however the site was much different back then and has evolved and mostly improved over time.

What I'm looking for is a way to keep the old spirit but in a new way for the modern site, we have some thoughts in the works, rest assured, your staff love the site as much as you and we have the same concerns, we have a great community, we just need to tap your potential

Good to hear Moddb Staff is aware of these (slight) problems too and to know that other people feel the same about a few points I raised.
It's not because we dislike Moddb now, it just feels like there could be so much more going on. Curious to hear what Moddb-Makers come up with ideawise. It would be interesting if we could get a sneak on some of the features you plan and give you some feedback.

I know it must be tons of work keeping this site alive and running (and spam-free), and I do thank you guys for the long years of great work! I just think it is a waste when you are doing all the work just so we can get more pointless and short-lived threads on the forums. So I hope we will figure out ways to have a more lively discussion about making games and modding, in the future.

Edited by: SinKing

I remember a while back asking why there are no mods any more, and got similar answers. Anyway-

I'm go to be Mr Controversial and say you can't force a community.

I'm going to further add that, in some ways, this has been a good thing. Before the likes of XNA and Game Maker allowed me to start on the road of home brew games, the whole modding scene, while lively, vibrant and full of energy, was also an exclusive club. Back when Half Life 1 and 2 were the games to mod, every mod team only wanted experienced applicants. How did you get experience? By being a on a mod team of course. While I was persuring a career in games via education instead of hands on back then, it still felt like I was locked out of the scene. Many mod teams screaming, pleading for programmers, animators, modelers, mappers ect. All of which would only take people on if they had a named mod under their belt. True, everybody had to start somewhere, so it was obviously possible to break in from nothing, that didn't change the situation.

This also raises the question, where are they now? I've been places that died due to internal drama or lack of activity. I was put in charge of a livejournal community that has few regular readers, the rest apparently having moved on to twitter, tumblr and facebook. While I think it's to early to call Moddb dead, I would like to know where they are going, and why?

Edit- Notifications on comments and replies would be nice also.

Edited by: SabreXT

to be honest moddb lost its charms when indiedb came into the picture. seems like people abandoned the site for the indie site, and moddb is basicly an indie site now if you watch the news.
we have no downloads section on front page, so its harder to see the new stuff. sometimes you found more interesting stuff in the downloads section then the usuall "we are still alive and we released a whole screenshot of a lowpoly model" kind of news.
we have no option to disable indie news, and we have no more modcast. at least now the youtube channel is kinda active, but i still miss henleys monthly videos of recommended stuff.

i dont recommend forcing a lot of community shit, like steam login or chat. we have desura, develope a chat for that. a site has to be simple. and easy to use. or im just too old and should be put down.

medve wrote: the usuall "we are still alive and we released a whole screenshot of a lowpoly model" kind of news.

Show examples of frontpaged news on Mod DB (not on IDB) that have only 1 screenshot of a low poly model: you said "usual" so you have show over 60-80% of the frontpage articles of 1 single day that sport only 1 low poly model picture to prove your point, otherwise medve you're simply hating and lying.

Although medve / Mr Bear seems to be rash and rude about it not to mention he's plain hating indies in quite a few of his comments and posts, some of his arguments are still valid - Mod DB should be more dedicated to mods and mod news alone, the front page of Mod DB that is.

That won't happen until Indie DB becomes just as popular as Mod DB is - that would at least allow tighter filtering of the ModDB front page articles (only very few indie articles would be let thru then, and only if they were mod related). At the moment indies would lose some of the visits they receive thru Mod DB. To remark, there are still some mod players simply interested in indies or mod developers that moved onto indie development that continue to use MDB more than IDB so it's not that bad to keep some of the indie news on MDB.

figalot wrote: Have to be a member for a certain amount of time to make a post, or at least a proper spam system. Mostly just this.
Force users to own a game before rating, assuming its not free.

Those are nice little things that would be useful to have on the sites.

SinKing wrote: - a new sub-site, dedicated to mod development states(...)
- mod states depend on update and production phases(...)
- When the mod updates, the update gets forwarded to the sub-sites front page(...)
- Job offers from mods/indies could be color coded(...)

SinKing has many great ideas. To note, it is not easy at all to implement any ideas with the situation being as it is - the site staff is quite thinly spread right now. Execution and time constraints are the problem. That is why the site received mostly tweaks and smaller features (such as Twitter integration) over the past months.

Simple ideas = tons of work.
Big ideas = ... well, mountains of work.
Writing ideas takes a few hours max, while executing them means many hours, weeks to months of hard work, sometimes even drudgery.

So to generalise and summarise, it is much easier to plan out ahead and make suggestions than carry out those plans, but hoping community suggested ideas such as SinKing's will be brought into life one day, in one form or another, especially things from the to-do list. Other remarks (such as Shrektacular's and figalot's remark about few events/comps being organised) should be done presently as that stuff the site staff should be always doing and seems like we're at fault here.

The thing is, I have been suggesting these things over and over for round about 5 years now. And nothing of the kind happened. The staff brings things on the way, but doesn't put them into context. Like we have groups and frontpages for our project, but nobody uses them. It's like Moddb wants to encourage us a little bit to make our own games and at the same time gives us only half the tools we need. Instead of more community driven projects, it seems there are less now than a few years ago and a lot is strictly commercial development by tiny studios. There seems to be no place for the great visions that brought about games like Natural Selection. You don't start something like that with a one man team and Unity engine.

Return to quality Moddb! Give us a way to work together and create games together with a perspective. Modding may have become smaller than in the past, but now we have a choice of engines and great things to do with them. I want to set up my project on Moddb, recruit from here, use my forums for discussions here and read my statistics about everything. I want to sell my project on Desura, and I don't mind it taking its cut, as long as it gave me the tools and the perspective to finish my project. Half of what I need is in place, the rest is constantly getting ignored. The only changes I notice are things that got cut out from the site, like Moddb monthly. Moddb is not giantbomb (no journalism), it's not a developer site (no perspective, no support), it doesn't give any prospect for selling your project in conjunction with Desura. It seems like the site is becoming more dysfunctional, instead of more developer-friendly. It could be shut down for development and keep the database for mods (like a museum). If that helps focusing on Indie game development. What pains me the most are the oportunities lost. For too long Modd is in that Limbo, so either kill it or make it great again.

SinKing wrote: The thing is, I have been suggesting these things over and over for round about 5 years now. And nothing of the kind happened. The staff brings things on the way, but doesn't put them into context.

Quite much happened over the last years however, new big projects were rolled out - Indie DB, Desura, Slide DB. Desura v2 to come sooner or later. Yet no v5 of Mod DB in sight anytime soon.

SinKing wrote: There seems to be no place for the great visions that brought about games like Natural Selection. You don't start something like that with a one man team and Unity engine.

Great works of art, such as Tolkien's works, were for the most part only one man army's creations. There are many similar examples in other areas of arts.

To note as well, games nowadays are treated like products solely purported to be sold instead of works of art they are supposed to be. And mods? Should they remain only as evidence in somebody's portfolio instead of being fan-made expansion packs to a beloved game? No matter how big is a dev team or how great visions are, it is only passion that counts - and it doesn't matter whether it comes from a single person or a whole team.

SinKing wrote: Half of what I need is in place, the rest is constantly getting ignored. The only changes I notice are things that got cut out from the site, like Moddb monthly.

Some of them are returning, like spotlights.

SinKing wrote: Moddb is not giantbomb (no journalism), it's not a developer site (no perspective, no support), it doesn't give any prospect for selling your project in conjunction with Desura. It seems like the site is becoming more dysfunctional, instead of more developer-friendly.

Importing/exporting functions to/from Desura, etc. The Mod DB community is merely undergoing changes due to introduction of Indie DB, Slide DB and Desura, which yet have to take their full shape.

SinKing wrote: It could be shut down for development and keep the database for mods (like a museum). If that helps focusing on Indie game development. What pains me the most are the oportunities lost. For too long Modd is in that Limbo, so either kill it or make it great again.

Mod DB is merely in stagnation between changes and changes all around it, caused by sister sites as you can see. MDB v5 simply waits for its time.

Some of my thoughts about some threads that could be improved. These things are probably something that can be done some time soon...

--

"The ModDB Bar" has become too random and is no longer what the description/info in the first post says. Now it's more like "The ModDB Pit of Insanity".

There could be 2 threads. One for those who want to continue the randomness. And a different one for those who want to have some more meaningful conversations without the quote pyramids and other crap.

Maybe this "new" thread would be more newbie friendly too... instead of being something that only a few people understand.

--

Another thread that could be improved is "What is everyone working on?". Lots of times people just post their work without saying anything about other people's work. It would be more useful thread if people said something.

Some year ago I tried to inspire people to do that by starting to give comments for like everyone. I think it helped a bit, but the thread needs some visible guidelines.

Maybe people could also mention in the thread if they've commented in the image gallery instead. Otherwise the thread might look like people just ignore stuff, even if they weren't.

General consensus seems to be that moddb's problem is that the site doesn't do enough FOR modders rather then not ENOUGH modders out there, period.

To me I'm not seeing the site's "limited abilities" as the problem (except there's lots of indie news on moddb): I'm seeing a lot of Doom 3, Quake & Doom 1/2 work being done, just very little on the front page. Just in the past two days, Blade Yautja has release a bunch of screens and a new gameplay video, The Space Pirate has released two updates and a couple articles/videos, Quoth 2.2 has been released, several Doom and Doom 3 maps have been uploaded to this site & Doom3Hell released a new version.

So I'm not seeing the site as a limit, just that people aren't using what the site has to offer to view what they want. I use the "Your Updates" page more then the main page, I just use the main to see if there's something I missed.

And the Doom Mod Pack was an awesome idea, more of stuff like that would be nice. Perhaps to encourage features along those lines you'd want to see if other news sites from respective communities would be interested in writing features like that. No reason the limited staff here has to do everything.

Not letting news like this on the front page would help too:
Moddb.com
Moddb.com

I've always disliked industry related news on the main site. I don't consider moddb a general news site, I don't believe it was ever intended to be a general news site and industry news just detracts from all the other mod related news that's being posted. At best it should be in the developer/engine/whatever news, but not main news.

An excuse can be made to get it on the front page, but let's face it: unless it's "modtools released" it's not really mod related.

tl;dr

I'll just respond to the thread title:

How can Moddb be brought back on track?

Get rid of the guest system...

Pls INtense.

Other than that, everything else about the site is top stuff.

Edited by: KnightofEquulei

KnightofEquulei wrote: tl;dr

I'll just respond to the thread title:

How can Moddb be brought back on track?

Get rid of the guest system...

Pls INtense.

Other than that, everything else about the site is top stuff.

Can you please provide feedback on what you feel is wrong the guest system.

TKAzA wrote:

KnightofEquulei wrote: tl;dr

I'll just respond to the thread title:

How can Moddb be brought back on track?

Get rid of the guest system...

Pls INtense.

Other than that, everything else about the site is top stuff.

Can you please provide feedback on what you feel is wrong the guest system.

Everything.
Their spamming, most of them can't speak english, spamming, non-sense messages on /members/guest, spamming, *how to download*, did I mention spamming?
My suggestions to moddb:
-Remove guest system (see above)
-Remove downvoting (so people won't use it for their opinions)
-Add tutorials for the profile (I mean how to add background music, etc... because most people [like me] don't know that)
(I think) this will improve the moddb community.