I Wanna Community

Fangames => Announcements => Topic started by: Denferok on February 07, 2017, 11:00:52 PM

Title: Team overhaul
Post by: Denferok on February 07, 2017, 11:00:52 PM
Alright so at this point, I'm basically doing nothing with the team. It's a gigantic mess right now, half the people are inactive, I'm getting tons of requests to join, the requirements of joining are basically 0, some people are almost offended if they aren't in the team etc. This isn't even close to what I want the team to be and I've had enough of this, which has led me to this situation.

From the very start, I always wanted the team to be a small group of high quality streams (not talking about bitrate) of people who care and put effort into their streaming. Since then, a lot of people have disagreed with me, often saying that anyone within the community should be allowed in. This is completely against my vision of the team and it's hard to even care about it, I'm under a lot of stress right now due to rl stuff and it's hard to stay motivated to even respond to applications.

Basically what I'm suggesting is completely starting over, changing the team to be about a small group of high quality streamers. The team would no longer just be about fangames, but rather the community as a whole. This would reduce the size to about 10-15 people. If we don't do this, then I'd be willing to hand over the role of leader or just completely scrapping the idea of a team in the first place. Sorry for getting to the point where I'm basically saying "my way or no way" but it's very hard for me to concentrate on something I don't even have fun with when I'm under a lot of stress.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: Shoepert on February 07, 2017, 11:07:13 PM
I've been streaming as much as I possibly can, going hours and hours a day. I've a lot of fangames to make up, but I'm probably going to marathon them in the future. I've got layouts, scenes, etc to give my stream life. I entertain, and it's something I want to do for a long time. I'm rarely passionate about anything, and streaming is definitely one of my main focuses.

I'd love to be part of it, but it's ultimately up to you. Glad you're getting it organized.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: Wolfiexe on February 08, 2017, 12:00:43 AM
The issue I always felt with having the "anyone in the community can join" mentality is that at that stage, the team may as well link straight to the IWBTG directory on Twitch. I'd imagine a more exclusive team would make it stand out that little bit more or rather mean something, as opposed to just a flashy tag that you can get on your profile if you stream fangames for a little bit.

Of course I don't know what I'd personally have the requirements as. That'd be something you'd have to decide and form a ground for. Still, I think it'd be worth a look as I agree that in the current stage, the team tag doesn't really mean a whole lot.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: patrickgh3 on February 08, 2017, 12:40:22 AM
I personally would really prefer a hand-selected 10-15 person team. As it is now, the team doesn't benefit its target audience, e.g. non-longtime-fangame-community-members. I'd like to see it help attract more people to the community as much as possible. On a related note, I think it'd be nice to re-do the page graphics and to actually have a description.

From the "other side's" point of view, being a team member makes you feel good, like you're accepted in the community. I have my doubts that joining the team as it is today actually helps your stream numbers at all, it's mainly for that feeling of acceptance, those words at the top of your channel. I think this is the root of why some people oppose an exclusive team, getting a flashy badge revoked FeelsBadMan, even if most others did too. I don't know what the solution to this sentiment is, or if it even needs a solution, just thought I'd share.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: PiranhaTooth on February 08, 2017, 03:31:35 AM
Oh man... a few differing opinions and points here, and all really valid ones at that. I definitely feel where Patrick is coming from in terms of feeling 'accepted' as it's put, but I doubt that would be too much of an issue in the long run, with a 'we've all been kicked out together' mentality, it'd soften the blow since you're not being singled out or anything.

I don't think it's a bad idea necessarily, starting from scratch. It would be taking a step backwards in terms of how far this community has come, but I can see how it frustrates Denferok to have something he's hand-crafted, built from the ground-up, be treated as a piss-take of sorts when it comes to being accepted.

If I had to give my own opinion on the matter, I'd say there needs to be a certain level of sheer skill involved when it comes to being a good candidate. Although skill is important, it's not what's in my opinion, the most important factor when it comes to picking candidates for the team. Respect. You can't get anything done without respect, and I think something like respect speaks for itself. People who've earned the respect of community members should be the ones representing them in a team like the wannabes.

I suppose that's all I really have to say on the matter. I'd like to sit down and stream more someday to maybe be part of something like this, but I'm in my last year of school so that's tricky to manage. Looking forward to seeing more interesting points people have on this topic.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: Denferok on February 08, 2017, 03:44:54 AM
You're forgetting that the team is mostly about getting new viewers to check out the other streamers. A small team size is important if you actually want people to look at the team page. Skill is not important, the only reason why I had a certain skill threshold before was so I would not get ultra spammed with applications, what matters is how entertaining the stream is. If I go offline and it ends up autohosting someone who is doing a micless boss grind, even if that person is extremely good, new viewers aren't going to be interested in that.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: PiranhaTooth on February 08, 2017, 04:25:52 AM
You're forgetting that the team is mostly about getting new viewers to check out the other streamers. A small team size is important if you actually want people to look at the team page. Skill is not important, the only reason why I had a certain skill threshold before was so I would not get ultra spammed with applications, what matters is how entertaining the stream is. If I go offline and it ends up autohosting someone who is doing a micless boss grind, even if that person is extremely good, new viewers aren't going to be interested in that.

A valid point. Substituting entertainment for skill is probably a much better idea. It's kind of hard to think otherwise in this instance though. Considering a solid %95 of the popular wannabes are exemplary players, we've been conditioned to think that being a good player is a sizable portion of what it means to be in the team. That being said, you're totally right. After a second evaluation, entertainment over skill, since that would also better represent who we are as a team in terms of personalities and such as well.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: Onynekyu on February 08, 2017, 05:09:07 AM
Since this community is supportive and welcoming, i don't feel the need to be a member team nor octrasized. That's why i feel good and like this community

I always feel that Wannabes team helps new comers to discover fangames world and community ("non-longtime-fangame-community-members" as patrick said ^^), like a showcase of fangames community and a first-step ladder. 
It was my case last year when i discover fangames while having no clues of what it is. I wander on twitch team, discover popular fangamers, then i follow "I wanna be the guy" game and discover/meet other awesome people. Now, i care less attention about wannabes team, but more about fangames community overall.

So I agree to put entertainment ahead of skills for the team. Also, having 10-15 members seems reasonable to me.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: Zero-G on February 08, 2017, 05:16:39 AM
This is your team den,you should do it how you like it the most.you already helped alot of lower viewed channels with this in the past.making the team morw clean would still benefit the whole com since people who wanna watch it get addicted anyways and will dig deeper.with too many,nobody might profit of it cause of the mess.

Gonna write more later at home cause of streamers without mic like gza or speedrunners here and there.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: pieceofcheese87 on February 08, 2017, 09:10:04 AM
Personally I haven't even checked the team page in months and I never use it, so it doesn't really matter to me what you do with it.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: OhNoezEinPandy on February 08, 2017, 11:56:43 AM
Completely fine to refine the twitch team to your wishes. Your team, your rules. Its nice of you that you still put it up as a discussionable topic here nevertheless.

Only pro/con argument I see is actually that the autohost feature shares the attention of viewers if they check their following page between all members. There is no con here if a "boring" stream gets hosted because no person in the world would unfollow just because the wrong guy is hosted.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: tehjman1993 on February 08, 2017, 06:14:59 PM
I'm still in the 'we need more team events' camp regarding these discussions. We used to have fun community events that anyone could do. BINGO was a big one, off the top of my head. I think a lot of these feelings towards the team are two-fold:

(1) Twitch fails to provide any team-related support. In fact, they've made it worse and irrelevant after the removal of the 'follow all' feature.

(2) We don't do fun, minor events that the team could easily set up. We don't do BINGO, we don't do blind races, we don't do anything. We all have our own communities and it feels very isolated. Granted, there's overlap, but sometimes it feels like "The Wannabes" are a conglomerate of streaming islands. We need more activity. We do Fangame Marathon as a yearly event, but what else? I'm sure doing small things, even like friendly races with team members, monthly events, etc. would greatly help the team.

Edit: I should put that in the end, it's ultimately your decision on what you do with the team. However, I do believe it is in your best interest for more events if you want a more positive look on the team.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: Denferok on February 08, 2017, 07:56:23 PM
I would like to do more events of races and such, the problem is that a lot of people have the mindset where they know they can't win, so what's even the point of joining. There doesn't seem to be a way around this because a lot of players don't focus on the fun aspect of a race. I also can't really think of common events that don't involve speedrunning or racing. Ideas are always welcome of course.

EDIT: A relay race is always something I've wanted to do, if we do another fangame marathon this year I'd love to organize it.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: OhNoezEinPandy on February 09, 2017, 02:14:51 AM
You can also play bosses head to head and see who has the better PB after 30 minutes.

You can also prepare a template gmk and make needle for 20 minutes which the over one has to play.

We can try to revive BINGO with the win8 problem out of the way.

There are alot of ideas outside of "basic" speedrunning. And even that you can turn into something else if you just run a single stage of a game multiple times for 20 minutes and then compara pb's.

Edit: but you're right. The "I don't wanna lose" mindset is pretty widespread here.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: tehjman1993 on February 09, 2017, 10:46:12 AM
I would like to do more events of races and such, the problem is that a lot of people have the mindset where they know they can't win, so what's even the point of joining. There doesn't seem to be a way around this because a lot of players don't focus on the fun aspect of a race. I also can't really think of common events that don't involve speedrunning or racing. Ideas are always welcome of course.

EDIT: A relay race is always something I've wanted to do, if we do another fangame marathon this year I'd love to organize it.

I'll agree with the bad mindset - it is something that is hard to fix. I think this is more prevalent in games that are already established as "speedruns", such as NANG or K2. Blind races, on the other hand, are much more random and anyone can really win.

To put in perspective, about 2 years ago me, fireball, and piece blind raced a ton of fangames that we all had never played before. Some were avoidance, some were needle, some were adventure. We seemingly had a nice split between winners of each blind race, and there wasn't a feeling of "I'm going to lose" when you started the game. Fireball and I also just did a huge blind race of a new game on steam which was incredible - we were only off of each other by a few minutes while the entire run took us over 6 (?) hours.

My point being that it depends on the event to alleviate the mindset of "I'm going to lose so why bother" when joining.

Regarding BINGO, Cake has been compiling a small private list (I think) of games that he thinks would be great in BINGO, so I think reviving and building BINGO back up would be little trouble. If it's done right the first time, we won't have to worry about it dying in 2 weeks.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: BBF on February 09, 2017, 12:30:20 PM
Re: Relay Race

I always felt like this should have been a thing long ago, but I thought it was pretty hard to organize. With 3 Teams (which is probably optimal), finding 3 players of similar skill for the same game can be an issue, especially if we want to include 5+ games to make it lengthy. The other thing is timezones being a major issue for the europeans (I feel like most of the Wannabe Speedrunners are american/canadian, maybe I'm wrong)

Re: Team Organization

I don't really care what happens. Left the team a while ago because it just felt pointless being in it (and I was taking a break from streaming anyway). Would be happy to join back in if it gets more "serious".

Re: Other Events

What else can we do? Weekly Fangame Challenge was nice, but Bingo is absolutely not my cup of tea (maybe because I'm bad at playing casually). I feel like we should use the FangameMarathon Twitch channel more, broadcast a weekly 2-4 players (Blind-)Race with commentary (I am sure we can find someone to commentate for most of anything) or something along those lines.

Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: tehjman1993 on February 09, 2017, 02:25:59 PM
Re: Relay Race

I always felt like this should have been a thing long ago, but I thought it was pretty hard to organize. With 3 Teams (which is probably optimal), finding 3 players of similar skill for the same game can be an issue, especially if we want to include 5+ games to make it lengthy. The other thing is timezones being a major issue for the europeans (I feel like most of the Wannabe Speedrunners are american/canadian, maybe I'm wrong)

Re: Team Organization

I don't really care what happens. Left the team a while ago because it just felt pointless being in it (and I was taking a break from streaming anyway). Would be happy to join back in if it gets more "serious".

Re: Other Events

What else can we do? Weekly Fangame Challenge was nice, but Bingo is absolutely not my cup of tea (maybe because I'm bad at playing casually). I feel like we should use the FangameMarathon Twitch channel more, broadcast a weekly 2-4 players (Blind-)Race with commentary (I am sure we can find someone to commentate for most of anything) or something along those lines.

About using the marathon channel - this topic has been brought up before, and it was decided that it doesn't seem like the best use of resources to utilize the channel for a non-marathon. Another event-themed stream would be much more appropriate.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: BBF on February 09, 2017, 02:32:11 PM
Even the GamesDoneQuick channel streams spotlights and racing tournaments from time to time as far as I know.

FangameMarathon already has a good Following that a new channel will probably not get to within a year.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: tehjman1993 on February 09, 2017, 02:42:04 PM
Even the GamesDoneQuick channel streams spotlights and racing tournaments from time to time as far as I know.

FangameMarathon already has a good Following that a new channel will probably not get to within a year.

Not to derail this thread into something as specific as the marathon channel, but I'll elaborate a little more.

The marathon channel was created with one use in mind - to host the fangame marathon. That's it. GamesDoneQuick was also initially started for the same reason, but they've grown extremely large and that's their decision to use it for non-gdq events. GDQ is a company, fangame marathon is simply me and Klazen. The dedication required to host anything regular would be a tedious task in and of itself. Very few people have access to the channel, and we like to keep it that way. Using it for non-marathon events makes the channel lose some its charm, its uniqueness, so to speak. An event channel, if used regularly, would certainly gain a following larger than I think you imagine.

On a side note, I still believe hitting the reset button on the team here is not a decision that would be beneficial. Events may be part of the answer, but team communication and a welcoming atmosphere is the key to running a successful team.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: CakeSauc3 on February 09, 2017, 05:53:33 PM
Regarding BINGO, Cake has been compiling a small private list (I think) of games that he thinks would be great in BINGO, so I think reviving and building BINGO back up would be little trouble. If it's done right the first time, we won't have to worry about it dying in 2 weeks.

I am indeed working on a list of more Bingo games to add to the pool, but it's going to be a while. I'm not the most experienced fangamer when it comes to the number of games I've cleared, so anyone who wants to help come up with possible games to include on the list is welcome to as well :)

Regarding other events, I would love to see some kind of weekly blind race happen the way BBF is proposing, and doing it with commentary would be neat. I also got the impression from talking with Sunbla earlier that he's interested in bringing back the Weekly Fangame Challenge in one form or another, which is something that would be fantastic.

Addressing the main topic, I don't know how much breaking up the current twitch team will really impact things, because I wasn't here back when the team was first formed in order to develop the proper perspective. I know that since I've been on the team I've heard Den's frustration on the fact that the team hasn't really been going in the direction that he's wanted, and I've heard people tell him that things will get better if the community comes together more. If we're still in the same place, and if Den wants to move on and do something else with the team, I believe that's probably not worse than doing nothing. As the general community we can still come together and make things work regardless of what happens to this specific twitch team.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: BBF on February 09, 2017, 05:59:02 PM
Whatever happened to King of the Hill? That seemed like a really neat event.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: Denferok on February 09, 2017, 09:41:14 PM
I really don't think setting up a relay would be that difficult. Players being on the same level in terms of skill doesn't matter that much. For instance having someone who averages a 40 in run the marathon against someone who averages a 45 is completely fine, it doesn't matter much. It's supposed to be about the fun and entertainment aspect, not about who ends up winning.

Also what I mean with events is scheduled streamed events, not a random race between 2 people. Yes, having more small races is good but I want to do more with medium / big events.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: Onynekyu on February 10, 2017, 05:53:28 AM
What do you think about creating "FangameEvents" channel ? We could leave special marathon uniqueness on marathon channel while having lot of side activities on Events Channel.
Title: Re: Team overhaul
Post by: Swordslinger on February 10, 2017, 05:47:56 PM
I never ran a high quality stream because i don't have the equipment to do so but i always tried to do my best to make it as watchable as possible and just as fun as possible for me, I was inactive for a month because i lost my pc but i didn't make my inactivity a secret either, i gave a vague tweet and that was it, only a couple people know the full story. As of now I do plan to upscale my equipment after a couple (major) things are taken care of so it's a curse i'm stuck with for a few months if not more. I do think the team got a little overflowed true, but i do hope that this will lead to a better future, most of the experience with watching streams for me is the streamer himself and if i like the game and i don't like the streamer one bit, i don't even care if its a game i greatly adore, you'll never see me in that stream. This was just my overall experience, and i don't think there is much else to say. As zero said as well this is your team so do as you see fit.