skeet please dont spam.

In the original Pokémon Red/Blue, when you encounter your rival in Lavender Town, he asks whether or not you know what it's like to have one of your Pokémon die. At this point in the game, he no longer has his Raticate that he used in previous battles.Your rival battle before this took place aboard the S.S. Anne. Your rival's Raticate sustained serious injuries from the battle…but, because crowding and confusion on the luxury liner, he was unable to make it to a Pokémon Center in time and the Raticate passed away. The real reason your rival is in Lavender Town to begin with is to lay his deceased friend to rest.

Despite all of this, your rival never outwardly tells you that you're responsible for the death of his Pokémon. He hides his grief and instead channels that energy into the motivation he needed to continue his quest to become Indigo League Champion. The death of his Raticate effectively destroys your rival's impish, childhood innocence. Although he tells himself that he doesn't hold you responsible, he subconsciously holds a great deal of resentment towards you which further fuels his ambitions.

Tearfully swearing upon his Raticate's grave to not fail in what he set out to do, he trains hard in hopes of becoming better than you…defeating you…and to eventually make it to the Pokémon League. Mere moments after he became Indigo League champion, he was defeated…by you. Although he fulfilled his promise to his fallen Pokémon, it was only for a painfully brief instant.

In the end, your rival is scolded by his grandfather while you receive the professor's praise. During the course of the game, you steal your rival's innocence, crush his dreams, and ultimately snatch away the love of his own grandfather.

Oh, and by the way, your rival doesn't have any parents. He's an orphan.

Nice. But dreadfully irrelevant. Was this supposed to go somewhere else?

Personally, and this might be just me, I have more time to do pixel art and other game making over summer, holidays, and weekends, so that tends to be when I am most active in those places. I do not know if other people are the same, but that generally seems to be how this board appears (going by post counts and "the general feel" (which I know is a bad thing to go by but hey)).

I don't think our activity problems would suddenly be fixed by merging those two boards. I do think renaming them would help, as people might not know they're there especially if they are used to other RM forums where they would naturally just go to the board called Resources.

I also think a lot of the time the people who are annoyed that a board is inactive are the people that use them, and are themselves inactive, so it is kindof a self fulfilling prophecy. Enough people seem to be saying the pixel boards are inactive that if they were all active there it would be active, lol.

I would also like to add, because this is a common theme lately, guessing things like "new members would probably..." or "it looks to new members like..." are silly, because we couldn't possibly know that. It is much better to go by personal view, how we ourselves use the forums, what we do and don't do, than trying to guess what a new member would do. That is not to say looking out for new members isn't important, because it is; but we can't guess things like "the board looks cluttered to new members" or "the board looks dead to new members" because we couldn't possibly know what goes through their mind. Everyone's different - I personally tend to join and post about a bit to guage activity rather than looking at numbers and names, for example.

This!

I check activity by the dates of the last few posts. Besides there's usually rules about necro-posting on most boards so if something is a month old and it's the latest post it's like meh. But it's not like the entire forums as a whole are down, it's just that section.

I don't know about anybody else but personally I've always found necroposting rules silly.

Even though I'm still somewhat sick-ey and more in the mood of watching some House M.D. or Lesbian Housewifes episodes and call it a day, lemme get some thoughts into this that noone seemed to have, or at least didn't mention.

First of all, let's put my position in stone... I haven't been around resource forums in a long time. Actually, I think the contest in 2008 (the one with Peri and Grathea as Nazi and Robot, if I'm not mistaken? I attended that one at least :p ) is where I last checked in. I've seen the resource manager, but I wasn't aware until a few that it's the only resource knot left on .org...

So, let's throw a short analysis of that resource manager in here, as I see it - under the aspects of what to improve, or why it doesn't work. Keep in mind that I didn't follow it for the last couple of years, so I might be wrong here and there. I'm also not trying to step on anyone's toes, so try to take what I write with a grain of salt or two ^^
Basically, what I did was clicking on a few categories that interested me, such as characters, battlers, whichever... I also clicked on Music, which has a fancy rollover header and otherwise a questionable layout XD, or this page, but yeah, that's obviously not intentional. Note that it doesn'T seem to be frequented at all though, or otherwise someone would've noted it by now, I'd think?

The main problem I have with it is that whatever I click on returns me 500 Pokémon-resources. Now you may like PKMN, or you may not, so let me give you some more examples: Dragon Quest, old ASCII-stuff, Fire Emblem, ... doesn't matter really. If you're wondering what my problem is: Regardless if I'm looking for those or not, I'm forced to read through literally hundrets of pages, trying to get what I want. If I'm looking for PKMN, I still have the trouble of downloading each and every graphic manually. If I'm not, I'm getting pissed at raiding through pages back and forth, trying to find out when the bunch of pixel monsters ends - just to find out that there's a bunch of swimsuit trainer pictures from the same game following :/

Admittedly, that is a problem of the Character Art category - one I, admittedly because I didn't pay attention to the category title - misread as "Character Sprites" - a term you're looking for with no hope in the resource manager. Correct me if I'm wrong, but charactersets should be the one most or first required resource type of them all... or so it is according to my sense. Hiding those under "Sprites" (which applies to quite a lot in 2D game design...) is not the best move, I think, and could explain why there's only a handful of resources compared to "Pokédex"-Character Art. Yet, it is the first category I manager to find ORIGINAL CONTENT in - that's right, the kind of content I'm looking for when I check out a resource manager. Up to now, the only original content I found was from Wyatt, though... again, I didn't look at every page of every category - far from it. But I did see Wyatt a lot of times, while other names I would've expected to see in there didn't appear at all. Might be because the name's in the filename, and others aren't? Who knows...

Not finding the username on a resource might be more than one problem... not only if you want to contact Wyatt, who changes nicknames and gender more often than other people coffee filters, but also if it's about copyright, or usage terms in general. I'm yet to see a resource in there having an entry at "License, Credits, or Additional Information", and not only doesn't it say anything, it's also quite inconclusive (at least to me), as "Not applicable" can mean anything from "credit doesn't have to be given" to "this cannot be used, not even if you give credit". I understand that 95% of the users of the forum don't care about giving credit at all, but IMO that doesn't quite justify the totally misplaced, rarely-if-at-all used box right in the center of attention: below the resource itself.


So, that's more or less what I see at first sight. I don't question that the resource manager is visited at all, as there's a link in the forums more or less. Apparently, people aren't interested lots in the stuff in there, though, for reasons I can understand: They don't get the best search options, and are basically thrown into a bunch of resources, being told "yay, have fun! >)". What I used to visit the resource forums for was to check out what people did, as cool and non-ripped resources was always something pretty rare to the RM scene. You should be aware that among all the sub-indie to indie game maker communities, the RPG Maker ones are those with the highest quality needs: Everything needs to be visually perfect in order to be released - music is too hard to do, scripts are there either way to just copy-paste, and what the majority can do is making maps and events. Still, the one thing they want to be perfect is their graphics, because for some reason, spicing a shitty game up with graphics from someone else makes people feel better about themselves. At least, that's my explanation for why most every other game design community can live without high-quality graphics, and therefore looks at projects differently as well.
Well, none of that is .org's fault or anything, just seems to be the nature of RM fellas. If you wanna serve those people, though, I think the system needs a revamp. A non-forum structure might be fine if the Web 2.0-aspect isn't neglected (comment function is enough if it's being used - probably people just feel less blocked about posting forum comments, though?), but in general, lots of the problems I addressed wouldnt be there in a regular forum structure - resources would automatically be in sub-categories (as in posts with topic titles), along with a timeless nickname to contact in case you want to. And people like me could loo through those, looking for "XYZ's awesome selfmade sprites of the month" and go in there, ignoring the 500 "yay I ripped sprites from a game I'm cool :D" topics, which wouldn't take up 100 pages anymore, but would be in a single topic for a single game, so people who are looking for them can find them just as easy. Not to mention everyone's still in their entrusted .org environment, and not in a suddenly different frontend.

Overall, just making it a forum would probably be the easy, yet stressful for the moderatives, yet not perfect solution. I'm thinking a deviantArt-esque resource manager could work out nicely, but you'd probably have difficulties establishing a new system, just like it somehow didn't work with the current installment of it. Maybe it's all just a matter of advertising it... I dunno.
Well, I'm gonna lay down now and dream of more joyful things than expecting the hate messges I get in return of this post from the people who put so much work into that... be aware I'm not trying to critisize ya, but yeah... apparently, something isn't working, eh?


EDIT: And yeah, necroposting rules don't make any sense - topics don't become uninteresting after 30 days per sé.

We're pretty lax about necroposting here. as long as the post is substantial, and doesn't break any other rules.

I apologise for not putting much effort into my reply to your post - I did read it - but am about to rush out.

Plans for the future:

• Much better search
• Tags and tag cloud
• The super secret special thing we have planned which I can't say but will be very cool, for the whole forums and for resources in general
• A forum for resource threads for people who would rather show their work in one place and for large collections like the pokemon sprites you mentioned
• A better default "no license was supplied" message
• Restyled pages for easier commenting and emphasis on comments
• Links to pixel art analysis in the resource manager to point out we have a pixelling community

I know the resource manager is overall a failure. Nobody uses it at all, not for original works anyway. Nobody comments.

The points I list are a start, at least, in the right direction, I think.



The script manager should probably be removed, nobody uses it and it makes us look dead when scripts are our big thing.

Music -- a new page will be created. I wanted to include google player in it but they took it down ;[.

This. A thousand times. People are just now giving me feedback on it, pointing out bugs etc, because they've been drawn to it, but it's been around for months without a word.

Nobody uses it.

That's a tad harsh now, though... I can see why you guys (no idea if it actually included you, but you get me) tried something of the sort, and that it didn't work doesn't mean that you failed but that you found out it's not what people really want. Your list of stuff to do about it sounds pretty good, which tells me that you definately profited from seeing what the system couldn't do, so... I'd say it worked pretty well ;)
The tag thing is something I thought about... if you're talking keywords. If properly handled, those are very effective, and the previously mentioned deviantArt proves that it can work if maintained by the members themselves.

Now to see if Raven's happy with it :p


As a side note, I had no idea that scripts were the one big quality of .org at this point... ^^"

Well if you have it more like Deviant art, it will promote more comments which is a good thing.... BUT I think what happens is that you'll have to break things down into tiny pieces still. This format calls for every piece of resource to be individualized. Each icon must be separate that's why there's so many. So you'll have to go through pages of thumbnails still just to find something. So your problem with going through tons of Pokemon resources is still prevalent. While if you fix the search it will make looking for something better BUT if you are just looking just to look you're still going to be faced with the same issues. When looking on a forum things are grouped with written descriptions. Can you apply this to the resource manager? Maybe but it might end up more work, because you'll have to sort through different categories. Tags will probably be your best defense which you suggested, but tags will have to be put in (especially if the uploader doesn't write anything). But yeah I like to credit people and I think people like to be credited as well. If you fix it, it might get better. But no matter what you do, leaving it how it is, isn't working. So give whatever you have in mind a shot imo, and see how it unfolds. I still think its just easier and makes more sense to have a forum, but it's cool if you have both :3

I'll try to give you a bunch of feedback so it doesn't get ignored. You could also highlight the new stuff on your main page and explain to people you want them to use it and to reply to that thread on what they think of it.

I was mentioning dA because it has a well-thought out category system, along with a quite potent keyword feature. The combination of those should allow for efficient combinations even for our cause, as there should only be the following major cases:

case A - you're looking for a specific resource, i.e. PKMN
solution - keyword-search 'pokemon'

case B - you're looking for a specific resource, i.e. a character set, of unknown detail
solution - raid through items in the 'Character Set' category*

case C - you're looking for a series-specific monster sprite, i.e. from Dragon Quest
solution - keyword-search 'dragon quest' within the 'Enemy Graphics' category

case D - you're looking for original content
solution - raid through items in the 'Original Content' category

*I highly suggest naming the RM-applicable categories after the resource types really...


One thing I would like for dA to implement since forever are checkboxes next to their categories, to easily search in multiple categories. Might be something to include here as well, though it sems more purposeful on dA than on .org really... simply because dA is for browsing, while the resource manager would be for looking up & downloading things. But yeah... thought I'd throw it in.

But I can see you (Raven) are already quite happy that the forum part seems to make it back XD Which makes me wonder if at that point, a resource manager would get any attention at all. There should probably be an option to link resources to a topic, or vice versa, to make some kind of connection, and possibly allow users to keep their resources up to date by doing that... which includes taking them down if needed. That'd mean less abandoned first-posts, but counter-maintained media pools that don't only co-exist, but benefit from each other.
And yeah, I know that's a bunch of work XD Just a suggestion at this point though...