I have to strongly agree with this post. One of the major reasons GR became and stayed popular was the credits system. It was defenetly the main attraction of the site for a lot of people - it was basically the only site on the web where there was a good active economy based on the trading of graphics/tutorials etc. It was not another generic graphics forum of which there were 1000's of around the web. Eventually GR got to the stage where credits were worth significant money since I constantly made an effort to make sure that the 'economy of credits' was steady and there were no leaks in the system that allowed people to exploit the gain of credits through methods apart from posting and trading. From some of the research I did with many users on the site while I was running it, I found this resulted in GR attracting a lot of different types of people. People who were good at rendering and graphics in general were attracted by the amount of profit and reputation they could make from the site from credits, while some people simply wanted high quality renders/resources and stayed active at the site so they could afford them. Other people just liked the fact that there was a huge amount of activity on the site and enjoyed being a part of a huge community with 10000's of posts per day. However as expected there are some groups of people that did not like this 'capitalistic' nature of the site. This is why you may have found people complaining about the credits system - people tended to be quite vocal about this. After some of the decisions made by the new staff to 'd------ue' the worth of credits and reduce their worth (i.e. via the credits steal item), this clearly brought a lot of people who liked the credits system to leave the site. In my opinion the focus of the site away from credits has therefore been a strong reason for the decrease in traffic. This is defenetly not an action I would have taken when running this site, but it is obvious that shaggy/dementia want GR to be a different type of site less driven on credits/selling. Although I do not visit the site too often anymore, this appears to have worked based on the posts I read when I visit the site since a lot more of the site is focused on other parts of the forum apart from the marketplace. For this I must congratulate them on achieving this even if it has reduced the amount of people that the site caters for. I hope any future additions to the site would continue to improve the experience for current users and make them stay at GR. For more users to join the site however I think a more business/marketing type view would need to be taken and introduce features (like the credits system did) that adds unique selling points to the site that will grab people's attention and make them active on the forum. Apart from the removal of credits, other factors could be some of the downtime like dementia suggested, or even just the general reduction of interest in people's interests in graphics (i.e. the '----- graphics designer' fad that many 15-18 year olds liked has weakened). Another could be less tutorials being submitted to tutorial archive sites which a lot of GR's traffic originally came from. I wouldn't realistically blame the decrease on traffic on issues casued by staff members - I don't believe that the increase/decrease of punishments for certain users would cause less users to join the site. Anyway I wish the present and future staff of GR luck with the site and I hope to see it running in the years to come! Thanks, Llamaman
I'm actually agreeing with joe on most of what he'd said. Even though I was the guy who initially suggested the cred steal item. Now bear in mind, in my defense I thought the item would be far less potent(think $500 cost, 1000 cred steal limit and it being very limited in number) like it was when it was around before(no one really minded it back then... (save for the occasional victim)
i can feel a save gr campaign starting here no really though on a serious note this site is dieing i only came here about a year ago and the only place i find worthwhile to look at is the ag crew section and spam heaven. its not because of spam heaven most of them dont even venture outside it main reason is no one sharing stuff anymore that why i joined this site to get resources which is what i think we should focus on improving in v4
Yeah, honestly the market place was also really good cause of the designers who were selling their work here. I mean before GR had the best deigners as well, but that steal item crap was so retarded, I mean people would sell so much crap and work hard to get the points and some kid just comes and steals it? Are you serious? Dumbest idea ever, I don't care even if it was a limit to how much you can steal, wtf? Why would you even think in your head to add that crap? Now PR's auction place is the new GR auction place. PR points are worth a lot more now then GR then vice versa like it was before. It's sad honestly, I use to go to this site for everything.
The whole idea of "PR creds being worth more" is unbelivably flawed. They aren't worth anything more, each site has it's own economy which doesn't particularly rise and fall on the quality of signatures, which the price of has remained preety even for the past 2 years or so. The item didn't kill GR, the steal item/creds. It wasn't the best idea maybe, but my god it definetely didn't stop the traffic the site used to (and still does to an extent). PS : We've still got far more talented designers here then on PR. Not all sell their stuff necessarily, but they're here.
And a lot of people are buying PR points with real cash, but I do agree it's not as good as the prime GR, because you could sell 30k GR for like almsot $100 but on PR I had to sell 100k points for $100 but I still think currently PR is doing better with the economy. I don't think so with the talented designers part sorry man, but M_A, Vo1ture, Glorius(from time to time) Bmat, and much others are on there. And here I haven't seen any crazy designer mostly noobs, and I see maybe 2 good teams. My personal opinion but when I look at the auction whats being sold here, sig showcase and the resources being posted, the quality on PR is better, I'm not trying to glute about PR because I just can't believe PR is doing better then GR again in my opinion. I use to have another account but I forgot the password and everything so don't think I'm a PR fan or anything lol.
Just for the record, most of the reason I was here once upon a time was because of the economy. I suck ass at making sigs. I could make maybe 250 credits for my "original" creations which were, to be quite honest, adaptations of tutorials that anyone could get. I soon realized that saving up about a thousand credits, hitting up people like Atreyu and Rogue on MSN, and buying full rights to their signatures (and in many cases their tutorials) could make me a lot of credits; I probably made around 20,000 over time, though through buying, selling, buying another I stayed steady around 3,000. I formed a partnership with somebody named .Reef in 2006(7?), which made both of us a ----load of credits. About the time of that partnership, the staff started to regulate tutorial selling. I think it was a maximum of 25 credits/tutorial and 50/learning rights .PSD. .Reef and I had planned to do what everybody else was doing; hundreds of credits to see a tutorial by a "------" designer. In fact, the very day he and I had bought rights to several of these "------" sigs and tutorials, they put that into effect. I remember typing up the "shop," making it look pretty and such, when I got the MSN telling me that we were ------ed. We were more than pissed at the time; we were going to be rich out of our minds had it gone according to plan. Those sigs/tuts were very popular; we still made several thousand credits each at those low prices, paying off what we spent on them and gaining a significant profit. For our first "venture" into the market, it turned out better than expected considering that we had to deal with what we thought were ridiculous rules; hell, we probably made a lot more than we would have selling those tutorials at 150-200 credits a piece, seeing as not everybody can afford that. Over the course of a few months, we had the market cornered regarding (what we considered to be) "------." In addition to people like Rogue and Atreyu (both of whom we jumped all over whenever they put anything new out, in addition to buying pretty much everything they had put out previously), we introduced some designers into the market who hadn't been selling their stuff before; new things for people to learn from. Were we as rich as we would have liked to be (which, to be quite frank, was never enough -- for us kids, this was like making the money neither of us were old enough to make at that time; our very own business, if you will)? Absolutely not. However, both of us turned a profit. In addition to this, the community was helped in my opinion; previously unseen "------" tutorials were put out for a relatively cheap price. Along the way, I formed friendships with who I considered to be the better designers. In addition to buying up their work, I also received discounts, lessons, and previously unreleased stuff to learn from; I got better as a designer as well. As far as I'm concerned, that credit-driven system helped a lot of people, myself included. Then the new staff toned it down; you guys have your reasons for doing so, and though I don't agree with it, it wasn't my call to make. Some of the stuff was getting out of hand; "------" this, "int3r" that, thousands of credits for mediocre signatures, driving the prices up for those that were of real quality. And you did what you thought would fix it. At least you tried to fix what you saw as a real problem, which is better than a lot of staff do elsewhere. Unfortunately, interest dropped. In my opinion, that economy was what kept GR alive. Yes it had its flaws, but what other site out there had the type of marketplace we had at the time? Myself, I still liked the community so I found other things to interest me. I grew out of graphics and moved on to arguing with fourteen year olds over global politics. That died out for me, and we were left with what it is today. Honestly, there isn't much pull for me here. I spend far more time at other places, and when I come here I see things like "why is GR dying" and "9000 penises." Maybe it's because I'm not into graphics, or maybe it's because the focus has moved on. Who knows? Me, I say bring the economy back. Or maybe it's elsewhere; I'll admit that I'm pretty disconnected from graphics now. The last time I used photoshop was for a t-shirt.
Funny that each one of the 'artists' Striker mentioned is banned from this site. Why? Because they constantly flamed, whined, and threw around their ego like they were something special the site needed and that banning them would kill the site. That doesn't fly, especially since the new staff has been here. We aren't going to run some elitist pro artist group that allows them to downplay everyone else. The next thing they all had in common? They almost solely stayed in the marketplace, rarely did they post elsewhere. Restricting credits to tutorials was for a very simple reason. Durial20 started selling a single tutorial for 350-500 credits PER tutorial, which he sold a little over 100 times. This in itself is fine, but what about all of these new users whom don't have access to credits, who don't have access to awesome work to sell, or anything they could possibly offer? Do you expect them to sit around for 350-500 posts to get 350-500 credits and buy it (or whatever is popular multiple months down the line)? No, that doesn't happen. Our idea was to make high end resources more readily available to new users to help encourage an overall community artistic boom. Unfortunately one of the side effects is that anyone more interested in themself and not the site would leave, as proven that is definitely what happened with a lot of high end artists, because they no longer had any major pulling power here on GR. This also was a downfall of the 'rights' on signatures. Many old world 'pro' artists would sell their sigs for FR for multiple thousands of credits a piece to multiple tens of people. Pegasus is a great example, I technically own nearly 150 of his signatures FR, so does about 100 people on GR alone. Regarding GP, there have been hundreds of good recommendations that haven't gone through, its not badgering, and not every good idea can or will be implemented. Everything anyone suggests that isn't... completely stupid, for lack of better words, goes to a staff vote (sometimes just global / admin, however for simple decisions I personally have been pushing staff to involve the lower brackets of staff). If it gets a majority vote of yes, we agree to implement it at some time, if its a no, then sorry, its not happening. We always provide reasoning why we don't accept a suggestion, yours were obviously flawed enough that the staff didn't care for them.
Dem, believe it or not I agreed with what you guys did with regards to restricting prices. In retrospect, of course; at the time, I simply wanted more credits and that was that. Cheap tutorials helped the community, and it was probably better for business in the long run for greedy f*ckers like myself. What you guys did allowed many newer people to become better artists, or at least learn the techniques of those who were. They could then modify those and create their own styles. It was good for the community and that was that. By the time someone had saved up a couple hundred credits for a tutorial, that style was out and there were better things out there. No real help. Regarding the old super-special artists (a suggestion: the word filters are completely stupid; censor the "major" potty words whatnot if you need to keep it PG-13. Kids will find nothing here that they haven't already been exposed to elsewhere. I think the level fad has passed, to be honest), what would happen is that people like myself would own full rights to a sig. After I had paid it off with tutorials and learning rights, I would auction it off for (usually) a thousand or so lower than what I got it for, allowing me to buy others and sell different tutorials. Repeat this process several times and everybody and their mother, cousin, and extended family has full rights to that sig. Some would resell them even after they sold rights to it, though usually not in the open. I made a point not to do this; not only was it bad for me (I don't want other people "owning" something I bought -- competition), it wasn't right to begin with. A sig usually lasted three weeks at most for me. Keep the price caps on the tutorials. I doubt you plan on removing them anyway, but just saying.
