heh, yeh. for rzn it's probably MORE ACTIVE now than when he left. GR is not dying, it's just changing. every year immediately after summer there's a "OMFG GR is dying" epidemic. then the site is even more active a year later. now this time ---- got shaken up. Excuse the language, but ti did. SO you lost a few cred whores... ohh well. I will agree though, the bannings shouldn't have happened. That was bull.
I'm not going to pretend I'm active enough in the OT or SH forums or on the IRC, but I think there's a serious problem. If we want to attract new members, we need to offer resources to new members. Become a source for them for both resources, help and then a place for them to spam/chat/interact. I know most people will say this is rediculous, but we should eliminate the credits thing, and allow all users access to all material posted. And then if people refuse to give their stuff away for free, they can take it somewhere else. I've always gived my tutorials/stocks/renders away for free. I'm more than happy to give a LR .psd of any of my tags to anyone who asks, and I've never gained credits from any way other than posting (and occasional off the bat generosity from some grateful members). ------ credits. New users don't have credits, so they physically cannot buy resources as long as they are for sale. People care to much about credits. I can understand how people can be pissed about the whole credit stealing item, which was a bad move, but i've never needed credits to enjoy GR, and i vote we make it so all members can do so.
well my theory was always just increase the number of creds per post as to generate INTENTIONAL inflation. This way the newbs would be able to buy things relatively quickly and the cred whores would suffer. but intentionally increasing the cred rate for the sake of new posters doesn't fly over well with most of the admin so ehh. Not my decision to make.
The best way to attract new members is to try and influence existing members to offer more free resources. As it is, increasing if we increase the amount of credits per post, effectively d------uing it as a currency, then people will raise their prices, and we'll eventually get more people spamming for creds. it would be a temporary solution at best, and we'd be worse off in the long run.
you can increase the creds per post Ad Infinintum. and should there be an effective cap, you could simply cull the data base by dividing total creds by 100 across the board... The idea is that many new members are NOT good at graphics yet. if they can't afford a tutorial easily due to rampant pricing, they should be enabled to obtain it. again there'd have to be a balance as there is(or atleast was) a tremendous tendency towards hoarding. I view hoarding as comparative to the rest of GR to be the problem, not the existence of creds. If the average amount of creds on hand is 20 and there are members with over 100k that indicates that there is a ton of hoarding. When 10 members can collectively control 40% of the total credits(and 60% of those held by active members), that doesn't work. you should be rewarded for posting and doing work and the like, but people can AND WILL hoard. and yes, we need o refocus on the resources aspect of the site. That's a community thing. again a lot of that is my personal though, it's not exactly representative of what logic and dem are thinking. And yes I know what I'm saying is Bass ackwards of what works long run in reality. Look at the US economy. There was a HUGE boom the last 8 years or so. The US money supply was increased rampantly, interest rates plummeted and A LOT of investment took place. That was artificially low and now people are suffering. the thing about infalation on a forum though is that inflation hits the newest the hardest. When I first started in late 2004 50 creds could buy you two sigs for full rights. Now comparable sigs are 10 times as expensive. back then it was 25 posts to get a sig(and yes that's WAY low but...) now it's 250-1000. That's a bit extreme. All I'm saying is that the forum credit policy should mirror what works in reality. If price inflation occurs and nominal income stays the same, real income goes down. Real income on GR is NOTHING. In real life, nominal income tends to match inflation just a little bit more closely.
Yep, I get what you're saying. And of course, since the price of stuff is so high, people are forced to sell everything they create to afford other's stuff. I'll never sell tags for FR. If I make it, it's mine forever.
Hmm.... Here's my take on the activity thing. I know I'm only active in the "signatures" thread, but hey, I'm active. I came here as a total noob... proof: I think this was the first tag I posted here. lol I basically had a hard time staying active because everything cost creds and I didn't have any whatsoever. It was really hard to get enough credits to buy any tuts or anything somewhat good. -_- So basically, by the time I started getting better I didn't need a lot of the resources I could've used long ago when it really would've counted. I don't know about the prem render business either. :mellow: It turned me off for a while and I just went to AnimeRender.com so I could get decent renders for being highly active "ONCE". Not this keep up the good work and post 60 posts every 40 days crap. -_- I'm thinkin' about buying a membership, but newer members will just leave. The only thing that kept me comin' back was a few really awesome CnCers and the good critique and art I saw here. Inverse, X'ed, Kovan, Chilled, Syke and Kennedy (a whole bnch of others can't member right now). That made me want to return and be active so I could become a better artist. So, imo, punish flamers more seriously to keep a bad reputation down. Change/remove prem render deal. Change/remove credits problem. (Especially that stupid credit stealing thing. I've never heard of it, but it sounds stupid) Get some cool competitions in here, that's a great idea. not just SOTW, ROTW, LAOTW/M Anywho, just thought I'd give meh 2 cents. ^_^
We have two different contests running at the moment, and neither are generating interest. People keep screaming for more cool contests, and when we offer them, nobody partakes in them. What are you waiting for? We can't afford to offer you cash prizes, because well, that takes money. If you truely are here for fun, then whats stopping people from joining in the contests we are offering? If you don't like the contests, offer up some ideas for other contests.
K, well then advertise them maybe? I didn't know about either of these aforesaid "contests". No need to get itchy there either pal. And that's only one of the problems.
For the Tag Wall contest, I think you should make a topic in the Sig and Battle section of the forums, because it like Hoplite_A2 some people are only active in those sections. And those are the people you want to enter. Whats with the fee though? a lot of people that make sigs that I know of are in the negative of credits, or don't have a lot of credits anymore.(And yes it only 50 creds, but that can be a lot to some people now) The tag wall contest would of been a good contest before the item was introduced, or maybe having it at the end of summer.
I have entered ROTY, and that one is something I'm interested in. However, the tag wall contest is just another contest aimed toward people that make tags. I suck at making tags, and they don't really appeal to me, plus tag contests are way too common. I understand you can't do cash prizes, and I'm not saying you should. One possibility that would be really cool would be a photomanip contest. This would focus on the more traditional uses of Photoshop, and each week people could pimp out cars or turn people into robots or aliens or whatever. I think that would be really fun. I've seen it on other sites and it usually gets about as many entries as SOTW does.
It may be just me, but I think a big thing is the Premium Renders sections. Often times, people who are new to graphic design wont be the best at rendering and masking images, so they tend to want to get the good ones off forums. By making them post over a long period of time until they could afford it, it turns them away more often. Maybe we could make Prem. Renders a little more accessible? Not absolutely open, but with a lesser standard for getting in.
There has been disussions about the current state of the Prem. Renders secton, and hopefully we'll come to a conclusion soon. As for the Credit Steal item fuss, I think it was a good move to get credits out of the system for the same reason as xlink said: It's just common sense that something had to be done, and some got struck harder than others, maybe to some peoples disagreement and it led to flaming/alot of mixed feelings about the whole situation. The Photomanip contest sounds like a good idea and I'd voulunteer to take care of that if it would ever happen, you'll never know yet since there is already 2 new contests that might have to become alittle more stable before we introduce yet another one. EDIT: And that was the longest post made by Morv EVER!
<span style="font-family:Comic Sans MS">But the threads for the contests are kinda hidden if you think about it. When most people come to this site, they immediately scroll down to the more active sections and just pass up the Site Contests forum. Honestly, when I come here I go straight to the Graphics Discussion forum. I think whenever there is something big going on here, there should be mass pm's about it. I GUARANTEE a pm to every member describing the contest with a link to the thread would make a lot more people aware of it and interested in it. No matter how good or interesting a contests is, if nobody knows about it, nobody will participate in it.</span>
