Having read a few forum discussions it seems that there can sometimes be a mismatch between people’s intentions. What I mean is that there are maybe 3 or 4 types of Unity users:
just for fun, may never release a game
AAA game PC/console game makers
casual game/app makers
MMORPG enthusiasts
Probably I missed a few categories. And people could belong to several categories. The problem is that at the moment there is no obvious way to distinguish people. Why that might be a problem is that a question by someone who makes games just for fun might be responded to by the reply “that will never make money”. Or someone who makes apps doesn’t need the replies about the latest lighting system etc.
My suggestion would be some sort of badge system people could add to their signature where you could select which categories you associate yourself with. e.g. “AAA game maker” or “Just for fun” etc.
Maybe other badges that say stuff like “Number of games released on PC: 23” or something like that.
The other alternative would be to have separate forums for different categories but this might not work as people belong to several.
What do you think? Or is it better not to and have it more egalitarian? It would be bad if people tried to pull rank using this system!
In my opinion 90% of unity users will never make anything on their own, most of them are trying to do remakes and create exact replicas of now popular games, which if you ask me is utterly stupid, but hey, that’s just me. So with that said the majority of the user base on here either has little to no experience in game development and / has no idea what exactly they want their own game to look like, not much help to the rest of us.
I completely agree with this and the badge system is a great suggestion and would be a very good addition to the fourms.
@5vStudios . I agree with your percentiles…however folks are not definitively cast into any one category in perpetuum. I have released a few iOS games before I decided I could not flex my muscle properly on that platform. I have made a few dozen games and other toolsets that were not games but utilized the realtime 3D engine for clients…So…how does one properly create the plethora of categories. and BTW…went to check your site but none of the images loaded for me…OS X Mountain Lion and Safari.
Currently re-writing the backend as we speak, in its un-finished state its set to display ‘filler content (text and images)’, I should be finished in a hour or 2 though, thanks for taking to the time to check it out.