A word on forum attitude.

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vdweller

Member
Hey guys... if you ever complain about frostycat giving the honest truth, please stay away from stackoverflow expecting help because they literally ban you six months for simply asking a "stupid question" or over something "asked incorrectly", while i agree some questions could be asked better and others have been asked before a gazillion times, just be thankful this site isn't anything like stackoverflow, 99% of our members here would be banned, myself included. There are limits to how much i agree with both sides of this discussion. I'm somewhere in between to be honest...
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
Why put all the onus on people providing help on the forum, and virtually none on people on the asking side?
The answer to that is simple:
We, the "helpers" are the experienced users.
We have been on this site for longer know the etiquette.
This conversation here will most likely be read by long time users of the GMC.
It's unreasonable to expect the thousands of new, and infrequent users to discuss how they would like to be treated, and conversely, how we would like them to formulate their questions.

Having experienced users show a lack of patience gives the forum an unfriendly look. I don't think that's the case when a question asker is being obtuse.

The other reason is that many times, these "newcomers" are not demonstrably being rude. Yes, they can be obtuse, and sometimes down right irritating. And yes, this is an issue. Pointing that out to them is definitely the right thing to do.
But, (big but), being rude when doing so is not the right solution. Not only is it unfriendly, but, it probably causes them to ignore your point in the first place.
If you want users to take more initiative, then being friendly towards them, and kindly pointing out why they are perhaps wrong, is far better than lashing out with harsh, snappy language.

Over the internet, what one person may perceive as a fairly straightforward, and inoffensive post may seem quite mean to others, which is why I believe being explicitly friendly is sometimes necessary.
Remember that goes for the other side too, their posts may be reaching you differently then how they sent it. Without any real interpersonal queues, we will tend to perceive them as more rude than they were being.
I think it's out job, as the people actually having this conversation, to keep our forum friendly, since we cannot discuss it with the thousands of future newcomers with questions to ask.
Perhaps a prominent tutorial on how to trace GML
There is an issue with video Tutorials. They don't make any money unless it's somewhat clickbaity. And making a good video tutorial is hard.
I was hoping perhaps YYG would fund tutorials, and, they did. Unfortunately it was a series of "my first game" tutorial like the many we have already seen out there. (Also they never got back to me after I gave them a quote. Talk about rude....)
if you ever complain about frostycat giving the honest truth, please stay away from stackoverflow
It's not about giving the honest truth.
I'm all for honest truth. That's why we value some of our members, such as frosty, so much. They are invaluable.
But, honest truth is alread hard to hear as it is. And delivering it kindly is important. Being snappy and rude is the problem. It's unkind and unhelpful.
I get that it's a fine line, but that's for what we are all here to discuss.
 
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Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
Here's why I'm still not warming up to this topic: Why put all the onus on people providing help on the forum, and virtually none on people on the asking side?

It's unproductive and selfish to talk about the rights of being helped before talking about the responsibilities of being helped. Skipping that conversation is how welfare bums are made, and this topic will embolden them if you don't stop being one-sided. It also misses opportunities for identifying points in the learning pipeline that need improvement.

For example, having traced through one's logic first is a reasonable responsibility before posting a topic. But mainstream GML education is all about cloning games and have no emphasis on sight-reading code. Perhaps a prominent tutorial on how to trace GML will help with responder burnout by making the responsibility to self-evaluate feasible to fulfill. See what I'm getting at? You don't spot that opportunity by continuing to talk about how rookies deserve a sheltered start, and how it's our responsibility to do (or not do) this and that to accommodate their every want.

The problem of this topic is the same one that a lot of anti-poverty and basic income advocates also have. So many of them come from the receiving side and still are, that a single "they're going to ask for more because they aren't the ones paying for it" can sweep them under. They get their credibility by their knowledge of their side of the deal, then lose most to all of it by disregarding the other end of the deal.

Sure, newcomers deserve protection, but so does the willingness of responders to keep answering. Start also talking about what to exact from newcomers and what can be done so that it can be reasonably exacted, then I'll consider it.
I hope you don't mind, but I honestly think you are completly missing the point that @saffeine (and other members, myself included) is trying to make. Please excuse this, but I'm going to use a post of yours as an example since you are vocally speaking out on the subject:



Quite frankly, this is a SHOCKING reply and 100% illustrative of the problem being discussed here. Would it have hurt so much to simply say:

"Hello! Okay, so, that's not quite how GML works... Why don't you check out this article on Syntax and this one on and/or and see if you can work out what the problem is? To get you started resolving the issue, It seems you're confusing the "!=" and "=!" syntax, and you can't use "and" in that way. Oh, and if you haven't done any of the basic tutorials already, maybe try them and then come back to the problem with the new knowledge?"

This says EXACTLY THE SAME AS YOU SAID, but is a much friendlier and less judgmental and arrogant way of saying it. It welcomes the user to investigate for themselves and says, "Hey, we're here to help you help yourself and happy to do it"... And on top of insulting them, you then provide them with the correct code! Thus nullifying everything you've just said. So you were criticizing and berating just for the hell of it? If you were going to supply the fixed code, couldn't you just do that and leave off the lecture? If you think they haven't done "due diligence" then what makes you think they'll read the links you posted and listen to what you have said? Why won't they just copy/paste the code you then supplied and use that without actually learning anything?

So, yeah, sorry, I can't condone this kind of attitude and while I greatly admire your programming skills - and I also have the highest respect for the amount of time and effort you put into helping people on this forum - I think that you (and a few other people, this is not just an issue with Frostycat) need to learn a bit of tact and diplomacy when it comes to replying sometimes.
 

MissingNo.

Member
"Hello! Okay, so, that's not quite how GML works... Why don't you check out this article on Syntax and this one on and/or and see if you can work out what the problem is? To get you started resolving the issue, It seems you're confusing the "!=" and "=!" syntax, and you can't use "and" in that way. Oh, and if you haven't done any of the basic tutorials already, maybe try them and then come back to the problem with the new knowledge?"
Ah Nocturne... A few posts back I was mentioning how polite you can be and here you deliver. Can always count on Nocturne to be a class act.

If you think they haven't done "due diligence" then what makes you think they'll read the links you posted and listen to what you have said?
This is a good point, I didn't think about that earlier. Insulting someone while including advice usually leads to the other party flatout ignoring said advice.

Another thing I thought of was that a lot of these beginners also probably just got done purchasing GMS2 (Unless there is a way to get it for free that I am not aware of)
So that is even more reason to be respectful of askers, although they should get respect regardless we still shouldn't abuse YYGs newly acquired customers.

If someone wants to be set straight they can join the Marine Corps.
 
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Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I'm one of those obnoxious elitist people. I've also finished around a hundred games in my years using GM. I like to think that there's some correlation between discipline and actually achieving things, so I'm trying to impart that mindset on people. I definitely enjoy helping people (otherwise I wouldn't have stayed with the GMC for what feels like a decade) but after getting a number of burns I'm trying to follow a strict "don't put more effort into helping someone than they put into asking for help" rule.

Firefox and Chrome both have built-in spell checkers these days, for instance, so if someone manages to misspell every single word in their post, the only explanation is that they don't care about correcting their mistakes... which is not a good mindset to have when programming. And there's a lot of cases where people seem to assume you're a mind reader and thus don't explain their problem properly. I'm currently in an ongoing PM conversation when a newbie user messaged me directly since "they didn't get any help" in the programming forums (randomly dragging someone in to solve your problems is considered kinda rude, but I decided to keep giving unhelpful answers until the guy gave up as a sort of practical lesson instead of pointing this out), and after 3 days and a dozen PMs, they still haven't told me what the problem is, only complained about how they haven't been able to solve it. People pls I'm a psycho not a psychic learn the difference

Also, there's a lot of cases where people have copied the biggest GM Youtube tutorials' code verbatim and ran into some issue - I'm pretty familiar with Shaun Spalding's platformer tutorial and HeartBeast's RPG overworld movement using the physics system at this point - which usually boils down to "I copied the code without knowing what it did, and I made a typo somewhere". I'm not sure whether this kind of incident is because of people watching YT tutorials with the wrong mindset ("get code to copypaste to get things magically work" instead of "get a concept presented to me in a more natural way than text and try to understand it") or whether most big-name tutorial makers do a bad job at teaching, but over the years it's left me with a grudge against both. I kinda wish the big-names would stop showing complete code samples in their videos altogether and just go through the concepts so people would be forced to try to understand them, but I guess that would alienate the "pls make my game for me" crowd...

I don't remember where I'm going with this rant, and it feels like I'm just going to make this more toxic if I say anything more, so I guess I'll stop being grumpy here.
TL;DR if people aren't gonna put in a honest effort doing stuff, they don't deserve help because then you're just doing their job for them.

This is a good point, I didn't think about that earlier. Insulting someone while including advice usually leads to the other party flatout ignoring said advice.

Another thing I thought of was that a lot of these beginners also probably just got done purchasing GMS2 (Unless there is a way to get it for free that I am not aware of)
So that is even more reason to be respectful of askers, although they should get respect regardless we shouldn't abuse YYGs newly acquired customers.
Not everyone is a customer. There's a month-long free trial version, educational licenses that the users themselves probably didn't fund (and I've seen a fair share of "hey pls do my homework for me" questions...) and there's been a number of suspicious questions where people are using GMS1.x or GM8, both of which aren't sold anymore (at least one of which was closed down for confirmed piracy). There's plenty of legitimate customers out there, but not everybody is one, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bit of overlap between the people that got their copy in the Caribbean and the people that didn't even try solving their problems on their own before asking about them on the internet.
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
Firefox and Chrome both have built-in spell checkers these days, for instance, so if someone manages to misspell every single word in their post, the only explanation is that they don't care about correcting their mistakes... which is not a good mindset to have when programming. And there's a lot of cases where people seem to assume you're a mind reader and thus don't explain their problem properly. I'm currently in an ongoing PM conversation when a newbie user messaged me directly since "they didn't get any help" in the programming forums (randomly dragging someone in to solve your problems is considered kinda rude, but I decided to keep giving unhelpful answers until the guy gave up as a sort of practical lesson instead of pointing this out), and after 3 days and a dozen PMs, they still haven't told me what the problem is, only complained about how they haven't been able to solve it. People pls I'm a psycho not a psychic learn the difference
Please don't do this. If ANYONE sends you (or anyone else) an unsolicited PM for help, politely inform them that this is against the forum rules and they should post in the programming forum. All you are doing is encouraging their poor behaviour and lack of patience. PMing people for help unless explicitly told to do so, is not something I like nor want to promote as it is a form of queue jumping, and basically says "I'm more important than everyone else patiently waiting for replies", when nobody is more important than anyone else around here... ;)

Also, there's a lot of cases where people have copied the biggest GM Youtube tutorials' code verbatim and ran into some issue - I'm pretty familiar with Shaun Spalding's platformer tutorial and HeartBeast's RPG overworld movement using the physics system at this point - which usually boils down to "I copied the code without knowing what it did, and I made a typo somewhere". I'm not sure whether this kind of incident is because of people watching YT tutorials with the wrong mindset ("get code to copypaste to get things magically work" instead of "get a concept presented to me in a more natural way than text and try to understand it") or whether most big-name tutorial makers do a bad job at teaching, but over the years it's left me with a grudge against both. I kinda wish the big-names would stop showing complete code samples in their videos altogether and just go through the concepts so people would be forced to try to understand them, but I guess that would alienate the "pls make my game for me" crowd...
I actually agree 100% with this... Unfortunately, what tutorial makers do on Youtube is beyond our control and we just have to deal with the fallout. :( Thankfully we have a new batch of tutorial makers coming along (I'm looking at you @samspade, @matharoo and @Slyddar!) who seem to be approaching things in a much more down-to-earth way and teach a more grass-roots methodology. Lets hope their tutorials get the same - if not more - attention from the userbase.
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
'm one of those obnoxious elitist people.
TBH i don't see as many replies from you in the programming section, but i cannot recall you ever being rude, which is what some users are complaining about.

'm not sure whether this kind of incident is because of people watching YT tutorials with the wrong mindset ("get code to copypaste to get things magically work" instead of "get a concept presented to me in a more natural way than text and try to understand it") or whether most big-name tutorial makers do a bad job at teaching, but over the years it's left me with a grudge against both.
TBH i think all youtube tutorial makers (myself included) are terrible at teaching. I don't have anything against them; Turns out teaching is really difficult :)
That being said I do agree with the sentiment that some tutorial styles attract a certain type of tutorial users. I don't know if we need a 50 part platformer tutorial, or if they consitute good teaching material, but yes, i don think a lot of people following these tutorials are not coming away from them having learnt very much at all.
I kinda wish the big-names would stop showing complete code samples in their videos altogether and just go through the concepts so people would be forced to try to understand them, but I guess that would alienate the "pls make my game for me" crowd...
again, making tutorials is very hard, and, i believe making these non-example tutorials are harder still - try getting a 50 parter out of data structures. Big name tutorial makers do this for a living. They need the views: and they need the video throughput.
There's plenty of legitimate customers out there, but not everybody is one, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bit of overlap between the people that got their copy in the Caribbean and the people that didn't even try solving their problems on their own before asking about them on the internet.
Perhaps we just don't notice the polite pirates because they are too smart/ not stupid enough to reveal they are using an illegitimate copy.
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
again, making tutorials is very hard, and, i believe making these non-example tutorials are harder still - try getting a 50 parter out of data structures. Big name tutorial makers do this for a living. They need the views: and they need the video throughput.
Thats not to say its not possible. i just think its far easier to go with the 'make a platformer' or 'rpg in gamemaker' rout than it is to actually make lessons with clear learning goals. Given the nature of youtube, and how it promotes content, its not at all surprising to see these kinds of tutorials rise to the top.

There are high quality tutorials out there that do a great job.

I actually agree 100% with this... Unfortunately, what tutorial makers do on Youtube is beyond our control and we just have to deal with the fallout.
Yoyogames has some official tutorials on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raGK_j1NVdE&list=PLhIbBGhnxj5JcbfoxS_CWTnImRL_wB_Wg
This is by no means a bad tutorial series but i don't think it achieves much out side of teaching users the very basics of gamemaker, and get the users excited to use gamemaker by producing their very first game. Which, is great, and needed, but only goes so far. (it seems a little... markety to me)
Perhaps they could fund tutorial makers to make more feature or pattern oriented tutorials. for instance they could have tutorials on how to use the the new sequences, or how to draw sprites in code. Think of the official Unity style tutorial videos.


While we are talking about good tutorial design: I think its possible to game the system. Make a 'platformer tutorial' but, at each episode, set out clear learning objectives, and structure the tutorial around that.
So rather than structuring the tutorial, and what is presented around what is a normal gamedev progression, try to think of what systems can be implemented with the feature you want to teach.
This is significantly more difficult to pull off (and what I would have wanted to see in the official tutorials.)
 
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Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
Yoyogames has some official tutorials on youtube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raGK_j1NVdE&list=PLhIbBGhnxj5JcbfoxS_CWTnImRL_wB_Wg
This is by no means a bad tutorial series but i don't think it achieves much out side of teaching users the very basics of gamemaker, and get the users excited to use gamemaker by producing their very first game. Which, is great, and needed, but only goes so far. (it seems a little... markety to me)
Perhaps they could fund tutorial makers to make more feature or pattern oriented tutorials. for instance they could have tutorials on how to use the the new sequences, or how to draw sprites in code. Think of the official Unity style tutorial videos.
Yup, this is all true... YYG needs to have more official tutorials, but they take a lot of time and effort to make, and also need to sell the product and be usable in an education environment. So, yeah, it's tough to get tutorials together as I don't have the equipment to make videos, and have to rely on others to them while I do the written part. That said, I'm currently working on an updated manual that includes mini-tutorials that cover things like drawing sprites, drawing text, basic movement, etc... just as you suggest! We're also reaching out to other developers with an eye to creating more custom video content for us. Oh, and there IS a new written sequences tutorial, but it's not available to the public yet due to certain issues outside of my control Hopefully it will be by the time 2.3.0 goes stable.

So, yeah, good feedback and we're actually working on most of the points you raise. :)
 

saffeine

Member
just to pitch in my two cents real quick here, as far as public responses go, i haven't seen you be rude or dismissive to anyone, @Yal.
there's a very big difference between becoming stern, and becoming rude, and i think at worst i've seen you be stern towards someone with very good reason. it's not a bad thing.

Firefox and Chrome both have built-in spell checkers these days, for instance, so if someone manages to misspell every single word in their post, the only explanation is that they don't care about correcting their mistakes... which is not a good mindset to have when programming. And there's a lot of cases where people seem to assume you're a mind reader and thus don't explain their problem properly. I'm currently in an ongoing PM conversation when a newbie user messaged me directly since "they didn't get any help" in the programming forums (randomly dragging someone in to solve your problems is considered kinda rude, but I decided to keep giving unhelpful answers until the guy gave up as a sort of practical lesson instead of pointing this out), and after 3 days and a dozen PMs, they still haven't told me what the problem is, only complained about how they haven't been able to solve it. People pls I'm a psycho not a psychic learn the difference.
i feel like this kind of behaviour was mentioned previously, and i still firmly believe that it isn't always somebody's fault that something like this happens.
there have been plenty of occasions both here in the community and elsewhere where i've seen / been involved with language barriers, or just sheer lack of literate ability.
i do get that spell checkers exist and yes, people should absolutely learn to use them if their spelling is atrocious, but that ties in with the thing i'm literally just about to say.
sometimes people just don't understand the etiquette yet. even bringing their attention to a spell checker could do them a world of good, as silly and obvious as it may sound.

the next thing i do want to say, and you're more than welcome to disagree here, but i don't think continuing an ongoing PM with a newbie just to feed them unhelpful answers is the way to go.
not only are you wasting the time of both yourself and the other, you're also not being very productive when it comes to getting a message across.
@Nocturne had his own response to this, but i think even if you're willing to at the very least respond to a PM, you should tell someone why you're not willing to help, and maybe they can learn and change their tone accordingly.

as far as tutorials go, i don't think there's necessarily a blame to be placed on anyone. it's down to the viewer to decide what they do with the information.
i do agree though, i think showing off the full code is a mistake, but i think it as least covers their *** if they choose to leave the code in, because then they don't get 100,000 viewers all asking them personally how to fix it.
there definitely does need to be more of an emphasis on understanding the code though. if i watched a tutorial nowadays, and even when i do for the sake of recommending it to a beginner friend, i pause the video at different points to see if the code actually makes sense to a beginner, and regardless of if it does or doesn't, i make sure to give them the full disclaimer that copying it straight from the source will not help them going forward.
i think that part of the issue is a beginner's tendency to jump ahead before first learning the basics, which a content creator can't cover every single time they make a video, or if they did it'd get boring, repetitive, and time consuming.
if a beginner follows the right course of learning, they won't run into the issue of not understanding. sometimes they don't and it's annoying, but hey, if someone makes a point of it then there's a chance they'll go back and learn.
if they continue to just ignore that advice, then it's best to call them out on it, or just leave them well alone. we can't keep giving our attention to people who aren't willing to learn, or we'll end up frustrated.
 
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H

Homunculus

Guest
@GMWolf I'm not a fan of youtube tutorials in general as a primary method of learning because they lead to what YAL described above, but I don't blame video tutorials per se, and in fact I enjoyed watching yours (and others).

Even when the subject of the tutorial is already clear to the viewer, they have the great merit to open your mind on how others approach a problem with respect to what you do or would have done. And that's probably the main problem here: the people who benefit most from video tutorials on very specific game mechanics, like "platformer tutorial" or "how to build the best inventory ever seen to humanity", are those who are already familiar with the concepts being explained. Instead, they (understandably) attract a crowd of new GM users who simply care about implementing their game and follow the tutorial blindly just to get to the final result.

Don't let the above discourage you though, I'm sure we tend to see mostly the users who fall into the latter category, it doesn't mean that the others do not exist.
 
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GMWolf

aka fel666
i think it as least covers their *** if they choose to leave the code in, because then they don't get 100,000 viewers all asking them personally how to fix it.
hahahahaha, if I, who hasnt made a tutorial in over a year, and never got that many views to begin with, still semi-regularly get asked questions in comments, PM,s or emails that are often resolved by fixing a copy-pasting error, you bet your ass youtubers with 100X the subscriber count are being bombarded with those sorts of questions too! Unfortunately those tutorial makers dont really spend any time on those forums so we cant have them confirm nor deny this, or actually participate in a conversation that concerns them.
 

saffeine

Member
hahahahaha, if I, who hasnt made a tutorial in over a year, and never got that many views to begin with, still semi-regularly get asked questions in comments, PM,s or emails that are often resolved by fixing a copy-pasting error, you bet your ass youtubers with 100X the subscriber count are being bombarded with those sorts of questions too! Unfortunately those tutorial makers dont really spend any time on those forums so we cant have them confirm nor deny this, or actually participate in a conversation that concerns them.
i think the most important thing i took away from this reply is the fact that ass isn't censored by default. thank you so much for this.

i'm just kidding, but yeah unfortunately that's just the way it goes sometimes. i don't make content so i don't know what it's like, but i do know that it's difficult to keep addressing the same thing.
the most painful part of it is just the fact that the 'same thing' in a lot of cases is literally just 'please for the love of god learn what an if statement is before you try tackling networking'.
people will still ask their questions, and the best responses we can give is to tell them where they need to go back and re-learn the basics, or leave them to venture off in that direction themselves.
all roads will eventually lead to home.
 

pixeltroid

Member
Yoyogames has some official tutorials on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raGK_j1NVdE&list=PLhIbBGhnxj5JcbfoxS_CWTnImRL_wB_Wg
This is by no means a bad tutorial series but i don't think it achieves much out side of teaching users the very basics of gamemaker, and get the users excited to use gamemaker by producing their very first game. Which, is great, and needed, but only goes so far. (it seems a little... markety to me)
Disclaimer: I absolutely love Gamemaker and the GMC, but I felt like responding to the above post.

It IS marketing 100%.

Gamemaker is marketed as an extremely easy game making tool. In fact, it's even marketed as a tool that let's one make great games without CODE!! Which IMO, is a huge exaggeration and not very representative of the reality.

This is how Gamemaker is described on google search:

gmgoogl.jpg

Now, does anyone here really believe that we can make "top 2D games" without code and programming?

And this is how Gamemaker is described on the Yoyo games website:
gmweb.jpg

Just lol. I understand Yoyo are trying to market a product, but at least they should have a disclaimer on their site saying that the fantastic eye-popping games showcased on their website were all made with tons of complicated code, and not the "drag and drop" function. IMHO it's somewhat misleading to showcase games made with code and saying "you can do this just using drag & drop!"

What's happening is that people fall for the exaggerated marketing and buy the software, only to later discover that drag & drop can only do so much. They realize that in order to make GOOD games, they have no choice but to work with codes. Obviously, they still want to make games with the software. That's why they come to these forums and ask for help. Yes, some of them ask for a working code. I've done that too. And I don't blame them. The fact is that, Gamemaker is marketed with the proposition "This will let you MAKE games easily" and not "This will help you LEARN to code to make games".

IMO if Gamemaker was indeed as easy and code-free as it's marketed on their website there wouldn't be too many people here (myself included) asking for code help.
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
Just lol. I understand Yoyo are trying to market a product, but at least they should have a disclaimer on their site saying that the fantastic eye-popping games showcased on their website were all made with tons of complicated code, and not the "drag and drop" function. IMHO it's somewhat misleading to showcase games made with code and saying "you can do this just using drag & drop!"
Ah, but you can!


So, no, it's not misleading at all. Drag and Drop is incredibly powerful, you just have to learn how to use it. ;)

They realize that in order to make GOOD games, they have no choice but to work with codes
I have to disagree with this also... Check out Eric Ruth games: http://ericruthgames.weebly.com/games.html Everything on that page was made ONLY using DnD, and his games were damned impressive (sadly, he left making games and the links no longer work... :( ). Again, it's just a question of using the tools correctly and understanding them. Maybe if more people produced DnD content, this idea of "DnD not being powerful enough to make good games" would finally be put to rest.
 

vdweller

Member
@Nocturne you can create a game in assembly, c, game maker with d&d and even inside games like Factorio. The common denominator for all is: IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. The thing is that one of the marketing points of GM is "you can create games without a single line of code!" and this entices a lot of people with the wrong ideas on what it takes to make a game. So it's natural to see more of this kind of people here than, say, the SFML forum. I'm not disagreeing with anything you said btw, just offering some extra perspective.

Lastly I would like to add that this focus of GM on ease of access may be detrimental in prioritizing more advanced features to be implemented, from a stencil buffer to faster GML overall (it is a shame that a colony sim game a la Rimworld can't happen in GM because the game will die with a single pathfinding request).
 

saffeine

Member
i like to think that although it's quite misleading, it can do a lot more good than harm.

speaking from personal experience, when i started i was absolutely terrified of code. it was extremely daunting to look at several lines and try to make sense of it all.
enter gamemaker 7, stage left. i'm sure the marketing has changed now to be more, as sad as it might be to say, 'baity', but a product is a product and you do what you must to sell it.
regardless, when i started out with 7 i used a lot of drag 'n' drop because it was so conveniently laid out for me, and that's what gamemaker was always about from the very beginning.
moving forward two years, i decided to dip my toes into the coding side of it, and the next think i know i'm primarily using code to build my games, which triggers this knock-on effect.
i went from drag 'n' drop, to gml, to amateur modding in minecraft using java, to ( once again, amateur ) coding in html, javascript, other various languages i have insignificant experience in.

i guess what i'm trying to say is, despite the fact that gamemaker's marketing might be misleading for someone looking to make the next hollow knight, it does get people interested in exploring code down the line, especially if they were hesitant to go near any other language to begin with. the road blocks either deter you, or spark the curiosity you needed to get your foot in the door of 'real' programming and languages.
 

Cpaz

Member
Hey guys... if you ever complain about frostycat giving the honest truth, please stay away from stackoverflow expecting help because they literally ban you six months for simply asking a "stupid question" or over something "asked incorrectly", while i agree some questions could be asked better and others have been asked before a gazillion times, just be thankful this site isn't anything like stackoverflow, 99% of our members here would be banned, myself included.
I think that's the whole point of this post, isn't it? That we don't become another stack overflow with our toxic attitude? (Which is fair, I've definitely seen that attitude seep in every so often.)

Because, speaking only for me, everytime I remember how toxic that website can be, after using it almost daily for work, the more I fume.
 
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saffeine

Member
I think that's the whole point of this post, isn't it? That we don't become another stack overflow with our toxic attitude? (Which is fair, I've definitely seen that attitude seep in every so often.)
Because, speaking only for me, everytime I remember how toxic that website can be, after using it almost daily for work, the more I fume.
this is actually i've been thinking about for a little while now, ever since stackoverflow was first mentioned.

i've seen two or three different people ( i think. admittedly i don't keep track of details like this ) bring stackoverflow up as a comparison to the yoyogames forum, which i think hurts the message a little bit.
just because this forum does it better than another, it doesn't mean that this forum does it right. it sure as hell is a lot better than what stackoverflow is implied to be like though, i don't have much experience there.
just because this forum is more green than red, it doesn't mean that it's green, it could just be a weird shade of yellow ( or brown if you want to mix your colours like that instead. i won't judge. )
nobody should have to just 'suck it up, because we're not stackoverflow'. if something is wrong, something is wrong. we shouldn't be comparing our neutral practices to bad ones to give off the illusion that they're good.
there is, and always will be room for improvement, even here. we're just further along the path of a welcoming community than stackoverflow might be, we're still not perfect.
 

vdweller

Member
I rarely use stack overflow but I believe it is not as much that they are toxic but rather they have very high standards and guidelines. While I do not support being an a-hole in forums or irl, one has to wonder how forums like stack overflow would be if they did not have such strict rules:

"HEY GUIZE HOW CAN I COMPUT0RZ"

(same question posted 178 times: )
"HEY GUIZE HOW CAN I SORT A VECTOR OF INTS"
 

saffeine

Member
i don't use stackoverflow so much as i just browse it for guidance through google searches.
people there seem a little extreme as far as their standards go, but as you suggested, maybe it's for the best.

it seems alright, maybe.
 

FrostyCat

Redemption Seeker
I hope you don't mind, but I honestly think you are completly missing the point that @saffeine (and other members, myself included) is trying to make. Please excuse this, but I'm going to use a post of yours as an example since you are vocally speaking out on the subject:



Quite frankly, this is a SHOCKING reply and 100% illustrative of the problem being discussed here. Would it have hurt so much to simply say:




This says EXACTLY THE SAME AS YOU SAID, but is a much friendlier and less judgmental and arrogant way of saying it. It welcomes the user to investigate for themselves and says, "Hey, we're here to help you help yourself and happy to do it"... And on top of insulting them, you then provide them with the correct code! Thus nullifying everything you've just said. So you were criticizing and berating just for the hell of it? If you were going to supply the fixed code, couldn't you just do that and leave off the lecture? If you think they haven't done "due diligence" then what makes you think they'll read the links you posted and listen to what you have said? Why won't they just copy/paste the code you then supplied and use that without actually learning anything?

So, yeah, sorry, I can't condone this kind of attitude and while I greatly admire your programming skills - and I also have the highest respect for the amount of time and effort you put into helping people on this forum - I think that you (and a few other people, this is not just an issue with Frostycat) need to learn a bit of tact and diplomacy when it comes to replying sometimes.
The original poster is the one who started the "not really learning" line on that topic (it's in the opening post), I'm just continuing that point and telling why. But if you don't like the tone, I understand why. I was just frustrated that the OP got believable code in post #3, then went for the unbelievable in post #6.
 
G

gelboy

Guest
Personally, I don't enjoy asking for help. I try my best to get things done as much as I can before trying to consult anyone so I don't come off as "needy" or disrespectful. Last year, on my now-lost email acc I asked for help as clear and polite as I could. I was given a reply and I very much appreciated the help, but the guy implied I was disabled since I didn't understand it. It didn't discourage me on my project, but since I've been hesitant to post.

That said, I really appreciate the reassurance by members and mods in this thread. I'm still only a year into GML, and these posts have helped me think asking for help is okay, especially if I've tried for hours to get it right. Thank you.
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
Why do I open this post, this is definitely a paper of reading comprehension. The sentence is toooooooo looooong.


Also, there's a lot of cases where people have copied the biggest GM Youtube tutorials' code verbatim and ran into some issue - I'm pretty familiar with Shaun Spalding's platformer tutorial and HeartBeast's RPG overworld movement using the physics system at this point - which usually boils down to "I copied the code without knowing what it did, and I made a typo somewhere". I'm not sure whether this kind of incident is because of people watching YT tutorials with the wrong mindset ("get code to copypaste to get things magically work" instead of "get a concept presented to me in a more natural way than text and try to understand it") or whether most big-name tutorial makers do a bad job at teaching, but over the years it's left me with a grudge against both. I kinda wish the big-names would stop showing complete code samples in their videos altogether and just go through the concepts so people would be forced to try to understand them, but I guess that would alienate the "pls make my game for me" crowd...
Jumping in on this, I've seen a lot of shade thrown at Shaun and others about there tutorials, having started out gamemaker and learning from Shaun's videos, Im a little biased but I can see how most users say his and others videos promote bad code practices, but saying that misses the entire reason of the video/tutorials, there not "Hey do this like this because this way is good!" They give you the starting steps to figure out how to go about doing it and then building off of that to make the good coding practices shine, The best tutorials inspire you to think about how to do a certain thing yourself, and expresses how this user (the video creator) goes about solving it in this sense. (good or bad is debatable) but the main key focus is its a start rather then "Go read the manual simp!" theres a joke that wont date well Its not going to stop the people who copy code and wonder why they are missing an " I " in nstance_create_depth(100,200,100000000,obj_massivechickenzombies Nothing ever will besides changing those people's mindset. Which sometimes takes a person like @FrostyCat to smack them with some reality, because saying "oh well you see gamemaker likes correct spiling" isnt going to get them to break that mindset of The forum is my oyster of which to take part in the pearls


Firefox and Chrome both have built-in spell checkers these days, for instance, so if someone manages to misspell every single word in their post, the only explanation is that they don't care about correcting their mistakes... which is not a good mindset to have when programming. And there's a lot of cases where people seem to assume you're a mind reader and thus don't explain their problem properly. I'm currently in an ongoing PM conversation when a newbie user messaged me directly since "they didn't get any help" in the programming forums (randomly dragging someone in to solve your problems is considered kinda rude, but I decided to keep giving unhelpful answers until the guy gave up as a sort of practical lesson instead of pointing this out), and after 3 days and a dozen PMs, they still haven't told me what the problem is, only complained about how they haven't been able to solve it. People pls I'm a psycho not a psychic learn the difference
Please don't do this. If ANYONE sends you (or anyone else) an unsolicited PM for help, politely inform them that this is against the forum rules and they should post in the programming forum. All you are doing is encouraging their poor behaviour and lack of patience. PMing people for help unless explicitly told to do so, is not something I like nor want to promote as it is a form of queue jumping, and basically says "I'm more important than everyone else patiently waiting for replies", when nobody is more important than anyone else around here... ;)
How to pm a user the proper way šŸ‘ˆšŸ˜ŽšŸ‘ˆ

Disclaimer: I absolutely love Gamemaker and the GMC, but I felt like responding to the above post.

It IS marketing 100%.

Gamemaker is marketed as an extremely easy game making tool. In fact, it's even marketed as a tool that let's one make great games without CODE!! Which IMO, is a huge exaggeration and not very representative of the reality.

This is how Gamemaker is described on google search:

View attachment 30821

Now, does anyone here really believe that we can make "top 2D games" without code and programming?

And this is how Gamemaker is described on the Yoyo games website:
View attachment 30822

Just lol. I understand Yoyo are trying to market a product, but at least they should have a disclaimer on their site saying that the fantastic eye-popping games showcased on their website were all made with tons of complicated code, and not the "drag and drop" function. IMHO it's somewhat misleading to showcase games made with code and saying "you can do this just using drag & drop!"

What's happening is that people fall for the exaggerated marketing and buy the software, only to later discover that drag & drop can only do so much. They realize that in order to make GOOD games, they have no choice but to work with codes. Obviously, they still want to make games with the software. That's why they come to these forums and ask for help. Yes, some of them ask for a working code. I've done that too. And I don't blame them. The fact is that, Gamemaker is marketed with the proposition "This will let you MAKE games easily" and not "This will help you LEARN to code to make games".

IMO if Gamemaker was indeed as easy and code-free as it's marketed on their website there wouldn't be too many people here (myself included) asking for code help.
Well technically its because they promote-
yoohno.png
But from they way D&D is used, its like buying a puzzle and it comes with a colored grid, and all the pieces are marked where to go!, but if you peel off that color paint, its the functions in gml.
I dont mean to diss anyone that uses D&D but it seems like a crutch, reinforcing the idea "video games are magic!" and offering nothing you can really take to another language or engine or another game.
I feel this from how YoYo advertises updates as well, Code is more fun and exciting and you learn from it and grown skills you can use somewhere else, while D&D teaches you to match blocks together in certain ways.
You're not really using the functions, or why certain parts go to certain things.
 
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GMWolf

aka fel666
I dont mean to diss anyone that uses D&D but it seems like a crutch, reinforcing the idea "video games are magic!" and offering nothing you can really take to another language or engine or another game.
what i personally dislike about DnD is that its just gml, but instead of typing words you drag blocks around. Its all the same logic, and same thinking. Yet newcommers will beleive DnD to be fundamentally easier than GML, its not, its just less intimidating. and perhaps DnD serves to make GML more intimidating, by suggesting DnD is the easy option, and GML is the advanced option.
 

saffeine

Member
what i personally dislike about DnD is that its just gml, but instead of typing words you drag blocks around. Its all the same logic, and same thinking. Yet newcommers will beleive DnD to be fundamentally easier than GML, its not, its just less intimidating. and perhaps DnD serves to make GML more intimidating, by suggesting DnD is the easy option, and GML is the advanced option.
the way i've always seen dnd is that it makes the gml side of things easier. while i was learning gml i learned to question what dnd was doing behind the scenes and how to do it in code.
both options provide you with the ingredients, but dnd also gives you the recipe book, and it's a lot more difficult to make mistakes with it as a result.
sure you can still make mistakes, but i think it's far less punishing than gml feels when you finally step into that world.
i like to think of it as training wheels for gml, because if programming is where you want to go, dnd is perfectly suitable for easing you into it, and anyone passionate towards programming will inevitably end up there.

dnd is the easy option, but only because it keeps your scope limited to the basics, and i can't see anything wrong with that.
once you grow out of the training wheels, then you can unlock the remaining 90% of what programming really is, all while understanding how different statements, expressions, functions and variables interact.
 

Rob

Member
I'm one of those obnoxious elitist people. I've also finished around a hundred games in my years using GM. I like to think that there's some correlation between discipline and actually achieving things, so I'm trying to impart that mindset on people. I definitely enjoy helping people (otherwise I wouldn't have stayed with the GMC for what feels like a decade) but after getting a number of burns I'm trying to follow a strict "don't put more effort into helping someone than they put into asking for help" rule.
I fortunately came to this same conclusion a while ago, with only a few months helping in Discord. If someone asks for help and you tell them how to check for what might be wrong, and then they come back and say "it still doesn't work" and you ask them if they did what you asked them to do and they say "no." then that's frustrating.

It seems like a good idea to wait an hour before responding to a question too because in that time at least 50% of people will have fixed the problem.

[Edit] I also realise that I'm hours/days behind in this topic lol
 
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Sabnock

Member
Personally, I don't enjoy asking for help. I try my best to get things done as much as I can before trying to consult anyone.
If i am honest I am a bit of a masochist and enjoy the problem solving as much as i do the resolution. I will sit there for hours or days and try multiple different lines code / read through functions in the manual related to my problem until a solution presents itself but if it doesn't I will then look to the internet and see what is out there on Youtube or Google and as a last resort i turn to to these forums. Which tbh is not that often. I am not exaggerating when I say that i will literally sit there for days trying to work things out. I love it.

95% of the time the answer is out on the web or in the manual which is why it is so often pointed to as a resource i guess.
 
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G

gelboy

Guest
If i am honest I am a bit of a masochist and enjoy the problem solving as much as i do the resolution. I will sit there for hours or days and try multiple different lines code / read through functions in the manual related to my problem until a solution presents itself but if it doesn't I will then look to the internet and see what is out there on Youtube or Google and as a last resort i turn to to these forums. Which tbh is not that often. I am not exaggerating when I say that i will literally sit there for days trying to work things out. I love it.
Can't say I don't agree. I feel and do the same. I find it extremely satisfying to say I did it on my own.
 

Sabnock

Member
I hasten to point out that it
Can't say I don't agree. I feel and do the same. I find it extremely satisfying to say I did it on my own.
It doesn't mean i get it right or even done in the proper way but that is also one of the things i love about coding, there are so many ways to achieve the same thing. It fascinates me just how differently different people approach things in different ways. That shows the power of logic and code.
 
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MissingNo.

Member
I kinda wish the big-names would stop showing complete code samples in their videos altogether and just go through the concepts so people would be forced to try to understand them
I heavily disagree, although I have bias here but in my early years with GM6 and GM7 I learned a lot from GM video tutorials, what helped me was being able to have some working code
that I could break apart and see how it worked while also challenging myself to add onto the code. If it wasn't for those video tutorials I wouldn't be where I am today.
If you asked me back then to just go over concepts, I wouldn't have learned much and wouldn't have had much fun doing it and I wouldn't be where I am today.

but I guess that would alienate the "pls make my game for me" crowd...
Sure there are moochers out there but I don't think the VAST majority of people who watch Shauns and other GM tutorial makers just want to be spoon fed everything.
I mean call me crazy, but I think most people actually want to have CONTROL over their creations, which is what GM is all about, giving you vast CONTROL. You are basically a god that can pop things in
and out of existence in GM. Who doesn't want that?

Not everyone is a customer.
Obviously, didn't say everyone was.

There's a month-long free trial version
Yeah, but I'm sure givin the user is enjoying the experience they will end up buying the program (Assuming they have integrity). Potential customer right there, because once the trial runs out you
don't have many options if you want to continue.

but not everybody is one, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bit of overlap between the people that got their copy in the Caribbean and the people that didn't even try solving their problems on their own before asking about them on the internet.
You can't just open with a bad attitude or a condescending tone just because you might think the majority of users are pirates. Hell even if it turned out most were pirates that still doesn't justify
a bad attitude. Everyone should be given a fair shake and be assumed to have honest intentions unless proven otherwise or they become rude.

I get it, questions like "I want to make a MMORPG as my first game" are annoying, ridiculous and laughable but a lot beginners have no concept of anything yet and it doesn't hurt
to kindly point out that this isn't the best thing to start with. If the asker wants to be rude or make demands then I say feel free to unleash!

If i am honest I am a bit of a masochist and enjoy the problem solving as much as i do the resolution. I will sit there for hours or days and try multiple different lines code
I agree, plus I can't be bothered to spend time writing up my problems most of the time. Also in my experience I tend to find the fastest solutions are gotten by either looking back over my own code or reading the manual.
When you ask a question here of the forum it might take a few hours to fully resolve the issue after a few replies.

Plus it tends to be more fun to try to figure it out.
 
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Toque

Member
The combined IQ here must be a gazillion.

Im pretty sure we can be nice to new users and show respect to the elders at the same time. They both deserve it.
 
C

Catastrophe

Guest
Drive by opinion here:

Helped off and on in the programmers section for a while. After a while you definitely begin to notice a few common topic themes

1) Topics that run dozens of replies long with one new question being stacked on top of another. No joke, I've seen one that was over 100 long for a pacman clone.
2) A person making one topic after another one, yet failing to use functions and principles that should have been learned from previous topics
3) And of course as mentioned earlier, the whole 3D MMO stuff XD

These kinds of topics and answers don't really help the person in the long run, in the long run only being taught basic programming principles and tutorials will help them.

If you just kindly try to help answer people's questions at face value, they learn to view the help forum as a crutch to avoid learning anything real. So sometimes you have to take a step back and question whether the question being asked should be answered or whether you should kindly point out that the forums may not be the best starting point to learn 100% of their GML, and where they should start instead.

Now, you can do this in a mean way, which I do see sometimes rarely, but I don't think personal insults are ever really warranted. The best way is to be encouraging, but also explain why what they're doing won't help them.


Re: Youtube tutorials. Yeah it's a shame they do this, but "learning how to fix bugs" and "how to use with/for/if in a simple game" gets a lot less views than "LEARN HOW TO MAKE A PLATFORMER!11!!1" Youtubers gotta eat xD Would be helpful if we could get some links for raw newb tutorials that are more helpful. If we tell them to just watch tutorials, and they go copy/paste some of shaun spaulding's code, I don't think any real progress was made lol.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
i think the most important thing i took away from this reply is the fact that ass isn't censored by default. thank you so much for this.
If it was censored, "password", "glass" and "massive" all would be unusable, along with a bunch of other common words. This phenomenon has a name which I'm pretty sure is filtered, so here's an URL to its page on Wikipedia.

what i personally dislike about DnD is that its just gml, but instead of typing words you drag blocks around. Its all the same logic, and same thinking. Yet newcommers will beleive DnD to be fundamentally easier than GML, its not, its just less intimidating. and perhaps DnD serves to make GML more intimidating, by suggesting DnD is the easy option, and GML is the advanced option.
The good thing is, if they get used to that way of thinking, new users can just switch over to applying it to code immediately without having to learn anything fundamentally new.

the way i've always seen dnd is that it makes the gml side of things easier. while i was learning gml i learned to question what dnd was doing behind the scenes and how to do it in code.
These days you can convert a D&D project to a code project, so you can find out first-hand!

Yeah it's a shame they do this, but "learning how to fix bugs" and "how to use with/for/if in a simple game" gets a lot less views than "LEARN HOW TO MAKE A PLATFORMER!11!!1" Youtubers gotta eat xD
We need the "Destroy all error messages FOREVER - MAKING YOUR CODE LOOK SEXY - you wouldn't believe these 10 easy tricks to find bugs (illegal in 20 countries!)" clickbaity version...
 
Z

zendraw

Guest
I'm one of those obnoxious elitist people. I've also finished around a hundred games in my years using GM. I like to think that there's some correlation between discipline and actually achieving things, so I'm trying to impart that mindset on people. I definitely enjoy helping people (otherwise I wouldn't have stayed with the GMC for what feels like a decade) but after getting a number of burns I'm trying to follow a strict "don't put more effort into helping someone than they put into asking for help" rule.

Firefox and Chrome both have built-in spell checkers these days, for instance, so if someone manages to misspell every single word in their post, the only explanation is that they don't care about correcting their mistakes... which is not a good mindset to have when programming. And there's a lot of cases where people seem to assume you're a mind reader and thus don't explain their problem properly. I'm currently in an ongoing PM conversation when a newbie user messaged me directly since "they didn't get any help" in the programming forums (randomly dragging someone in to solve your problems is considered kinda rude, but I decided to keep giving unhelpful answers until the guy gave up as a sort of practical lesson instead of pointing this out), and after 3 days and a dozen PMs, they still haven't told me what the problem is, only complained about how they haven't been able to solve it. People pls I'm a psycho not a psychic learn the difference

Also, there's a lot of cases where people have copied the biggest GM Youtube tutorials' code verbatim and ran into some issue - I'm pretty familiar with Shaun Spalding's platformer tutorial and HeartBeast's RPG overworld movement using the physics system at this point - which usually boils down to "I copied the code without knowing what it did, and I made a typo somewhere". I'm not sure whether this kind of incident is because of people watching YT tutorials with the wrong mindset ("get code to copypaste to get things magically work" instead of "get a concept presented to me in a more natural way than text and try to understand it") or whether most big-name tutorial makers do a bad job at teaching, but over the years it's left me with a grudge against both. I kinda wish the big-names would stop showing complete code samples in their videos altogether and just go through the concepts so people would be forced to try to understand them, but I guess that would alienate the "pls make my game for me" crowd...

I don't remember where I'm going with this rant, and it feels like I'm just going to make this more toxic if I say anything more, so I guess I'll stop being grumpy here.
TL;DR if people aren't gonna put in a honest effort doing stuff, they don't deserve help because then you're just doing their job for them.


Not everyone is a customer. There's a month-long free trial version, educational licenses that the users themselves probably didn't fund (and I've seen a fair share of "hey pls do my homework for me" questions...) and there's been a number of suspicious questions where people are using GMS1.x or GM8, both of which aren't sold anymore (at least one of which was closed down for confirmed piracy). There's plenty of legitimate customers out there, but not everybody is one, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bit of overlap between the people that got their copy in the Caribbean and the people that didn't even try solving their problems on their own before asking about them on the internet.

you need somthing infront of you to understand. ithink your forgetting how schools work
 

Sabnock

Member
1) Topics that run dozens of replies long with one new question being stacked on top of another. No joke, I've seen one that was over 100 long for a pacman clone.
To be fair to those guys they are just using that Pacman thread to talk to one another. There are not many posts by other people in there. i look in on it every now and then to see where they are with it. They don't seem to want any other assistance from others. It is kinda endearing :D
 

Fanatrick

Member
@Nocturne I just won't be bothered to jump through loops to assist someone not willing to do his part, especially if there's this risk of being vilified for it. The responsibility should be on the person seeking assistance to, at the very least, display some amount of willingness to improve and learn instead of being willfully ignorant. You cannot seriously expect experienced users to follow these borderline social-justice guidelines without also having guidelines in place that would force newbies ("rookies" is apparently condescending) to properly conduct themselves. Nobody wants to maliciously discourage newbies from posting, but you'll very soon realize that disincentivizing experienced users from assisting them is a steep and overall counter-productive hill to tread. Newcomers that are turned off by valid criticism - good riddance - competent people actually willing to learn will quickly fill their shoes, which won't be the case for veterans who decide that helping them grow (however sternly) just isn't worth their time. This line of thought where newbies asking for help should dictate authority rather than well-versed experts is so backwards and out of touch.

TLDR; Moderating team should also curate newbie topics rather than exclusively curating feedback. Otherwise this will become the norm. (And for the love of god, instead of just lazily deleting whole posts take your time to actually remove parts which perhaps cross boundaries, you're all better than that)
 

tetris_mess

Member
@Nocturne I just won't be bothered to jump through loops to assist someone not willing to do his part, especially if there's this risk of being vilified for it. The responsibility should be on the person seeking assistance to, at the very least, display some amount of willingness to improve and learn instead of being willfully ignorant.
Occasionally there are times where a faction will be "stirred up"(there are literal types here in a vague expression @Nocturne). People will turn their backs on each other explicitly when that was implicit in their design. Presuming that everything in their design imposes a futile effort in every area of a person's life; that is what hurts others the most. Rigorous chains of logic, seeing nothing but bad results, when the outcome is always expected, but projected into our lives as an unexpected outcome, there is still a common basis; there was always a common basis.

A really eye-opening moment for them, is when people see that they are very troubled, all the support they need isn't available, but professionals still show them compassion. There is nothing supporting their passion anymore, and that wildfire in their mind dwindles, while they are still supported enough that they can play a supportive role with everything in their life that is still in motion. It should then be implicit, that a person would learn to play an active role again, if something like their communication style was suffering, or they had some other problems with behavior.
 

samspade

Member
YouTube tutorials are hard to make :). As someone who can only spend about 10 hours a week on programming, doing the GML series took about 5+ hours of that time every week for the last five months, and if it weren't for the quarantine I'm not sure I would have finished it yet. And there is little to no financial compensation. But fortunately, it is still fun and personally rewarding, so I'm going to keep doing them for the moment.

But on topic. I do think this forum is nice. I think the fact that someone can start a topic with we aren't being very nice and literally every single person agrees that (at least in most cases) niceness is a goal is a good indicator. Here are a few things I try to keep in mind when responding:
  • Don't carry a negative experience in one post to the next with a new person. This is especially important when the posts are similar as if often the case with multiple new people working through the same type of problem.
  • I don't know who that person is or what they're currently going through. I do in fact often ask myself would I feel okay about my response if I found out the person was a 10 year old, just had someone close to them die, is struggling with depression, etc.
  • Sometimes the problem of what's an explanation that will work for this person is a more interesting problem for me to solve than the actual problem they're asking about
  • Most people aren't bad or dumb, they're new and learning the ropes and will soon be observing all the rules and possibly helping to answer questions as well while people who don't want to learn will (most of the time) eventually stop asking questions regardless of the way they're responded to (there are a couple of people who have managed to persist despite apparently never learning which I'm almost more impressed with)
  • If I'm okay with occasionally not providing the perfect response or perfect tone then I have to give others the same latitude. This is a harder one for me to explain but I think I'm just trying to say I want to be who I am (within reason) and in order to not feel bad about that I will let other people be who they are (within reason) even if that means they ask dumb questions or refuse to take advice, didn't bother to read even the basic forum rules, etc. Or more simply, I don't want the pressure to be perfect all the time and so I'm not going to require that of other people either (which means being okay with dumb questions or people not listening to responses, and so on).
I also have 'stock' answers for a lot of the common 'offenses' such as failure to post using code tags, failure to read the manual, asking questions like can I make a 3D MMORPG in GameMaker, replies that say nothing more than "what you said didn't work" or "still not working", etc. that I've made over the years to hopefully be helpful but not mean, and, like most people here, there are just people I don't, or seldom, respond to anymore (but often will watch the exchanges out of a strange amusement for what crazy thing will happen next).
 

tetris_mess

Member
I really appreciate your outlook on the reality of this moment, @samspade -as much as I appreciate everyone else's outlook, so thank you for remaining on topic, and thank you to everyone for getting this off the ground. As far as everyone rolling out, we are all here to support each other.
 
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