OFFICIAL [DONE] GMC Feedback Survey #2

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rmanthorp

GameMaker Staff
Admin
GameMaker Dev.
Back in September last year, we ran a Feedback Survey that gave us loads of great data on the GMC. We wanted to run a similar one to see how things have changed! Follow the link below and let us know how you are feeling about the GMC.

Thanks!!

[FINISHED]
 
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True Valhalla

Full-Time Developer
GMC Elder
Glad to see another one of these. I shared a few opinions:

Better social features would be nice...a single status feed on the homepage doesn't do much to establish a sense of community (see GameJolt for a good example). I would like to see more interesting discussions encouraged or perhaps even started by YoYo Games staff once a month - business & game design seems to be a real area of neglect on the GMC, users just aren't engaged and there is little meaningful discussion surrounding these topics (and others). Having access to technical help is of course useful but please don't prioritise it over features that actually create a sense of community and give us opportunities to engage with others.

This poll asks how "Supportive" the community is, and although the GMC should be a positive place I see a lot misinformation on the forum and users with the experience to correct mistakes are too often attacked for simply telling others they are wrong or highlighting broader issues with the GM product/team (the GMC member FrostyCat comes to mind). It's critical to create an environment where experienced veteran users are not driven away by the amateur crowd that is so easily offended by their own ignorance.

From my perspective, veteran user engagement on the GMC is at an all-time low. This has a bigger impact on the community, and subsequent availability of resources and information, than YoYo Games likely assumes.

Finally, it doesn't feel like there is any YoYo Games staff presence on the forum anymore. I know this is in part due to [redacted] but the forum feels soulless with how little YoYo Games staff engage with us these days. The forum lacks a real sense of brand identity - we want to hear from people like Russell Kay, or at the very least, a Community Manager that conveys information from important internal figures to us. Honestly, this is one of easiest things the company could do to improve forum engagement: talk to us!
 
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Back in September last year, we ran a Feedback Survey that gave us loads of great data on the GMC. We wanted to run a similar one to see how things have changed! Follow the link below and let us know how you are feeling about the GMC.

Thanks!!
Thank you for doing this. You guys have always been great listeners. I'll fill one out later today. :)
 

FrostyCat

Redemption Seeker
I have also submitted my response. Like TrueValhalla, I also believe there is an issue with the "usefulness" and "supportiveness" on the GMC. It is not all that useful once you stop needing help with basic coding questions, and in many ways it is supportive in the wrong places.

In particular, I think the GMC is supportive of many perverse incentives when it comes to coding. It encourages tutorial plagiarism and worship, it supports D&D ignorance and denigration, and it promotes using other people as an on-call resource instead of a last-resort. Being friendly isn't everything. You need to put technical proficiency and self-sufficiency ahead of that to be truly effective as a development-oriented community. And sometimes that means calling stuff out.

For disclosure, here are my comments for the last question:
More support for actual basic skills: The GMC has too much focus on activity-specific training (e.g. how to make specific game genres) and break-fix help, and not enough on actual basics (e.g. basic control structures, scoping, design and code patterns, handling common errors). This is creating a generation of perpetually dependent rookies whose technical creativity and ability to self-help are essentially nonexistent. I would like to see a prominent go-to section where novices can pick up these skills, and I am willing to contribute to this section if YoYo would like to get it started.

More serious support for D&D: It has come to my attention that many novices who explicitly want D&D answers are met with uneducated responses from intermediate responders with no D&D experience. The responders first openly proclaim ignorance in D&D, then the novices are given GML answers (which often have obvious D&D equivalents for anyone with experience) and told to use GML only if they want help. As one of the few responders who can use D&D and GML, I absolutely despise these kinds of responses. There should be more learning and support resources for the D&D front, and if it needs to be sponsored to encourage activity, so be it. According to Forrester (source: https://kissflow.com/no-code/), no-code development platforms will be worth $21.2B by 2022. YoYo should not pass up on this and squander the work that has gone into the D&D system.

More support for extension development and maintenance: This is an area of chronic neglect that I would like to see more YoYo attention going forward. The extension mechanism has many functionality holes and missing injection points, and the lack of a critical mass in developers familiar with it allows these issues to hide until a particular integration demands it. Tickets raised for them also tend to be neglected because the developers raising them are a lone voice. I would like a section where extension development techniques are taught and actively discussed, so that holes are more likely to be discovered and extension issues get more helping hands. Members of the YoYo dev team who are involved in vendor API integration should also be active here, since they will likely be more effective getting news and broadcasting here than individually responding to numerous tickets of the same stripe at the helpdesk.

Leveraging the GMC for helpdesk tickets: I can't help but wonder how much of the poor turnarounds at the helpdesk is caused by service technicians being distracted by coding-related tickets that the GMC is designed to handle, as opposed to being dedicated to actual engine-level faults and genuine support issues. There should be a consent box on the helpdesk authorizing reposts on the GMC in a dedicated section, where responders with at least 1-2 years of experience or admin permission may answer. Any ticket that the helpdesk can delegate is one that won't distract from things only YoYo can handle.
 
I have also submitted my response. Like TrueValhalla, I also believe there is an issue with the "usefulness" and "supportiveness" on the GMC. It is not all that useful once you stop needing help with basic coding questions, and in many ways it is supportive in the wrong places.

In particular, I think the GMC is supportive of many perverse incentives when it comes to coding. It encourages tutorial plagiarism and worship, it supports D&D ignorance and denigration, and it promotes using other people as an on-call resource instead of a last-resort. Being friendly isn't everything. You need to put technical proficiency and self-sufficiency ahead of that to be truly effective as a development-oriented community. And sometimes that means calling stuff out.

For disclosure, here are my comments for the last question:
Is that what this is? A "development" community? I bought GM5 specifically because I wouldn't need to program (and kept getting free upgrades til like 2012.)

Edit: I do not want this to turn into an argument, but that's a serious question for me. I honestly have no interest in belonging to a programming community, but if I'm the minority here...
 
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FrostyCat

Redemption Seeker
Is that what this is? A "development" community? I bought GM5 for $20 specifically because I wouldn't need to program (and kept getting free upgrades til like 2012.)

Edit: I do not want this to turn into an argument, but that's a serious question for me. I honestly have no interest in belonging to a programming community, but if I'm the minority here...
I said "development-oriented community", not "coding-oriented community". Do you know the difference?

Hint: All coding is development, but not all development is coding.
 
Fair enough. No, I didn't know that. I do know that I'm a terrible coder, enjoy making games, have been afraid to ask for help, and love the marketplace.

That's all I have to contribute to this conversation. Thanks again YYG.
 

curato

Member
Yeah I would say since they separated GML from DND there hasn't been a lot forum support for DND like there is for GML. I know the other day I had to create DND project to look to explain to someone where a function was exactly. When they were mashed together I would do both especially for stuff like click a button to change to a room you really could drag and drop that faster that you could code it really and then you could see what it was easier. I also miss being able to drag and drop my code in separate little items in an event and use the comment to label what each did. Made it so readable. I might be in the minority having a joy for self documenting things.
 

Toque

Member
More staff engagement and maybe a section for small staff demos/examples that others can learn from or discuss the reasons why it was made that way and if any possible optimisations that could be made.

Yes that would be great.

Yeah I would say since they separated GML from DND there hasn't been a lot forum support for DND like there is for GML. I know the other day I had to create DND project to look to explain to someone where a function was exactly. When they were mashed together I would do both especially for stuff like click a button to change to a room you really could drag and drop that faster that you could code it really and then you could see what it was easier. I also miss being able to drag and drop my code in separate little items in an event and use the comment to label what each did. Made it so readable. I might be in the minority having a joy for self documenting things.
I used drag and drop a few years before GM. I thought I could just drop into GM DND and carry on. But I found the code difficult to read and follow. Help on the forums was” use GML. “. So I just went to GML.

I think people really do want to help with DND questions but don’t know how to use it.

Is there any forum staff that help with DND questions?
 
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S

Sam (Deleted User)

Guest
I have also submitted my response. Like TrueValhalla, I also believe there is an issue with the "usefulness" and "supportiveness" on the GMC. It is not all that useful once you stop needing help with basic coding questions, and in many ways it is supportive in the wrong places.

In particular, I think the GMC is supportive of many perverse incentives when it comes to coding. It encourages tutorial plagiarism and worship, it supports D&D ignorance and denigration, and it promotes using other people as an on-call resource instead of a last-resort. Being friendly isn't everything. You need to put technical proficiency and self-sufficiency ahead of that to be truly effective as a development-oriented community. And sometimes that means calling stuff out.

For disclosure, here are my comments for the last question:
Re: "it promotes using other people as an on-call resource instead of a last-resort."

If you are referencing what I think you are, I couldn't agree more. It seems that people on here get an error from their code, and their first instinct is to ask a question on the GMC and let other users who have zero access to their code do all the debugging for them until the problem is resolved, when really, that should be a last resort when you can't rid of an error and have been debugging it for days, then I would say you have some right to expect help from the community, even then, people shouldn't be so needy that they expect the community to do everything for them. That should never be a first instinct. Debugging issues on your own should always be the first priority of the developer. No matter how experienced. Most of what I know as a programmer, artist, digital music composer, and game developer, above all else, is reading documentation in the case of programming, and hands on experience. Not asking everyone to fix my game. The latter is not learning; it is the easy way out, and at the end of the day your code works when others fix it for you, you just have no first hand experience in knowing why tf it works...
 
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