[POLL] Central store vs Manialinks

[novationx]

Hi All,

I was thinking about a central store directly in the menus of Maniaplanet.What are the pro's & cons when you compare it to manialinks with the same functionality? Lets find out.

Central Store :
Just like the titlepack store this store will be accessable for everyone directly in the main menu. You can find everything this game has to offer there, except titlepacks :
- Crosshairs
- Avatars
- Items
- Horns
- Skins
- Stickers
- Badges
- ...


Advantages Central Store :
- Everybody can ( and will ) find/use it
- It will look better than 99% of the Manialinks out there
- All content together at 1 place
- If the contributors switch to another game the content wont go lost.
- Content can ( and should ) be stored on NADEO servers/webspace/domain w/e
- People dont need to use dropbox or their own domain anymore
- Maniaplanets become a real currency directly in the game
- NADEO has all the control and an easy way to add official contents themselves
- Content-creators will earn planets more easily.
- It feels more rewarding for the content-creators to actually create something
- Content-creators can easily get exposure. People will see/find/rate their work more easily.
- TOP rated content can be highlighted in the store together with the newest content etc...
- Players get constantly the feeling that this game is growing eventho we never get any updates, ever.
- NADEO could keep updating this and work to some sort of official store and make money of it...


Disadvantages ManiaLinks :
- Do you know 1 manialink on the top of your head where u can find crosshairs? I dont
- How would I find a manialink if I dont know its name? With that maniafinder thingy nobody knows about? Yeah...
- Did you see how some manialinks are totally outdated ... the creators are probably playing CSGO
- How many times does a manialink looks totally aweful? A lot
- What if the manialink creator loses his content? Bye bye content
- What if somebody has the best content EVER and cant create a manialink? Bye bye content
- What if somebody has the best content EVER and manages to create a manialink but NOBODY knows about it? Bye bye content

What's so fun about creating a manialink anyways? Nobody will find/use it anyways.


PS : I'm not saying Manialinks shouldnt excist. I'm just saying they should be used for other purposes, but surely not for content.


Feedback please

[kripkee]

Manialinks are/were useful in TM1, because you can find them easily in the maingame. In Maniaplanet, the manialinks got rekt and are hidden as hell. You find only one random in the "home" title and the position is more like "maybe I click on it". I think there would be much more Manialinks, but nadeo decreased the way to make it public for everyone. It's atm find a random player with a link in his/her nickname and hope that he sells TM²/SM/Whatever stuff.

What's so fun about creating a manialink anyways? Nobody will find/use it anyways.

I'm hosting 2 Manialinks (1 in TMUF and 1 in Maniaplanet) - The manialink in TM1 is still online and work "normal". I had the possibilities to share my skins/maps/mods/.../ for coppers and gained a lot of it. I had the same motivation in Maniaplanet with TM²Canyon (< MP2), but lost it very fast. Btw. my Manialink in Maniaplanet is not working atm because of a youtube error, and I'm not motivated to fix this (and I have a fixed version on my pc^^).

The biggest problem for Manialink hoster in Maniaplanet is, that you have 0 possibilities to show it the players (at least you have luck and you see it in the home title or you linked it into your nickname). There were a "maniapub" system in Maniaplanet, but this get rekt too and is useless like TM²Valley . I'm not here to make this thread to a negative topic here. But I have the feeling that nadeo does not know what they want and did to much "random" things for Manialink user in the past.

- Yes, Manialinks are useless with the current Maniaplanet system.

[djhubertus]

You can do it right now, but perhaps nobody will waste time to build. You don't need to wait 2 years for Nadeo.

[oiram456]

you said you´re gonna write down the pros and cons, actually you write down the pros of your idea and the cons of manialinks, which you obviously dont like..

[TheBigMiike]

I don't agree.

I won't develop my arguments but it's simply because I like to see how players are creative. We can see sometimes great manialinks with great contents. I just like to see the creative side of players.

If you make a central place, it removes the great concept of manialinks.

I could try to create a robot that index manialink's page but I'm not motivated since I don't play any games (even TM) anymore.

[novationx]

you said you´re gonna write down the pros and cons, actually you write down the pros of your idea and the cons of manialinks, which you obviously dont like..

You're absolutely right and that's wrong of me. But everything I wrote down is true.

[novationx]

I don't agree.

I won't develop my arguments but it's simply because I like to see how players are creative. We can see sometimes great manialinks with great contents. I just like to see the creative side of players.

If you make a central place, it removes the great concept of manialinks.

I could try to create a robot that index manialink's page but I'm not motivated since I don't play any games (even TM) anymore.

Wont develop arguments
so yeah... what can I do with this reply?

You could create a robot
But you didnt, you havent and you wont and you're not even motivated. What if a paid office of developers did it for you and everybody would benefit?

It removes the great concept of manialinks
If you look at my arguments then how "great' are these manialinks exactly? When's the last time you visited/used a manialink? What about a central store? You're against it?
I also said manialinks can & should be used to do something else, but not promote content. I like manialinks and they should stay. I dont want them removed.

[TheBigMiike]

Wont develop arguments
so yeah... what can I do with this reply?

I gave an answer and I said that I like players who put forward their creativity through Manialink. What more do you expect from ?

I don't want to have a huge platform like Facebook with always the same design each time I click on a link. I prefer to see something new each time I visit something on ManiaPlanet / TM. A search engine would be better I think : Manialinks creators keep their visitors and their manialinks are better known.

You could create a robot
But you didnt, you havent and you wont and you're not even motivated. What if a paid office of developers did it for you and everybody would benefit?

Why this question ? I don't understand why you ask that...
I could try or someone else can do that using PHP / XML. Off course it''ll never be as performant as Google but it can solve the problem.

It removes the great concept of manialinks
If you look at my arguments then how "great' are these manialinks exactly? When's the last time you visited/used a manialink? What about a central store? You're against it?
I also said manialinks can & should be used to do something else, but not promote content. I like manialinks and they should stay. I dont want them removed.

That's your opinion, not mine so that's why I answered that. If players visit a manialink, it's because manialinks creators show interesting contents (skins, MS games, 3D models, etc...) and if manialinks creators create manialinks it's because they want to do a personal area : their universe(<== The concept of a manialink imo).

By creating this "Central store", then those manialinks won't be used / visited anymore so manialink's creators won't create manialinks anymore.

[Rots]

Im not motivated either to fix my ml... even if I would add much more maniascript knowledge I acquired (still 5% of what can be done, i'm a noob )

I had a project I stopped working on, It was a public upload site for crosshairs The layout is written in php and xml frames are done... I also started a maniaexchange manialink ingame map finder working with MX api... but yea, everything fades like smoke with this system.

My only wish is to rework maniapub. Set non intrusive ads cant be so hard, visit stores, manialink maniarank etc. Actually more than 2000 users bookmarked my ML "revival" and it's sad to say it...

I like ML and I want a central store but with manialinks. @NADEO Take maniaexplore and set it under "STORE" button in main menu. THAT would do the work for everyone, ty bigmike. Or take domino's search engine and set it there that would be nice.

[oliverde8]

I quite agree, it is difficult to have one site that does all. First because MX is such a fantastic site and Maniapark is such a fantastic site
They both do 80% of what is needed.

The main problem is the hassle of creating a Manialink. Per page information is very low. Scrollbars can be done with Maniascript but it is quite a hassle to make.

You could create a robot
But you didnt, you havent and you wont and you're not even motivated. What if a paid office of developers did it for you and everybody would benefit?

Why this question ? I don't understand why you ask that...
I could try or someone else can do that using PHP / XML. Off course it''ll never be as performant as Google but it can solve the problem.

A search engine would definitively be the way to go, google finds everything so moogle should as well. But moogle doesn't exist. Creating something as good as google impossible, but something good and scalable with Elastic Search & PHP can be done.
The main issue I see is the crawling. It could be done very basically, but it would have been nice to have some metadata to make it easier to differentiate contents.