More news about FTB's Future. (Important announcement)

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Captainnana

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Jul 29, 2019
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I am a little worried about the ads that will be on the website, one of my favorite things about FTB is that this is one of the few places on the internet that is not littered with ads.
Other than that I am excited too see how FTB progresses :)

I am one of the web developers and I also hate sites with 5 ads to a page, at this point we have plans to add new features to the website soon and these areas will display small banner ads at the top or bottom of the page of the page. No flashing colors, no popups, no large ads. If we get ads up they will be small and as unobtrusive as possible.
 

slowpoke

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FTB Founder
Jul 29, 2019
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lol any ad will be unobtrusive. As to colors there will be a range. that range will be limited at the start, but will expand over time. Also we will be offering sizes from small right up to 9XL (not a typo) although there will be a small extra charge above 4XL I believe.
 

Lawbroken

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Jul 29, 2019
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lol any ad will be unobtrusive. As to colors there will be a range. that range will be limited at the start, but will expand over time. Also we will be offering sizes from small right up to 9XL (not a typo) although there will be a small extra charge above 4XL I believe.


Q&A at the bottom of your thread answering questions maybe a better idea slow. (just in case this thread gets more posts) Not everyone goes through every single post to see if the question has been answered :p
 

stlmonster21

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Jul 29, 2019
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FTB is why i still play this game, so anything that can be done to further the enjoyment of my experience is cool with me. You (the FTB team) have every right as self-made and hard-working people to make as much money off this as you possibly can, so when I see how limited this process is it reassures me that you all really do care more about making FTB better, than money. Thank you, and i look forward to the new ways of which i can fail with machinery and blow my house up :D !
 

Bevo

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Jul 29, 2019
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I can't imagine anyone having a problem with this. Thousand and thousands of YouTubers/Livestreamers monetize videos of playing FTB and the various modes in MC, and many also have their own merchandise as well.
 

kittle

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Jul 29, 2019
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Definitely interesting times ahead.
The merchandise sounds like a great way to raise money. but please include a generic "Donate" button for those of us who dont a t-shirt.
Or provide other things to buy. Coffee mug? Mouse pad?

and +1 to the NON-intrusive ads. Last thing i want is to have to find an adblock for the FTB launcher
 

vimes

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Jul 29, 2019
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I am totally in favor of this. You're obviously very concerned about making sure that it continues to be focused on giving people a great experience with the launcher and the modpacks, rather than "selling out" and aiming straight at making money with no thought for anyone else. I expect and hope this will make it easier for people to continue to make awesome progress on the launcher and the modpacks, which is only a good thing for all concerned.

...Just one request - more of a forlorn hope, really. Can you make the t-shirt available in 'tall'?

No? Well, that's ok. Nobody makes tall printed t-shirts, really.
 

VodkaShot

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Jul 29, 2019
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Win Win situation. Still free access to FTB, FTB merchandise, and mod devs having the option to earn some money through their endeavours.
 

Mtshaw113

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Jul 29, 2019
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Can anyone explain why people would be unhappy with FTB shirts coming?! I dont see how anyone would start to hate on them making money.
 

kj4lxc

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Jul 29, 2019
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I agree whole heartedly with with the decision to go onto be a full fledged business. By having an income it insures the future of Feed The Beast and all of supported projects.
 

Enigmius1

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Jul 29, 2019
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I'll risk being the doodoo head in the crowd, but anything I say is meant in the form of respectful feedback.

I'm hoping that with this announcements and the subsequent steps towards the described business model that we can expect to see FTB treated like a business. And by that I'm not talking about effort assembling and maintaining the packs, I'm talking about no longer straddling the fence between mod devs and players. Now the mod devs are the vendors, FTB is the packager, and the players are the customer. And that mans the vendors don't get coddled anymore. If they don't play nice they don't get their own pram to play in with their selected friends. It means if mods or mod suites are technically unstable, they're not included in packs. (Looking at you, Voxel Mods, but not to exclude all the other mods over time that have added very little but detracted a whole lot.)

If I'm now the potential consumer, I don't want to troubleshoot packs anymore. If it's listed as a pack for download, it means it works, and if a mod is discovered after the fact to be unstable and causing issues, it's promptly and prominently announced so players don't have to play private investigator figuring out why their game keeps crashing, or memory leaks keep demolishing framerates. They can disable the mod or take appropriate action.

I'm one of the community members who spends hours tracking down edge case issues that nobody really talks about and for which the answers and solutions can only be found in the dustiest corners of the interwebs. Thing is, the answers are there, but nobody brings them forward. Secret Rooms crashed my game umpteen times and it was only by fluke a found a tangential reference to it causing problems after a couple of hours of googling that I was able to disable it and solve that problem. A mod that does hardly anything worthwhile producing show-stopping issues and nobody said squat.

I don't want to see alpha mods shipped with packs "for worldgen" and then wind up having to restart worlds with the next evolved step anyways. If the mod isn't ready for prime time, it doesn't belong in a pack.

If I paid you for this product, I'd be asking for my money back. If we're to move in the direction of monetization, there's much room for improvement. Many players will spend an hour or two here and their trying to track down issues and resolve them without even stopping to think about what they're doing, but I'm not one of them. I'm not spending any more of my time fixing things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place while you guys are enjoying your all expenses paid convention trips. Now is a great time to refocus on what matters, and it's not making nice with mod devs at the expense of the players anymore. You've got something to offer them by way of monetization opportunities for being part of an FTB pack and that's it. They don't need second chances for atrocious behavior and they don't deserve to earn money off the back of a broken mod.
 

BanzaiBlitz

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Jul 29, 2019
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Best of luck in the endeavour. If you are new to managing a business you might consider a book called EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey. It is very pragmatic and might give you extra tools in addition to the plans already laid.

I am looking forward to getting some shirts. Now the problem is how do I choose which shirts first...? :eek:
 

Captainnana

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Jul 29, 2019
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I'll risk being the doodoo head in the crowd, but anything I say is meant in the form of respectful feedback. (cont)

To clarify, mod developers aren't getting paid, we would simply (in future) be giving them a location to sell their products without the massive overhead, mod developing is still a hobby for these people and FTB is still a hobby for all of us at this point, we aren't going to be chasing people down for updates when we dont even pay them. That said we do want to create the best modpacks we can so if we do come across problem mods as we have done recently then they will be removed, as always.

Secondly, you're not gonna have a bug free experience, we've got minecraft doing updates, mods updating and then we've got to try and get all that working together, it's never going to be perfect. If you want perfect then I'm sorry to say you got the wrong game/place, any modding community is going to experience this issue and while we can do things to lessen the impact, automated backups, notices etc we cant ever remove all the bugs.

I do 100% agree with your third point, if a mod or something we are doing doesn't do anything meaningful then we shouldn't really be adding it because all it's going to do is introduce bugs and end up with issues, its better to wait for mods to be featured.

Finally, you didn't pay us for this product, that's kinda the point. If you were paying us then we could, hypothetically, afford to do all the things you speak about like pay people to fix bugs etc but you don't FTB modpacks are free to use and always will be, the income we will generate from this is most likely minimal compared to any other paid game development studio. We're going to continue to treat mod devs in the way we always have, with respect, they do this as a hobby. Not a full time job. They give us their product for free and in return if they wish they could post their merch on our site (That's not even a thing yet by the way) thats not payment, that's just a service we give to them in return for the work they do, any money they get isn't from us its from their fans who want to support them
 

Golrith

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Nov 11, 2012
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Frankly I can hardly believe it's taken this long. Make as much money as you can and Make FTB even more amazing! You and all the people who make FTB work should be well compensated for you genius and you efforts. That's not "selling out", or "cashing in", that's just fair. Its how the world is supposed to reward hard work.

Off Topic, but unfortunately the world doesn't work that way. A work colleague, who I've worked with for over 10 years, is being made redundant, but she works harder then other people who have been told their jobs are safe.

On Topic, try and find merchandise that is "unique". T-shirts, mugs, etc are pretty boring (even with unique print).
 

YasukiHumai

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Thinking of designs we can put on light right now... I just realised how right you are.

Exactly, I buy a lot of shirts that are not the exact one I want, but at least they are not black. I become very grateful for those IPs that provided non-black options.
 

Cieronph

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
145
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I'll risk being the doodoo head in the crowd, but anything I say is meant in the form of respectful feedback.

I'm hoping that with this announcements and the subsequent steps towards the described business model that we can expect to see FTB treated like a business. And by that I'm not talking about effort assembling and maintaining the packs, I'm talking about no longer straddling the fence between mod devs and players. Now the mod devs are the vendors, FTB is the packager, and the players are the customer. And that mans the vendors don't get coddled anymore. If they don't play nice they don't get their own pram to play in with their selected friends. It means if mods or mod suites are technically unstable, they're not included in packs. (Looking at you, Voxel Mods, but not to exclude all the other mods over time that have added very little but detracted a whole lot.)

If I'm now the potential consumer, I don't want to troubleshoot packs anymore. If it's listed as a pack for download, it means it works, and if a mod is discovered after the fact to be unstable and causing issues, it's promptly and prominently announced so players don't have to play private investigator figuring out why their game keeps crashing, or memory leaks keep demolishing framerates. They can disable the mod or take appropriate action.

I'm one of the community members who spends hours tracking down edge case issues that nobody really talks about and for which the answers and solutions can only be found in the dustiest corners of the interwebs. Thing is, the answers are there, but nobody brings them forward. Secret Rooms crashed my game umpteen times and it was only by fluke a found a tangential reference to it causing problems after a couple of hours of googling that I was able to disable it and solve that problem. A mod that does hardly anything worthwhile producing show-stopping issues and nobody said squat.

I don't want to see alpha mods shipped with packs "for worldgen" and then wind up having to restart worlds with the next evolved step anyways. If the mod isn't ready for prime time, it doesn't belong in a pack.

If I paid you for this product, I'd be asking for my money back. If we're to move in the direction of monetization, there's much room for improvement. Many players will spend an hour or two here and their trying to track down issues and resolve them without even stopping to think about what they're doing, but I'm not one of them. I'm not spending any more of my time fixing things that shouldn't have been broken in the first place while you guys are enjoying your all expenses paid convention trips. Now is a great time to refocus on what matters, and it's not making nice with mod devs at the expense of the players anymore. You've got something to offer them by way of monetization opportunities for being part of an FTB pack and that's it. They don't need second chances for atrocious behavior and they don't deserve to earn money off the back of a broken mod.



I think you are right in all senses upto a point, yes FTB packs should be clean, mods should only be in their if they are stable however at the end of the day its a "mod". A modification to the game, which means it edits the game in ways it was not originally intended, once in a while these bugs are bound to pop-up and cause problems, this risk is then increased heavily by the amount of mods. This at the end of the day means some "bugs" that would effect one pc wouldn't the other etc etc. There is no way even with 3-4 dedicated staff working over 60-70hrs a week you could find them all, it's impossible. That is the reason they release "beta" etc to find these bugs but even then some will inevitably slip through. At the end of the day we still have to remember these packs are based around hacky "mods" which edit the game, this isnt something that has months of 1000's privately beta testing, this is a small group (business) making it easy for most people to play mods. I respect your comment however still think we need to look at this realisticly, there is no-new staff working on this project, nor are most putting any-more time than they already do into it, they are just being rewarded for doing so.
 
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