Quoted from a recent thread by Jacob suggesting a site reset when the new editor comes out:
(03-14-2012, 07:19 PM)Qwertygiy Wrote: I think that wouldn't actually be such a terrible idea; however, if it comes to that, we should probably keep the old stuff around too, maybe as a subdomain (old.buildism.net?) or maybe even just as a bunch of files stored somewhere. I'd hate to see most of the past year of my life just get totally reset.
And if this happens, there should probably be some sort of reward for making games and contributing. I know it's been suggesting a hundred times over, but there would be almost no better opportunity for implementing a currency system. It needn't drive the whole system like in Roblox, but it would provide three purposes: Motivation for making games, income for the site, and reason to make more official content.
Personally, I think the skin system should stay the way it is: no "costs", total customization. Maybe break it up into segments -- head, torso, pants -- but I can't see something like tGL's system ever being quite as good as Minecraft's and hence ours. A very small amount of currency could be required to post a skin; however, deleting a skin would reearn you that currency. This way it would be free enough to publish a skin for a friend, but if you want to be a very successful skin maker you'd probably want to get some visits for your game. There's a bunch of ways you could bypass it, so I'm not sure how good of an idea it is.
Models, textures, and tools -- those could be good complements to skins. I don't think requiring currency for models or textures would be very feasible, but having a sort of "toolbox" that players can take into other games could be very useful. In fact, if done right, it could become an integral part of gameplay. Say you have a portal gun, to take a random example. You'd be able to add its name to a list of disallowed tools if you thought it would harm your game, but with some basic scripting knowledge, you could make some really nice easter eggs into games that would require it, without making having the gun be too OP -- make some materials have a script that deletes the "bullet" upon impact so it doesn't spawn portals, for example.
But at the very basic, just a plain reset of Buildism might help get things pumping again.