I got a lot of very agressive and hateful messages from people saying that Bandori Party is useless without cards tracking, so as a human being, I decided to share my feelings.
After I worked so hard for months and really seeing the progress I made in terms of my coding skills and polishing many things, doing an all-nighter the day before and the day after the launch to fix every single bug the minute after it got reported, hearing that’s it’s “half assed” and “all buggy” seriously hurts.
From December to March, I completely re-wrote the engine behind my websites so it’s easier and faster to create new sites. My original plan was to finish that v2, then update Cinderella Producers with it, then update Stardust Run, then start other websites.
When BanG Dream! Girls Band Party came out, I partnered up with a bunch of great people and I put my engine re-writing on hold to work on that one first. We all agreed that it was more important: we wanted to provide the database of cards as soon as possible, which includes transparents, clean arts and detailed stats, which is something that wasn’t available yet. For us, our priority was to get that database available as soon as possible.
I worked my ass off to polish lots of things, a shitton of details work much better than any other of our websites, and it’s also very very easy to use on a developer point of view (which will hopefully bring more developers, I’m really running out of sleep ^^). But now that’s the thing: one of the few things that are missing in the v2 of my engine is a generic way to track cards (or “things”). It could be done manually, like our other websites, but my plan with this re-writing is to avoid manual things as much as possible.
Cards tracking wasn’t the priority in the v2 and I don’t think it should be. Here’s why:
- 85% of our School Idol Tomodachi visitors only use our website to get cards, idols and songs info. The majority of users who have an account also don’t input their cards. Yes, it’s what I wanted School Idol Tomodachi to be: a tracker, but no, it’s not what it is today.
- BanG Dream! Girls Band Party doesn’t have a complete database like that on any other platform, so a new website with the database is a big addition for the community.
- Finally, I haven’t seen any other resource get asked for cards tracking. It didn’t seem to be a need within the existing community.
In the end, the only thing I can say is that I learned my lesson. Next time I start something, I’ll make sure that nobody knows that I’m the same person who made School Idol Tomodachi. That’s probably the reason why people had this kind of ecxpectations, which I’ve never seen anywhere else for anybody else.
All of that said, I've seen some positive comments about the new website and according to the traffic we're getting, it seems like people use our new little database of cards and members, so it wasn't useless :) Some people also asked for cards tracking in a much nicer and honest way, which I appreciate. I'm also happy to hear that people want that feature, and I will do my best to implement it as soon as I can.
I think the feature will take me ~4 full days, so I'll either spread that out over the week after I get home from work or do that in 2 big weekends. Hopefully it will be out soon. I'm looking forward to hear your feedback on the new system I'm planning to make and also the other little things our team is working on to make our new little community a fun place :)
