Offer your advice (improving our beloved AG Site)
 

hi everyone and especially posters who hate me! :D (a big foolish smile)

i see in the last 6 months that all famous sites (not necessarily concerning Games) are updating their platforms (FB,Myspace,Gmail ...and whatever) and our beloved AG's had the same platform for more like 2-3 years (i am not sure)

anyways i would like to open this thread that can make me and other posters here say and share whatever they think that would be great and an upgrade for AG Site.

1st about the scene of the week ,i think the Site would be running out of memorable games sooner or later ,unless you are about to repeat some you already showed, so anyway i suggest that this one could be the scene of the month instead ,dedicated only to the memorable games and there would be another one that can be for a new Games (just about to be released) ,which can hold/show one game maybe of the Hype-o-Meter that give a chance to all posters to share their expectations and information and release date about it beside the preview section.

2nd the review hot key has ratings, production date, article date so what about genre too, i sometimes want to look up for drama games or Cartoon games for example which might be the mood i am craving for right now. and that can make searching for games much fun.

P.S:this thread not to be taken for what i advice ,but it is an idea to open some sort of connection for all posters to share and give their advices that would make this Site Expand for the sake of Adventure Scene !



I wasn't sure where to start this thread, so if should be moved to another forum ...then accept my apologies

Tabacco and the rest of the staff do a great job with the resources that they have available.

They are working on improvements in the background and i'm sure given more time and resources they would love to put in place a lot of new features.

For me personally i'd love to see more user interaction on the main site. Maybe a wiki style database where us users could contribute information about the games as well as adding screenshots and videos. A Database where you could submit your own reviews and scores etc so that a Users score would sit alongside the official score.

I would also love to see a personal space where you could list or have a shelfspace of games you own, create blog posts and articles about your favourite games etc.

Basically a mix between Giant Bomb and LibraryThing.

We're actually planning a significant site update in the non-too-distant future. But it's been a long, slow process just to reach this point and we're not quite done yet.

Some of the ideas mentioned above will be included, plus quite a bit more.

that is such great news ,
hope you would not keep us waiting for very long though.

Time to Expand The Facebook page .
with Only 4,408 Likes and 41,838 real members here sounds much little

We're planning to have a more prominent "like us on Facebook" button on the site.

Keep in mind though that those 41k+ members accumulated over many years, and not everyone is an active user.

Guys about your upcoming upgrading ,did you ever think of a Difficulty statues in that game's details box with games reviews ....something (Easy,Fair,Hard and challenging) !?

Difficulty is very subjective, so that's not something I see us doing. Besides, that's what the reviews are for. :D

Theres really too many games with too many different shades of difficulties to stamp on a rubric. Whats hard for one person is a breeze for another. One word just isnt enough to explain difficulty.

Progress dont bring always good results. Regarding websites, see what happened with imdb look (luckily there still is old look). For me adventuregamers.com is near perfect.

I do miss clickable tags though sometimes to find games from same category as Advie1 mentioned.

Regarding Lucien21 idea - why? I mean there are already so many sites where u can do those things, eg moby and gamespot. Personally i cant see the point why to reinvent the wheel. Why spend resources if opportunities already exist.
At the same time, genre specific site where one could create personal track list, eg for upcoming games, do have positive sides.

No offence to anyone. All i want to say we should be careful with changes we wish.

We're certainly mindful of not trying to fix things that aren't broken, and we're also making sure that what we do change is well implemented (which admittedly we haven't always done in the past, as exemplified by our still rather crummy Games A-Z index... sorry!).

That isn't to say you might not be a bit disoriented initially when we relaunch the site ... new designs always take some time getting used to, and I've never seen a site relaunch anywhere without at least some level of complaint. :)

We're not including a wiki style database or personal game tracking in our plans now, but it's stuff we may look into in the future. Keep in mind though it's not trivial to implement in a properly integrated way (the way sites like giantbomb have) especially given our limited resources.

I do think wikified AG game pages could be very worthwhile as places like giantbomb only have good pages for the best known adventure games, and the adventure game wikia that someone started a few years ago never really took off -- whereas at AG we'd have the existing community to help make it work. It's a distant possibility though as ideally we'd want to integrate it well rather than run a seperate off-the-shelf wiki.

i was thinking of a reader's rating that can follow the reviewer rating's maybe within a week or two,

i dont know how this would work but i have a idea of that whenever a new game get reviewed, should also have a poll for reader's rating's within too.

in the end all new games would have, Reviewer's Rating and Readers Rating.

i guess this shouldn't be difficult and i wouldn't bother about all those already reviewed games as that would make a big super huge mess!!

IMO

• Maybe it wouldn't be bad to have some kind of "sub-genre" categorizations, not only the usual mysteries, comedies... but also similar to what the old Home of the Underdogs site did - Grand Adventure, History, Detective games...

• The "Scene of the Week" seems to be gaining in popularity, but it's still kinda obscure feature. I would put it even a bit higher on the main page, and maybe brought the "voting stars" for it, beside the option to leave comments. Also, i would love to see staff putting their comments on the scene, why is it that the scene rises above others in game etc.

• I know the "time is tight", but more articles would be welcomed.

Wow wow wow wow. Huge flashback incoming. :crazy:

(Quick search through my mail archive...)

Hah! Email from me to Jack back in October 2006 (bolding added):

I like the idea of having genre categories (or rather: tags, since a game can have several), but I agree that it's going to be tough to implement. We really need to establish a (rather limited) list of tags, and then stick to it. I think the type of settings should be the main way to sort things (sci-fi, fantasy, historical, etc.) (but then, what is Myst?), possibly with the tone too (horror, comedy, etc.) (but then, once again, what is Myst?). The list of themes at Underdogs might be a nice starting point (I especially like the use of some "transversal" categories, such as "licensed", or the very-practical "unique").

Great minds think alike. :D

And it did get implemented at some point (after I left the team). It's the "Theme" field on every game's page (see example). Of course, it's not searchable yet (unless you have some reasonable google-fu), but it's somewhere in the database.

(I can't even begin to imagine how much work it must have been to tag all the games on the site... Glad I was gone when that happened. :P)

EDIT: And the "Unique" tag even got implemented, and could act as a list of many of my favourite games. Now that makes my day.

:D And yes, i probably haven't put it well - i know about the genres in game info, and i love to open those infos, though i was thinking of something more user-friendly and even more detailed. Yes, tags could work, or even simple "menu" reachable somewhere in the main page where you could list titles by predefined sub-genres. It wouldn't be such of a problem even if it doesn't list every little game there is, as forums are already full of "Similar games to..." threads.

My head just exploded. :crazy:

Yup, our classification system has been revamped again recently in another internal overhaul. A few categories have been tweaked a bit but the "theme" category is new (it may still need some refinement, but should be close now).

Sadly, most of the games aren't tagged yet, except for those with direct connections to our old criteria. That still leaves thousands of games in the database with empty or incomplete theme fields now. The thought of going back and filling all those in just made my head explode again.

Hey, that wasn't criticism but a selfish endeavor - and i was referring to the articles delving into the genre issues, like thelast one, not the usual preview/review articles.

Oh, I didn't take it as criticism, but the thought of more anything is daunting. We're way past the point of time being tight and well into it being near the breaking point. :crazy:

(That said, there is a new editorial planned for a few weeks from now.)

I don't know if this belongs here or not, but just so you know, Jackal, none of the links I tried in your Feature: What are Adventure Games? work.

Here
i reported this to Jackel but i guess Jackel is so busy that he might had been exploded already :)

http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/s...violent009.gif

That's odd, aimless. They're working for me. What browser are you using? Anyone else having that problem?

(A1, just haven't gotten to your fix yet.)

I have the same problem. All the links to a review lead to a blank page. For instance, the link to Blade Runner is:
http://www.adventuregamers.com/artic...play.php?id=14
which for me is a blank page.

A working link would be:
http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,14

That's exactly what I'm getting, Kurufinwe. Here's the link to Stacking which leads me to a blank page.
http://www.adventuregamers.com/artic...ay.php?id=1853

Jackal, I use Opera.

Okay, will look into this and get that resolved. Thanks for the heads-up.

Much improvement this morning though some pages are still coming up blank but I sort of object to clicking on Zork Grand Inquisitor and getting an interview with Graham Annable of Telltale Games. Must be broken link fatigue setting in. ;)

I have that issue too and I'm using the latest version of Firefox.

Guys this thread made to offer advices about the upcoming updates and improve the Site not to fix problems ... if you would like to report some bug or other , it would be appropriate to post at http://www.adventuregamers.com/forum...ad.php?t=30739

Advie,

Since Jackal is reading this thread and has already responded to the problem of broken/unworking links, it seems reasonable to continue comments on it here instead of jumping around to another thread.

Anyway, site improvement must surely be related to links that actually work. It's irksome enough to know what an adventure game is and simply want to see a review of a particular game, but for someone who doesn't know what an AG is, clicking on a link to a game review to find out and getting nowhere might mean an end to her interest if she has to go hunting to find it. (Or he. I know some adventurers are he's. ;))

its your call aimless no doubt i didnt mean to direct anyhow , i only meant that improving is different from Fixing and surely Jackel (if i am to say) will respond to any thread especially when all posts starting to relate to the other thread (report) more .

cheers aimless :)

Yeah, the fewer threads I need to follow, the better. :D

And you're right, a lot of those links were still buggered. That's what you get when AG's actual owner pitches in. You just can't find good help these days. (Shhh, don't tell Marek I said that. :P)

Anyway, I've gone through and (believe I've) fixed all the article links now.

i would like to make a thread titled what you think of Jackal is he a sweetheart or always Grumpy? :D ...but naaah i dont wanna get banned of AG's .. i love it too much

Oh, I'm absolutely both. It's part of my charm. :P

I vote for sweetheart since I'm considering changing my screen name to Grumpy. :D

They do something like this at the pop culture site The A.V. Club. Each review has a space for logged-in users to rate, and an averaged user-rating is posted below the reviewer grade for every film, game, album, etc. reviewed. It's pretty cool, and cuts down on people complaining about ratings in the comments, as they can express their opinion in a productive way by grading the game themselves.

Little fixes in the database (the ones discussed here: http://www.adventuregamers.com/forum...ad.php?t=29773)

And please try to keep the menus and colour theme unchanged.

We're definitely planning something along the lines of the A.V. Club system, and Games A-Z will get a big overhaul including support for 0-9.

We're sticking with the current colour scheme, logo, etc. but be prepared for some changes in the layout and menus. I believe you'll really like these changes once you're used to them though.

I also want to second the suggestion that it would be nice to be able to see a list of games that fulfill certain criteria.

For example, sometimes I want to see all the games in the database that were made by the same developer. I might look at an entry of Puzzle Agent and want to click on "Telltale Games" to be able to see all the other adventures made by Telltale.

You mean like the list down the righthand column that is already available on any game page? :P

But there will be lots more ways to filter games according to various criteria once we roll out the changes.

Oh, ah! Thanks! That list is a bit unassuming...is it already there for long?
I somewhat hope not... :frusty:

Pretty much since the dawn of time, I think. So no, not long. ;)