Games page updates

[Pumaman]

Hello,

Just to let you know, the Games page has now been updated to include detailed voting information. You can access this by clicking the "see a detailed breakdown of the votes" link in the User Ratings section of the Game Detail pages.

This is probably of most use to game authors, so you can see how people are rating your game. It also lists the reasons people gave for giving up on the game, which could be helpful in identifying any specific problems with the game that you might be able to improve.

Also, it's now possible for the page moderators to remove comments, so if you spot any overly offensive or spammy comments, please do report them to AGA or myself.
Please note that we will NOT delete a comment just because it says they didn't like the game -- people have a right to say what they thought.

Feedback welcome on the usefulness or otherwise of the new graphs.

[Gord10]

Cool, this will be useful for the developers.

[Kweepa]

Interesting to see the breakdown.
For example, two people said Two Of A Kind had abysmal graphics. I think this is a good case for throwing out the top and bottom X votes.

[Pumaman]

Just a quick note to mention the new Games Digest list:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=digest

This allows you to get an easy overview of all the games in a compact list, which is sometimes easier than wading through the pages with the game descriptions and screenshots on. You can also sort by any column.

This should also make it easier for whoever does the AGS Awards this year to get a list of games released this year.

[Ubel]

Hey, that's a great feature, CJ. Makes finding games much easier.

[Kweepa]

Nice. Makes it easy to find the new games.
Was it a concious decision to not have a rating column?

[Pumaman]

Yeah, it's the usual thing about the rating not necessarily being a good way of ranking games, especially if the game is new or has relatively few votes. It could be added though, I'll consider it.

Anyway, thanks to AGA for introducing me to RSS and making the suggestion; the Games page now has an RSS feed for new games; if you want to try it out point your RSS reader at the Games Page, and it should automatically discover the feed.

[AGA]

Feed's broken. I suspect it's because all the HTML tags haven't been stripped. Make sure you:

Code: ags

htmlentities($orig);

and

Code: ags

strip_tags($orig);

before building the feed. This ought to strip and/or convert any HTML.

[Pumaman]

Strange, it actually seems that htmlentities was actually causing the problem -- I guess tags like $ouml; are valid html but not xml. Anyway I've removed the call to that, and it now seems to be working.

[Ali]

These are great new features, thanks!

Yeah, it's the usual thing about the rating not necessarily being a good way of ranking games, especially if the game is new or has relatively few votes. It could be added though, I'll consider it.

Voting isn't necessarily a great way of ranking games (one person thought Apprentice was visually Abysmal), but it would be a good way of quickly finding (probably) good games. Would it be possible to rank the games in order of votes, but to give new games an automatic spot at the top while they gather votes?