What's New: Mar 21

Features of Notes

GDC 2014

Our first real event page went live for the Game Developers Conference at http://www.gamespot.com/gdc/:

Other Changes

Please note that this isn't intended to be a list of ALL the changes we make (we work on a lot more than this, srsly), but rather a list of changes that will directly affect or be seen by our members.

• Fixed a bug that affected Facebook sharing. Now, when you attempt to share a GameSpot article or video on Facebook, it should not appear as though you're sharing a 404 error page or a completely different article or video.
• Converted all core Stacks (Games I Want, Games I'm Playing, Games I Own, Games I've Finished, and Games I've Played) to unordered Stacks. We hadn't intended for these Stacks to be ordered by default, and this will fix issues where some users who had ordered core Stacks with more than 100 games were unable to edit them.

Hmm. Now you've done the conversion, my Games I Own stack is just throwing a server error.

Ok, cool! A new thread for this week! :)

Firstly, I want to say that the ability to sort and filter games by platform (PS2/PS3/PS4/Xbox/Xbox360/Xbox One etc.) is very important for stacks. I cannot think of any scenario that would've made stacks better without that ability and I find myself questioning the design decision with respect to that. On top of that, there are problems with some games' platform version and the corresponding stacks' entry helped me remember what game there was an issue with, so that I could avoid that in the future purchase. I hope that information is stored somewhere in the database of my library that it can be retrieved in the future when the sort/filter by platform is activated again. Is it @LarkAnderson

When I click on edit a stack, the edit page comes up. The buttons on the top are really big with a ton of space between them. It takes up nearly half the browser. Consider that I have a fairly small screen and an even smaller firefox window on my computer. It is difficult to see more than 3 games at a time. This is an aesthetic change, but I think GS would be well served to change the buttons to be small, but still readable, on the top of the page, so that maximum number of games are visible at the same time. On top of that, the top meta data (Game, Release Date, GS Score, My Score) should be frozen so that it doesn't disappear when you scroll down.

Thirdly, in the edit stack window, the games aren't linked. It would be nice to open up a game in separate tabs while you're editing to check on your own priorities, so that you don't have to save, exit editing, and then go click on it. Becomes tedious after a while.

Fourth, the brief description for each game is TOTALLY AWESOME!!! Hats off to the one to think of it.

Fifth, I don't see a way to change the order of an ordered stack through the arrows you mentioned earlier. I don't see the up/down arrows at all. I see the numbers, but not the arrows.

Lastly, editing a large list leaves a lot to be desired. It's cumbersome. I bought 6 PSP games recently (ya, I'm behind times a bit), and created a new stack, added them to the new stack, and wanted to delete them from Games I Want stack (I didn't move them, I haven't tried out the Move button yet). However in the process, it deleted 6 more games (in addition to the ones I wanted to delete), as I found from the number of games in the stack. One of them was MGS4, which I found, but I can't figure out which games the additional 5 are. In addition, when I checked the box on one game and deleted them, others would get highlighted. So I think a field at the top of the page saying how many games have been selected would be very helpful. Just to make sure I don't delete games that I don't want to delete. For now, I would recommend that noone use the delete button until this is sorted out.

There are a few others I thought of, but can't seem to recall them now. It'll come to me and I'll post as I recall them. Thanks Lark!

@dab198: This is being fixed now. Sorry about that!

@LarkAnderson: At least editing it is still working, in the meantime.

@anarayan: Thanks for the great feedback!

Allowing the adding of games on a per-platform basis to Stacks was always something we intended to do, but it was also always something we knew wouldn't make the initial relaunch. This is something that we're working on though--more on that at a later date.

We'll look into shrinking down the icons and locking the table headers in Stack Edit Mode.

Good call, we'll make game names linkable in Edit Mode.

In the future, we're going to make changes to how the delete functionality is handled, so this should sort itself out over time. As for the Move functionality, please give it a try! It effectively copies the selected games over to a different Stack and then removes them from the current stack.

@LarkAnderson:

I just tested out Move. I tried moving Super Mario Galaxy from my Games I want stack to my Wii games stack. It added to the latter, and deleted it from the former, but with a few side effects. First, there were 141 games on the Want stack, and after I "moved" it, there were 139. So it unintentionally deleted an additional game, which I don't know what. Secondly, when I looked back at the edit list page of the Want stack, one of the other games were checked, though I had checked exactly one game during the move process. Another game had accidentally got checked.

I suspect there is some problem with the delete button. I would recommend users don't delete games from any large stack until this is resolved. I lost a total of 7 games to this move/delete that I don't know what. (The other 6 are when I deleted certain games and noticed that the number of games in my Want stack was lower than the number of games I should've had after the delete.)

I am going to test the move button a bit more later over the weekend. So please wait.

edit: I just tried it again. I "moved" super paper mario from my Wanted stack into my Wii Games stack, and it deleted an additional game to make my games list 137 (instead of 138) from the original count of 139, and it selected prince of persia classic (PoPC) in the edit Want list. (It might've selected more, but I didn't have the time to check all of them.)

While PoPC was selected, Move and Copy weren't enabled. I had to uncheck and recheck PoPC to enable them. But when I clicked move, see what happened above. I wasn't able to click on any of the stacks again. I had to exit edit mode, before it would let me edit again. Hope this helps, Lark.

@LarkAnderson: Lark, I thought that the bug (deleting an extra game I didn't want to delete when doing a move) from a stack was due to Firefox. I have hence been able to replicate that with Chrome as well. Now I am down to 135 Wanted games... :( The problem is I don't know which games it deletes.

I tried creating a 2 ordered test stacks, and moved games from one stack to the other in Chrome. Worked perfectly. However, Wanted stacks are unordered now. I haven't tried to mess around with unordered stacks yet. I did try to move 1 game from one ordered stack to another in Firefox, and it deletes an additional game here as well. This is confusing as heck. Something funky is going on. I can't make head or tails of it now. Please let me know if you want more details.

For anyone who MUST modify stacks, I recommend using Chrome. Though there are issues with Chrome as well, but significantly less issues.

Lastly, I am posting 2 consecutive posts in this thread. I hope the system doesn't ban me like it did the last time I posted two in a row. I am not padding up my post count or spamming. I am giving valuable feedback to the GS community. I hope the system recognizes that, but if it doesn't, someone please help!

edit: I am getting an error saying "You posted too many messages in a row." And I can't post anymore on this thread. I should be able to post more than one message in a row because I am helping the community iron out its bugs. Someone please fix this. Thanks!

@dab198: Your stack is fixed now!

@LarkAnderson: I wouldn't call what it is doing now "fixed".

What it does now is just show the first 100 and claim there are only 100 items in it, when in fact there are 900+. The other 800 items can't be viewed unless in edit mode, where it splits up into pages.

Collections are going to be big, so limiting to a view of only 100, without any other pages, seems like a flaw (especially since you are doing paging for editing).

Completely agree, @dab198. I didn't notice it until just now. It is unfortunately, a step backward for GS.

@anarayan: @dab198: Thanks for letting us know about this issue--I've got a bug filed for it and I'll let you know once it's fixed!

Any word on the bugs I reported earlier (see my 2 previous posts on this thread) with the Move function Lark? Have you been able to recreate them? Thanks!

@anarayan: I've been unable to recreate it myself, but I don't currently have a stack with 100+ games and that may be why. Regardless, it's in our bug queue and I'll give you an update once we can get it fixed.

Thanks!