Monday! Monday! Monday! - Page 2

QforQ · #11 11-04-2008, 06:22 AM

HOLY CRAP BOX ART IS AWESOME!

http://www.gamerdna.com/game/enter-t...-pc-compatible

Pocketwolf · #12 11-04-2008, 07:24 AM

Thanks, gDNA staff, great job! Games system is fantastic and the site appears to be running faster.

Just a question: did you reset the entire existing games database in order to roll this update out, or just lay it out on top? If the latter, how are you dealing with duplicate (or triplicate, etc.) entries? I went to add a game that came up with three search results - all refer correctly to the game that I wanted to add, but I didn't know which one to pick.

Pat yourselves on the back!

Retodon8 · #13 11-04-2008, 10:35 AM

Looking good; good job!

I'm at work, so I can't really add to my personal games library right now, but I will later.

I'm also curious about what Pocketwolf just said.

In the past people manually added games and incorrectly capitalized the titles.

Once a (manually added) title exists, the system becomes case insensitive, and it becomes impossible to add a game "AbC" if "ABC" already exists.
This now turns out to be a blessing in disguise.

For instance I added:
Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time
Now I can distinguish between it and the proper title easily:
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

However there are some titles that are identical.
In those cases I think it's actually impossible to be sure you're deleting the right one from your gamerDNA Panel.
Well, unless you add a character or screenshot or something to one of them.

I guess the best way to clean up your personal library is to check if your old title is the proper one, and if not, delete it.
Then add the proper one.
That way no confusion.

It would be great if you could see which of your titles are manually added.
I think that should be relatively easy to do, and it would be really helpful to us.

Imran · #14 11-04-2008, 02:13 PM

We did our best to match as many of the erroneous titles to the proper games that we could.

However, we didn't catch ALL of them - if you have a game that you feel isn't being merged properly - send a support ticket and we'll take care of it!

Mia · #15 11-04-2008, 02:31 PM

Nice - even my favorite childhood game - that no one here had ever heard of - is on the list: Below the Root!

snowkissed · #16 11-04-2008, 03:11 PM

Oooh, this will keep me busy during class when I should be paying attention to the professor.

Thanks, gDNA! My academic life, however, curses you.

QforQ · #17 11-04-2008, 07:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Retodon8

Looking good; good job!

I'm at work, so I can't really add to my personal games library right now, but I will later.

I'm also curious about what Pocketwolf just said.

In the past people manually added games and incorrectly capitalized the titles.

Once a (manually added) title exists, the system becomes case insensitive, and it becomes impossible to add a game "AbC" if "ABC" already exists.
This now turns out to be a blessing in disguise.

For instance I added:
Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time
Now I can distinguish between it and the proper title easily:
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

However there are some titles that are identical.
In those cases I think it's actually impossible to be sure you're deleting the right one from your gamerDNA Panel.
Well, unless you add a character or screenshot or something to one of them.

I guess the best way to clean up your personal library is to check if your old title is the proper one, and if not, delete it.
Then add the proper one.
That way no confusion.

It would be great if you could see which of your titles are manually added.
I think that should be relatively easy to do, and it would be really helpful to us.

You're correct, we do have games in the system that have both the manually added versions and the games that we added last night from our mega-database of games. The devs are currently working on correcting these issues today.

Retodon8 · #18 11-04-2008, 08:38 PM

Mia, I never heard of Below the Root, but YouTube taught me I would've surely enjoyed it myself.
I recall reading the devs are open to suggestions when it comes to missing games, so I expect to see it in your profile sooner or later.

Quote:

Originally Posted by snowkissed

Thanks, gDNA! My academic life, however, curses you.

You're right, adding all the games that mean something can take a while.
I'll just spread things out a bit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by QforQ

You're correct, we do have games in the system that have both the manually added versions and the games that we added last night from our mega-database of games. The devs are currently working on correcting these issues today.

Great!

I hope I don't sound ungrateful; it's really nice having a big library of games to add to my profile now.
This is just one of those issues that is unavoidable when making this kind of change to a database.
I'm sure these little niggles will be gone in no time.

fattychubs · #19 11-04-2008, 08:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by QforQ

You're correct, we do have games in the system that have both the manually added versions and the games that we added last night from our mega-database of games. The devs are currently working on correcting these issues today.

Just to further clarify, if you have a have a duplicate game or one of the ones that didn't match in your profile. They will be fixed/merged over time, it probably won't be today for everybody. If you do need it done right away or something just doesn't seem right though, please do send a support request.

Thanks!

Wormy · #20 11-04-2008, 08:59 PM

Previously we had a listing of games that was manually entered by gamerDNA (and in fact.. GuildCafe) staff back sometime around the turn of the stone age.

Knowing that the goal of gamerDNA was to really cater to every gamer, and knowing that we never could add every game into our system, we made a point to let people add games themselves. But, since we're not crazy enough to watch games like 'poop' enter the upper echelons of the website, we created a tiered system of the games early on.

When we entered a game, it was "tier 3". This meant it had the basic info that we thought was legit, like a properly spelled name, an icon..etc. If a member entered a game, it was a "tier 4". We still let users do some things with their own tier 4 games, like add characters for them.. and experiences..etc., but other members really shouldn't see tier 4 games. There are other tiers.. (2 meant we had more metadata about the game.. like the races, classes, factions...etc., and 1 meant we pull data live from the game (I think just WoW right now)

As time went on, we developed systems to migrate tier 4 games periodically up to tier 3, and add new tier 3 games more often. We developed ways to merge misspelled tier 4s into tier 3s..etc. (no easy feat!) We also added more tier 2s for games that we knew would fit into our metadata structure (Warhammer for example).

All this was awesome, but a few things were missing.

We never took into account the platforms people were playing on. This means that when someone wanted to recruit for a clan for say.. Call of Duty.. we couldn't differentiate between PC and XBOX. (obviously something folks would want to do). Now it was nice to have the notion of one game that all the images, experiences..etc. fit under. But in the end, the fidelity of the information is paramount, as we can always roll up data across multiple platforms as a part of the product, but we could never "un-rollup" the uber-games.
Throughout the system, the application relied on the names of games as being the identifier. This was done for a variety of reasons, not least because we just didn't have the games in the system. It was however, a burden on everything we did. Game names are unreliable.. and once you consider the same game name on multiple platforms, you got problems. The time had come to finally bite the bullet, and fix most of these problems.

So we got more data. And the data was awesome.

What we have done with this build is really address (most of) the underlying data model problems, lay the foundation upon which we can get a much better understanding of gamers in general, and provide better, more appropriate features for each gamer based on what they play.

Oh.. and we added about 40 thousand more games, along with tons of metadata around them (box art, release dates, screenshots, genres.... all kinds of fun).

The way we added the games was intelligent. Trying to preserve as much of the existing data in the best way possible. We back populated ids for games that used to be name identified only (which wouldn't work now that a game exists on many platforms), and we merged existing tier 3 games with the new data.

We retain a tier 4 category for members who don't find their game and want to add it, or if they have a game that our data just doesn't have yet.

So.. how does this affect you?

you can have lots more fun adding TONS more games that you recall from yesteryear, and that you are anticipating. (the data should be quite good with games being added very soon after announcement)
Many features (guild game associations, your games, your characters...etc) now reference games with respect to a platform.
Some features still use a game name, and thus will not be platform specific, but as time permits we will convert them over to be more 'correct' (This is mainly the news section, and recruiting)
The stage is set for some truly awesome new features. Having the data around platforms, box art, release dates..etc and having them in a volume cannot go understated. Without them, many features we have dreamed of could remain only dreams. Now our toolbox just got way beefier. Expect to see us take full advantage of this data in many ways, including utilizing it in concert with our unique gameplay data to give everyone more understanding as to why great games are great, and what games you as a gamer might like to play next.

We will certainly have some bumps as we deal with cases of incorrect platforms, game mismatches..etc, but this is a very large step forward for the product.

If you do run into any issues, with your games, your guild's games, or just the stuff you are seeing on the site, be sure to contact our support team, and they will get you fixed up ASAP.

I hope that sheds some more light into what we did in this last build, and a tiny bit of whats laying ahead of us. As always, thanks to all of you for your continued support and feedback.