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Enhance "Join a Game"... & thoughts on Suggestions cleanup

PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 7:54 pm
by JeopardyTempest
Concise description:
  • Remove duplicates of the same exact game from "Join a Game".
  • Also probably some simple filtering of very excessive similar games.
  • Clean up Suggestions Forum by organized central lists?

Specifics/Details:
  • See below

How this will benefit the site and/or other comments:
  • Helps people try different games using Join a Game, encourage expanding your horizon and make it easier to find fun games.
  • Help make the suggestions forum easy to search for previous suggestions?


Join a Game cleanup: I wouldn't be surprised if this type of thing has been suggested before, but I would think a few minor alterations to the Join A Game link would allow for a much better CC experience. It's where I would go for games, especially as a new user. As time has gone on, I've come to enjoy some types of games more than others, but I still think ideally Find A Game would be a great place to be tempted to try new game types/setupos I haven't really looked into before. I personally enjoy a lot of variety in my games.
Right now, it could just be me, but the majority of page 1 of Join A Game is populated with duplicated games... very few map varieties... and games filled with team games against well organized teams of experts.
Now I know that putting the created games earliest first is both kind to those waiting longest (which I like) and thereby also a bit of a benefit to longtime users and pay members. Which I'm not really against. But a bit of minor filtering would make the page a lot more useful in my opinion.
  • Top desire: Remove from the list all exactly duplicated games until the prior ones will... or at most keep 2 copies. By duplicate I mean same map, same setup. Especially if every player is exactly the same. Having 10 copies might help a user get more attention, but I'm really doubting it helps them get many more games... and it would be beneficial for much more of the community to have more variety
  • Less pressing/probably more controversial: Apply more looser limits to the page using broader filters? Maybe only a certain # of games per person on the page. Maybe only a certain number per type/size/options/map.
    Maybe even set it so that at least maybe something like 1/4 of the results will have only 1 remaining player needed, another 1/4 more than half full... to make the page a bit extra useful (seems like 75% of the time I use the page, I join in a game and wait many days... in part because there's so many other empty games on page 1). Mix up the result order a bit so that people don't just focus on nearly full games, but encourage use of the page more. Not sure about this one, but welcome any ways that make the page more useful/popular and get games going for all, while encouraging variety :D
Perhaps I've missed some great way to find good games, or easy options somewhere, but if not, I think this might improve the experience a lot.


Cleanup of Suggestions Forum: Maybe I missed something, but I found it impossible to find something applicable to my suggestion above!?! Searching by those words found tons of other messages relating to it in no real way. There's also not much organization to things at this point. I tried looking through Accepted/Rejected folders... but goodness, what, like 100 pages each!?!
To which I offer... maybe, with a little initiative, we put together some topics with organized lists of similar threads???
Because there's obviously a lot of repeated themes. First of all, there's game setup options, game play options (resign/draw/etc), and probably other primary topics like forum setup thoughts, account options (emails and such), and of course maybe some misc? Then there are common themes within some of those that could further group threads.
I'm guessing people have talked about reorganization like this has been suggested before. But maybe where this is different... is that I think I'd be willing to perhaps take up at least a significant part of grouping old threads in Accepted/Rejected and such. I'm not sure I'd be so great at sticking up with it with new threads... so basically what I'm asking is
  • Is there real interest in a cleanup like this
  • Is it likely we can find people to keep it up... rather promptly tie new threads to old threads when a user is lame and doesn't go looking so we don't get millions of old dead duplicated threads... and update the organization threads as new thoughts come up. I've gotta think there's a ton of duplication, and I'd think in the future we could move to limit a bit of that, and would help a lot. Make this a bit more streamlined overall?

Thanks for hearing my suggestions, and please do respond with your thoughts whatever they may be :D

Re: Enhance "Join a Game"... & thoughts on Suggestions clean

PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 8:10 pm
by Metsfanmax
I won't speak about the Join a Game part because I don't know the technical details in how that would be implemented.

JeopardyTempest wrote:Cleanup of Suggestions Forum: Maybe I missed something, but I found it impossible to find something applicable to my suggestion above!?! Searching by those words found tons of other messages relating to it in no real way. There's also not much organization to things at this point. I tried looking through Accepted/Rejected folders... but goodness, what, like 100 pages each!?!


The Rejected Suggestions forum has suggestions dating back basically to the beginning of Conquer Club. It's great that we have a lot of ideas coming from many unique points of view, but of course there are many suggestions that are either just a little too strange for the site, or simply don't have enough support.

To which I offer... maybe, with a little initiative, we put together some topics with organized lists of similar threads???
Because there's obviously a lot of repeated themes. First of all, there's game setup options, game play options (resign/draw/etc), and probably other primary topics like forum setup thoughts, account options (emails and such), and of course maybe some misc? Then there are common themes within some of those that could further group threads.


This occurs now, albeit to a very limited extent. For example, the "resign" option topics are typically all merged into the same (very large) topic in Rejected. However, what you're talking about is on a much larger scale and would indeed require indexing of over 100 pages of rejected suggestions. The thing is... they're rejected, so I'm guessing that's why no one has ever put in the time to do that. It would be a lot of work, only to make it easier for people to find out what isn't going to be done. It would be great to have in theory, though. The problem is that if you don't make it granular enough and you start merging together topics that are only related to each other in their theme, you actually make it harder to figure out what's there, because the topics don't have individualized names. An index of those topics should also contain a brief blurb about why this particular suggestion was rejected, if it's a contentious one like the resign option.

Is there real interest in a cleanup like this


Speaking for the Suggestions mods, not really. TFO and rds, among others, just recently spent weeks cleaning out those 100 pages from this forum and moving them to Rejected. There hasn't been a substantial movement towards cleaning up that forum. I don't think we're opposed to it, though. I know the frustration you're talking about, trying to see if something's been suggested before with hundreds of irrelevant posts getting in my way.

Is it likely we can find people to keep it up... rather promptly tie new threads to old threads when a user is lame and doesn't go looking so we don't get millions of old dead duplicated threads... and update the organization threads as new thoughts come up. I've gotta think there's a ton of duplication, and I'd think in the future we could move to limit a bit of that, and would help a lot. Make this a bit more streamlined overall?


I would probably put in some time to keeping the index up to date if someone were to do the non-trivial task of getting it started. But I don't think you'll willingly get us to do the initial task unless there's a way to massively decrease the number of threads we have to index.

Re: Enhance "Join a Game"... & thoughts on Suggestions clean

PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 9:03 pm
by TheForgivenOne
I really doubt the first one is going to be introduced, based on the fact some players like playing the exact same map/settings multiple times. You would basically make it impossible to get more than 1 game going on the same settings.

Re: Enhance "Join a Game"... & thoughts on Suggestions clean

PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2011 9:33 pm
by Metsfanmax
TheForgivenOne wrote:I really doubt the first one is going to be introduced, based on the fact some players like playing the exact same map/settings multiple times. You would basically make it impossible to get more than 1 game going on the same settings.


I don't think this is true. Most people who are looking for a specific game type will use Game Finder. People who are looking to scroll through all available games do not need to see multiple copies of the same available games, because they're not really looking for any game type in particular. If they find one they like and want to join more than one with those same people, they can go back to Game Finder and search out all games on that map with those settings.

Re: Enhance "Join a Game"... & thoughts on Suggestions clean

PostPosted: Wed Jun 22, 2011 4:15 am
by JeopardyTempest
Or perhaps a "show duplicate games" button somewhere on the page/game if that does prove popular...



Thanks for the feedback so far guys, look forward to continued discussion :-)

Re: Enhance "Join a Game"... & thoughts on Suggestions clean

PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2012 9:21 am
by blakebowling
Done!