The site needs better front page organization

crpgnut - you are just plain wrong - news were always diverse.

Just look here - two random examples from the past:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070314004640/http://www.rpgwatch.com/
Tuesday - March 13, 2007

UFO: Extraterrestrials
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Loki
Piracy discussion
Dawn of Magic
Nightwatch
Bioshock art
…

https://web.archive.org/web/20100928194512/http://www.rpgwatch.com/

Tuesday - September 28, 2010
Deus Ex: HR
Elemental: War of Magic
Gog- article
Deathspank-Thongs of virtue
Age of Wonders trilogy
…

The non-pure-CRPG ratio was even higher.

Couch is just posting much more because more interesting stuff is going on.

… and you old lazy guys just can't follow

Like I said before in this thread I think the people that run this site are doing a great job. Anyone that thinks they can do a better surely can or should start their own site and see how easy it is to do a GREAT job and please everyone.

Couchpotato said:

Then I pity you crpgnut as half of those are RPG's and some have RPG elements. It must be nice to have a narrow minded view of what games to play.

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Unlike the news,here's an interesting tidbit: Of the 34 newsbits that are on the front page, 18 have zero comments and a stunning 28/34 have less than 5. I think I'll allow that to make my statement for me, but it probably won't sink in

Okay, that's enough reading/posting in this thread. I'm doing a terrible job of lurking. I need to be like the 94% and not the 6....

Funny you mention that as many new-bits for the last five years under previous news editors also had zero comments. Food for thought as they say.

Anyway I'm tired of taking abuse from certain older members who never change. I wont sit idle anymore either when this happens to me, or other staff members.

As stated before if you don't like our site your welcome to leave, and make your own. Then maybe you will see how you can't please everyone. It's not possible.

For all those members who write encouragements thank you as I appreciate it.

Update: I'm not against tags or changes my problem is the attitude of certain posters.

If you will allow me a short digression, regarding the "Union of Bitter Men".

1. The humble part: I didn't invent the "organization". It's from a Norwegian comic radio show, many years ago.

2. The regretful(?) part: When I used the term, I was in no way implying that any of the posters, especially crpgnut and Drithius were old, bitter men. That didn't cross my mind. I used the term solely as a hopefully funny (some may say desperate) way of saying that although I very much prefer the site as it is, I would not be severly disturbed if things changed. So, if anyone felt I was attacking them, I'm sorry. I wasn't.

pibbur who sometimes sees what he may have written a long time after he wrote them.

No complaints from me. Keep up the good work. (I thought I'd post this since my silence wouldn't necessarily be taken as support.)

I sympathize with the OP occasionally as some times Kickstarter updates or patches really have no substance and the front page sometimes moves fast (if you don't visit daily). Honestly though I prefer visiting this site to my kickstarter activity page since this has all that and more.

But really agree that its easy to scan for items of interest and you usually have at least 1 day to see posts on the front page and the really interesting updates linger in the recent comments area anyway.

I cannot say I want to inflict any additional work on the moderators as it is as they say its volunteer work and having done some forum administration/moderation before I think its great what they have done. I was starting to worry about the site before couch stepped up as it was noticeably slowing down at the time. So thanks couch for your work.

If I were to suggest an experimental system it might be an up/down voting system like reddit/dig/hacker news/slashdot but I don't think we have the content volume to support it and its probably a lot of work but has the benefit of pushing the work back on the visitors for moderation by and large. ( I sort of use the number of comments as a substitute )

I like the layout as it is, but I do agree sometimes things can get lost and bypassed unfairly. And all the new kickstarter stuff news items, well, it does get to be a bit much.

I would suggest a new section or category, of "hot news", which would be the biggest and most important news stories regarding rpgs. How this would be chosen is another wrinkle, but I'd say things like stories on the most hyped rpgs such as Witcher 3, Tides of Numenera, Divinity original sin (or whatever the new rpg Larian announces), Dragon Age Inquisition and so on would be suitable. Then there could be a link to click on if people only wanted to see the "hot news" items, and the regular format would still be the default for those who like the way it is now.

How this would work in practice - For example, there could be one news bit permanently posted at the top, "Hot news", with what is considered to be the biggest rpg news story of the week, then in the same news bit box, there would be a link saying- "To see other hot news items, click here".

This news item would of course change on a weekly basis, depending on whatever new big story came up. Or, if it was especially notable news, it could be kept in place for a couple weeks or longer.

As far as comments go, Couch is right. In the past we had just as many newsbits with 0 comments. If that is a measure to go by, I fail to see the point. A majority of our visitors don't go to our forums and just check out the front page. They don't comment. Comments are provided on a variety of games. I think there are also games being commented on that are not seen as pure CRPGs by some.

as far as I can tell, and I know its been mentionned before, the only real difference I see is that there are a lot more news post. Which in theory should be considered a pretty good thing! I guess when things changes it makes some people upset/uneasy.

As a side, but important note, I think all the staff has been doing a great job and I love all the news, previews, interviews and all!

With that said, I wouldn't be against a way to categorize some news. I dont really use the forums at all myself and just go by whatever news post/forum posts shows up on the main page 99% of the time. So I do end up missing things, especially if I don't visit the site for a day or two. I'm not much of a forum person so I find poking through a forum a bit tedious.

If it was just me though I wouldnt even really mention it…I AM lazy and enjoy the site anyway.

But since a majority of the members seem to be "silent", so I guess it is quite likely that they do as I do and just lurk the news and front page posts rather than the forums. If that is truly the case, then a little update would probably make the site more accessible /enjoyable/ useful for the silent lurkers which seem to be the case of a lot of users.

Is it necessary? I'm fairly sure it isn't, but it would probably be nice.

Now another question would be, how to make silent lurkers like me more involved? and find a way to get them to participate more…but I guess that'll be enough for now

Galaad said:

as far as I can tell, and I know its been mentionned before, the only real difference I see is that there are a lot more news post. Which in theory should be considered a pretty good thing! I guess when things changes it makes some people upset/uneasy.

As a side, but important note, I think all the staff has been doing a great job and I love all the news, previews, interviews and all!

With that said, I wouldn't be against a way to categorize some news.

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Thank you, Galaad.

And a positive tone changes everything, my friends. This was far more constructive. ^.^

This can perhaps easily added:

A new <News Menu> entry {All Non-Indie RPG news}

Which is equivalent to {All RPG-news} \ {All Indie-news}

Both sets are already implemented - see pic.
The difference of these two sets should be easy to query.

***
That said, IMHO ignoring Indie-stuff should be punished by the CRPG-gods

Couchpotato said:

Funny you mention that as many new-bits for the last five years under previous news editors also had zero comments. Food for thought as they say.

Anyway I'm tired of taking abuse from certain older members who never change. I wont sit idle anymore either when this happens to me, or other staff members.

As stated before if you don't like our site your welcome to leave, and make your own. Then maybe you will see how you can't please everyone. It's not possible.

For all those members who write encouragements thank you as I appreciate it.

Update: I'm not against tags or changes my problem is the attitude of certain posters.

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I don't like this attitude of :
"If you don't like it, then leave"

It's rude and unproductive. No matter the attitude of the poster, it makes for a negative view of the site.

Instead, it would be better to invite people like Drithius to help out if they wanted to.

Maybe they can devise a full category system and present it in a poll to see how many people would be happy with it for example.

Just saying that they should leave and create their own site is problematic as many of these 'older' posters are how the Watch got started and it would be a shame to lose these people.

Please note: I quoted you Couch because it's the first one that happened to be there when I opened the browser this morning, but I've seen other people say similar things. This is not direct criticism of you, but rather of that type of statement.

We have many categories for games that can be used to create different views such as the Indie page. However that goes much further than just filtering out news. It also filters articles and what you can search for in the games database. In this case it only gives indie games as a result. Also the gallery is filtered to only show screenshots and artwork from indie games.
But we are not going to implement a platitude of different sites. The only one I plan to add in the future is rpgdot.rpgwatch.com.
(although this will show the exact same thing as RPGWatch, but with the RPGDot layout and the old forums as static pages, for nostalgic reasons)

At the moment your forum account carries over to the front page. It is not used right now, but the idea is to do something similar as we had on RPGDot and allow you to filter your own news, by disabling the categories and/or games you don't want to see. It also makes it possible to highlight the news that has been added since your last visit, if we would like that.

As to Pladio's comment. I think there are many ways to say something and using terminology as 'crap' in relation to news posts isn't very constructive and is actually insulting. As crpgnut himself suggested a new site should be started that catered to his views of what is an RPG and what not, I suggested that he could be the one starting it as he is the only one who could determine the correct criteria for that.

...but with the RPGDot layout and the old forums as static pages, for nostalgic reasons...

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Oh yeah - that's big news for me - there is some great old content to find.

I was a bit shocked about the acrimony and aggression in this thread. Everyone take a deep breath?

I have no problem wiht the sites news flow as it is now. However I could imagine a tag system could be an improvement. For me less for filtering daily news, but I sometimes wished for such a system when reviewing or searching old news posts etc. Not sure if it's worth the extra effort for the news posters, though.

The best system for researching old RPGWatch articles?

Google - just type in:
site:RPGWatch.com [name of the game] [opt. topic1] [opt. topic2]…

I did that for more than 125 games in a very short time recently when searching for old reviews - works pretty good. Note that you can exclude with '-', too - example:

site:RPGWatch.com Skyrim review -Dragonborn

Myrthos said:

As to Pladio's comment. I think there are many ways to say something and using terminology as 'crap' in relation to news posts isn't very constructive and is actually insulting. As crpgnut himself suggested a new site should be started that catered to his views of what is an RPG and what not, I suggested that he could be the one starting it as he is the only one who could determine the correct criteria for that.

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Sorry the post got longer and less structured as I went along writing it.

Actually, the nut didn't actually say it was crap, just that they weren't CRPGs that interested him.

Your reply of finding people and creating a new site was actually not offensive at all in my opinion as you explained yourself.

It's more the type of :
"If you don't like it then leave" that I was talking about anyway.


About the news, I know Drithius said stuff about random junk and all that crap, and I am sure it is offensive, but going into it then should be discouraged.

If you look back at Drithius post, you can easily see that they weren't comments on the actual quality of the newsposts, but rather expressions.

For example, "random junk" and "all that crap". Of course he could have been more diplomatic about it, but I hate it when people scream these types of comments.

It reminds me of xenophobic comments you hear the far-right shout all the time to foreigners or to lefttists. "If you don't like it here then go away".

No, they should be allowed to voice their concerns, that's part of a forum.

… and what's the problem to formulate a service-question this way?

Hi Myrthos, some news-topics don't interest me so much. Do you think there's a way to implement an easy to use tag-filter system?

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I hate to tell adult people how to behave in social groups. This should be a naturalness.

Drithius said:

I posted about this elsewhere but - surprise, surprise - it got buried in a mountain of other topics.

As it stands right now, there are simply too many "News" posts for anyone to quickly find a topic of interest to them. It is not a news site if the only commentary being made is generally of the incendiary kind on the latest hot topic (because other relevant topics of possible interest to people are quickly buried with 0 comments).

The site needs to categorize and possibly even restrict front page posts. Do we really need Steam sales listed on the front page? Should Kickstarter projects in their last week really be lumped together in a giant wall of text with the latest Dragon Age preview? Does the latest batch of game reviews really need so much space on the front page? That is the gist of my complaint/concern.

So, please add categories for news stories so that it is easier to find topics of interest. And possibly less prominence for fluff news such as reviews and current sales. Because, as it stands right now, this is not RPGWatch but moreso '5-latest-hot-topics'Watch.

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Well, while it's not exactly like the question you posted, there was nothing offensive here...

It was only after sakichop's somewhat sarcastic comments that Drithius said things which could be considered insulting.

Yes, can we redesign the front page with only news that Drithius and Crpgnut are interested in. That way they won't have to actually look through the news titles.

For instance, there are 11 new news articles today and it took me 23 seconds to look at the titles and decide if I was interested in it or not.

You really can't expect people to invest that kind of time.

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So, no I still don't see the need for all the hostility ...