Filtering out 'Bad' or unknown games

[Fuchur]

I still believe that the idea of attributing automatically a "quality" to every game on this site has no sense :
Is the quality of chess better than that of skat (a card game quite popular in Germany) ? What would be the meaning of a sentence like "the quality of chess is better than the quality of skat" ? Would this be helpful to anyone ?

[FSKFSK]

You can't have "search by quality", because everyone is going to have their own subjective definition of quality.

You can search for "popularity", which is loosely correlated with quality, but not perfectly.

You also can search for "award winning games" as one of the tags.

I usually search for whatever tag I'm looking for, and sort by popularity. I also have it exclude games I've played before when I search.

If you don't want "chess" to show up in your searches, play one game of chess, and then have search "exclude games you've played before".

[tbhp]

You can't have "search by quality", because everyone is going to have their own subjective definition of quality.

You can search for "popularity", which is loosely correlated with quality, but not perfectly.

You also can search for "award winning games" as one of the tags.

I usually search for whatever tag I'm looking for, and sort by popularity. I also have it exclude games I've played before when I search.

It would be easy to allow people to give ratings and be able to sort games by it.

Your argument doesn't make much sense, because you say you don't want to sort by quality because it's subjective, but you are okay with being able to sort by popularity or award winning even though those are subjective metrics as well.

It makes more sense to want to sort games by what people thought of them, than by how many people are playing them.

Every other artform has quality ratings. Imagine if everyone just watched movies randomly without any way to know how highly regarded those movies are. It would be like everyone is living in their own bubble.

[Suoivax]

You can't have "search by quality", because everyone is going to have their own subjective definition of quality.

You can search for "popularity", which is loosely correlated with quality, but not perfectly.

You also can search for "award winning games" as one of the tags.

I usually search for whatever tag I'm looking for, and sort by popularity. I also have it exclude games I've played before when I search.

It would be easy to allow people to give ratings and be able to sort games by it.

Your argument doesn't make much sense, because you say you don't want to sort by quality because it's subjective, but you are okay with being able to sort by popularity or award winning even though those are subjective metrics as well.

It makes more sense to want to sort games by what people thought of them, than by how many people are playing them.

Every other artform has quality ratings. Imagine if everyone just watched movies randomly without any way to know how highly regarded those movies are. It would be like everyone is living in their own bubble.

how are "popularity" and "award winning" subjective? most played game on the site is by definition the most popular, if a game has won an award (SDJ) then its considered award winning.

[tbhp]

how are "popularity" and "award winning" subjective? most played game on the site is by definition the most popular, if a game has won an award (SDJ) then its considered award winning.

Awards are based on subjective opinions just like users ratings. The decision to play a game is also a subjective choice.

I don’t understand how someone can claim to not care about quality ratings because it’s subjective, and at the same time appear to be interested in awards and popularity metrics. It doesn’t make sense and feels like the person isn’t properly explaining what their problem with quality ratings is, exactly.

[dschingis27]

It might be interesting that BGA starts an algorithm similar to that an youtube : If you like games A, B and C and hate games X and Y and there are some other players on this site with the same pattern which also like games D and E, than BGA could propose you these games.

This already exists! In the Games menu, the 2nd panel, below "Play again", is called "Our selection for you" and I am almost sure that is based on some kind of algorithm you describe. Also in the Play now area, you get Personal recommendations shoved in your face all the time.

Also I think the "Most popular" panel is really ordered from left to right by popularity, meaning some combination of number of created games in some given time and typical RT game length. So that Lucky Numbers would need many more created games than Terraforming Mars to be most popular.

[lefalaf]

"Our selection for you"

In my experience, this isn't what you think.

Currently mine shows the same games, in the same order, that the By Relevance, and By Popularity sorting does. And the 3rd item I hate and only played once or twice on here, Catan.

In the very near past, say earlier this year(?), it used to be a list of 4 unplayed games that tended to be not to my liking - lots of heavy war games that I was avoiding, but as I got around to trying them, they dropped off the list and another random title took its place. At some point it switched to just the most popular / most marketed games.

So I don't know what they are doing, but there doesn't seem to be anything fancy behind the scenes, based on my experience.

[tbhp]

Also, the problem with the youtube system of giving you suggestions based on similar interests is that not only is it obviously going to be very imperfect, it's also not good for culture, because it encourages people to stay in their comfort zone and only listen to the recommendations of people who are supposedly like them. This also creates a sort of fallacious reinforcing circle where everyone just plays what others are playing and you lose sight of is anyone actually appreciating the games or are people just copying what other people are doing.

It's a much more healthy mindset to look at what people in general thought of a game, then from there decide what might fit your tastes, or alternatively, maybe make you interested in something you initially wouldn't have considered, thus leading to expanding your tastes.

[SquireKeladry]

Every other artform has quality ratings. Imagine if everyone just watched movies randomly without any way to know how highly regarded those movies are. It would be like everyone is living in their own bubble.

Yes there are plenty of quality ratings for movies but when you go to a cinema, they don't usually have reviews for all the movies they're currently showing available in the lobby where you buy your movie ticket & popcorn. It's normal to have to seek out this information elsewhere if you care about other people's rating of a movie/etc.

Any game on here that has a BGG page, has a link to its BGG page on its game page here. It's really quite easy to check what other people think of it, if you care about that. If you're not aware, you can also use BGG to sort all the games on BGA by BGG ranking, number of ratings or highest average rating. And BGG's game pages also link back to the game on here. So I really don't think BGA needs to go to the trouble of duplicating information that is easily available on BGG. Maybe BGA could make it a bit more obvious that there is great integration with BGG for anyone who cares about ratings and reviews but duplicating BGG's info just for people who are too lazy to click a few links would be a big waste of effort imo.

Here you go - a list of games on BGA sorted by their ranking on BGG. To get back to BGA, you can just go to the web links section of whichever individual game you decide you want to try next and find the link for BGA.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefami ... &sort=rank


Edited to add:
BGA used to have a place where you could see how many tables of every game were active at that time, divided into real time and turn based per game. I'm pretty sure it generally lined up with what you would get when you sort via popularity for all games. (I remember Wingspan and Azul regularly being at the top, and Arc Nova & TFM weren't on BGA at the time) I still liked looking though it through and would like it if it came back. Unfortunately this section disappeared when they redid the games in progress page a few years ago and that specific info is only available to developers now. I'm not the only one who misses this though - there's a suggestion about it in the bugs forum that you can vote up/support here: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=114345

Something that I think would be really useful is the ability to tag a game with "not interested" (don't suggest it to me again). Having the option to do this would be much more helpful to me than BGA assigning quality ratings to games or even getting the section mentioned above back. If you'd like this too, support this suggestion: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=19867

[Meeplelowda]

Any game on here that has a BGG page, has a link to its BGG page on its game page here. It's really quite easy to check what other people think of it, if you care about that. If you're not aware, you can also use BGG to sort all the games on BGA by BGG ranking, number of ratings or highest average rating. And BGG's game pages also link back to the game on here. So I really don't think BGA needs to go to the trouble of duplicating information that is easily available on BGG. Maybe BGA could make it a bit more obvious that there is great integration with BGG for anyone who cares about ratings and reviews but duplicating BGG's info just for people who are too lazy to click a few links would be a big waste of effort imo.

Here you go - a list of games on BGA sorted by their ranking on BGG. To get back to BGA, you can just go to the web links section of whichever individual game you decide you want to try next and find the link for BGA.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamefami ... &sort=rank

Thanks for this. I've never been a BGG power user, so I wasn't aware of this. I primarily use BGG for the wisdom of the crowd of what player count is best for a game before I set up a turn-based game for the first time.

As for everything else you said: 10/10. No notes.