What's New: Mar 14

Features of Note

Improved Stacks - Out Now

After a couple weeks worth of delays, we've finally released our newly improved Stacks system!

Here's what's changed:

• Everything old is new again. Stacks are now tabular, somewhat like lists used to be on the old site, which makes it much easier to present and organize them. We've also completely redone the UI on Stack Edit Mode and the Create a New Stack pages to better optimize them.
• Sortable Stacks. You can now quickly sort Stacks by rank (ordered Stacks only), alphabetical order, release date, GameSpot's score, or your score, using the table headers.
• Copy and move. It's now possible to quickly copy or move games from one Stack to another.
• Shortcut to rate games. Stacks now prompt you with a shortcut to rate games.
• Fixed bug with converting Stacks between unordered and ordered. This has apparently been broken for some time, but not anymore!
• Fixed bugs with IE and saving Stacks. More bugs that have been around forever.
• Fixed bug that prevented you from saving an empty Stack. And a third long-lived bug squashed.

Let us know what you think of the new Stacks!

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.

• Eliminated a ton of server errors
• Made minor tweaks to site copy

They're awesome, and pretty much the same as the library from the old site. Keep up the fantastic work. :)

Well, sorry to rain on the parade, but there seem to be a lot of bugs there.

1. I have 152 games in the Games I Want stack. When I try to delete and save, it gives me an error saying you can't have more than 100 games on an ordered stack.

2. I created a new ordered stack called PSP Games. I added the 6 PSP games I own to this stack. However, the order in which I added them was random. I wanted to change the order within the stack to reflect my own priorities, but I am not able to figure out how to go about doing that. It seems like the only order possible is the order in which the games are entered into the stack. This needs to be fixed.

3. The GS score has not been populated fully. And in some cases, the GS score listed is just plain wrong. For example, Descent 3 is listed as 4.2 when the actual GS score in 9.

4. I now have -12 Ratings & Reviews. I had a lot of ratings, which I went back and deleted. Now the total rating count is -12. Needs to be fixed. (Not a stacks issue though.)

5. I still cannot save an empty stack. Is it possible that I didn't get the rollout that everybody else seems to have gotten?

Are these issues going to be addressed? There are other bugs, but I am not listing them for brevity. Again, sorry to rain on your parade, but I still prefer the old fully functional library system.

edit: A lot of the game names are still incorrect. For example, I don't know what Wario Land Advance: Youki no Otakara is. I assume that is Wario Land 4, which is where it takes me when I click on it, but that is not what is displayed on the Games I Want stack.

@anarayan: Thanks for the feedback! Some responses below:

1. Ordered Stacks can currently only store a maximum of 100 games, though this is something we'll be changing in the future. Do you know how you were able to add so many games to your Stack?
2. You should be able to change your Stack's order by adjusting the rank number manually, or by using the little up or down arrows (which, admittedly, are a bit confusing as they currently increase or decrease the rank number, not alter the position in the list). We'll be making a second pass to this part of it in the future, and add in the ability to click and drag games as well.
3. Thanks for pointing this out. We'll look into it!
4. We'll look into this as well.
5. Which Stack are you unable to save as empty?

If you can report any other issues you'll find, we'll work on those as well. Thanks!

As for game names, this is a side effect of the games migration we did when we launched the new site. Wario Land Advance: Youki no Otakara is the Japanese name of Wario Land 4, and it seems like whatever version you had in your list on the old site was somehow converted to this version on the new site. I'll see if there's anything we can do about this (this has affected everyone in one way or another), but in the meanwhile you can also remove and re-add games to fix this if you want.

It looks like there are multiple entries for a number of games. I think when my list was converted from the old tabular format to the new stack format, items got duplicated. Take the entry for "The Last of Us" for instance. The top entry doesn't have a GS score, and when I clicked on it, I was taken to the game's page. When I clicked on the little "+" to add the game, the check box (indicating being a part of my stack) was not filled in. When I clicked on the box and added it to my stack, it duplicated the entry and added the second one, with the correct score.

Check out Wolfenstien, three entries, one with the wrong date.

This occurs a lot in my stack for some reason.

On a positive note, the changes implemented are a huge step forward in the right direction! Thanks!

@harry_james_pot: Thanks! And thanks for your patience with us while we worked on this as well!

@jrt1979: Thanks for the feedback! This looks like the same problem that @anarayan mentioned above that he was experiencing above. I'll see what we can do, but as you discovered, you can also correct the problem by removing and re-adding games to your stacks for now, if you like.

No problem. :) Even though a lot of users were upset, some of us were still sure that you guys will get everything fixed. The new site has come a really long way since what I've seen in the closed beta back in August.

I just want to note that you still cannot add directly to the default 'games I own' stack from any of the gamespaces, like you can with the playing, want to play and finished stacks.

As the 'Own' stack is the only one I actively use, it would be helpful if you could just add to it from the gamespace.

@LarkAnderson

Thanks for your quick response, Lark!

The way I got 152 games onto the Games I Want stack is odd. I already had around 140 games on the games I want library before the site migrated. It seems like GS has just copied that library to this stack during the transition. However that's not the end of it. I have been adding to that stack by going to the individual game page, clicking the follow/unfollow button (the white '+' symbol) and then checking the add to the Games I Want check mark since the migration and it kept on adding to that stack without giving errors.

Now however, I cannot delete any game individually from the stack menu because the number of games in that stack is higher than 100 even if I delete a few games. I will have to delete 53 or more games for it to save, and I don't want to do that in one go because I might make some mistakes.

You guys are correct about duplicate entries. I went to Wario Land 4, and checked the "I Want to play this" check mark, and it duplicated the entry, this time with the correct name, making it my 153rd game in the stack. I also was able to reverse the process by unchecking that check mark, when it deleted the newly created 153rd entry (but not the old one with the wrong name which is still present and bugging me).

And the above two paragraphs show my predicament of why I am unable to delete ANY game from my Games I Want stack.

Secondly, I got the error on saving an empty stack. I recently bought a Wii, and some games associated with it, so I thought it would be cool to create a Wii Games I Own stack. I clicked create new stack button, entered information pertaining to stack, DID NOT ADD ANY GAMES TO IT, then tried to save, and it gave me an error. (Basically the red bar just under the address bar of the browser saying the stack is empty.)

I am going to experiment with the method you mentioned to change the intrinsic ordering within an ordered stack. I will comment on it once I get it done, but I must say the website is extremely slow when editing.

edit: I am not able to adjust the intrinsic rank manually. I click on edit the stack, delete the rank inside the edit, change the rank, and when I click elsewhere, it reverts back to the original rank. And I don't have the little arrows you talked about. I just don't see them.

edit2: Actually, I was able to edit the rank manually by changing the numbers. I had to save and exit to see it. But I still don't see the little arrows you're talking about though...

This is such an amazing improvement first of all. I do have a question though. In the 'My Score' column is my score for that game meant to be displayed? Currently every game in the stack has the 'RATE' link.

Yes.

I really like the GDC coverage page. It's easier to parse than the home page.

Gonna try this stacks system.

I don't know where to report this but something is really wrong with the site. I can't post thread to address the problems because that's also buggy, it keeps saying 404: Not Found. So i'm sorry but i'm going to post the issues here, hopefully someone will see them:

I don't know if it's just me, but when someone replies to a thread it doesn't go on the top of the forum page and the number of posts that are shown does not match the number of posts in a thread.

(I'm trying to post screenshots of the bug but the images are not being displayed for some reason.)

Another problem is when i go to my profile i can't scroll down, i only see the section where i can post on my wall and then there is nothing else below that.

All this started happening a couple of hours ago, the site was fine before that. :/

Edit: Everything is fixed now.

I have found a glitch with custom stacks. If you delete a custom stack, it will disappear from your profile, but the system will think the stack is still there. The stacks tab will show the number of custom stacks you have. Looking at your profile Lark, the stacks tab indicates you have 4 custom stacks. Mine indicates that I have 7, but I really only have 2. I did have 5 others, but those have been deleted. It should also be mentioned that if I try to recreate one of those 5 stacks with the same name, it will give me an error that a stack with that name already exists.

I'm also experiencing that review number issue as well. My profile shows that I currently have -2 reviews. I kind of understand how this happened. When the site changed, the scores we applied were brought over, but our profile didn't count them; the tab indicated we had 0 reviews. I had 34 brought over and deleted all 34. So it's not simply subtracting 1 for each review deleted either.

@dab198: We'll look into ways of bringing other Stacks into our gamespace pages.

@anarayan: Ok, that makes sense it was caused by a migration issue. We've actually forced all of the core Stacks (the default ones) into being unordered by default, so you should now be able to make changes to that long list and manage it.

As for the issue with games like Wario Land, we can make a manual pass through Stacks like this to fix for now. We're working on a longer-term fix for everyone else as well.

Stacks can be saved if they're empty, but it seems like we missed the case where you try to create an empty Stack. I'll file an issue for this one, but in the meanwhile the workaround is: create your Stack and add a game to it, save it, then remove the game and resave it.

Lastly, you don't see these arrows when you mouse over the rank field?

@mitchmacca92: Thanks! As for the ratings not showing up, this is something that we're working on fixing now.

@Willy105: Thanks!

@Blabadon: Please let us know what you think!

@CyberLips: Glad to hear everything is resolved!

@Kuromino: Thanks for finding this! I'll file an issue to get it looked at.

@LarkAnderson:

Lark, you can check for yourself. I don't have the arrows on my edit stacks page.

Also, I have a bunch of other bugs and nifty enhancements to get around them while editing which I can post. I was wondering, should I do it here or will you create a new thread for March 21st? Thanks.

edit: On second thoughts, it became an unordered stack when you forced all migration stacks to be unordered. So that might explain it.

edit2: Actually belay that. My ordered stack doesn't have the arrows or the numbering either. I used to find the numbers, but now they've disappeared.