A conundrum

[kane_magus]

If I leave "Early Access Products" selected in my settings for the Steam discovery queue, then most of the games that show up in my discovery queue are Early Access games (I refuse to refer to "Early Access games" as "EA games" for what should be obvious reasons), which sucks because I've long ago stopped buying Early Access games. At most, I might Wishlist an Early Access game if it looks interesting, but only when/if it actually releases "properly"[1] will I consider buying it, because about half the time when I've bought Early Access shit in the past, it ended up just being utterly abandoned[2] without ever becoming anything resembling a full, complete game. (EDIT 2) I turned the "Early Access Products" option back on and ran through another queue, just for the hell of it, and literally every game in the queue was an Early Access game. (/EDIT 2)

On the other hand, if I deselect "Early Access Products" in the settings for the discovery queue, then the overall average quality of the games that show up in my discovery queue takes a noticeable nosedive. That said, I know there are games out there that have been completed and aren't total shit, because I see them when I'm just browsing regular-ass Steam. It's just that so very few of them are showing up in my discovery queue, in favor of asset flip shit and "meme games" and porn/hentai shit and the like.

Oh, and also, I'm still getting porn/hentai games in my queue, even though I have "Adult Only Sexual Content" deselected in my overall Steam Store settings (as there's no option for it specifically in the discovery queue settings). I think that has more to do with some such games not being properly put into the AO category, though, despite being porn/hentai. Not sure if that's a "publisher/developer being scuzzy" issue or a "Steam being negligent" issue or both of those issues combined. (EDIT) I think the biggest culprits are the porn/hentai games that have been "cleaned up" for Steam release so that they're technically not porn/hentai games, despite obviously being porn/hentai games, but which then have easily accessible "restoration" patches (usually available in posts by the developers themselves right there in the Steam forum for the game) that allow them to circumvent being labeled as an AO game by Steam, and, thus, show up in my discovery queue, despite my having turned that option the fuck off. (/EDIT)

[1] - Not that the arbitrary "released" distinction actually means anything, anymore, because far too many "released" games are still being actively developed (too often to the detriment of the game in question), even after leaving "Early Access."

[2] - Conversely, even if a "properly released" game stops being actively developed (after it has reached a state that I, personally, would consider to be a complete, fully functional game), far too many morons on the Steam forums or in Steam reviews for the game will stupidly bleat about how the game was "abandoned," so in this case, I guess it's a matter of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Comments

[owsf2000]

Regarding the cleaned up games, that's probably a good chunk of what's causing that to pop up.

You could try adjusting your queue to remove the most obvious of the tags that might be causing these things to pop up. "Hentai" and "Sexual Content" would be good starters. You may not get suggestions for some games you might like due to that which is why I didn't also include "Nudity" as that would have gotten rid of Witcher 3 and others. (Seems "Nudity" gets added to any game with a person in a swimsuit...)

That would probably clear up a bulk of them at least. From there take a look at other tags you feel you can safely axe based on any suggestions that make it through.

You may lose some recommendations as I said but seriously we have limited time for the massive amount of games being churned out. If something's REAL good it'll probably make its way on to your radar at some point... and by then it might even be on sale! Until then might as well just stop worrying about it unless you got 100% completion on the games you already owned amirite? I say this as someone who has games bought from years ago that still aren't started. X_X

Regarding the ignoring of various tags, I just did a test of a few and it seems to work fine. I was probably trying to add tags incorrectly in the past since now it correctly shows me what I'm ignoring. Since I have zero interest in anything multiplayer these days[1] I went ahead and ignored "MMO" "Massive MMO" "Co-op" "Asynchronous Co-op" (the 4 vs 1 type games) as well as a bunch of other similar tags. The next few queues I did at least seemed to be void of those fucking things. I'd go further with removing "FPS" but we got the lulz crowd adding those to every visual novel they find. While I'm currently exhausted on those (Still haven't completed all of Kanon or the Higurashi series) I do pick up some now and then if they look half way interesting and are on sale. They're great for days I just feel like lying back in bed and reading along rather than trying to complete some fucked up high energy platformer like Touhou Lunar Nights. ^_^; (A touhou game I'd recommend to you. Metroidvania type mixed with bullet hell. You'll understand by the time you get to the later bosses.)

Yeah, you may lose recommendations for games you might like, but if enough people just started ignoring tags properly, maybe enough devs would get pissed off enough at players mistagging their games for the 'lulz' to make steam implement a proper tag system that can't be fucked up by bad actors. In particular that system I mentioned before where the devs can pick the tags they believe suit their game on release, and players can have an alternate set that players can turn on/off.

Hm. This turned into a bigger rant than I originally planned.


[1] Aardwolf being the only exception and that's because I can ignore most of the players as I go about playing it)

[kane_magus]

My current list of blocked tags are "Massively Multiplayer," "MOBA," "MMORPG," "Match 3," "Sports," "eSports," "Card Game," "Trading Card Game," "Asynchronous Multiplayer," and "Warhammer 40K." For some asinine reason, Steam only lets you ignore up to ten tags, and those are my ten, at least for now.

Actually... *checks* ...it's just for the general storefront preferences that they limit you to ten tags, for whatever dumb reason. For the discovery queue settings, they do let you ignore more than ten. For that, my ignored tags are the ones above along with "Racing" and "Clicker."

Also, ignoring the "Massively Multiplayer" and "MMORPG" tags still does not fully prevent MMO games from showing up in my queue. For the most part, ignoring tags does a decent job of hiding unwanted shit, but it's still not perfectly honored.

As for tags like "Sexual Content" and "Nudity," those would hide games like Leisure Suit Larry, so that's why I don't have those ignored. As much as it sucks and as much as I complain about it, I'd rather have false negatives show up than for potential positives to be unduly hidden. I'd rather that Steam would just crack down more on the "cleaned up" porn/hentai games by categorizing them as AO like they actually should be, but that'll likely never happen.

[owsf2000]

On a separate note, regarding asset flip games, I feel people should look a bit deeper into whether it falls into the definition given by the link you gave or not.

A game made with an rpgmaker or similar engine by itself isn't going to be shovelware. Even if it's using pre-bought graphics, it can still be a great game if the devs are focusing on story and putting some effort into customizing it. Koby and I use to do that when we were working on the long abandoned OW!RPG decades ago.

Granted that's also why it never really got anywhere near close to being done even with the premade graphics sets, sound effects, etc. We were trying to extend the base engine by using it in creative ways in the battle system, map system, triggers, etc.

I guess my real point here is that way too often people immediately bitch about a game costing more than 2 bucks if it dares to use bought assets. They recognize that fucking tree and they're out for blood, essentially. Figuratively. I hope.

I guess I take more of an offense on that, and why I wouldn't ignore the asset flip tag, since I do have most rpg makers, the pixel game maker, and at least one or two Visual Novel engines bought on steam. One day I might actually try to use them too. >_> I do occasionally buy assets when they go on sale just for that purpose as well.

This is not to say some people are doing exactly what the website describes however. Part of why they do that is to game the steam card mechanic to make their real money that way - something they were able to do easily when Steam had their green light system in place for approving games. You pay 100 bucks then can put as many games as you want on greenlight to be approved. People quickly figured out how to game that system to have bots approve shit "games". I think it's gotten a bit better these days now that it costs, iirc, 100 dollars to put a game on steam period. Makes their card abuse practice less profitable at the very least.

[kane_magus]

I get your point, but at the same time, if I see a game in my discovery queue that looks exactly like a hundred other games that I've already clicked past, particularly if that game has a "Mostly Negative" review rating specifically because it apparently is just yet another zero-effort cookie cutter game, then I'm not going to lose too much sleep over missing out on a potential GOTY by clicking past it as well, because if it really is as good as all that, I'll probably find out about it some other way eventually, like you said in your other comment. It's usually the Unity/Unreal engine games (like those Digital Suicide games that Jim Sterling got into a tussle over a few years ago) that are the most egregious offenders, I've found.

I went on a spree of buying every RPG Maker game I could get my hands on several years ago (started with a Humble Bundle thing, I think, though I've bought some others separately since then, on their own merits), and given that I've actually played maybe 1% of those ones at this point, whenever I see newer RPG Maker games showing up in my discovery queue nowadays, it just kind of makes my eyes glaze over entirely, unless it really stands out in some way. (Especially since most of the ones I've seen lately have been those weird "single-room" games where you just sit there and talk to a single NPC through a dialogue tree for the entire game, and that's the whole "game.")

And I was the same way as far as buying the RPG Maker applications themselves (except for the most recent one[s?]) and things like the original version of GameMaker Studio and downloading free stuff like Adventure Game Studio and the like, but I've spent a combined grand total of maybe an hour or two on any of them at this point, and the seeming likelihood of me ever doing more than that is pretty low. :/