[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

  • I'm Share-Locked
  • Administrator
  • Posts: 1,396
  • Trades: 222
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #525, on October 3rd, 2017, 11:10 PM »
FIX: 'add to tradables/wishlist' buttons were visible to guests... Buttons didn't do anything, of course, but I still needed to hide 'em.

Note: I'm back from a visit to the ER, my right eye is currently out of order (as well as most of that half of my face, isn't it fun). Having only one eye under the hand (hand?!) makes it difficult to type on a keyboard or watch my monitor altogether, so expect a slowdown for a couple of weeks. The fix above only took a line of code to add, it was shorter to fix than to type this.

/u/humpaaa

  • Full Member
  • ▶ ¦ Yep
  • Posts: 190
  • Trades: 10

[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

  • I'm Share-Locked
  • Administrator
  • Posts: 1,396
  • Trades: 222
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #527, on October 4th, 2017, 11:12 AM »
I'm doing a bit better this morning but I still have short periods where my vision is too blurry to type.

FIX: Offer previews (on the offer list) were showing all items in an offer even when the offer was in 'accepted' status. It should only have shown the accepted items, of course. (Also used the opportunity to fix warnings that were showing up for unchosen items in these situations.)
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #528, on October 8th, 2017, 04:53 PM »Last edited on November 16th, 2017, 11:18 AM
NEW: if a game was added to a bundle before it was on Steam, once it gets added to Steam, it should automatically show the old bundle listed in its game page, as an 'unconfirmed' item (i.e. possibly greenlit but no guaranteed keys.)
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #529, on October 8th, 2017, 11:18 PM »
NEW: Game tags now show short descriptions for confusing tags. I wrote them myself[1] and I'm not much of a player, so apologies for any approximations. The description is also shown in individual game pages. I'm also now showing the number of games that fit a tag.[2]
 1. Please feel free to suggest more descriptions and/or fix mine!
 2. Not on the tag list, though... The query takes 10 seconds to execute and I'm neither interested in caching it, nor in adding an index for it. All I can say is that the 'Action' tag is really, really useless, with over 25% of all games carrying it. And the Indie tag is even worse -- a third of the games use it. And probably much more if you dismiss DLCs & non-games.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #530, on October 10th, 2017, 06:01 PM »
NEW: In bundle and offer pages, if a game is found to be a VR exclusive (i.e. won't run without a VR headset), it will now be indicated with a clear little 'VR ONLY' icon.

Please note that due to technology limitations (?), not all VR-only games are tagged as such. Over time, I hope this improves.

sillythings

  • Newbie
  • Posts: 2
  • Trades: 3
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #531, on October 10th, 2017, 07:53 PM »
Had a laugh reading through the descriptions. Why in the world is Lara Croft even a tag? And why is Shadowrun: Dragonfall one of the games tagged with it, but Lara Croft GO isn't?

[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

  • I'm Share-Locked
  • Administrator
  • Posts: 1,396
  • Trades: 222
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #532, on October 10th, 2017, 09:40 PM »
Quote from sillythings on October 10th, 2017, 07:53 PM
Had a laugh reading through the descriptions. Why in the world is Lara Croft even a tag? And why is Shadowrun: Dragonfall one of the games tagged with it, but Lara Croft GO isn't?
Most tags are created by Steam users. The more people use a certain tag, the more likely it is to show up in the game description.
That's why the list of tags constantly evolves. There are about 80 new game tags these days that aren't listed at Barter, including the dreaded 'VR Only' which I had to rewrite my scraper for in order to pinpoint these games.
Shadowrun was probably a joke-tag, it was actually removed later (you can't see it on the Steam store), so it'll shortly disappear from LT's too.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #533, on October 13th, 2017, 10:36 PM »
NEW: Many new things actually, I worked like crazy on the site these last couple of days, but mostly on this new feature: developer & publisher data.

The full list is here: https://lestrades.com/studios/ (there are over 10k entries, so I hope to add pagination & sorting at some point. Sorry for the ugly UI, I was more focused on building the feature than making it look great.)

On most games (*they need to be Steam and not DLCs or junk*), you'll now have a 'Studio' link, with clickable developer & publisher names.
Let's imagine you're looking at an anime game, and you'd like to see if there's a chance it'll be bundled soon.
For instance, let's take a look at 'Forget me not', a game currently at a nice discount on Steam.
I click on the publisher link, AGM PLAYISM: https://lestrades.com/studio/995/

What does it say?
"48 games released by this studio. 27% bundled so far.
Last seen bundled: Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, 2 months ago."

Oh, so that publisher got a game in a Humble Monthly recently. You'll recognize some of their other games as having been bundled at Humble over the last few years (Astebreed, Mitsurugi, Kero Blaster...). Looking at release dates, it becomes quickly obvious that the publisher usually doesn't like bundling games, but will occasionally bundle a recent game (e.g. Mitsurugi was released 2014 and bundled the same year). The 'Momodora' series has been bundled before, so it's not new.
Anyway, considering that only 27% of their catalog got bundled so far, my conclusion is that it's unlikely for 'Forget me not' to be bundled in the near future, despite its top discount (which usually suggests imminent bundling.)

Another example... Emerald City Confidential is in my wishlist. Chances of ever being bundled?
Developed by Wadjet Eye Games, published by PlayFirst.
Let's click Wadjet Eyes (sometimes, developers decide whether they'll be bundled; mostly it's the publisher though.)
Bad luck: no bundling in over a year, but only 2 games unbundled. One of them is Shardlight, their most recent game; indicating that it's very likely to be bundled within a year, unless Wadjet changed their policy. (Probably bundled when their next game is out, as promotional work.)
What about Emerald..? Oh, bugger, it's the only game not published by Wadjet. Directly from the Wadjet page, I can click the publisher name, PlayFirst, and see that it released many games, but bundled 0% of them.
Conclusion: nope, no chance in Hell that this game is getting bundled anytime soon. (Worse, it's basically from the 'back catalog' of that publisher, meaning it's never even on sale. Hasn't been in years.)

/u/humpaaa

  • Full Member
  • ▶ ¦ Yep
  • Posts: 190
  • Trades: 10
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #534, on October 13th, 2017, 10:52 PM »
This is neat!
I often look up devs / publishers on steam, this makes that process alot easier, and provides additional data on an easy to grasp platform!

[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

  • I'm Share-Locked
  • Administrator
  • Posts: 1,396
  • Trades: 222
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #535, on October 13th, 2017, 11:31 PM »
Yeah, that was the idea... I wanted to do that from day 1 (but had to implement BVG features that were more urgent)[1], because I keep checking publishers to see if a game I want is likely to be bundled. Because most of this can be automated, I took it upon myself to write a studio scraper (which was hellish because for some reason the database kept populating improperly; the current one seems to work fine but I'm not 100% happy with it), and then write a couple functions to evaluate future bundle chances.
 1. No doubt BVG will also copy my studio database idea within the next few weeks, like it has done for quite a lot of LT features so far... :whistle: The fact that LT originally took its cue from BVG is only because the community asked for a straight-up replacement when BVG was dying; I don't really know BVG's excuse for taking my ideas, ah ah. I mean, I'm not going anywhere!
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #536, on October 14th, 2017, 02:25 PM »
FIX: the 'Skip' feature on match lists was broken and could only hold up to 2 different users. (I was using an array_flip() function where I should have used array_keys(). Rookie mistake. Okay, maybe not rookie but...)
Sorry about that-- I only just realized it, and no one ever reported it.

NEW: this was also added last night, but after I announced the feature-- on game pages, if a dev/publisher has more than one games on Steam, the number of games will be shown next to their name. This will save you clicking a name hoping to find another game from a developer whose game you like... ;)
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #537, on October 14th, 2017, 07:25 PM »
NEW: Increased maximum comment length to ~1000 characters, instead of ~250. Gotta stay ahead of Twitter, eh! :lol:
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #538, on October 17th, 2017, 08:47 AM »
I've changed a tiny detail in offer lists, where ratios used to be done 'à la barter', with the tradable & wishlist icons listed separately along with their numbers. Now I'm showing a 'ratio' logo, basically, then the ratio in the "x : y" format used everywhere else on the site. It looks better, it's cleaner, it's shorter (which is good when you're viewing offers on mobile), and it's more consistent.

Question: which icon do you prefer to represent ratios? I'm going for ♎ right now (libra = google it, it's fun), but I could also go for 📈 (charts icon). The latter is more pleasing to the eye, but probably less relevant.
Posted: October 17th, 2017, 12:44 AM

I forgot there's also the ratio icon in the sorting dropdown... (the shamrock)
Wondering which is best. I need to harmonize this. Opinions?

/u/humpaaa

  • Full Member
  • ▶ ¦ Yep
  • Posts: 190
  • Trades: 10