/gamergatehq/ - GamerGate Headquarters

Anon, your work is mindblowing and impressive. It's great as shit and you deserve a pat on the head.

My question is : how is it different from review aggregators like based gamer ? I know the site is kinda controversial amongst GG, but it allows for all the same stuff as yours (except posting images in the comments, and your categorization system which seems very vast).

I'm not saying BG is better/worse, I'm just always thinking that centralization somewhat is preferable. Having several sites that offer similar, if not identical, features, makes it more difficult to spread them and make them "catch on". That is happening with places like sealion.club, you have numerous little twitter-alternatives like that and it makes it difficult to make it go big.

Your version looks kinda better than BG, I feel, but I'm just worried having too many places to do the same thing wouldn't overall kill them all.

>>320548

As far as the news aggregator is concerned, you're able to discuss the quality of the articles being posted, which in turn affects the site's score. From there, the site's score affects where the site shows up in the news aggregator. Which means, a site that has a low score and a high completion rate on that score will show up before smaller sites that may be slower to report on news, giving them more traffic. A site with high score completion rate and a good score will show up more often.

The news also moderately affects the score of the game. For games that are not released, it gives you a sort of "preview score" that hints at if the game is going to be good or not. And, since the data is logged, you can see how the hype from the news of the game affected the actual game. So you can clearly see if a game was overhyped or underhyped before release.

It also has deep freeze integration and you can easily see sites that have ethical problems and head to Deep Freeze easily.

Things are designed to work together on Game Sense in ways other sites don't. It's also designed to give you much more information than just a numerical score, as well as to help you find specific things about a game without having to crawl through a lot of reviews that don't talk about what you're interested in.

>>320547

white background sucks. Is there a dark mode?

Are you auto-filtering usernames like ZoeQuinn/Anita/spacekatgal?

Are you relying on beta testers to begin establishing baseline scores, or have oyu thought about jumpstarting the system with either a baseline ELO middle score or borrowing review values from another site like Metacritic and letting them adjust organically from there?

what longterm plans have you made or are willing to make with publishers/studios if your userbase passes the tipping point for sustainability?

What measures do you have in place to un-cuck a popular but bad reviewer that goes full-SJW down the road?

might visit the site later, have a meeting in 10

>>320550

I see. To me it feels your site focuses on a "community" drive, whereas BG tries to be more of a "professional-looking" actual news site…

I think it's something that should be actually clarified and pushed. Maybe contacting BG and discuss with them about your own site/work could help showcase the variety of this whole thing.

>>320551

Personal opinions :

Filtering usernames or any such thing would be dumb.

And if a reviewer goes full-SJW, that's fine too. Retards are allowed to have a voice, even a shitty one. If they find their audience, what matters is that the audience is given more diversity of thought and criticism than just "boobs are evil".

>>320551

>white background sucks. Is there a dark mode?

No dark mode, yet.

>Are you relying on beta testers to begin establishing baseline scores, or have oyu thought about jumpstarting the system with either a baseline ELO middle score or borrowing review values from another site like Metacritic and letting them adjust organically from there?

Everything starts at a 5 baseline, but it will quickly move based on user reviews. After it gets enough reviews, it'll settle in to where it's supposed to be.

>what longterm plans have you made or are willing to make with publishers/studios if your userbase passes the tipping point for sustainability?

The plan is to add a soft serve system where you can promote individual games on the site that will be open to everyone. I would like to avoid direct marketing from publishers or developers at all costs. The plan is to add features to the site people will want to pay for. I do not want Game Sense to depend on traditional income streams. For example, the Amazon Affiliate ads basically just pull in the top results from Amazon and cache them, and then it displays what's relevant to the games on the page or what games you follow. What ends up happening, is say you like a game, it'll show you related merchandise like plushies, figures, art books, OSTs, etc. The plan is to fund with things like that instead of taking big checks from developers or publishers. I do want to make money from Game Sense, but the primary goal is to put gamers first and make a good site for gamers who actually care about games.

>What measures do you have in place to un-cuck a popular but bad reviewer that goes full-SJW down the road?

Funny you mention this. Part of Game Sense is that I want to keep that stuff out. I wrote an AI that will detect Social Justice bullshit. In fact, when training it, it was capable of learning specific games were SJW stuff, just from feeding it SJW articles about that game. You also able to report reviews that are political agenda pushing. One of the goals of the site is to make sure that there's a place where gamers are greater than cry bullies.

>>320553

>I see. To me it feels your site focuses on a "community" drive, whereas BG tries to be more of a "professional-looking" actual news site…

That's very well put actually. It's more of a cross between a forum and a review site as opposed to another review site. Part of the inspiration for how reviews work in Game Sense was a Mass Effect 3 thread about plot holes in a forum. It was filled with great digging and opinions, and things that normally wouldn't be classified as reviews. But it was lost in a forum, not affecting any scores or anything. And being shared, it just looked like a forum post. Game Sense is exactly what you say, it's supposed to be a hybrid of the two, which basically turns mini-reviews that are close to forum posts into scores. It also organizes the reviews in ways that forums and review sites don't. An example I used in the /v/ gg thread was that instead of trying to tell someone a game has bad localization, you can just link them the bad reviews about localization and show them it's bad.

>>320554

Polite sage about the SJW stuff, but it won't filter them, it'll only make their posts less visible and give them lower priority. I don't want to silence those opinions, but the focus of Game Sense is games, not politics. Not unless the community really wants it gone.

>>320555

That's a touchy point though. It's very easy to decide what concerns "politics" and what doesn't unfairly, and it's rather out-of-place to decide what is "right" politics and what isn't as well. Just because people think "take asses away" doesn't mean they should be forbidden to write anything, or even have their job made more difficult. What matters is that other voices drown them out. Reminder that, before GG, the issue wasn't that kotaku was bad, but that only kotaku was listened to. What matters is that there is more than just those crazy ideologues, not that they stop existing.

>>320556

It's very touchy indeed. It does take a lot to trigger the AI. A lot more than idle speak of politics, you basically have to go pretty tumblr for it to pick up on things. And even then, it won't stop you from posting, only treat it as a lower quality post.

My attitude toward it is that if it's completely removed, it's not any better than SJWs completely shutting down opponents, yet at the same time people don't want to see it. The balance I found is to give it lower priority while still letting it be posted. But I just want to reiterate, that it takes a lot for it to go off. It's more of an extremist detector than a political detector.

>>320557

Meh. I think it'd be best to not go there and just let people write whatever.

>>320553

>Filtering usernames or any such thing would be dumb.

>And if a reviewer goes full-SJW, that's fine too.

my concern isn't that Zoe or Anita would actually be writing reviews(realistically, they'd probably use a variant or totally different name to avoid heat imo), but someone would snatch up these names just to troll/post fake "this game is sexist" reviews and news about misogynistic character reveals, etc. I'm not concerned with gatekeeping so much as what the response would be to elaborate roleplay. In the same vein, someone could be impersonating Jack Thompson who hasn't had a voice in years, and predict how many school shootings each game would encourage.

>>320569

I've already accounted for that. I think if someone does try that, they will have a bad time. I've got some pretty good experience with dealing with that type of stuff.

Thanks for the questions and everything too. It's a big help, there's a lot to Game Sense and it's pretty difficult to explain things.

I'm working on a hentai and adult game sister site since it was wanted so badly . I'm not completely familiar with h-games and stuff, any advice would be appreciated. So far I'm just going to make it very similar to what Game Sense is, just a different skin and some of the less important categories like platform reviews removed.

>>320577

>I think if someone does try that, they will have a bad time. I've got some pretty good experience with dealing with that type of stuff.

is that a challenge, doubles man?

>>320748

No, but someone is going to do it eventually. I have a bunch of mod tools to make cleaning up those types of messes easy.

>>320810

I'm just an anon. I've already been talking with people like Acid and Bone Golem the whole time. If you have any questions feel free to ask. I've been working on this thing for several years. I've put way too much work into this for it to be some sort of ruse, if that's what you're trying to imply.

So I tried to go the site but it's not loading for me. Is it currently down?

>>320816

It should be back up. There might be some hickups while it's in open beta. But if you notice anything else or you are using a browser and notice something wrong feel free to tell me.

>>320818

It's back up now, thanks for the fast reply. Incase it ever happens again am using Pale Moon which is a version of Firefox.

>>320819

No problem. Glad to have you at Game Sense.

>>320818

Me again and I just signed up and tried to import my stream account only to find out it was already imported. I just signed up right now and don't have any other account, so is this a error due to being a beta or did someone used my stream account?

>>320823

It's a beta thing. I just tried it on the dev machine and it ran into an error, but the errors are hidden on the production server so it doesn't leak sensitive info. It looks like it just doesn't gracefully fail with a helpful message, give me a sec, it looks like an easy fix.

>>320825

Ok thanks for working on it, I'll try it again later today. If it still happens I'll just email you guys.

>>320823

It should be fixed. Let me know if it works or not, the same thing happened on my end too but I got it working.

>>320830

Got it connected with my stream account but it's not synching up my library of 230 games. I guess I'll try again later then.

>>320825

>errors are hidden on the production server

>production

now I know you're serious, that's serious terminology here(no sarcasm)

>>320831

I got it up and running, but it's a little slow. Let me know how it works.

>>320834

I worked hard to make sure the site respects people's privacy. There are people out there that think we want to destroy all women just for posting in this thread, they're absolutely insane.

>>320844

Just tried it again and it works now, all my stream games are listed on my account. Thanks for helping out.

>>320849

You're welcome. I appreciate people telling me about this stuff so I can fix it.

If you ever get any 403 errors when submitting something, please let me know too. I'm tweaking the WAF and it's still giving some false positives, it seems. I rather be overly secure than not secure enough. There's been a few hickups but things are going great.

I added a feature so now you can see how many times your reviews have been read. The site is finally indexed by Google, so it'll start to reach people now. Part of what Game Sense will do is push good gamer reviews up in Google, so it'll essentially compete with other review sites instead of being closed off sections of the internet.

I'm planning on doing an AMA on KiA tomorrow too, I'll update the thread.

I have to say I went to go write my first review, and it was only about ONE aspect of the game, but I decided to try and make it decently thorough anyways.

Hitting the 741/750 count I hit "submit" only to be told it was too long. Is that a glitch in the counter or is it just misleading?

Also, are we sure we really want to limit it to twitter-esque bite-sized snippets of information?

I mean if you think it's a good idea then I'll support it, but I'm worried about a flood of just "good graphiks" and "I liek teh music" reviews.

Continued: I also can't help but notice the "explain it fully." beside my "Please shorten up your review a bit." message.

>>321134

>>321135

This should be fixed. If it's not let me know. I raised the limit for reviews to 1000 characters as well. Were you using some bbcode markup or adding links or anything? If you were, that should be fixed.

As for your concerns about useless posts, the site can detect if a review is well written or not. Basically, if you're writing high quality reviews, you don't have to worry about competing with a bunch of awful twitter-style posting of "awesome gaem" or "these graphics are great". The good ones will more or less float up to the top. It's naive, which means it doesn't care what the review is about, just how well it's written. So if someone writes a review saying something is bad, and it's well written, it's given equal weight to someone who writes a well written review that says that same thing is good. From there, it all depends on if people agree or disagree. But the system is basically set up so that even if someone writes a terrible review, like you mentioned, and it gets a ton of votes, it still will fall short of a well written review with a few votes. That's actually one of the major problems I saw with existing review sites, and it's something that Game Sense is aiming to fix.

If it ever becomes a serious problem, it'll be possible with the tools Game Sense has to stop those types of posts from ever even being posted. And I plan on developing more stuff. If you haven't noticed already, there's a few filters in place. There's one for detecting buzzwords too, so if someone comes along and writes some fluff review that's basically

>this game is an exciting new gaming experience. You will explore a vast open world

it will be flat out rejected. One of the main goals are to ensure that people who write good content don't get drowned out and to make sure that the good content stands above the bad content, no matter what. It's all designed to be naive and only care about the quality of the content, not the content itself. I notice a huge problem with user content sites is the quality tends to nose dive eventually once the community gets large. One of the goals is to make sure Game Sense has the tools to stop that from happening. It's quite clear that just voting isn't enough to keep content high quality from other sites.

If you think there should be more categories for reviews, including the star rating reviews, feel free to mention them. It's very easy for me to add new categories. Thanks for being patient while it's in beta. I'll fix everything as fast as I can if you let me know there's a problem.

>>321134

>>321135

This should be fixed. If it's not let me know. I raised the limit for reviews to 1000 characters as well. Were you using some bbcode markup or adding links or anything? If you were, that should be fixed.

As for your concerns about useless posts, the site can detect if a review is well written or not. Basically, if you're writing high quality reviews, you don't have to worry about competing with a bunch of awful twitter-style posting of "awesome gaem" or "these graphics are great". The good ones will more or less float up to the top. It's naive, which means it doesn't care what the review is about, just how well it's written. So if someone writes a review saying something is bad, and it's well written, it's given equal weight to someone who writes a well written review that says that same thing is good. From there, it all depends on if people agree or disagree. But the system is basically set up so that even if someone writes a terrible review, like you mentioned, and it gets a ton of votes, it still will fall short of a well written review with a few votes. That's actually one of the major problems I saw with existing review sites, and it's something that Game Sense is aiming to fix.

If it ever becomes a serious problem, it'll be possible with the tools Game Sense has to stop those types of posts from ever even being posted. And I plan on developing more stuff. If you haven't noticed already, there's a few filters in place. There's one for detecting buzzwords too, so if someone comes along and writes some fluff review that's basically

>this game is an exciting new gaming experience. You will explore a vast open world

it will be flat out rejected. One of the main goals are to ensure that people who write good content don't get drowned out and to make sure that the good content stands above the bad content, no matter what. It's all designed to be naive and only care about the quality of the content, not the content itself. I notice a huge problem with user content sites is the quality tends to nose dive eventually once the community gets large. One of the goals is to make sure Game Sense has the tools to stop that from happening. It's quite clear that just voting isn't enough to keep content high quality from other sites.

If you think there should be more categories for reviews, including the star rating reviews, feel free to mention them. It's very easy for me to add new categories. Thanks for being patient while it's in beta. I'll fix everything as fast as I can if you let me know there's a problem.

>>321174

Well, don't worry too much about my opinion, I'm a total noob when it comes to reviewing stuff so I could be way off anyways. I wasn't using links or anything, just plain text.

Also as you mentioned I think keeping the stars and the written reviews seperate is a good idea, since the stars offer a good at-a-glance view, and then those who want more depth can read the comments, so that's nice.

Also for those who are too lazy to write anything can still at least slap some stars up.

>>321205

I'm hoping it's fixed then. I have been cleaning up a few little bugs here and there (nothing major). Glad you are liking it, one of the goals is to make people who don't normally write reviews start, so we can get some decent opinions on games out there.

Everyone has been doing a very good writing reviews so far, it's coming along nicely. I'm planning on an AMA at KiA this Sunday, I'll keep everyone posted.

>>320547

Seems neat

Question for the dev(s) behind GameSense.

Is it possible to add an option to list the Japanese localization team in addition to the American and European teams? I'm asking because I was trying to update Shovel Knight's game information on there but there wasn't an option to add its Japanese localization team.

>>321612

Yes, I can do it in the next few days. I have been busy with real life stuff, my body is sore and I'm exhausted. I finally just got to play some games and hang out tonight, which I needed.

I have another set of features I will be adding that I'm working on. I'm usually around a lot more but I have some real life stuff to tend to. It's seasonal and doesn't happen often and I just got past a bunch of work. I'll be around for the next few days at least. It's not serious or anything, just other obligations. I'll try my best to get it done tomorrow, I don't see why I can't.

I have a twitter too, and I turned on DMs from anyone.

https://twitter.com/GameSensedotCo

You can also email me "aaron at gamesense.co"

I am going to do an AMA eventually at KiA or maybe some other subs too. There's a lot of stuff I haven't explained yet. I added advanced search syntax before the public beta. So, if you want to do something like find all mario games for SNES in the gamesense database that has info filled out, you can just search "mario ON snes" (the ON has to be caps). There's a bunch of hidden stuff like that, I sort of hid it a little bit, because if everything is there right away it gets too overwhelming quickly.

While it's in beta, I can add new star review categories, as well as other review categories pretty easily. I can also reword them (I renamed the localization reviews to include localization and bad writing). So if any of that stuff is missing, let me know. I would like to not make any large changes like that once I start shilling more.

To be honest, if there are other game things missing, let me know, it'd be easier to do it in one big swoop, though it's not too hard to change. I wasn't sure if there should be things like how many players the game supports, if it supports local coop, online or couch multiplayer, etc.

I had to switch ids but I'm still here. I added the Japanese localization as requested. I also added another star rating, "worth a buy", where you can rate it 1 to 5 stars if it's worth buying. Game Sense now tracks upcoming and recently released games, and you can filter them by which consoles you registered or which games you're following. You can also browse them, the database is filled with some major releases, but some smaller ones could definitely added. If you know of some, feel free to add them. Game Sense is meant to be able to find lesser known and smaller games, so don't feel like it's too small or obscure to add. Only thing I ask is that it's not an adult or hentai game (that sister site is still being worked on and planned).

Game Sense is finally getting indexed well by Google, and reviews are starting to show up. One of the main advantages of Game Sense is that it works as an archive that can be found via search engines. I.E. it will allow people to find niche reviews or situations with games (like bad writing, memes in game, etc). It's still filling out in google and moving up so it's not easily found now, but that's a more long term goal, and when the time comes it will work as a solid voice. Game Sense could definitely use some more reviews that focus on more specific things like memes, bugs, etc, and it doesn't really matter when the game is from. If you're sitting on some, come join up and write a quick review about it. It will help to get gamer's opinions out of echo chambers and to reach people who normally aren't so invested in this stuff.

Even if you don't like to write reviews, there's a ton of stuff to do. You can use the star rating system and rate various attributes of games, publishers/developers/etc., add missing games, fill out missing information for existing games, vote on existing reviews, and tag games, publishers/developers/etc. The star rating system and voting helps with the score, so you can help with some scores even if you don't like to write reviews. The other things are a bit more anonymous and aren't attached to your name on the site.

I'm going to be pretty busy for the rest of the week and next week with real life stuff. I wanted to do one earlier, but I'm going to get around to an AMA as soon as I can. I would like to time it with a release of some larger games, there's not really much going on right now as far as bigger game releases.

https://twitter.com/GameSensedotCo/status/720431462286123008

It's been a while, I was pretty busy last week. I wanted to post some updates. I am pushing things on twitter a bit, I want to get more people aware that Game Sense exists before I do an AMA for it. The rate things are going I imagine I could do one this weekend. I wanted to wait for 8chan to stabilize too.

I added a night mode now, I remember some anons wanting it (I wanted it too). It's in beta so if you notice anything that's not readable let me know. You can toggle it by clicking on the sun or moon in the top right below your username or the signup button (it's on top if you're mobile). It will remember what you set it too on your computer, you don't need an account or anything to use it.

You can now filter the feeds by review types. So, if you want a big list of say, good game music, you can just filter all video reviews by "Good Music". You can also get music in the Channels feature, but the Channels don't work with all review categories (though I can add that later). Not to mention filtering reviews like this is a big help for showing people things like writing or localization being poor.

I adjusted some of the tooltips for voting to make them less confusing, they were borderline broken before in some cases as the titles would be different but the descriptions wouldn't. It should be all fixed now and a lot less confusing.

Thanks for putting up with some of the problems with the site earlier on. Most of it should be fixed now. But as always you can reach me here or on Twitter and I'll fix it or add the feature eventually.

I've wanted to do some sort of awards for a while, but I haven't been too sure how to do it. Most award shows are basically rigged and games aren't picked on anything objective. I was thinking of making a quarterly report or something, where Game Sense calculates various factors that can be reviewed for games, like best music, worst music, best writing/localization, worst writing/localization, most glitches, best gameplay, best/worst graphics, etc. and returns the best and worst given certain parameters. That way, the report is more like a quarterly (or yearly or whatever) gamer's choice award where the awards in the report are given by what people review and vote on. So we have objective and quantifiable awards instead of a bunch of ass pulls. I imagine Game Sense will need a lot of reviews for that to work reliably, but I think it'd be interesting to see a report of what is popular or not and all that stuff. It's definitely one of the stretch goals, but it'll take some time to work out. Just want to see if you guys are interested in that or not.

And the hgame site is still being worked on. All upgrades to Game Sense will apply to the hgame version too.

This is the first time in a long time where ive seen a new website and thought that its a really good and necessary idea.

Unless something comes up in real life that I can't control (like my chaotic work schedule), there's going to be an AMA on voat (/v/gaming) regarding the Game Census and the Developer Guide. I will also make a guide for Youtubers.

The Game Census will be Game Sense analysing reviews and extrapolating the data to create awards. It will be entirely based on your reviews and input about games. We will do one every year. Reviews you write for 2016 games will apply toward the 2016 Game Census. The first one we do will be 2015. As time goes on, we will grow more specific, like best NES game, best First Person Shooter, etc.

Developer Guide will explain the rules for adding your own game you are working on, and how you can use Game Sense to get feedback on your game as well as how you can use Game Sense to help people find your game. It will also contain suggestions on distributing your game demos and various other things.

The Youtube Guide will explain how people with Youtube Channels can tailor their videos to Game Sense and how they can use their own videos to write a Game Sense review. The idea is to also help Youtubers who are starting out to help get started by going through Game Sense.

>>323076

if you like it so much, why don't you MARRY IT

>>323538

>best NES game

if this isn't annual, I consider it my duty to quality test and try to force Hydlide as the top NES game incorrectly