Discussion devolved into insults.
A thousand kids make naive games on the same topic is the problem very few addressed. I don’t pay for the service, I was glad to find this place and chose to support it. So what are the kids saying so loud on “your” search pages? Horror. Horror and Visual novels. Maybe that’s a noise we need to listen to. XP
> I can't see where you're speaking from.
They're speaking from the heart, silly :3
> It seems to me you talk like you’re entitled to something when they actually don’t owe you anything.
As a user of their platform, they're entitled a good user experience. I hope that's something you strive to bring your users as a game developer ;)
> Of course, I may be missing something.
How very self-aware! You're gonna get far in life.
the simplest way to explain it would be that the usability of something is directly connected with how happy the users would be when using that something, and how happy the users are determines whether the product is good enough in the long run
Take DeviantArt as an example, it was considered THE best G-rated art website a few years ago, and now a lot of users have stopped using the website and would rather stick to social media instead (DA users, I said "a lot", not "all". Don't reply with "Oh I'm still using DA"). Why did that happen? There was a change in UI that was sudden and changed almost everything that everyone had to relearn how to use the website, which is a BIG no in terms of website maintenance, and they didn't revert it at all, I think it's because they thought the users would be patient in learning everything again, which didn't happen, and now DA lost a lot of its users, but it still works as there are still some old users that stayed and new users that didn't have to go through that
Now how is that relevant to itchio? It's having a similar situation where a lot of people are complaining about the same topic, in this case, the tag exclusion feature, and in DeviantArt's case the sudden UI change. I know it's been a long time since we asked for it but we're still here, but I'm sure the active users of Itchio are reducing, I mean look at the recent games, all of them are either low effort, horror, visual novel or all of them, the only ones that can be rated as "good enough" is the occasional big projects and a few of the ones that won game jams, from what I see these two are the only things keeping Itchio alive.
I understand all that. But how do users deserve this change? What makes the devs “owe” users this change? It’s the part I don’t get. We could agree that they “owe it to themselves”, to the “legacy of their work” or something like that. You seem to think it’s in their best interest to make that change. It’s a strange position to be in, affirming you know someone’s best interest when they say it isn’t and when it’s obvious the change you want is in your best interest.
I don’t think itch is here to provide you with the service you are expecting from it.
Let’s say it is though. What good is it repeating it to people who won’t hear your claim? Is this forum a sort of democratic space? Was it ever in any way presented so?
I think you’re assessing the situation very incorrectly and I need arguments to change my view.
Well... to put it simply (from what I've learnt), they owe the users a usable interface and functions because users can switch to better platforms when given the chance, which we haven't.. yet. So.. yeah If there's suddenly a platform with the same features as itchio but with multiple tag exclusion feature, a LOT of people would switch pretty quickly, if said platform is developed in the right ways (feel free to ask about the details).
I’m glad you are willing to make the best of this discussion, which others have failed before. Note that what you are saying is that the devs of itch.io have an interest in adding this feature. That has nothing to do with owing something to users. I already addressed this aspect: the people asking obviously have that interest. I trust Leafo that he knows what their best interest is. They’ve heard you, they just don’t agree with you. For me, that’s the point where I would think about the leverage I can find or drop the case. In a way, this thread is sort of this leverage: showing your number, I just want to remind people that being rude is not how you get people to agree with you. A handful of mere “+1” would do more I guess than 1 good, reasonable point made. I wish you success in your endeavour.
It's stunning that there's no proper filter feature of any kind on a website that's existed this long. Given the longterm refusal to even address the issue by anybody with any actual power or influence over the site (No offense, mods), it seems pretty clear they don't care. May as well just officially endorse folks' web extensions at this point; I'm beyond tired of seeing the umpteenth Five Nights at Wuzzy's Fuzzy Ass Playhouse: For Real (SCARY!!) mishmash clone when I look up "puzzle" or "gay". Even using the singular filter tag that can even be applied in the url, removing -horror still leaves me with a pile of click-through games and visual novels designed for people who enjoy staring at big booba anime women. Deviant Art has a better filtering system than this.
I am curious. Does anyone know a game site where you actually can exclude tags? Other than Steam. I know Steam can do that. But I also know that several others can not do that, or I am unable to find that feature.
It seems to me, that tags are rare and exclusion even rarer. While it would be a nice feature, at the same time this is not a common feature. Even on steam it is kinda hidden. You have to click on the right side instead of the left side or middle of a tag in the search page.
Humblestore has no tags. You can positivly filter for genre and other stuff.
Epicgames has no tags. You can combine some genres to filter.
Gamejolt has some hashtags, but I could not even find out how to combine them.
Origin/EA does not seem to have tags either. You can select a genre and then filter for franchise or age restriction.
Gog has tags, but I only found how to combine them. Not how to exclude them.
Not a download store, but Armorgames has no exclusion either.
Google Play Store seems to have tags, but I neither found how to search for a tag, nor how to combine, lest exclude them.
Playstation Store can combine genres as filters, but exclusion I could not find.
Amazon. You can exclude stuff in a search with preceding -. But that is not a tag exclusion, just a regular search. I could try search itch with google and exclude items.
People love saying "everyone else has this feature already and it works great!" when it's not remotely true. Wouldn't be the first time. They tried to complain the same way about payouts, back when itch.io had the shortest turnaround out of all the major websites where you could sell stuff. It's almost as if truth was an inconvenience.
Oh, there are content sites with exclusion of tags, but specific to gaming it seems rare, except for the market leader. One would think that many would imitate Steam for that, but apparantly not.
Might have to do with the catalogue size. Of the other sites, Steam has the biggest by far, yet they only have ~160k titles compared to the ~850k titles on itch (560k claim released status). And of course, the other sites usually lack the tags to begin with.
I believe Steam just added it, because it was dirt cheap to add into their existing framwork of tagging. It starts with them having only a limited selection of tags and when filtering their catalogue by tags it appears as "tag" and "-tag", so basically, even the exclusion tags are positive searches.
In contrast to "filtering" on itch, that is done (or appears) as added sub urls. My guess is, that there is not really filtering done at all. It is a cross-section of overlapping url conditions. And there just aren't nightly builds of negative tags that could be overlapped. There would have to be built two lists for every tag, and since tags are custom, one does not just build a list of 1-million-minus-the-seven-games-with-obscure-tag to overlap ... for every obscure tag.
So starting at my guess, filtering would not be integrateable into existing browse, but would have to be added on top. For singular that was trivial. For multiple, it apparantly is not.
But it might be a help to many, if the existing option would be available as an UI element in browse. I would not need it, but that is because I do not put too much weight on tags anyways. Dev tagging is often horrible. Tags on Steam are user chosen by majority. At least it says "Popular user-defined tags for this product" under a game.
as you said, it's as if the truth was an inconvenience...
I mean as the other guy said, itchio needs this because it is a problem here on itchio, not because it's just a simple "Quality of Life improvement", I see lots of other (dare I say, unnecessary) updates but this problem has never been solved, I doubt the Devs are even taking this problem seriously. I don't know what happened back then, but I'm pretty sure it's a much-needed improvement here...
It's been frustrating for me too, not knowing what to tell people for such a long time, but I trust the dev team. If they weren't able to do it in years, there must be a good reason. Edit: in all this time, people continue to demand and assume bad faith, which is doubly frustrating. There are many other features on itch.io that can help us discover games, but people won't use them because they've decided that the one thing they want is tag exclusion and nothing else.
If people assume bad faith, they should apply Hanlon's razor. Also, if I were to believe the threads about tagging and exclusion, I would also have to assume horror is unpopular. Well, horror is very popular on itch, so maybe tag exclusion is not in such a high demand, as those threads might suggest. After all, the people happy with recommendations and related games and other means of finding games do not regularly make community threads about how things are ok. It is the people fed up with horror stuff that do.
Sure, it might be a handy feature in some situations. But would it be a feature that most users would use? Or is this one of those scenarious, where the people able to use that feature would not need it, cause they would know how to find stuff without it.
I have trouble believing someone looking for the 10k new games in the last month. Like, itch show me everything, except horror and visual novels, I will dig through the remaining 8k games myself. To be realistic, you have to start somehow with positive filtering. And this should thin out the games already. And who knows, maybe that puzzle platformer pixel adventure you might like, does has some minor horror elements that made the dev chose horror tag - after all, horror is popular, so everyone and their dog is tagging it.
Games that are actually not so welcome, such as horror games, dominate the front page.
Excluding tags is just what people think is a good solution to this problem.
Other websites don’t have this problem, so their need for it is not urgent.
Steam will not put horror games on your home page after you click “dislike” on some horror game.
Do you talk about the actual front page or the front page of browse? Because the actual front page is not very dominated by horror. It is featured games, bundles, jams etc.
But Horror is the most popular tag on itch. Followed by visual novel. Then simulation, then roguelike. It says so on the front page upper left corner.
In contrast to Steam the presentation is somewhat inverted. Once logged in, you are presented with a ton of recommendations and some popular games list is a minor part of the page. On itch front page, recommendations are one side scroll hidden in the middle.
So anyways, itch should not recommend horror games to you, after you liked and played some other games. But you need to go to the actual recommendation area and not the front page or browse.
(Please do not try to downvote random horror games to adjust your recommendations. Not only would this be unfair, we also do not know how much this would be weighted in contrast to your positive interactions. Furthermore, to downvote such games, you would have to interact with those games, so itch might actually be convinced you do like them horror games ;-)
I’m not saying tag exclusion is unnecessary, but the way my network of community is organized precludes the need for search: we follow a dozen of “scout” accounts who look through what’s coming out, others dig in the archives, and putting that knowledge in common, we are like a review media leviathan hooked up as several collectives. If the interface doesn’t do it, work around is something you can do right here right now. #dont-flail-against-the-world
Please feel free to comment on https://itch.io/t/3283176/how-to-not-exclude-this-tag
evidently the one solution, adding "?exclude=tg.(tag)" doesn't even work right now, at least on my end. it's been way too long for this to be addressed in a real capacity. I had assumed all the games were simply improperly tagged, but no, if you filter to include only horror, the same games show up.
That is something on your end. That url below will give you no results.
https://itch.io/games/tag-horror?exclude=tg.horror
searching for games is tiring when the before mentioned by mods, positive search fails you hard. You could spam all tags but the ones you don't want ALL day, you'd quickly notice they(devs of games) also tags their games with other tags that you DO want to see.
I am tired of Visual Novels, Text Based and "Simulation" that is mostly just simulating words on top of a drawn background and person... so... a visual novel... just not tagged as one... and searching for 3D, Action, Adventure and whatever else still doesn't work as visual novels can have 3D backgrounds and characters. And the story can be one of action and/or adventure. Even tho that's not what the game genre itself means. Anyways, my point is: multiple tag exclusion is a must if people do not properly tag their games. Can't be having more action/adventure visual novels...
Maybe now that the new search feature is rolled out, site developers might have time for other projects.
My concern is, that a fully implemented multiple tag exclusion as seen on Steam (if you look for it) is not a trivial task to implement in the existing framework.
Personally, I have little use for the feature. I am an adult and can surf without ad blocker. If I can scroll past ads I do not care for, I can scroll past games I do not care for. The typical offenders, horror and visual novels, are also typically recogniseable at a glance. There is just too much inconsistency and disagreement about tag usage to rely on any filtering.
