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Game position Tag Adult

A topic by Sirxtias created Dec 13, 2023 Views: 673 Replies: 6

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Hello,

I'm a developer of Lucky Paradox and since November we've been noticing that our game was almost top in Adult page before November 4th and after certain changes you made, our game went deep in the position of any tag we have, almost like if you had taken us out of the algorithm.
We really would like to know what's happening with our game, because we've been trying everything to have a better position but nothing is working... a lot of other devs went through this too, but they recover their position at some point, though we still can't... while other devs maintain their position up top all the time, since their games came out, we just wanna know what's going on with our game, because at this point we are thinking in removing the game from the platform.

I really hope we get an answer from this, because we really like the platform.

Sirxtias, Lucky Paradox Developer

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redonihunter1 year ago

because at this point we are thinking in removing the game from the platform

You really think that leaving a platform you have 14k followers on, is a good idea?

The game is 4 years in the making. People do play other games. Other games are good as well.

That being said, the sorting in popular seems to have hickups, see here

https://itch.io/t/3276137/how-does-the-popular-section-work-are-we-delisted

The algorithm is supposed to not reward any shenanigans by people trying to game the system and it also will bring in randomness and boost unknown games here and there. They probably changed something in weighting or had/have a bug in counting numbers. Or maybe they fixed a bug, and popular was tilted all the time till now and has to readjust to the intended ranking.

If you want to see your game on top, just look in top-rated and adult tag. It is right there on page 1.

You seem to wonder why "recovery" takes longer for your game specifically. Maybe it has to do with the size of the game. I would assume for a 7GB, there are many people that might check out the game page, but do not download. I guess that the page visit/download ratio might have an influence in popular ranking. But it is all guesswork, since they understandably will not tell how it works.

Popular

A special algorithm we’ve created that combines many signals from a project. We don’t reveal the specifics because we don’t want people trying to cheat. (Note to cheaters: we see you and we will delist your pages). The popularity sort is comprised of a “historical” and “recent” component added together. What that means is that recent activity has more of an impact compared to overall views. This helps new games surface on top of games that have been popular for a while. How new something is also has an impact. We’ve designed the algorithm to show both stuff that’s really popular, and up-and-coming projects who need a shot to get discovered.

It could be as simple as a bunch of new users discovering itch and browsing lots of (new) games, making them more popular in relation to established old games. Users that have not the bandwidth to download 7GB ;-)

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Sirxtias1 year ago (2 edits)

Of course it's not a good idea, We understand that the people of course plays other games but it seems that itchio threw us down just because, even when we've been bringing such a good traffic to Itch.io from other platforms since forever... and as you mention we have a lot of years under development in this platform and just because a change of algorythm or a bug that appearently not only affected us but some other devs too, took us deep down in the ranking,

It seems that the other devs that I've been watching already recovered their positions... or at least part of it, but us even though we released a Update yesterday, we still are buried in the deep hole of not only Adult Tag but every other tag we are in, we've been trying to do everything fair and square while other devs that still don't go down in the ranking also maintain their position almost like holy grails in the Tag, then how they can't go down not even for a second, but us, 2 guys that have been trying to develop a game with a lot of quality content, Overnight we were buried in the adult tag , being even lower than ABANDONED games when we have been updating at least every 2 or 3 months.

Now talking about the weight of the game it shouldn't be a problem since a lot of games that are in popular literally weigh exactly the same if not more than our game, and if that's not enough not only we upload our game full but we also upload a compressed version that only weigh 2gb so NO! it can't be the weight of it, just to make sure of it we even put external links to the website.

It's really frustrasting because we also share a part of what we earn with the website and even doing that they cut our wings... We're in the top rated rank but that doesn't seem to have any relevance on our visits or downloads at all.

Sirxtias, Lucky Paradox Developer

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redonihunter1 year ago

This is all speculation and guesswork. But something did happen, that is for sure. If the rules changed, it will take time for all the games to find their "organic" place in the ranking. I recently discovered a bug in counting how many games there are. It does not work properly when considering adult games, by using only one tag (who knows, maybe that is what skews the ranking algorithm - if they put in the number of total games with a certain tag in a formula and that number is wrong...). It works if you use two tags. They also changed servers around that time and there were network outages somewhere in Asia.

Maybe some of the games that recovered quick have much traffic from outside of itch.

Look at your game page and click the related games button. There are lots of games with over 2k ratings. Wich is quite a lot and indicates that those games are very popular. Then visit those games and look at their respective related games buttons. Most of those have your game in the list. And it can be assumed that those lists have a similar randomness like the regular search button. You also are on page 1 of highest rated of some tags.

I want to make two points here.

First, if your game is only visited by players, if it is high in the popular ranking, your game is not really popular. That would be being famous for being famous. It has no substance. You are visible in so many other places, I cannot believe that popular ranking is the major factor that drives players to your game. And the popular ranking algorithm should ideally be effect and not cause.

Second, unless we are talking about a user that visits itch only shortly and then stopps, you will get noticed by most users looking for that kind of game eventually. You are too big to not get noticed. Even if the ranking is currently screwed, you are not really missing out on players in the middle run. After they played their first games on page 1 of popular, they might check out the highest rated or related games for example.

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Sirxtias1 year ago (1 edit)

I totally understand your points, anywho I would like some admin to really check if there is something wrong with our situation, because literally what bothers us the most is that we are below abandoned games, and that we are not in the top even for a second, even after having made a giant update and also having great numbers in our favor, we are not asking to be left 24/7 at the top of the tag, we are simply asking to have the algorythm applied to us in the same way it is applied to other people, because at this point as I said in the beginning of this post, it seems that we have been removed from the algorithm, relegating us to be even worse than a new or abandoned game...

Sirxtias, Lucky Paradox Developer.

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redonihunter1 year ago

You have the statistics to make a point to support. Tell them with numbers, that it looks like something is going very wrong. That the algorithm is not working as expected and overdos the boost for new games in general popular sort to the point of pushing actual popular games out of the loop. Maybe added in with some other stuff that seriously mixes the games so that "popular" is now a lie and should read "random and new". There already is new&popular sorting. People expect some resemblance of actual popular, if they see popular sorting.

Of course I can not tell how the thing works, but I do can tell that your game is not considered to have had any major update in the last 30 days. An update is not automatically a major update and frankly, with 4 years in the making I serously doubt, that you have had like 50 "major" updates, if you update every month. But this should not be enough to push you so far down.

If you combine several tags, so that you have smaller set of games, it looks more plausible on the other hand. Adult, Dating Sim, Erotic, Harem will give a list in popular where I fully believe that the games above you are currently more popular than your game.

Should the sorting algorithm for one reason or another only consider small numbers, a huge variance in result is to be expected. I still speculate, that with their server moving, that there might be load balancing servers that do not properly report the access numbers. So games hosted on that one would report a lot less popularity. Or they might have changed the algorithm, so that visitors going to the game from their feed are weighed less, as they are recurring visitors.

Judging from the other thread, the only response you might get here, is, that there is nothing wrong with your account and that you should not rely on internal itch promotion. The fact that the game in that thread apparantly managed to appear last in list indicates, that there was or is at least one bug, but that might not be a software bug, as they were or still are moving servers.

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redonihunter358 days ago

Sooo. Page two of popular. Of all games, not some tag.

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