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A search question for leafo

A topic by X and Z Productions created Mar 20, 2019 Views: 1,105 Replies: 21

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X and Z Productions5 years ago(+1)

Please note that this was a reply that I wrote to leafo in another thread. But it is of vital import we get an answer and to see if anyone else can help us with this search issue. My objective is not to tick anyone off, it is to have an open discussion that will benefit everyone.

leafo,

We are having the same problem in the site search. What ever we have done to tick you guys off we are sorry. I am serious when I say, WE ARE SORRY. Can we PLEASE be put back into the search results? Please. Our game Wizards of Alamar and a free version has been uploaded a couple weeks and all was going fine... then i asked someone in support how we could get on the front page. Look, you need to understand that if there is something we don't understand, we will ask the staff questions. We aren't afraid of hearing 'NO' as an answer, we just want to know the answer. I bring this up because after I submitted a support email asking how to get our game promoted on this site... no one can find us. Go onto the back end of your website and look at our views... steady trend upwards each day... Then the email was sent and a steady trend downwards. Now i want you to look at our activity on the site... it has been a steady trend upwards. Were doing what your staff said to do and the result... is that we apparently pissed someone off and NO ONE can even search for us unless they know our EXACT GAME NAME. We took all the screen shots if your interested.

For example:

- If I type in “Wizard” 62 games show up except ours, which happens to be Wizards of Alamar.

-If I search through all the games on sale, which we are running ours for 75% off… nothing.

-If I search role playing which is what the game is under… nothing.

So here I am saying, you win. I am sorry and will never ask a question again after this mail. But could we please get our game listed again? If not could you please have the courtesy to tell me that our game is not wanted on your site, because i don't want to waste your time or mine. And I am sorry if this post upsets anyone, but it upsets me to no end when something we have work on for such a long time, and have poured so much into is just tossed to the side without any reason why.

The X and Z Team

i did attach the screen shots of search for wizards and wizards of alamar. we have 30 or 40 more screen shots of various searches if you want to see those also.

BrentAbernathy5 years ago

I was wondering why more people weren't playing this game!

X and Z Productions5 years ago

I'm interested in the answer. But thanks brent!

No Time To PlayModerator moved this topic to Questions & Support 5 years ago

No Time To PlayModerator5 years ago

Pending a more informed answer, I doubt there's a problem with search. Searching for "Alamar" returns both editions of your game, which means they're listed. On the other hand, searching for highly generic terms like "wizards" or " role playing" is likely to return your game buried under many other results. Doubly so as free-form searches cut off altogether after a few dozen results, as you've noticed. Try looking under the role-playing genre instead, but be prepared to browse through lots and lots of results. We do have over 150K games on Itch.io by now, and a lot of them must be RPGs and/or about wizards.

Itch.io as designed tries to give as many games as possible a chance, but with so many of them uploaded, the software can only do so much. You simply have to advertise in other venues as much as you can, in addition to here.

No Time To PlayModerator5 years ago

I'd like to add something as a fellow creator. I happen to be working on a game of my own, that just entered the production stage. Can you guess what it is?

...A generic fantasy RPG that has the word "wizard" right there in the title.

And yes, this is pure coincidence. But do you understand how terribly generic our respective games are? That mine is a text-based Twine while yours is a colorful platformer isn't going to register in a search by theme or genre. Said search doesn't need to be broken, or biased, to bury the both of us under an avalanche of countless other games that are all more or less the same thing.

X and Z Productions5 years ago

I see what your saying... but there is a problem. You see, we searched under everything. Have screenshots of everything. (We have been doing that for a while on all the sites we put our games on so we can go back and compare placements of the game with any new sale strategys we are trying.) We searched under every tag and variation of the word and the title. And as to searching only 'Alamar' we did that to and nothing came up yesterday.

A week and a half ago we did all these searches... and again guess what... they showed up. Not in the top but somewhere in the results. And we have all the screen shots of all that also. Just because someone says there is no problem and wants to dismiss it out of hand, doesn't mean its not happening. If you take a moment to actually look at the pictures i posted in support you will see that there is a problem.

I think it great that you are making a wizard rpg... i just hope you don't run into the problems we are having. If no one can see our game... then no one knows it exists. I brought us here Itchio because i truly believed that this platform was a place where indie devs came to blossom and grow as developers and artists... I still believe that. A Place to grow... Not a place indie games come to die.

nullModerator5 years ago (3 edits)

But searching for "Alamar" returns your game. "role playing wizardry" does as well. I'm looking at the screenshots you provided in this thread, what exactly is the problem here?

The game's positions in searches fluctuate, sometimes it's placed higher, sometimes lower - depending on a few different variables.

As said above, it's rather unrealistic to expect that your game will consistently show up in the top if you search for "wizards" as that is a very, very common phrase.

X and Z Productions5 years ago

Alright i will show another example... We started a sale on the game on the 13th, a week ago. so i JUST did a search of ALL PC GAMES running a sale for the last 30 days. Here are the results IN EVERY 'SORT BY' CATEGORY (thats: popular, new & popular, top sellers, top rated, most recent) I will post them in that order and this is ALL GAMES ON SALE THAT ARE WINDOWS PLATFORM, ON SALE, FOR THE LAST 30 DAYS (you can see those selected on the left side.). The 6th picture is a screenshot of our game taken at the same time showing it is on sale. And if you are really concerned NULL then why don't you do the search yourself. The problem is for some reason our game is not being shown... and no one will tell us why. Apparently there is only 15 Window games on sale in the last 30 days... where I KNOW THERE IS AT LEAST 16. Now do you see the problem Null??? We need your help null.

X and Z Productions5 years ago

and i do like how you moved this to a dead thread.... You all need to understand we have put everything into this and we are getting no help or even answers that make any sense.

No Time To PlayModerator5 years ago

I moved this to the appropriate category, where it has better chances to be seen by people who can help. Doubly so as said category is less busy. In General Discussion it would quickly fall off the first page. And I did point out that my answer is not the most authoritative, just the best I can offer until someone more knowledgeable can chime in.

X and Z Productions5 years ago

So your answer is what we rename our game to just ALAMAR? Instead of fixing the problem? So when people come to search for our game they will need to know the last word in the name.... try a search for 'wizards of'...

No Time To PlayModerator5 years ago

That's not at all what I suggested. In fact, my personal suggestion is to do some advertising outside of Itch.io as well, as opposed to expecting Itch.io to make your game successful all by itself. Again, we have over 150K games here by now, and every single one of their creators would like a spot in the top search results. We'd like to give them one too, if we could, but it's simply infeasible.

X and Z Productions5 years ago

Crickets.... i hear only crickets. Look were are interested in a answer. it might be that we have done something wrong... but if no one tells us what it is we can't fix it.

No Time To PlayModerator5 years ago

I was asleep. I posted my second answer late last night, and went to bed soon after. To the point, the gist of our answers is that you probably did nothing wrong. Your game is simply getting buried in search results, as it happens in fact to most of them, Including my own.

X and Z Productions5 years ago

It is just frustrating. I have been trying to promote the game all over the place and promoting Itchio also. My reasoning is the more traffic itchio gets the better chance I will get noticed. Thank you for your feedback. I apologize if my previous statements sounded 'pissy' , but i was frustrated and confused. maybe you all should start a new thread and put it at the top of the community that will be 'Promoting you game on Itchio' tips.

No Time To PlayModerator5 years ago(+1)

Now that's a good feature to request!

leafoAdmin5 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

Hey,

Sorry for not getting back to your post sooner, I've been at a conference last week.

We haven't done anything to your page. It was never removed from search (see search results page), and is displaying like all other project pages would.

As for an explanation of what you're seeing: your project's name isn't named 'Wizard', it's 'Wizards of Alamar.' Our search system is designed to help people file projects by title match. For people trying to search for things by topic we try to point people browsing to go to our tag pages, like https://itch.io/games/tag-wizard

When you're searching by a broad word like wizard then you're essentially up in a pool of all projects that happen to include the word wizard. That's not how people browse for games. It's rare for someone to want to find a game by topic because it happens to have that word in the title. Either they're searching by the full title, or they're trying to find a topic, and in that case we try to direct them to the tag page. Search is complicated though, and difficult to get right for all scenarios. In the future we'll likely tweak how the search page presents projects, including how they're ordered, but this is how it currently works.

Regarding your concern about the project not showing up on http://itch.io/sales, that page excludes sales that end further than a month away. We do this to prevent people creating very long sales from taking up space for other sales. But, regardless of the length of your sale, your project is marked appropriately when it appears on our browse pages, and also included in pages like https://itch.io/games/on-sale. Keep in mind that constantly having your project on sale is against our quality guidelines. We recommend setting the price appropriately instead of abusing the sale system to advertise your game.

I've also noticed that you:

Spammed many channels in our discord with advertisements for your project without reading the rules
Spammed on our community in unrelated topics without regard for the rules
Created what appears to be a fake account trying to make it seem like a third party is experiencing your very specific issue
Made multiple false accusations of manipulating your project's visibility, all while ignoring community rules and arguing with site moderators

I understand you want to succeed on our platform, but this type of activity makes it more difficult for our team to help the thousands of other developers that publish through itch.io. Please be courteous of our team's time, and if you continue to make it difficult for us to help you then we may have to close future topics you create in our community since this type of discussion is not constructive for other developers.

Thanks

X and Z Productions5 years ago

So you are basically calling me a liar and a cheat?

You know i tried to handle all this through your support email, right. I haven't tried to manipulate anyone. i put up pictures to show you what i was finding and i was asking questions about the search results. Legit questions.My company has built 2 social media sites from scratch and built their search engines, i know how it works. And when i did the searches it was for wizard and wizards. When i got back answers that didn't make much sense from the staff... i asked more questions. I am trying to learn this site... hence the questions. (If you need help with your search engine, we can help you with that.)

Like discord... you say i spammed it... no i visited a channel and saw a posting for a game there for sale. so i posted one for sale in that same channel. then you, leafo took it down and said this channel is not for self promotion... the irony of that was i was reading what you put UNDER a self promoted game for sale. I chatted with a couple of mods on the discord asked them questions and they actually answered me, without calling me a liar, and i then understood what i could and could not do. (You should take a page from their book... they answered and did call me a liar and a cheat.)

Whats funny is that i wrote and asked you all if there was a way that we could promote our game on your site or to have staff members look at our game. I have reached out more than you can imagine... the reply i got was a resounding NO. that you would not find it fair to promote any game... ( I still have the emails if your interested in reading them. ) Yet 2 days after i got that email there was a game on the sites main page being promoted large as day. All this would make someone ask why they are being treated differently... you really do know how to make a person feel welcome on your site. So please don't lay the blame of all this at my feet, there is enough to go around.

As to running sales, we will reprice the game this week and and not run sales as often. Again we are just trying to get noticed, thats why we decided to give it away. Now is there a limit on running bundles? we have 5 other games we are redoing for pc to put up on this site. and was thinking about running bundles on all of our game for a weekend once a month or so. Will it be worth our time to put these games up on Itchio?

mathgeek5 years ago

Good eveing Leafo. I have a question for you. You mention fake accounts below with a link. But that link does not saying anything about a "third party is experiencing your very specific issue". In fact the only one I found was the one I posted and I can assure you I am not a fake account created by teh developers. Maybe you should get some facts straight. When I saw the game in recommended games thread I searched for it and couldn't find it. Since you can't seem to get this part of your complaint correct maybe the rest is made up on your part? The whole sapmming in the community thing is arguably BS as well. Is it really unrelated? Here they are talking about not finding their game and then talking about hier game. I agree it wasn't the topic of the thread but it does seem related to the conversation. And if you link to your examples of the bad behavior why is there no link for the "false accusation"? Makes me wonder.

Of course at the moment I am just really annoyed with you as I am the only one I can find that also mentioned these issues and hence it seems to me you are just saying I am a fake account and never once did you bother to actually check. Well at least I have no communication from you about it so I will assume you were being lazy and also making assumptions.

leafoAdmin5 years ago

Are you related to X and Z Productions, eg. friend, family, or instructed by the account to post about their project? Please disclose your connection to the project. Thanks

X and Z Productions5 years ago (3 edits)

Is this person related to me or my partner? So now... your now taking to harassing the people that like my game also? Could you please forward me a phone number, so that i can actually call and we can discuss this like adults? Because this, like most text messaging discussions, is getting out of hand. Yes i was a little upset last night when you basically called us liars and a cheats. But again harassing individuals are playing our game and voiced their own unsolicited opinions is beyond the pale. I would really appreciate you forward that phone number by email to me. Or set up a time for us to voice chat on discord.

on a side note i had considered this topic closed the other day when the mods had replied and we worked through the problem. That was until you, Leafo, jumped on and made all the accusations, it kind of upset me. Do me one favor... scroll up to the original post, yes i said "Wizard" when referring to my search... BUT ACTUALLY LOOK AT THE PIC I PUT UP AND THE WORD I SEARCHED IN THAT PIC. When i try to have a discussion or ask for help in a matter i try and give all relevant info with the question. I hope you we can now put this behind us and move forward like i thought we did last weekend.

mathgeek5 years ago (2 edits)

1) I have never been instructed by x and z to post anything.

2) I am a fmaily member, but does that mean I can't support my family? I have not been involved in the development of the game, just enjoy playing it.

3) Does being a family member automaticly mean that when I actually searched for "wizard" I got 61 other titles with the name "wizard" in it except the one I was looking for? So are you implying if I think there is a problem then I should not address it since I am related? I didn't start the thread, just made a reply which I did not know was against the rules.

4) The next time I have a game night with my friends over I will make sure not to go to itch in the future.

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