PurposeGames Update

I love it.
But will PMs sent to friends still work the same way with the whole "followers" thing?

This is exciting! i'm especially glad to see improvements in creating & participating in Tournaments.

The updates look great. Looking forward to the new creation tools, and the challenge mode.

Questions:
a) Is there going to be an edit button for comments on your games? I miss this when I mess up a HTML hyperlink code for example.
b) Will there be an indicator to see which games you haven't played yet during tournaments? It takes a lot of time with tournaments that have a huge amount of games, or when somebody adds a game to a 40+ games tournament.
c) Is there going to be a possibility to copy and edit finished shape drawings during the creation of a game? Let's say you have two shapes that are quite similar, but are slightly different. Or if you made an error half-way through the drawing.
d) Are you able to use more than 50 characters in a paragraph when writing or copying game descriptions? This fixes the weird reading jumps you have to create when you have a large description. Maybe an extra tab with extra information would be nice, something you can close and open with a + and - sign.
e) Is there going to be a global leaderboard for the challenges?

These are some of the questions that come to mind right now. Would be great if you could play up to four or more players in the future with the challenge mode. Maybe even team play would be interesting, two on two for example. These things attract a lot of new members to PG.

Anyways, looking forward to the huge update!

also will we be able to re rate games?

Thanks all, for the comments.

@Joshuas18: 'Follow' will work much the same as it does on Twitter or Instagram and other such sites. As for 'friends', members that you follow, and that follows you = friends.

@heateh: When it comes to sharing backgrounds or "boilerplate" games, this is something that will be revisited. The possibility to "fork" a game and continue it in another direction than its original author will be good. It just needs some more thought into it. As for challenges, for now it will be for only two players. The global leaderboard that you suggest, for challenges that end up on the wall, is a good idea. I'll see about that. As for suggestions on the shape engine, it'll be easier to discuss it after you've tried it out. There are surely improvements to be made but as a first release I think it will suffice.

@ilikepie: yes

@Night Fury: possible yes, but I'm not so sure it's going to happen.

The moderators and I are currently testing it and hopefully, sooner rather than later, the new logic can be in place here.

The update looks great from the screen shots, but I wonder about the rating system. I cant see where you rate the game by stars, or do I just miss it?:)

@Alcyone and Ilikepie:

The new rating system is simply a "Like" system. There are no star ratings. Each system has advantages and disadvantages, of course. The star system seems to have become problematical (see below), so David decided to try the new system.

The new system will allow re-rating. You can like a game, but if you decide that isn't right, you can unlike it later, and then "re-like" it if (for example) the author changes it to fix errors.

The current ratings will be converted to the new ratings in a straightforward manner: all 4- and 5-star ratings will be turned into "likes". All 1-, 2-, and 3-star ratings will simply be dropped.

There were some problems with the star-rating system. First, it became ever more bimodal in the way people used it. They either gave 1-stars or 5-stars, not much in between. Second, it was abused in many cases. There were a number of incidents of simple "vandalism", in which people went through and gave a lot of 1-star ratings. In one case it was on the order of 900 games. Others gave 1-star ratings for a variety of unsavory reasons: personal vendetta, political or religious disagreement with a game and so on. There may even have been attempts to downrate games so that a particular author's games would rise in the "Top Rated" view of the games page.

I don't know if the new system will be more used than the star-ratings, but I do know that most people didn't bother to rate games in the old system. I hope there is more participation in the new.

@Heateh:

a) There is no edit function for game comments. I don't know if that will be in a further update, but as of now, it isn't included. However, there is a function for reporting a comment. You can flag a comment, and explain why it should be deleted. David or a mod will see that (maybe not right away) and can delete (but not edit) the comment. In that case, you'd have to re-submit a new comment.

b) No, there is no indicator for what tournament games you've played. Not that I've seen, anyway. It sounds like a very good idea to me, though. Maybe David will consider that for the future.

c) As David indicated, there will not be a feature to make a 'boilerplate' initially. So each game will have to be created from scratch. I think David is working on introducing a way to reuse shape backgrounds, but that it won't be available for awhile after the next update. But you can save a game and go back to edit it later, just as you can edit dot games or multiple choice. That includes editing the shapes. And there is no function to copy and paste a shape within a game. That too, sounds like a good idea.

d) I'm not sure about character limits per paragraph in game descriptions. I'll try to test that later.

e) Re: a leaderboard for challenges, it isn't in there at present. It sounds like an idea that might be popular. As David agrees, it might make its way in by the time of the major new release. If not, it will probably make it into a minor update later.

[implied] f) Re: multi-player challenges go, sounds a lot like a tournament in a private group, but more impromptu and flexible. As David indicated, that won't be possible initially. It may be added to a later update depending partly on demand for the feature, and how well the 2-player challenge system works. It's an interesting idea, including the team play.

So we have to manually re-friend our current friends? That's how I'm understanding it.

darn. i'm going to have about 10 less friends

in the new update, can you promote people in your group if they haven't just joined? cause in my group i wanted to promote American Idol, and he wasn't on the list so i pressed see all and it wouldn't let me promote him. i had to ban everybody on the list until i reached him, promote him, and make everyone a member again

thanks

I've noticed myself that the star system of ratings & also the comments on games have been abused- glad to see these issues addressed

Closing this topic now.
See PurposeGames Update from Aug 7 instead for latest info.