A bundle of bundle changes and more.
Did you hear this update has bundles? Well there's other stuff too, but let's go over all that and more so you know what to expect when the 1.17 update releases tomorrow April 10th!
Bundles
Bundles versions are becoming editions
So this all started as a wrap-up update for the 1.15: Editions update we saw back in October. Editions came and merged many of filler entries of the site that plagued the search results. So now I wanted to take that a bit further by starting to combine bundle versions.
The most popular examples are these Game of the Year editions where they're technically bundles because they include the DLC and base game, but really are just editions. These games will soon begin to combine as an edition with 1.17. I'm excited for this because the top rated games page includes many of these duplicates, it'll be great to see them consolidated.
The gist of an edition is that you cannot log these games directly, but instead you go to the parent base (Bloodborne here) and log that with the edition field set to "Bloodborne: Game of the Year Edition". This then shows up on your profile as just Bloodborne but anywhere with log details like reviews or your journal will show the specific edition you played. Find more details in the 1.15 blog post: https://backloggd.medium.com/game-editions-1-15-update-71feeb6e66db
Browsing bundles
What's also great is finally the ability to browse bundles and their contents in a way that makes sense. You can now see a bundle's contents and what bundles a game belongs to from the game page along with the other related games.
Standalone bundle logging
Bundle versions aren't the only ones getting changes, as you'll also be able to log any standalone bundle just like you would an edition.
This will let you log any game that belongs to a bundle while still keeping track exactly which version you played. Just like editions, filling this field will represent the base game in your overall collection but show up as the bundle in your review / journal.
This applies to library entries as well, just like editions.
More personalized covers
Standalone bundles are also becoming an option for personalized covers! Some labels were added to help differentiate where each of the covers are coming from.
Your Game Stats
With the bundle change, I wanted to introduce a new way to think about game categories. Going forward, games will be split into two categories: base and extras. Extras will include DLC, expansions, episodes, seasons, updates, and packs / addons. These will come with a revised category filter that allows you to browse the entire set at once.
By default browsing the global games page will set the categories to 'Games' and hide extras. Everywhere else will default to showing 'All' games, including your profile.
This change will also affect the number displayed on your profile played stats.
Now only the number of base games will be shown, with a tooltip displaying the complete list of games and their categories. The primary purpose of this change is to separate the inflated feeling of adding a bunch of DLC to your collection without over-representing that profile level glance.
List Management
While I want to dedicate an entire update to lists in the future, these were two heavily requested features I could get in without needing too much work.
New Privacy Options
Introducing two new privacy options to control who can view your list. Personal is almost like public except the list won't be discoverable via the games page or home page. Instead anyone can find it on your profile. Unlisted is a step further where it's hidden and only accessible via a direct link, but only your friends (people you follow) can access it. Great for getting early feedback!
Quick Remove
The 'Add to list' button is getting an upgrade to now add OR remove entries from lists. When you open the modal, the checkmark will be pre-filled in for lists that already contain the game. Unselecting it will remove all entries of the game from the selected list.
This does mean the modal only really works when you have 1 game per list, but this seems to be how 90% of lists are used anyway. Keep in mind this will delete any notes you have for removed entries as well!
Log Editor UI Tweaks
Fans of the full-sized log editor will see the UI reorganized with a better focus on priority. Renaming the log has been moved to "right-clicking" the tab to give more room for actual logging fields.
The time fields are now hidden behind a checkbox to help prevent overwhelming users just getting used to the editor or if you're not into logging. The upside, finish time is now easily accessible when you do decide to show the fields.
Two new default settings regarding editor behaviors were also added:
Behavior upon first play session: None, Started, Finished
This one will be very handy if you're always setting your started or finished dates, as this default automatically sets the date when you first create a session or open the dates on the quick editor.
Playtime sync setting: None, Sync Sessions
Up until now, playtime for a log was disabled by default to instead use the time logged in play sessions to sync. Now this is being reversed, but this setting would restore that if you primarily use play sessions to track your time.
Adult Games
This update will also be delivering one of the promises I made during my moderation update back in February. Up until this point, games with the IGDB 'erotic' theme or 'eroge' tag were being labeled on the backend and then hidden on certain parts of the site without any option to display them.
Now you'll have more control over this visibility with these new profile-level toggles in your settings:
Enabling the toggle for 'Search and browse' will re-allow adult games to appear throughout the site such as in search, on the home page, and when browsing the games library. The Discovery Engine specific setting just gates whether adult recommendations appear when you use the Discovery Engine feature.
By default, and for signed out users, these toggles will remain disabled. Covers will also appear blurred when browsing if you come across an adult game, like a list. Finally these games will also be labeled with an 'ADULT' tag on their game page to make it clear the content it may contain.
Backloggd nor IGDB hosts any explicit content via covers, screenshots, or any game metadata and this is primarily a profile-level filter preference on how much you'd like to be exposed to these games.
That primarily covers all the major features coming in the 1.17 update, now I want to touch a bit on some policy announcements.
An Update on Policy
Community Guidelines
The new guidelines introduced in February have been pretty successful in alerting us to the most urgent reports with the new report categories. Although the "hidden rating" policy was a bit less useful when announced and we haven't utilized it since. This is being revised as it's not a very scalable solution to enforce on a wide scale. And since the goal was to be more transparent, hiding ratings doesn't really solve the issue for the people affected by it. So this rating policy is being retired.Instead I'll be looking at different ways to give you more control over the reviews you want to see. Far from easy but I want to explore options that don't limit the types of reviews to exist but let you browse the ones you want to see instead.
Restricted Games
The third and final part of the February moderation update was on "restricted" games. These are games that are no longer available via IGDB's API (the database we get all game data from) for violating one of their content policies. As mentioned in last year's post, I'm continuing to stick by their policy and these games will remain off of Backloggd. Personally, I'd rather not host this type of content on a site meant for social logging. Beyond that, maintaining a secondary table of manually inputted game data just for content-restricted games isn't sustainable for myself either.
Sometimes these games get brought to Backloggd before they're restricted on IGDB. This puts them in a limbo state since they can no longer sync their metadata. Meaning it can't be updated or verified. So while I won't delete them off the site, they will have their media hidden and certain logging features limited.
The Black Souls I & II ports are not considered restricted since they're the unpatched versions, those will come back but after I can devise a way to give moderators higher visibility into these more sensitive games, either with manually approved reviews or just more proactive notices. I don't have the exact solution yet but will communicate that plan when I do.
This was a long one but I'm excited to share everything coming! The new bundle features will really make the editions update feel complete once those bundle versions are merged. It won't be long before the next update though, as the 1998 Replay Event is just around the corner starting on April 21st. See you then!
MrProg
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