Community MetaSteam | July 2019 - Racing Towards Empty Wallets

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Amzin

Amzin

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Phoenix RISING said:
If you are a completionist (and I did Platinum GoW even though I played it almost a year after it was released), then you fight the Valkyries. These are optional fights, but the game's excellence compels you to attempt the challenge.

Restart places are generally very reasonable. I do remember the slow descent into the Valkyrie vaults though.
Click to expand...
I was just citing the Valkyries as hard fights, generally considered obnoxiously hard by a lot of GoW fans, but they didn't seem as bad to me as a lot of other stuff. But they are optional and even though I would die and restart the fight, it wasn't bad because you start right there (usually, I think there was one that had a bad checkpoint). I think checkpointing is the most underconsidered aspect of a lot of games nowadays, and there's been tons of games that just straight up get it wrong, or have bad checkpoints and claim they "add challenge" somehow which is bunk.

Furi is another good example of bad checkpointing. Every encounter is a 3-stage boss fight, and you have essentially 3 "lives" per encounter that restart the phase you're in, if you lose the 3rd one you start the entire encounter over. Past the first couple fights, when I was getting used to controls, I never lost more than 1 of those lives (and usually not even that) on the first 2 phases, but almost always lost all of them on the final phase. So then I have to do the 2 phases I just beat handily the first time, again, to get to the phase I actually need practice on, and which is always significantly different than any other part of the fight (by design). It's not fun and is a time sink and I stopped playing an otherwise excellent game because I hated wasting my time like that. It's a smaller scale version of if you died in an MMO and had to go redo the previous 10 levels in the previous zone before you could go redo the fight you died at. Sure there's a few people that'd like that but it'd be opt-in if anything.

Hard West had the worst example I've ever seen and probably will ever see but they actually added manual saves which completely fixed the problem.
 
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This would probably make more sense in the August thread (I'll probably re-post it when it's up :) ), but here's a look at some of the Adventure games launching in August, courtesy of Gamewalker and Adventure Gamers:



The games shown are:

Lightstep Chronicles
Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure
ROOM 208
The Great Perhaps
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan
Blair Witch
 
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Eferis

Eferis

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FunktionJCB said:
This would probably make more sense in the August thread (I'll probably re-post it when it's up :) ), but here's a look at some of the Adventure games launching in August, courtesy of Gamewalker and Adventure Gamers:



The games shown are:

Lightstep Chronicles
Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure
ROOM 208
The Great Perhaps
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan
Blair Witch
Click to expand...
Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure looks pretty cool. I might grab it at launch if the price is right (for me).

Edit: It's apparently $19,99 with a 10% launch discount. I'll get it if they apply the actual regional price for the EU region (instead of doing the $1=€1 thing).
 
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FunnyJay

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Sweden

Let me tell you all about while True: learn().
Solve logic puzzles where you need to sort stuff to perform different tasks, all the while learning the theories behind machine learning!
The game links you to articles and videos of you want to learn deeper about machine learning as well.

As I know very little about machine learning beyond a rough idea of how it works, I can't tell you how much you actually learn about its inner workings.

But the game is ace though! And not very expensive!

If you like Zachtronics games, you will most certainly like this one as well!
 
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Snakethesniper

Snakethesniper

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Tried Crystal Crisis and it's very well done!
Doesn't seem to have many buyers at the moment though... Online games seems to take a while to match
 
Mivey

Mivey

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Durante said:
How could so many of you "like" my previous post (regarding Dark Souls vs. Character Action games)?
I wrote it's instead of its !
I'm exceedingly disappointed in myself.
Click to expand...
I make that mistake so often, it would be hypocritical to judge other people on it.
 
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lashman

lashman

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👀 👀 👀

Since launching Steam Labs, Community feedback on our initial Store discovery experiments has lead us to create a number of new features and improvements we're excited to share.

What we've learned

We've received really positive feedback since launching the Interactive Recommender. We've heard from many of you that the Interactive Recommender is helping you find interesting games, and we also see this reflected in our early data. One way we study what’s interesting to users is to look at how frequently a visit to a store page turns into a positive action like adding the item to a wishlist, or purchasing it. That frequency varies depending on how users arrived at the store page. We also look at how frequently people choose to visit a store page via the recommender.

Our initial data show the Interactive Recommender is performing very well by those measures. We do of course take these signs with grain of salt, given the novelty and promotion of our experiment likely make for an unfair comparison. Next up, we will work to evaluate the recommender in ways that eliminate this potential bias.

Furthermore, we're especially pleased to see that users are being exposed to a broad range of titles. In fact, nearly 10,000 different games have been added to wishlists from the Interactive Recommender page so far. So yeah, initial signs indicate the Interactive Recommender experiment is working!

Episode 1 of the Automatic Show, a half-hour algorithmically-generated video about Steam games, was received by the Community with a more mixed response. While much of the feedback we received has indicated that the show's utility and format have promise, we did hear from many users that 30 minutes is... a lot of minutes. If this rings true for you, we now offer three new short variations of the initial half-hour experience that we hope you'll enjoy.

If you're in search of your next favorite game, you can give the Interactive Recommender a try for yourself at Steam Labs - Interactive Recommender and watch the new short n' sweet Automatic Shows at Steam Labs - Automatic Show.

What's new

The Interactive Recommender

New "exclude" feature

You can now tell the interactive recommender to exclude some of your recently played games when generating recommendations for you. By default, the set of games that are excluded in this way is taken from your global Steam ignore list here. If you've chosen to ignore a game via its store page, we won't use it to generate recommendations for you, but you can now interactively toggle excluded games on and off to see the effect that has on your recommendations. (Toggling the exclusion state of games via the interactive recommender in this way will not affect those Steam-wide ignore settings.) If you want to ignore a particular game across all of Steam, you can set that on the store page for that game. Let us know how this feature works for you!

User interface improvements

Your feedback has also informed a few minor improvements to the interface. For example, hovering over a played game in the left-hand column now displays the title of the game, which is useful when the thumbnail art itself is not so legible, and clicking a game in the played list now navigates to its store page, as one might expect.

Always training

The interactive recommender model adapts in two ways. First, it adapts right away to an individual user's behavior; as you play new games, or revisit old ones, the model uses that data to give you updated recommendations. The second way the model adapts is by periodically re-training itself to take into account global changes, staying up-to-date with the latest releases and the gradually changing patterns of player behavior. This re-training process is an intensive operation that crunches billions of data points and can take a whole day to complete. We've been doing some behind-the-scenes cleanup work to make the re-training process smoother and more automated, which will enable us to use the technology in new contexts, like other Labs experiments or the Store itself.

The Automatic Show

New short shows

  • Top Releases for June, covering 21 titles from our monthly roundup in a tight 2 minutes 34 seconds.
  • The 3-Minute VR Show, which covers some of the latest VR titles across all genres.
  • Rapid! Fire! Horror! In the first two shows, each game clip is 8 seconds long. This show experiments with 3-second clips. Can you handle it?

We hope you'll check out our new shows, then let us know what you think in the discussions.

What's next

We've heard your requests for more dynamic tag selection tools to help guide the Interactive Recommender's results, and we hope to build these soon. We will also continue to monitor and improve the Interactive Recommender's success connecting users with compelling content. The strong performance we're seeing so far may be due in part to the novelty of the feature, so we're continuing to monitor results and conduct additional tests to confirm our initial findings. Meanwhile, given your positive feedback, we're exploring ways to offer the Interactive Recommender's features in other parts of the Store.

As we're looking at next steps for each of our fledgling experiments, we are also embarking on a fourth, which we're excited to share with you soon.

Keep in touch

These experiments are guided in large part by the Steam community of players and game developers. We love to hear what you think of them in the Steam Labs community forum at General Steam Labs Discussion :: Steam Labs

-The Steam Team
Click to expand...
 
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