Community MetaSteam | July 2019 - Racing Towards Empty Wallets

Status
Not open for further replies.
OP
lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
30,566
85,715
113
I don't consider its current UI to be particularly usable. I'd be fine with paying to hire someone to design something less atrocious.
well they will probably add supporter DLC ... so maybe that will help them out a bit :p
 

JMTHEFOX

Planning to Be a Game Designer
Oct 4, 2018
517
688
93
Brooklyn, NY
Cool that they're updating the experiments. Micro trailers seems to be improving very well.
 

Wok

Wok
Oct 30, 2018
4,923
13,188
113
France
@Wok I think you forgot to post something in here, something... Taggy wink wink ;D
True. I was too busy thinking. The frontiers are porous between the forums anyway, right? What is posted on one ends up on the other, and vice versa.

There are 337 Steam tags, and their ids are listed on Github.
If you edit the HTML code of the Automatic Recommender, and then fiddle with the sliders, you may be able to get a few recommendations for any tag.



 
Last edited:

Kvik

Crossbell City Councillor
Dec 6, 2018
4,154
10,289
113
Downunder.
I already have RetroArch on Steam though.



It's merely a custom shortcut.
:wd_p:


But more seriously, what do you all think about creating an OT for RetroArch? we can share tips and tricks, configuration options, optimal settings for specific games, screenshots and so on. A community effort, basically.

I'm not an authority figure on RetroArch by any means, but I do have some experience configuring Sony and Nintendo cores, as well as PC-98 and ScummVM. It would be good to collab with someone familiar with MAME cores, for instance.
 

fokkusu

Burn baby burn🔥🎵
Dec 9, 2018
1,729
4,921
113
38
I already have RetroArch on Steam though.



It's merely a custom shortcut.
:wd_p:


But more seriously, what do you all think about creating an OT for RetroArch? we can share tips and tricks, configuration options, optimal settings for specific games, screenshots and so on. A community effort, basically.

I'm not an authority figure on RetroArch by any means, but I do have some experience configuring Sony and Nintendo cores, as well as PC-98 and ScummVM. It would be good to collab with someone familiar with MAME cores, for instance.
 

Nabs

Hyper˗Toxic Pro˗Consumer
Oct 23, 2018
3,691
12,295
113
One Retroarch / Steam tip is to launch specific games directly from Steam

Shortcut target looks like this: "D:\Emu\RetroArch\retroarch.exe" -L "cores\bsnes_performance_libretro.dll" "D:\Emu\SNES\Roms\rom.sfc" Make sure you fill in the core portion with the one you want to use with that game.

Most modern emulators support this feature. It can come in handy w/ Steam Input configs.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BO7AMMOOD

Kvik

Crossbell City Councillor
Dec 6, 2018
4,154
10,289
113
Downunder.
I don't consider its current UI to be particularly usable. I'd be fine with paying to hire someone to design something less atrocious.
Are you referring to its Desktop UI, or the XMB-styled UI? There is still plenty of room for improvements, for sure. But I'd like to think the desktop UI is usable enough these days that it's a step in the right direction.

I'm still more comfortable editing the .ini files directly though.
 

Kvik

Crossbell City Councillor
Dec 6, 2018
4,154
10,289
113
Downunder.
Shortcut target looks like this: "D:\Emu\RetroArch\retroarch.exe" -L "cores\bsnes_performance_libretro.dll" "D:\Emu\SNES\Roms\rom.sfc" Make sure you fill in the core portion with the one you want to use with that game.
I'll add to this the --config flag as well since sometimes I'd like to use the opengl driver instead of vulkan, or any other specific config options.
 
  • Like
Reactions: lashman and Nabs

MJunioR

MetaMember
Mar 13, 2019
2,059
5,433
113
Don't get me wrong, WWE 2K19 is not good compared to other yearly franchises or even some WWE games from the old THQ, but I just reached 74hrs on it and don't plan to stop playing anytime soon. Fuck me, I'm even thinking about the possibility of getting 2K20 down the line :sick:
 

r3n4ud

Dr. Boom Boom
Oct 17, 2018
607
1,889
93
Don't get me wrong, WWE 2K19 is not good compared to other yearly franchises or even some WWE games from the old THQ, but I just reached 74hrs on it and don't plan to stop playing anytime soon. Fuck me, I'm even thinking about the possibility of getting 2K20 down the line :sick:
I love the series for its glitches. I’ve not played 2k19, but had some hilarious glitches in 2k18 playing with my son
 
  • Like
Reactions: MJunioR

QFNS

Plays too many card games
Nov 18, 2018
1,187
2,876
113
Battle.net still says expecting to release this year o_O

I'm thinking hoping a release date at Blizzcon.
I expect you are correct. I bet they Announce it is out or coming out very shortly after Blizzcon. They need some BIG news at Blizzcon and I suspect it will be that and Diablo 4 reveal. It sounded like D4 was close to showing up last Blizzcon, so in theory it should be ready now. Unless they rebooted it.... again.... again.
 

Durante

I <3 Pixels
Oct 21, 2018
3,860
18,469
113
The recommendation engine seems to give surprisingly on-point results.

I asked it for somewhat recent somewhere between mainstream and niche coop games and the first suggestion was Guacamelee 2 -- which is exactly what we actually played today (but on Gamepass, and really, if I could do it again I'd just have bought it on Steam).
 

BlueOdin

Dec 3, 2018
995
2,665
93
Started Resident Evil 2 yesterday. It’s pretty good so far. Could top Sekiro as my GotY but need to play more to find out.

Have to play a few games that released this year but 2019 seems like a good year for quality games so far.

Also played some Dragon Quest Builders 2 on my Switch and that is a game I would like to play on my PC with a FOV -slider
 

Amzin

No one beats me 17 times in a row!
Dec 5, 2018
1,001
2,110
113
Pet peeve of mine in music / rhythm games - they're all (or, almost all) score based, so why do they ALL feel the need to have fail states as well? Is there a single person that enjoys their song suddenly stopping because they flubbed one too many wubbs? If you suck your score already reflects that so... just why? It also makes some games incredibly tedious (looking at you, Thumper) when you can nail the first 2/3 of a track and then faceplant the last 1/3 over and over but it's a rhythm game so obviously there's no checkpoints....

Bleh. Kind of reminding me why I stopped playing them so much a few years ago as I'm getting into them again. At least Beat Saber has the option to disable that in the free play mode.
 

Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
7,038
25,821
113
True. I was too busy thinking. The frontiers are porous between the forums anyway, right? What is posted on one ends up on the other, and vice versa.

There are 337 Steam tags, and their ids are listed on Github.
If you edit the HTML code of the Automatic Recommender, and then fiddle with the sliders, you may be able to get a few recommendations for any tag.



First of all, YAY, thanks for posting, this is the only way I have to interact with you as I'm not part of the other forum, sorry hehe

Secondly, this is actually great, it shouldn't be difficult to make some kind of menu to display all the 300 tags or even making combinations of them, if this already exists I expect them to improve the number of options.

Anyway, great trick, maybe I should try this too. Thank wok :cat-heart-blob::drinking-blob:
 

Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
7,038
25,821
113
The hiding of already wishlisted game makes the recommander so much more useful.
Already found quite a few games I had never heard about but look right up my alley.
Right? like, as you know lashman, KainXVIII, Matimeo, Tizoc, me and much more people check the steam new pages thread which is the closest thing to a daily selection we have by checking the Steamdb daily and probably 3 times per day. if we miss some things, imagine the general customer who just opens Steam and goes to the store or the library.

So far the recommender is VERY on point, I have discovered a few games that look really nice and didn't know they existed (also thanks for that KO Mech game lol) so this is probably the best queue they have made, if somehow they manage to merge the "12 random results" to this Mahine Learning system, it could potentially be one of the best ways to discover new products.

We will see but so far, this steam lab initiative and the WIP features they have placed on the platform are really cool.
 

Exzyleph

Dark Eroge Lord
Oct 9, 2018
878
1,313
93
Pet peeve of mine in music / rhythm games - they're all (or, almost all) score based, so why do they ALL feel the need to have fail states as well? Is there a single person that enjoys their song suddenly stopping because they flubbed one too many wubbs? If you suck your score already reflects that so... just why? It also makes some games incredibly tedious (looking at you, Thumper) when you can nail the first 2/3 of a track and then faceplant the last 1/3 over and over but it's a rhythm game so obviously there's no checkpoints....

Bleh. Kind of reminding me why I stopped playing them so much a few years ago as I'm getting into them again. At least Beat Saber has the option to disable that in the free play mode.
I recently started playing a bunch of rhythm games and this is a huge bug bear for me as well.
Like, I know that I suck and all scoring metrics will reflect that, so at least let me work on sucking less without kicking me out of the the song.

Another really annoying thing I ran into was gating content behind skill based challenges. There are a lot of songs in INVAXION that are locked up in the "campaign" mode, and unlocking those requires beating specific challenges for the locked song, in addition to just as getting there by beating the previous songs (but see below). But the songs in campaign mode are locked to specific difficulty levels, meaning that I have to master songs on hard even if I just wanted to play them on normal. It makes no sense.

But INVAXION does have one good point in regard to the original complaint, despite still making that mistake, which is the inclusion of a character that eliminates the fail state at the cost of earning less score. You can also use this character to clear campaign stages while AFK'ing, but you still have to beat the challenges to actually unlock the songs.
 

Li Kao

It’s a strange world. Let’s keep it that way.
Jan 28, 2019
7,781
15,703
113
Did Koei continue the Dynasty Warrior series ?
...
Yeah. I know. Stupid question.

But the last time I saw the franchise talked about was when they put out a sorta open world DW that got trashed in the reviews. Were there good ones since then ?
 
  • Like
Reactions: MJunioR
OP
lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
30,566
85,715
113
Did Koei continue the Dynasty Warrior series ?
...
Yeah. I know. Stupid question.

But the last time I saw the franchise talked about was when they put out a sorta open world DW that got trashed in the reviews. Were there good ones since then ?
they're already on the third season pass for that one .... apparently they improved it a lot :) but you'd have to ask The Queen for details - i know she plays it a lot! :)

:blobnoanime:
 

Echoes

"My destiny is to continue fighting"
Oct 31, 2018
551
1,347
93
43
Castelló, Spain
Pet peeve of mine in music / rhythm games - they're all (or, almost all) score based, so why do they ALL feel the need to have fail states as well? Is there a single person that enjoys their song suddenly stopping because they flubbed one too many wubbs? If you suck your score already reflects that so... just why? It also makes some games incredibly tedious (looking at you, Thumper) when you can nail the first 2/3 of a track and then faceplant the last 1/3 over and over but it's a rhythm game so obviously there's no checkpoints....

Bleh. Kind of reminding me why I stopped playing them so much a few years ago as I'm getting into them again. At least Beat Saber has the option to disable that in the free play mode.
Well said, this is one of those features that really make you stop playing these kind of games. The pressure to nail all the sections is so grinding. In fact, driving games share the same problem, you are doing great but one mistake and you have to restart and throw 10-15 minutes to the bin. One possible solution is the inclusion of a rewind feature, it's a pity not many games have tried that route...
 

Exzyleph

Dark Eroge Lord
Oct 9, 2018
878
1,313
93
Well said, this is one of those features that really make you stop playing these kind of games. The pressure to nail all the sections is so grinding. In fact, driving games share the same problem, you are doing great but one mistake and you have to restart and throw 10-15 minutes to the bin. One possible solution is the inclusion of a rewind feature, it's a pity not many games have tried that route...
It would also be nice if more games had a practice mode akin to what you see in RockSmith (and Guitar Hero?) where you can pick a specific section of a song and practice that section over and over again. It makes learning difficult (sections of) songs much more enjoyable.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Echoes and lashman

Ascheroth

Chilling in the Megastructure
Nov 12, 2018
5,139
12,002
113
also thanks for that KO Mech game lol)
Don't thank me, thank the AI recommendation gods~

But yeah, it seems far more useful than the discovery queues so far. Still haven't even played around with tag filtering. My wishlist grew by 10 so far.
 
OP
lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
30,566
85,715
113
It would also be nice if more games had a practice mode akin to what you see in RockSmith (and Guitar Hero?) where you can pick a specific section of a song and practice that section over and over again. It makes learning difficult (sections of) songs much more enjoyable.
not to mention guitarcade! ;)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Exzyleph

FunnyJay

Powered by the Cloud
Apr 6, 2019
1,460
3,802
113
Sweden
Another really annoying thing I ran into was gating content behind skill based challenges.
Reminds me of when I booted up Tony Hawk 2 on my Retropie awhile ago just to mess around a bit. All levels except the first one are locked by default.

In a game made to just boot up and play around a bit, trying to get a good high score...
 
  • Like
Reactions: xinek

MJunioR

MetaMember
Mar 13, 2019
2,059
5,433
113
I don't know if the recommender works for me and I don't know what I really like or if my recommendations are fucked thanks to my time in IdleMaster. Maybe I should give Last Day of June a go since in default settings it's the top recommendation for me once I remove the free-to-play tag so I discover that.
 

prudis

anime occult member
Sep 19, 2018
10,245
26,781
113
The Kingdom of Beer and Porn
twitter.com
hmm interesting
Greetings Androids! We have a bit of sad news today, the following Rockin’ Android games will be retired from Steam store on July 31st, 2019; Bunny Must Die!, Gundemonium Recollection, GundeadGline and Hitogata Happa. We are sorry for the inconvenience, the original developer Platine Dispositif has decided to retire the games; with the intention to update and publish them on Steam at a later date. Please contact them directly for more details. The decision to retire the games was not ours, but we respect their decision and we thank Platine Dispositif for granting us permission to publish their games and to add our own spin, such as the popular remix soundtracks. Please keep in mind, the updated versions will be very different from the versions Rockin’ Android published on Steam. If you’ve previously purchased, Bunny Must Die!, Gundemonium Recollection, GundeadGline and Hitogata Happa, we urge you to download them to your library before they are retired on July 31st, 2019. If you’ve been gifted codes, you can still redeem them after the games are retired. It has been an absolute blast working on these games and we’re extremely grateful to the fans, programmers, translators and specially Platine Dispositif for all their wonderful support! Thank you all!!

Sincerely yours,
Rockin’ Android Team
 

Knurek

OG old coot
Oct 16, 2018
2,450
6,027
113
. If you’ve previously purchased, Bunny Must Die!, Gundemonium Recollection, GundeadGline and Hitogata Happa, we urge you to download them to your library before they are retired on July 31st, 2019
Say what? Will the old versions depots be nuked or what?
 

Wok

Wok
Oct 30, 2018
4,923
13,188
113
France
I don't know if the recommender works for me and I don't know what I really like or if my recommendations are fucked thanks to my time in IdleMaster. Maybe I should give Last Day of June a go since in default settings it's the top recommendation for me once I remove the free-to-play tag so I discover that.
I suspect that recommendations are based on your 50 most played games, so card idling should not be a big issue. I am not sure though.

Bundles might be an issue, and The Last Day of June was part of a Humble bundle, and a Monthly bundle.
For instance, if any of these games are in your top 50, that might help TLDoJ be recommended to you:



 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: lashman

MJunioR

MetaMember
Mar 13, 2019
2,059
5,433
113
Recommendations are based on your 50 most played games, so card idling should not be a big issue.

Bundles might be an issue, and The Last Day of June was part of a Humble bundle, and a Monthly bundle.
For instance, if any of these games are in your top 50, that might help TLDoJ be recommended to you:



Not a single one of those games are among my most played games, although I've most of them in my library. I got the idea about my idled games impacting my recommendations due to this::

Great observation. The good news is: we already take this into account, for exactly the reason you describe. Play-time information is normalized based on the distribution of per-game play-time, so that games with intrinsically different play times are on an equal-footing as far as the model is concerned.
Considering that I've idled tons of smaller games and got 5 ~ 8 hrs of playtime in a bunch of these whereas the avg usually don't go above than 2 ~ 3 hrs according to AStats (for example, Turbo Pug DX, Woodle Tree Adventures, etc.), the recommender might interpret me as a big fan of those kind of games? Dunno. Most of those games also share the 'indie' and / or 'adventure' tag, but I kinda don't want to filter those out since they are really broad.

Another recommendations that are really high in my list, probably thanks to those cheap idled games with a really high playtime, are the Data Hacker games, even though I've ignored them in the past.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: xinek and lashman

Wok

Wok
Oct 30, 2018
4,923
13,188
113
France
Considering that I've idled tons of smaller games and got 5 ~ 8 hrs of playtime in a bunch of these whereas the avg usually don't go above than 2 ~ 3 hrs according to AStats (for example, Turbo Pug DX, Woodle Tree Adventures, etc.), the recommender might interpret me as a big fan of those kind of games?
Hmmm... The system should rightfully consider that you are a big fan of these games. :p

The question is: are these idled games part of your 50 most played games?

We don't know for sure whether the algorithm only considers the top 50, or whether the algorithm actually takes into account your whole library and it is just a cosmetic decision to display the top 50 on the page of the Interactive Recommender. One weird recommendation which I get is Steel Rats, and I blame Humble Monthly for this one, but this would only make sense if the algorithm takes into account the whole library.

If you say that none of these idled games are in your top 50, that would further consolidate my belief that the algorithm takes into account the whole library. In this case, it could be the right time to create a new account and stop idling games for longer than necessary. ;)
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Panda Pedinte

Big_Al

Miserable old git
Jan 22, 2019
139
370
63
If you're an EDF fan, Earth Defense Force 5 is an absolute must. It's absolutely brilliant. I mean it's still EDF but just things like having different weather in some levels, some enemies actually ducking between buildings making it a bastard to get at that them and a bigger variety of enemies really make it fucking fantastic. That and it REALLY ramps up, as you'd expect :cool: The online has also been super smooooooooth, really impressed with it.
 

MJunioR

MetaMember
Mar 13, 2019
2,059
5,433
113
Hmmm... The system should rightfully consider that you are a big fan of these games.

The question is: are these idled games part of your 50 most played games? We don't know for sure whether the algorithm only considers the top 50, or whether the algorithm actually takes into account your whole library and it is just a cosmetic decision to display the top 50 on the page of the Interactive Recommender. If you say that none of these idled games are in your top 50, that would give a hint that the algorithm might take into account the whole library.
None of them are. In fact, I doubt there's most than 10 games in my top 50 are tagged as indie or free-to-play, both tags that appear a lot in my recommendations if I don't filter them.

The thing is, the algorithm is doing what is supposed to do and I can't blame them for thinking that I'm a fan of fucking Woodle Tree Adventures and the likes since my playtime is almost double than average. I think that the solution in this case is maybe playing the games I buy? I never thought it would come to this.
 

BlackRainbowFT

Mouse Accelerated Member
Apr 17, 2019
507
1,172
93
38
Switzerland
I gave up after a dozen of missions as well. For me it's a repetitive and frustrating game, I didn't have fun at all while playing it.
It took me a while to "get it".

The whole point of the game is looting ridiculous weapons* and, to do so, you're supposed to beat each mission in almost every difficulty level.

*and boy are they ridiculous. Stuff like an assault rifle that shoots really quickly but the bullets stay mostly still during the first 3 seconds and then instantly go from 0 to infinity.

Basically (and to simplify things), on any difficulty setting the actual difficulty curve progresses exponentially whereas the loot you get improves linearly.
This means that you won't be able to just beat the game on NORMAL... At some point you won't be able to advance further but you'll be strong enough to restart the first few missions on HARD. This will allow you to farm better weapons (as the drops' level ceiling increases) and progress further.

As far as gameplay loops go this one is a bit unusual, I'll give you that!

But I do recommend playing the entirety of the game with somebody else!

Edit: with that said, I completed EDF 2017, played EDF Insect Armageddon (and hated it) and I still have to finish EDF 4.1 (the progression was too slow and I lost interest after a while)... so I'm not sure I'm going to buy EDF5 right away.
 

BlueOdin

Dec 3, 2018
995
2,665
93
Finally got Grid view working properly again. Turned out I was modifying the wrong value so no wonder the space between rows didn't go away. Also finally learned how to get rid of it in skins so Air + no space between rows means Valve can take their time with the client update.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Milena
Status
Not open for further replies.