I posted a status on the main site yesterday, but I wanted to bring it to the forums since it’ll kind of stay in site for longer. (original status for reference: peter’s Grouvee status Feb. 9, 2016, 11:54 a.m.)
Basically I’ve been going through my collection paring down the Backlog shelf. I’ve decided there are a ton of games on there that I’m never going to play, and I want to use that shelf to keep track of games that I want to actually get around to playing. Before, I would just use it to hoard everything I hadn’t played.
Here’s the problem; there are a lot of games on the shelf that I haven’t played, and I kind of don’t know what to do with them. I’ve created a “Collection” shelf to put them on, and I was kind of thinking that might be a good thing for everyone to have.
What do you guys do with games on your shelves that you’re never going to play?
Well, I have mentioned to you several times that I think there should be a difference between something being in your collection and being in a status that the shelves are used for. I am totally down for your comment in that thread about being able to add to your collection and then put in a shelf on top of that. To me, the shelves are more like tags and there should be some core piece beneath it that indicates it is a game you own.
I am with you on that completely… I think one issue is that there currently is no core piece like that, which I think you would agree with. Currently we have playing, played, wishlist, backlog, and user defined. None of those indicate ownership. As I mentioned to @peter I do not use the played shelf to indicate ownership. Nothing we have now directly relates or indicates ownership, except possibly backlog (although I could have a borrowed game in my backlog). It would make sense if something like colection served as that core piece to which you refer. That is, as long as games can occupy other shelves (e.g played) without defaulting to the collection.
I think that it would be a good idea to to be able to split the shelves.
Taking the hint from this, there was something that i actually wanted to ask.
My idea was to split the wishlist among launched & not launched, so that i could keep better track of the games i’d like to look into prior to their releases. Anyone else thinks that this would be a good idea?
Also, i’m getting emails from the forum’s digest, which is something pretty nice, but would it be possible to receive emails/ warnings regarding games’ release dates? i.e. games in the “to be launched” shelf, i usually have to access it to keep track of the release dates coming. It is not that difficult, of course, but how about adding the option to be reminded of those release dates in an email like the forum’s digest maybe?
I think that having data on released versus non yet released may be useful. I’m skeptical that this needs to be another shelf per se. I think it would make sense for each game to have a tag or some form of meta data flag that indicates it as released vs not yet released, if that makes sense. That way you could sort or filter your wish list based on that tag/data. I am of the mind that having too many default shelves is cumbersome and cluttered and think that filtering is a better solution for this type of request. I think that provided the release date info is accurate and present it should be easy to track and then filter for this type of thing.
It might be interesting to allow user defined notifications, whereby you can set up a personal notification based on the data of your choosing. I’m not qualified to say that this is easy (or possible) but it is a potentially useful function.
Edit: I thought about it some more and realized there already is a way to view only those games that are yet to be released. Within the Filter Options section in your game list select the current day under Date Released From and Grouvee will filter out all games released prior to today, leaving you a list of everything you are interested that will be released on a future date. It leaves me wondering if we really need any more than what is currently available. I think if what you are looking for hinges on email notifications, those notifications could be handled by the system as is. At least, I assume so.
If we could weight entries in a list we could give low, mid and high priorities to any entry on a list. we could do this kind of like a separate version of the 5 star rating system with a default of ‘mid priority’ when we first click a shelf (with maybe the 5 star rating coming up on the ‘played’ shelf?) That way we might see less redundant list creation (games to play year 201X) and would be very powerful when filtering through other things like genres or platforms. The trick is to assign a rating to a entry that is specific to a list and not the title itself, not sure if the rating system could be cloned and/or reworked to do just look at a list but it would be nice and easy as a user to use that sort of thing. It’s something i could definitely see myself using. This could remove a lot of redundant list creation with filters down to genre etc.
I take a while to process things.