Tools for Collectors (suggestions)

Karnov2084 · December 29, 2014, 6:04pm

So I did a bit of game collection organizing over the weekend and decided to finally start tracking everything digitally, and this site seemed a good fit for that. The goofy intro video sold me on it anyway. So first of all, much thanks Peter for your hard work on this. After the process of adding everything in, I just thought of a few suggestions that might be pretty useful for collectors, especially those with larger libraries of old stuff.

Search within shelves:
It would be great to be able to search within your collection to see if something is there. For those instances when you’re raiding a yard sale or swap meet, and can’t remember if you have a certain game or not. If you’re sifting through a couple hundred games on a smart phone it might take a while… If there’s a workaround I’m missing on this, let me know!

Price/Rarity checks:
On the game’s page, it’d be cool to have a quick link to some kind of price chart or maybe a simple ebay search to be able to easily check a game’s value.

Condition rating:
When a game is part of your collection, it might be nice to be able to tag it’s condition, complete in box, missing manual, torn label, etc

Switch game art:
Sometimes there are multiple cover art images, it’d be cool to set the artwork accordingly for whatever system you are playing it on.

I know some of these features are part of other collection tracking software, but I think those lack the sense of community that Grouvee is trying to foster. Maybe some of these are easy to implement, maybe not, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring them up!

One other minor gripe, after adding in all my games, it was pretty tedious to go through and add the platform info for each. Maybe instead when you click to add a game to your shelf, you could immediately choose the platform(s) you want to categorize it under.

So those are just some suggestions, otherwise the process of adding my collection went pretty smoothly, and of course I ended up generating a nice backlog of games to catch up on this winter. I’ll try and contribute a few obscure reviews here and there as well.

http://www.grouvee.com/user/Karnov2084/

a winner is you

peter · December 30, 2014, 6:57pm

I’m working on a visual, and functional redesign of some of the parts of Grouvee. One of the big things I’m adding in is a metadata dialog that will let you enter all your platform data, time played, condition data, etc.

I love this idea. I’ll get it in there soon.

I’m working on something for this.

Glad you like Grouvee so far! Thanks for all the suggestions.

mrhaydel · January 2, 2015, 3:39am

I’ll just chime in here and say that I’m looking forward to the additional metadata options you’re planning on adding Peter.

For the past several months, I’ve been pretty obsessively tracking my time played on every game I can using the ‘Add Dates Played’ option, and I’d love to have the ability to see that data from different perspectives (date ranges, ranked by aggregated time played, etc.).

Keep up the great work, and here’s to a groovy Grouvee in 2015. Hi o! I’m sorry for that. I really am.

Midnightoil · January 2, 2015, 1:58pm

Im liking what im hearing, but I just ask that when adding more features doing it in a non-intrusive way will be the path to success. The reason I use grouvee over all the other backlog sites is because of its ease of use. One click solutions to adding a game to my backlog or to my “playing” category is amazing.

What turned me away from sites like howlongtobeat was how complicated everything was. Im fine with lots of customization, but dont make it essential.

peter · January 2, 2015, 2:11pm

Totally agree with simplicity. The simple button interface won’t be going anywhere. I’ll just be adding in an option to add more data on a separate page that you can ignore if you don’t want to use it.

mmuffins · January 9, 2015, 4:55pm

I wholeheartedly agree with the ideas so far.

I only begun creating my collection a few days ago and the option to import from steam tremendously helped getting things started, but with a gaming history of about 25 years, steam only covers so much.
What I’m currently missing (or can’t seem to find) is an option in the main game list to filter out games that are already in my collection to only browse games that I didn’t already add.

Anyway, what I have seen so far of grouvee is absolutely awesome, keep up the great work!

titusfox · January 21, 2015, 3:03am

Hi Peter, hi all!
I’m a rateyourmusic and goodreads user, and I discovered grouvee just a couple of days ago.
So, I believe (and I trust! this can be the definitive site to track, catalog and rate a videogame collection. Congrats! But, before starting the complex task of remembering and surf, as TIV73 said, a 25/30 years gaming history, I’m evaluating the best way to classify, tag, rate, etc my collection and I’d like to know if some features available on those sites are implemented here, or will be implemented in a future, or maybe never

filter collection by publisher/developer (I’m adding shelves right now but I’d like to avoid this)
filter collection by rating or rating range
customize/add more columns in ‘my games’ view (e.g., add the total # of ratings, average rating, publisher/developer, etc)
combined filters based on personal shelves? e.g.: platform & humor
compare collections/ratings with other user
add personal notes en every game page
(suggestion) show the total number of ratings in the ‘games’ view (now it says “(X average Grouvee user rating)”, it’d be nice to see also “based on Y reviews” as in every specific game page)
thanks in advance and congrats for the site!

peter · January 21, 2015, 12:50pm

Hi @titusfox

I love lists like this! I’ve added these to my backlog of features (here if you want to look at it Trello). Everything you’ve suggested is feasible. The filtering of the collection should be fairly easy to do.

As for personal notes, you can use the status messages as a personal note for a game. There’s a box on every game page to enter them, and also on the front page when you’re logged in. You can mark it as private and no one but you can see it. I’m going to make that more prevalent in the redesign of the site I’m working on currently (you can see screens of it over here: Screenshots of the new profile pages - #13 by MrSaturn21)

titusfox · January 22, 2015, 3:18am

E X C E L E N T ! ! !
Thanks in advance! I checked the backlog link, there are several really interesting features! maybe another one could be “top games by year” charts (something like https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/album/2014), based on somehow weighted/normalized average score for the game (I don’t know how to write this in english, not the “classical” average score, but some formula considering normalization of each rating using the user’s average score. I mean, for example, a 5 star rating is not so relevant if the user average rating is 4.90…)
I’ll check the status messages as for personal notes, thanks again!