Dear GOG, now that the sorting in the game library is sorted again, I have a few proposals on how to improve on it. The proposals are fairly small, so if you have any formalized development cycle, such as Agile, you may consider them as MVPs for your future scrums. Here they are:

1. Unify version control. It's difficult to find out which games people need to update, when versions are jumping up and down. For March, for example, I got update notification for a number of games (I last got everything up to date a month ago), and there was a lot of weirdness. For example, Divinity 2 is now version 1.4.700.38, whereas my old version was 2.0.0.11. Same with Capitalism 2, which seems to be downgraded from 2.5.0.11 to 1.09. If I may suggest, incorporate the version date into its number. To The Moon makes it nice and obvious (the version at the time of this writing is 15.02.2018), and if its trend continues, I'll know whether to update the game when I get a new update notification.

2. Rename certain games to have them sort correctly. This goes especially for series (for example, the current sorting for the Patrician games is Patrician, Patrician 3, Patrician II), and for large franchises. Some of them, especially the Star Wars games have inconsistent trademark signs in their names (either (R) or TM), which makes their sorting flawed.

3. Add a page control to the library. In longer game lists (I, for example, have 8 pages), the user has to scroll down the page to select the next page. Having a pull-down to jump to a particular page, or at least having the pagination on top of the library as well would improve the user experience, in my opinion.

The old 2.X.Y.Z version format was GOG's own, while there is no new format, they just put the dev's build version. Which I'm OK with it, mainly to be able to compare with other stores. I agree that's somewhat annoying, but: a) I'm not sure this is an easy fix to implement, all with having to add custom ad-hoc exceptions to the alphabetical sorting rule, and b) right now, the games in a franchise may not be properly ordered, but at least they are listed together... You can already jump to any page you want with the 'vanilla' GOG library. Just click in the current page number at the bottom and type the page you want to go.

Additionally, the Barefoot Essentials userscript allows you to jump between pages of any paginated section of the website (store, library, forum, etc.) by pressing Ctrl + left/arrow key.

The way it's normally done is having two names: an internal name for sorting and a display name for, uh, displaying. Renaming might not be possible legally, and it won't work for large numbers and unnumbered installments:

- Game: the something
- Game: another something

- Final Fantasy VIII
- Final Fantasy IX
- Final Fantasy X

I'm not using anything else, but a dev version would be fine, if it was consistently applied through the site. Currently, however, many games still have the GOG version and some, like Syberia and System Shock 2 recently got updated while keeping their previous version numbers, only adding a new number at the end ("hotfix3" and "update_2", respectively). Where I work, we add a date in the YYYYMMDD format as the last part of the version number. The exceptions are a good idea. Special characters should be exempted. But in some cases, like with my example, Patrician 3 actually shows the name "Patrician III" in the profile page. Had GOG named it as such in the list, it would have been properly ordered within the franchise. There are similar inconsistencies, especially when the number of the first part is omitted. In that case, the numbered games may be listed before the first part. Thank you; I wasn't aware of that. I tried it, and it works, but it's really non-obvious. If there is already this option, it should be trivial to add a better interface (I thought skipping pages wasn't implemented because it messed up proper ordering in pagination; something we've struggled with in our company). I'm aware of Adalia Fundamentals, but I've been a little reluctant to add any add-ons to my browser other than uBlock Origin and Ghostery. Just a personal choice, I guess, but a full product wouldn't require third-party software. The long list of improvements offered by AF should serve GOG as a list of features they may consider adding, if they aim for continuous improvement. That is an excellent idea. I hope GOG will run with it.

i just wish they would even listen to suggestions anymore about user convenience issues with library, reviews etc. frankly its not on their to do lists. but some nice suggestions never the less, right now i have to resort to cumbersome tags to put in order those series games with all different names, drives me crazy

Like GOG really cares? They don't give a flying fuck.

As much as I want to disagree I have to agree, with the current state they been dealing with things and being silent to the community with issues, this will never happen in our life time.

True, I forgot about these features of the AF script. Sorry, adaliabooks! :P I'm not saying you aren't right or that your suggestions aren't appropriate (e.g. you're totally right about version numbering: GOG began to adopt the new format a long time ago, so by now there's been more than enough time for adapting the whole catalog to the new system). I'm simply saying that what you suggest has been suggested before many times by many others, and nothing has been done about it. So at this point, I guess the only two viable options are either throwing the towel and moving one's business elsewhere, or else giving up the chase, accepting they're not going to do anything, and trying to make the most out of third party tools like the BE and AF scripts.

Needless to say, for the time being I've opted for the second option. But if there aren't some radical improvements come September (GOG will celebrate its 10th birthday) I'm gonna be very, very disappointed... :\

it looks like GOG is slowly but surely working their way through the catalogue to update all games to the new format. You usually see quite a bunch of "internal updates" coming out which (among other things) change the displayed version.
however in the end the exact format of the versioning is up to the game developers.
I don't think GOG has the power to force every development team to conform to a consistent versioning scheme. :)