My Account is the heart of your GOG.com experience. It's the one place that's 100% yours, and the place you always go to download your games and manage the entire library.
[emphasis added]
The more time passes, and the more I go through the new account system, the more the above statement rings like you're mocking us. Manage our entire library? There is no way of managing the entire library other than the useless two basic options of "By Title" and "By Purchase Date".
The first one is useless because your sense of alphabetising is seriously screwed up, and does not actually take into account game series and their chronological order (the last attached screenshot is a prime example).
The second one is also pretty useless for anyone wanting to keep track of the chronological order in which games were added to"library" (what an euphemism), as all games are listed based on the date of actual purchase, gifted games included, and not based on the date they were added. The "Orders History" suffers from the same.
Why would one care what date a gifter purchased a game they were gifted? Perhaps because it's easier for GOG to just use the accounting info and be done with it.
And before anyone jumps in to say "but we have tags now" - yes we have, and I will present my experience using them in a bit, but tags are not meant to "manage" our entire library, the only purpose they serve is filtering and searching, and that is not managing and sorting the entire library.
You wanted to change the account system to make things easier for you? Fine, just call it by its name, and drop this hyping PR talk how it's done to improve our user experience and we all should be excited and rejoicing about it.
Replacing the nice shelves with the bland looking game catalogue,and depriving us from any sort of permanent management and order of our games has not improved our experience (of which you're sure of, priceless).
I said calling it a game library is an euphemism, because we no longer have shelves with pretty little boxes on them, we now have game cards floating over thin wooden ledges. It looks no different than browsing the game catalogue, and you also made sure that it can't look any different than the game catalogue. Manual sorting was the one feature that truly allowed us to personalise the game library and order our game boxes in ways that made sense.
Now, there have been arguments that manual ordering was not good enough, or that it was not practical if one had a few hundreds of games. It was an
option for those that wanted to use it. An option that was taken away with nth to replace it in an efficient and satisfying way.
Is it more practical or less time consuming to manually tag hundreds of games, so that one can have
advanced filtering and searching?
I'm all for new features that people want to use, but taking away options that were useful and used, and without a warning, is not customer-friendly..
GOG Support claimed for a long time that they didn't have an ETA on the new account system going live; I even got a reply on Sunday about the PM notifications not working, and it was still along the lines "the glitch will be fixed very soon". Then Chamb made the
Friday News Dump; I asked him on Friday when the new system would roll out, I got no reply,and Monday morning - bang!
So, again, thanks for that treatment.
Now, in regards to the new game collection page:
The default "View by" is Grid. As stated
and [url=https://www.gog.com/forum/general/my_account_big_changes_on_the_horizon/post482]here,and I think by a few others in this thread, changing the setting to List is not saved, it reverts back to Grid between browser sessions. Interestingly, the "Sort by" setting is. Is there a reason we can;t have even that? The game catalogue behaves the same way, are the two connected?
GENRES: Is there a logic in the order genres are displayed in the "GENRES" drop-down menu that I'm failing to follow (see 1st attached screenshot)? It's not alphabetical, which would make the most sense to me, nor does it look to be based on any other criteria, it's not even the same as the "GAMES" tab on the nav-bar; if I had to guess, I'd go for "favourite genres of the GOG emplyoee(s) tasked to create the drop-down menu".
I can't help but wonder - is it really that hard to maintain some sort of logic and order in such things?
TAGS: Don't quite follow the logic of the order, but let's put that aside for a moment:
- Impossible to rearrange it.
- New tags created are added at the top.
- New tags created don't show up in the "TAGS" drop-down menu without refreshing the page.
- Filtering per tags, and then clearing them does not always refresh the page, it more often than not stays stuck, and requires to click on the browser refresh button.
- And of course, tags can't be used to sort one's game collection.
But wait, it gets better!
ASSIGN TAGS - If more than one tags are assigned, only the very top of tags show on the game card, the rest show only at the very bottom in the game details.Can someone explain to me why this is designed this way? I'd expect to be able to see in a glance what tags I've assigned and manage them. So, are we supposed to keep track of what tags we have assigned to each game, are we supposed to open each game's details to refresh our memory, or are we supposed to keep filtering until the game we have in mind shows up in one of our searches?
- Tags mysteriously vanish from the drop-down menu, making it impossible to either assign them or deselct them if perviously assigned. Currently, the "FAVOURITE" tag refuses to show up (see 2nd attached screenshot); closing and reopening the page didn't help, and not even an account refresh (
https://www.gog.com/user/refresh) made it return.
I guess that should teach me to go against my instinct and test a feature I knew I should stay away from.
Accessing a specific game In the
Friday News Dump, Chamb said:
-- Improved navigation. Now it will be easier to jump straight into the store page, support, and forums relevant to each item in your collection.
Except that it's not improved navigation. Left- clicking on any of:
- Store Page & Reviews
- Support
- Forum
opens the respective page in the same tab, with no way to return to where one was; one has to hit the "back" button in their browser, an action that, of course, just takes one back to the game collection page, where one has to repeat the same steps all over to continue where they left off. Not practical, not time saving, not improved experience.
All of them should open on a separate tab by default when left-clicking on them, that's improved navigation.
- GOG Downloader Links: should either also open in a new tab (for the same reasons stated above), or better yet, work like the Changelog option does.
Updates OK GOG, I understand simplifying your life. But using a tiny blue dot
to indicate updates and new games? Seriously? Just look at the last two attached screenshots - does that look distinct enough to you? It looks more like a smudge, a colourful one, but a smudge nonetheless. And this is on a 1024X768 resolution, can't help but wonder how visible this is on higher resolutions. I think you need to come up with something better, the old red tags were pretty distinct, each with its own label (NEW & UPDATED); whey replace something that worked perfectly fine with something like this?
This blue dot also appears only on the game card, so I'm curious how one will know what exactly got an update if there's no changelog. Can we get an answer to this?
I'll be adding more as I'm going through my new
shiny account system, and I hope that someone is really listening and taking notes.
