Passive Boycott. Even if I was actively participating, I've not seen any compelling releases in several months, and the support of developers like
Nicalis is
not exactly bueno. Problems:
The website is outdated as heck. Lots of things are broken. GOG released a new store page and I've
yet to see it. There are paradigms that appear on this very forum that are obsolete conceits from the days of Web 2.0 such as the forum reputation system.
The Forum Code of Conduct don't match the games. Releasing porn games while pooh-pooh the discussion thereof? Frankly strange. Also makes the already
absurdly tiny moderation team's job much harder.
Experiments have been conducted without the previous warning of users. Don't just drop things into our lap and act like we're supposed to be peachy with them.
Library management leaves much to be desired. Like a lack of a freesort or being able to mute updates from hidden games. Changelogs are practically cryptids that they're a rumour when one shows up.
UTF support is a bit tricky. GOG doesn't support emoji. That's sort of a problem which is trifling. But the bigger problem is instead of deleting the offending codepoint and returning an error, inserting invalid unicode will just
bamf the remainder of a post into the void. You ever see what happens when you insert a few nonprintables on GOG? I don't think GOG supports Hebrew or Arabic in any useful fashion.
Behold, the stones upon which reviews are set upon! Games are largely not static. On GOG, they used to be, but there's only so many millions of old shareware titles that GOG could bother to pick up. Point is, GOG now have games that change; and that means things can occur such as a developer who
clicks tongue makes a complete mess of their bed, so to speak. Such as Forager's dev, Hopfrog. The "Solo indie darling" turned out to have been an uncredited team effort; and I can't edit my review to add that to my reflections. Speaking of stones, GOG treats the review system as a limited commodity; giving users an arbitrarily small number of characters of which to put their thoughts in.
VET THE RELEASES. In lay terms, I bequest of GOG to actually check the content of the games they're releasing. It shouldn't be up to us users to discover the violent hanging scene in
No One Lives in Heaven, or the alleged rape scenes in many of the recent releases.
MST3K discovered this the hard way to screen everything they are going to riff because
Sidehackers (AKA: Five the Hard Way) contains a scene where one of the characters is raped and then killed.
The writers were unaware of the film's darker content when they selected it for the show, only watching it in its entirety during their usual joke-writing sessions. They were horrified to discover the scene in which Rommel's girlfriend Rita is raped and killed, juxtaposed with shots of Luke and Lois' children playfully roughhousing. This scene, and the discovery of Rita's nearly nude body, were removed from the episode.
That was back in the 1990s with a bunch of cowpokes from Minnesota. I presume GOG's crew is more in number and able to do this for titles which have not previously been though a ratings board; seeing as video playthoughs do exist in spades and getting in contact with a developer shouldn't be a tall order. (Even if some of them are absolute edgelords; getting them to reveal their hand should be easy; many like to brag about "offensive" content.)
Personal Problems:
GOG really has a streak for not hiring outside of Poland. This is a "I feel they're losing potental talent by not just hiring an eagar intern working in Germany and
not having them commute several hours a day back and forth." sort of thing; whatever GOG saves in taxes from Poland's nationalistic policy is soured by a lack of global workforce. Who the heck is going to show up knowing three languages to do helpdesk support in French at the wages/benefits that Poland offers?
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[*]BBCode is creaky and old. I'm not sure why we don't have WYSIWYG editing or why a userscript has to be used for a live preview function.
[*]Not to menton that most of BBcode is riddled with ambiguities and problems in formatting. GOG doesn't even support the whole of it.
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Who the hell picks these‽ There are many a time when GOG has made a release that could be said to be a completely subpar game. Storybooks such as
To the Moon, joyless experiences whose presence on the store is utterly baffling such as
Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, and more insultingly, stillborn or dead games with no realistic chance of updating such as
Block'hood. There's more than two OSes. This is just me signifying my complaint about the absolutely apathy that GOG shows for Linux, but with a minor sidenote for things that weren't built on X86 processors like the Z80 or Motorola 68000.
I'm not a randy 14 year old. I don't mind pornography, or pornographic games. But I do have a semblance of standards, even if they're mostly lyrics to a Sir Mixalot song. Point is, not only is Sturgeon's Revelation in full effect, but finding games which mesh the two well is
quite an undertaking. This relates to a point above.
Maybe "Coming Soon" is too generous a title. This relates to games which have been announced well ahead of any reasonable semblance of time which may yet only be a design document on a hermit's desk somewhere in the mountains of Nicaragua. Anticipation may be part of the fun, but I'm a bit old fashioned and prefer my games to be announced only when the absolute completion of code and localization can be ascertained; there are countless games which were previewed in Nintendo Power which never came to be simply because they never got localized.
Not Problems:
The Politics ban. It's clear that there are enough volatile elements within the forums as to render useful discussion a pointless endeavour; furthermore there are enough platforms to grandstand and soapbox upon. This is a games platform first and foremost.
However, I would discourage GOG from releasing games which blatantly seek to slap us in the face on hot-button topics or are just modern political simulators. No more movies. This endeavour was a mistake. Given the volatile nature of copyright, and the lack of titles befitting to a platform such as GOG, I would personally be fine if we all forgot it existed and the server space for these was reclaimed for Motocross Madness or something.