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[UPDATE: 15.05.2015]
We've started importing the old Private Messages into Chat. :) It's a process so you will see them gradually being added to your conversations.

[ORIGINAL]

Hi all,

Many of you probably already know this - from the various hints we dropped here and there - but for quite some time now we have been hard at work on the brand new My Account section.

Since this is a very vital part of your experience at GOG.com (basically the one place that's 100% yours), and its release day is approaching pretty fast, I wanted to give you some heads-up and a brief overview of the changes that we have in store for you. Read on! :)

New things dedicated to your games:
-- Shared user wishlist. Yes, this highly requested feature will finally make its debut along with the new My Account. With just a few clicks, you will be able to decide whether your wishlist is private (viewable only by you), shared with friends (viewable only by you and people from your friends list, which is the default setting) or shared with everyone (because why not? ;)). You will get a handy link to your wishlist that you can share wherever and with whomever you like (a GOG.com Account is not required to view a wishlist shared with everyone). :)
-- Advanced filtering. We decided that, since your collections are getting bigger and bigger with each passing day, this is the perfect time to introduce some robust filtering options to both the Library AND Wishlist. Now, finding all your RPGs with Polish localization and co-op will be… well... finally possible. ;) It’s worth noting that the filtering options are based on your collection (so if you have no games with a Polish localization, you will not see the Polish option in the language filter).
-- User tags for the Library. With the new My Account, you will be able to create your own tags (up to 50), assign them to your games and movies and later use them to even better navigate and filter your collection. You will be able to assign multiple tags to each item in your collection and doing so will be possible from both your shelf/list directly or from the game/movie details.
-- Orders history. As part of the transition into the new My Account, we are retiring the "gifts" section, but in its place we are giving you a list of ALL your past orders and ALL your gifts, including the ones that have been given to you (finally). The orders history can be tailored and adjusted to your liking with a few clicks (for example, you can change it to list gifts only).
-- Changelogs. You will be able to view game changelogs directly on the new My Account page within the game details overlay. Of course, not every game will have it, but we will be keeping the changelogs up to date for the most popular, latest titles the same way we are doing right now on the forums.
-- Better organization of the downloads list. We improved the way downloads are organized on the game/movie details overlay. It will be easier to download the correct OS and language version of our installers and see which goodies are part of which DLC.

New things dedicated to communication:
-- Friends list. Already introduced in GOG Galaxy, the friends system is making its way to the GOG.com website as part of the new My Account section.
-- Chat. Old and weary private messages are retiring and are transformed into a new, live chat system. Chat will be available from both GOG Galaxy and My Account. Don't worry, all your past conversations that were conducted via private messages will be imported and preserved in the chat (and you will now be able to continue them live!).

Smaller but notable improvements:
-- Proper game versioning. With the new My Account, we will start to display the actual game version in the downloads on the game details overlay, so you will be able to easily identify if the version you have on your computer is the latest one, or it needs updating.
-- Improved navigation. Now it will be easier to jump straight into the store page, support, and forums relevant to each item in your collection.
-- Locale settings. Change your preferred currency and website / newsletter language directly on My Account to have them stored within your profile.
-- Pagination. We brought back the much requested, tried-and-true pagination view to the new My Account. This change is dictated mostly by your convenience but also by performance / stability for accounts with bigger collections (and with better performance, we are improving your convenience at the same time:)). The default size of each page is 100 items, but we believe that with the myriad of new filtering options it won't be a problem.
-- Text titles. The new My Account will display game/movie titles in text form, both on the list and shelf views. No more deciphering the logos on small boxes! :)
-- Mobile device support. Yes, viewing My Account on your mobile device will no longer be a chore.
-- COMING SOON: Proper graphics and links for all titles. We are conducting a little clean up in this area. Pretty sooan all games should have proper graphics and links in place.
-- COMING SOON: 5 new shelf skins. We are starting with only 1 skin (the classic wood), but soon after release we will add a bunch of new styles. It's purely a visual thing, so we didn't want to focus on that before release. Since many of you requested new styles, we will be introducing them pretty soon.
-- COMING SOON: Improved searching. Soon, finding desired titles will be easier thanks to the search improvements that we'll be implementing on the new My Account. Also, as part of the solution, we will be changing the way that titles from a series are ordered (i.e. Broken Sword should always show up before Broken Sword 2).

Of course the full list of changes and improvements is much longer, but highlights should give you a nice overview of what is coming. Hope you like it already, and that you will love it when we release it in just a few days. :)

Lastly, I wanted to point out the two important things that all of you should keep in mind:
-- The change is mandatory. We love freedom of choice, and we love giving it to you whenever it's possible, but unfortunately in this case it's not possible. Maintaining two, completely separate products dedicated to the same things would negatively impact both of them on all fronts. Performance, scalability, our ability to improve and expand them, but most importantly your convenience - as some of the new features were not possible to implement on the old My Account - would all be impacted.
-- Manual sorting is no more. We have decided to skip this functionality because it was beyond our reach to deliver the quality we wanted to. We decided it would be better if we were focused on the numerous other options requested by you.

Hope all of this gives you a clear vision what to expect in the coming days. Also please rest assured that we already have plans on how to develop the My Account section in the near and distant future: what to add, what should be changed a bit, etc., but we are always open to your feedback - so jump in and share your opinion. :)

Take care,
Chamb & The Website Team
Post edited May 15, 2015 by Chamb
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Hi all,

Thanks for all the feeback and keep it coming! We are carefully reading every post in this topic and making some notes (but please understand we cannot respond to each of you ;)).

As for the chat replacing PMs - which seems to be to most hot topic - here are few more details:
-- By default you will be able chat with everyone on GOG.com - they don't have to be your friends.
-- You will be able to change you default privacy settings to "friends only" or block it completely.
-- You will be able to start conversation the same way you did with PMs - by finding specific user on GOG.com. Previously it was limited only to the forums, but with the new My Account we will be extending that to product reviews, community wishlist, GOGmixes (basically to every place user avatar and name appears on GOG.com).
-- You can chat with multiple people at the same time, but each conversation is 1:1. There are no rooms and/or group conversations.
-- The new chat interface look a lot like the PMs, so it will feel pretty familiar.
Post edited May 09, 2015 by Chamb
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Brasas: The personalization appeal of having YOUR shelf, ordered in your way is far from being properly replaced with better filtering and tagging. What is happening here is privileging search functionalities over individualization functionalities.

In a way we will all have the same shelf (well... one of 5 skins...) with the games in the same order... so instead of a Library Shelf which reinforces the concept of ownership: these are your games, you own them DRM free, no one can take them from you, display them as you will... it's a tiny step in the opposite direction.
The really weird thing is that they're putting effort into making more skins at the same time. It's as though they've gone through the popular requests and clocked that people wanted more skins, but they haven't really grasped the whole psychological appeal of the virtual shelf.

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Brasas: Anyone know if there's a wishlist to get Manual Sorting back already? I'd be interested how many cared about this.
Not currently under site/Features; feel free to do the honours. However, there is http://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/manual_sorting for the Galaxy client, and it's gained 372 votes over the past three or four days.
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HypersomniacLive: I see my GOG collection in a similar way. For GOG to say that this is [emphasis added]

basically the one place that's 100% yours
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HypersomniacLive: and then deny me the ability to have it organised the way I like it
well, you are not the only one using the shelf. Me for example, I don't find it "convienent" to manually sort 100+ titles.
I welcome the tags, filtering, etc.
If you make a system for thousends of users you will never make everyone happy. Which means everyone will probably have to make a compromise somewhere.
it is always easy to wish for some technical solutions that makes everybody happy - but actually making that solutions will usually just don't work.

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HypersomniacLive: and say that they're doing it for my convenience is disingenuous and mocking.
c'mon.
read the post. It is extra listed in an extra bullet point, with the reason given "that is was out of our reach". I don't see any mocking.

honestly, there is so much stuff in the announcement that has been requested for years, like changelogs/proper versioning, sharing wishlists, sorting your library by some self-defined categories, that the amount of complaining and galaxophobia here feels rather disingenuous/mocking.
Post edited May 09, 2015 by immi101
@Chamb

Thank you for addressing our concerns about the new chat system. But I have some questions:

1 - I really liked manual sorting, and so did many others, obviously. If the new shelf system aims to be better with organizing, manual sorting would really help with that. So are we ever going to get it back or not?

2 - If shelf search is being improved, are you guys going to improve forum search too?

3 - I liked the way the game boxes looked. Probably not as important as my first questions, but will we have the option to have the games on our shelf display as the old boxes?

4 - And what about the unbundling? I do realize that this new account system is supposed to fix most of the bugs that came with the unbundling, but will we ever get the option to download bundled installers like we used to? Because I think the unbundling should be an option, not a forced change.

5 - If I may drift off the topic of the "My Account" stuff for a bit, which I already did with my question about forum searching, will the forums in general ever get improved as well? It's been a year since that "Let's discuss your experience with the forum" thread, but so far there haven't been any real changes or anything. (A lot of the users in that thread have great ideas too!)

Probably more questions that should be asked, but I'll just leave it there for now.... and I'd really appreciate it if Chamb (or some other blue) would come in and answer every one of those questions.
Wow, great, all your in-depth posts and arguments made me more pessimistic again...
Frankly for some reason I didn't even know that this manual sorting thing exists, so I won't miss it at all, lucky me.
Regarding the chat system, I don't think it will change that much after all, but we'll see.
It's not like complaining and arguing does anything, as you can see looking into one of the many regional pricing threads and others.

For now I'm just happy to enjoy and sort my local backup and I haven't bought a game on GOG.com since the introduction of regional banning.
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immi101: well, you are not the only one using the shelf. Me for example, I don't find it "convienent" to manually sort 100+ titles.
I welcome the tags, filtering, etc.
If you make a system for thousends of users you will never make everyone happy. Which means everyone will probably have to make a compromise somewhere.
it is always easy to wish for some technical solutions that makes everybody happy - but actually making that solutions will usually just don't work.

[...]
And neither are you. The difference is that no-one was forcing you to use manual sorting, it was an option for those that preferred to do things that way. Now other options are added, all of which seem to work only as filtering, and this one is being scrapped and we're left with two very basic options for ordering our whole collection.

I'm glad you're happy with the changes, and it's your prerogative to not care for features and options that are being scrapped, I wonder though if you wouldn't voice your opinion if you found certain changes to not be to your liking.


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immi101: [...]

c'mon.
read the post. It is extra listed in an extra bullet point, with the reason given "that is was out of our reach". I don't see any mocking.

honestly, there is so much stuff in the announcement that has been requested for years, like changelogs/proper versioning, sharing wishlists, sorting your library by some self-defined categories, that the amount of complaining and galaxophobia here feels rather disingenuous/mocking.
Filtering is not the same as sorting one's complete collection; you're either not able or refuse to see the difference because you don't care about it. It's one thing being happy with the changes, and another arguing that they're universally positive and everyone should rejoice, because if they don't then (surely) they're suffering from some sort of phobia and are complaining for the sake of complaining.

It's just your opinion, and you're free to express it, but that doesn't make it more valid than that of others.
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Brasas: So I see posts about how "Chat" will be friends only. Did I miss that in the OP?
I did read that PM history will be migrated and can be continued...

So is there an assumption I'm PMing only "friends" today? I sometimes find PM most useful to de-escalate conflicts...
Or will people you PM'd in the past be automatically added as friends? That would be ironic...

Or actually, where is the "there, there" about only being able to "chat" with friends? Is it an assumption that "chat" in My Account will work similarly to "Chat" in Galaxy Beta? If so I'd say that assumption has a high chance of becoming reality, which is worrying.

So, if this is confirmed, I'd much prefer an open messaging back channel, where folks would further be given the option to ignore or block other users. A more selective version of the "I don't want to be PMd at all" setting of today.
See post #212.
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VanishedOne: [...]

Not currently under site/Features; feel free to do the honours. However, there is http://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/manual_sorting for the Galaxy client, and it's gained 372 votes over the past three or four days.
Judging by the way things are going, the only way to get this option back on the site is for it to get implemented for the Galaxy client. I voted, but am not holding my breath.
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gibbeynator: Gonna be honest, I don't like that you're taking away my manual sorting. That thing did a much better job of keeping my games in alphabetical order than your own a-z sorting method did. A 100 item limit per page? Sounds like you're forcing Galaxy's library page on us.
It has been hinted before that the new account system is very much the same as the galaxy account system.
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paladin181: Does this mean we'll have to redownload our collections to get the proper version numbers on all the files (or manually rename each one)? My launch box is going to be a bear to manage. I may just link to the locations of my backups rather than to the installers themselves. That way if I update a game I don't have to go and change my files in the Launch box entry.
EDIT: That won't be possible. >:( This will take forever.
I may be wrong, but my understanding is that they will not be changing the file names, but only the display of the version on the library page. Instead of seeing "2.0.0" and such, you will see "1.5 (gog-10)". This has already begun for a few games. See and [url=http://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_what_did_just_update_thread/post8117]here.
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Shambhala: It's a much needed and welcome change, but with the dropping of manual sorting it becomes even more important to have a way to sort in a sensible way the games belonging to the same series.
From the OP:
"Also, as part of the solution, we will be changing the way that titles from a series are ordered (i.e. Broken Sword should always show up before Broken Sword 2)."
Post edited May 09, 2015 by mrkgnao
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Shambhala: It's a much needed and welcome change, but with the dropping of manual sorting it becomes even more important to have a way to sort in a sensible way the games belonging to the same series.
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mrkgnao: From the OP:
"Also, as part of the solution, we will be changing the way that titles from a series are ordered (i.e. Broken Sword should always show up before Broken Sword 2)."
I hadn't caught that! Great news indeed, I had lost the ability to manually sort games once they started the unbundling (though I assume it is related to the number of games you have on the shelf and not the unbundling in itself) and it really bugged me to see them all mixed up.
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mrkgnao: I may be wrong, but my understanding is that they will not be changing the file names, but only the display of the version on the library page. Instead of seeing "2.0.0" and such, you will see "1.5 (gog-10)". This has already begun for a few games. See and [url=http://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_what_did_just_update_thread/post8117]here
Great. That will be even more confusing. The file I downloaded doesn't match the file name on the download page. Which one is what? I's not a huge issue for some of us tech saavy people, but I can see the plug and play crowd getting quickly confused.
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Brasas: Sometimes I think GOG does not understand its core market demographic...
I actually think they understand their core demographic very well. It's just that you and I and most of the people posting in this thread are no longer part of it.

Hint: Their core demographic is interested in clients, friends, achievements, trading cards, greenlight, early access, AAA games regardless of DRM, water in its gaseous state.


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Shambhala: I had lost the ability to manually sort games once they started the unbundling (though I assume it is related to the number of games you have on the shelf and not the unbundling in itself) and it really bugged me to see them all mixed up.
Yes. PaterAlf tested it and found out that it breaks at 629 unhidden games, IIRC.
Post edited May 09, 2015 by mrkgnao
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paladin181: Great. That will be even more confusing. The file I downloaded doesn't match the file name on the download page. Which one is what? I's not a huge issue for some of us tech saavy people, but I can see the plug and play crowd getting quickly confused.
once again i will write my thought about this problem

since the begining in the library :

there should have been displayed GOG build : x.x.x.x / Game build : x.x.x.x (with a tooltip to explain what's the meaning of each).

but GOG never wanted to make things simple; now i wash my hands with their stupidities (the last thing they used : it doesn't help at all : it's worse than before ....)
Post edited May 09, 2015 by DyNaer
Awesome improvements looking forward to the other features coming soon too!
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stg83: Not everything is complaining, these are legitimate concerns that need to be addressed as GOG has confirmed that this change is mandatory so naturally members are curious to know whether features important to them are going to be there and how the ones like chat are going to be implemented as the replacement of the old PM functionality.
There is nothing wrong with constructive feedback, but some people were acting like they knew what was going to happen when it wasn't even released yet. Honestly if I was a web dev for GOG, I wouldn't want to listen to any of it, because they can never do anything right according to some people here. First it was trivial crap like the site change as far as colors, now it's this... they are adding things people wanted for a long time, and still people find things to complain about.

Not saying people shouldn't want to get answers to site changes, but some people in this thread complain all the time about everything GOG does anymore... nothing is ever good enough. Not to mention some people in this thread had a bit of an attitude, I wouldn't answer them either.

I wasn't referring to everyone though, by all means you should say your opinion... but you should also keep an open mind until we actually see the changes.

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stg83:
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Maighstir: Yeah, and world peace is right around the corner, too. :-P
Maybe... yea what am I saying. :P
Post edited May 09, 2015 by user deleted
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Well perhaps people would be less cynical if GOG took the time to gather proper feedback from the community beforehand instead of implementing changes that are to the detriment of the users like the half hearted library undbundling which caused a myriad of issues which are still unresolved. And now with the removal of manual sorting which is clearly important to many users that do not appreciate the lack of their preferred sorting option. So prior experience along with the general vagueness and lack of clarity in announcements, followed by non communication regarding specific decisions that are imposed without consideration in most cases, is what causes people to question every "improvement" even if it is well intentioned.

GOG assured everyone that the introduction of Galaxy would not affect the user experience on the website yet now it is constantly giving 500 internal errors along with some other glitches like hidden lower threshold posts for some users since the day the GOG Galaxy beta launched, which does not exactly inspire confidence that the implementation of the new My Account section will go without any hitches. I do sincerely hope it does go really well and drastically improves our experience by providing useful features that are actually beneficial to all the users whether they use the optional Galaxy client or not.
Post edited May 09, 2015 by stg83