I read it as this.

1. GOG fucks up
2. Play dead for a far too long time.
3. Some PR statement (including the necessary we are sorry) stating everything will get better.
4. Long silence followed by either
a) small improvement (still worse than before) and celebrating this as a new high
b) nothing to be heard again
5. Go to 1 and repeat!

Merry Christmas to you too Santa!

We've changed the autoplay on game cards on the big header, and added all the controls there, so it's up to you if you want to play it or not.
If you mean when you hover over a game tile, this won't be changed.

I like this feature and do not see the big deal of not scrolling over a picture if you don't want a video to play.

I have to agree with Cavalary, and say that it never stops to amaze me how GOG always manages to use so many words in reply to issues users have, yet actually says very little about the months-long issues at hand.

Forgive me for being a tad pedantic - this thread was never in need of any reviving; users didn't magically start liking the 'new' GOG, nor stopped discussing the issues. The last post before yours was from yesterday, hardly an indication that the thread was dead as you make it sound.


Better late than never, I guess.

More than a year ago, GOG had a few users over at their offices in Warsaw. The problematic and mostly lacking communication was one of the topics discussed, and from what those users shared here, GOG seemed interested and prepared to actively work on improving things on this front.
Fast-forward to today, and nothing has changed as here you are apologising and telling us that this post of yours is the first step towards fixing communication. After two months of users commenting and giving feedback on the problems the site revamp introduced. While GOG remained silent.
I'm sorry to say that I don't believe anything will ever change on this front. Experience says that GOG shows up and makes an announcement/statement after the numbers show that its users aren't all talk and no action; in this specific case, I'll go on a limb and say that the previous two big(ger) sales didn't go as hoped/expected, and concern about the next one coming up (Winter sale) going the same way has something to do with the timing and content of this response.
You may think that I'm being unfair and (too) cynical, but this is far from our first rodeo, and so far the score isn't in your favour. So yes, I'm being cynical, and changing my view on this requires quite some hard and consistent work on GOG's part. I may not even be alone in this.


[emphasis added]

I guess we'll have to wait and see what the part I highlighted entails, but, seeing what sort of changes the anniversary revamp brought, and the recent bug with the nav-bar hiding the settings part of the forum, the initial reaction is feeling some dread.


Since it seems that GOG has decided which things will remain as they are, it'd be appreciated if you shared that list with us. I understand that GOG would like to avoid a possible shitstorm at the eves of the big Winter sale, but beating around the bush, after two months of silence, makes this attempt at restoring two-way communication feel less sincere.

Just like the following:

This feels more like what I said about a shitstorm and possible impact on the upcoming Winter sale, than actually understanding your users' point and seriously taking it into consideration; we've been through a few such vague statements that you should know by now that it means nothing until something's actually done.

And frankly, I, like many others, just don't get why GOG wants so desperately to keep this. It's probably the most hated change you introduced, by old and new users alike and for good reasons, so what exactly is it that GOG gains from having, and keeping, it in place? All the while showing, once more, complete disrespect to users with slow internet connection and/or capped internet data plans?


You are correct that GOGmixes were a tool of discoverability, just not exclusively games discoverability. And while you refer to a huge amount of "spam' mixes, there were a number of them that provided info not made readily available by GOG on game pages, info relevant to a good number of your userbase that wants to make informed decisions. Were I (more) cynical person, I'd say that it's convenient for GOG that that info isn't visible any more.


There's no denying that the current review system is an improvement to the previous one. But that doesn't mean that it's devoid of issues. Like the leaking of total amount of games a user has. More than a month ago, Linko90 had said in this very thread that a fix was coming. But with no further communication from GOG, we have no idea if that fix was ever implemented or not, i.e. going over reviews I have no idea if all those showing their total number of games do so by choice or if the leak's still active.

And some of us remember that the previous review system was GOG downgrading the one he had before it with the 2014 better, fresher GOG revamp. So we basically got that one back with a few extra features. And a few issues we didn't have. Like the lack of any sort of formatting that Lucumo mentioned. Again.


[emphasis added]

Two things:

1. What's with the part I highlighted? Seriously, DarthJDG fixed the formatting issue, along with a number of other issues (seriously, just install his hack and see for yourself), some of which your web-devs are still bouncing ideas about, more than a month ago in just a few hours. And that was hacking GOG's code. How hard and time consuming can it be for GOG's web-devs to implement a native fix?

2. These issues have been brought up a few times before, be it in this thread or (in one or more of) the other ones. Why will you bring this to the devs now if you've been reading and listening to our feedback since day one?

Anyway, others have already pointed out plenty of things, and I'm fairly certain they'll continue, and probably do a better job at it than me, so back to wait and see mode.

Because I don't want to play this every time I browse the store.

Yes, the new website is trash. I'm not sure what they changed on the back end outside of the visuals but it runs like garbage now on my machine when it ran flawless before and there's been no changes to my browser or add-ons during this time.

It literally takes 30 seconds for the username/password box to load now when the "login" button in the top header is clicked. There’s also times when the “login” button does not appear at all on certain pages.

I contacted GOG support regarding the problem and they wanted me to be their guinea pig and install a different browser to trouble shoot the issue for them. Why the hell would I do this and add a bunch of unnecessary junk files to my system and unneeded registry entries when it was never a problem prior to the website change? This clearly indicates it's a problem they created during the changes and nothing has been done about it.

GOG is going backwards with this new buggy/poorly coded design.

Shake my head…

Low-Bandwidth / Data Capping
Autoplaying videos, heavy javascript & font package usage, oversize pictures etc.
All make navigating the site slow to load and data hungry. As someone with a terribly slow & small capped internet plan (and faced with alternatives that are highly expensive), the last thing I need is to spend what little data I have navigating the site when I could be spending it in on downloading your games. I can handle pictures etc loading slowly (I have had to develop a modicum of patience with my setup), but the order of load these days makes site navigation sometimes impossible (many years ago, the last things loaded on a site was the multimedia, not the functional elements, which is not the norm any more).

That's not to say those of us with slow speeds aren't downloading your games: some of us use our meagre bandwidth to do our "shopping", then use alternatives to perform a mass download session all at once. By choice or necessity, this is what some of us do.

Browser Compatibility:
If you back-tracked your design to earlier iterations of web design, it would probably be more likely that older browsers would continue to work properly. After all, your previous site design was still working, and was still professional and functional enough to attract customers. That being said, I don't necessarily have a big problem with losing IE11 when supported alternatives can so easily be downloaded and used, even for the odd website or two. I do have sympathy however for those who are using "supported" browsers, but the site remains broken because of versioning issues.
In this case I think you're jumping the gun with web versioning.

Let's boil it down to basics: We are here to:
- Buy games
- Download our purchases
- Play.

If your site design makes it distasteful to navigate, well...that prevents us from buying them in the first place, doesn't it?

Maybe you want to see the title...
Or you don't particularly want to need to be very sure you keep your mouse in a certain position while scrolling.
Or you want to, you know, actually click on it and go to the game page.
Or maybe even to add it directly to cart.

Prior to the site redesign, I always looked at the sale pages. I deliberately ignored the insomnia sales as being an obnoxious gimmick, but would at least read through weekend, weekly, and quarterly sales. I didn't buy that much in the regular sales, but I did keep an eye out for games my friends might like, and would refer them when a sale happened. After the site redesign, it's so much trouble to find what's on sale that I haven't even looked at most of the sales. For those that I did look at, I mostly wanted to see if GOG had yet given up and reverted to the old way of presenting sales. When I saw that they persevered with the new site, I gave up and closed the tab. I don't know what was offered for sale in any of the post-redesign sales, and I haven't mentioned GOG discounts to anyone as a result. I don't anticipate becoming more patient with the numerous site design problems, so if the sale pages don't return to their prior level of quality, I probably will continue not to know about discounts on games I would actually buy or refer to others.

On linux in firefox there's nothing and in chromium there is "this plugin is not supported"... seems like really accurate metaphor for GOG... :D

It doesn't work that way. Ask any web designer. Redesigning a website is a lot like renovating a house, you can't just decide you want to replace the kitchen with a living room and undemolish that wall. By the time you've committed the new design, the old one is very likely archived or gone.

Are you also aware of the problem that every login and logout always leads to the main page, and not on the site where you have been before? Regardless if you are on a gamepage or forum page.

annoying examples:
You are on a game page and want to log in (maybe even think of buying the game)
What happens? You are switched to the main page. -> annoying

You are on a game page and want to log out (and maybe read some more information about the game afterwards)
What happens? You are switched to the main page. -> annoying

You are in forum thread and want to log in and write a post
What happens? You are switched to the main page. -> annoying

You are in forum thread and want to log out and want continue reading in the thread or forum
What happens? You are switched to the main page. -> annoying


The problems persists many years and everyone is annoyed by it.
So is this a wanted feature which will never be changed, or do you consider changing it?

Some possibilities come to mind:

Maybe they are overworked? Reading a bit in between the lines I would say that they are absolutely busy with the Winter Sale right now. The anniversary re-design must have cost like months of development time. There might not be much spare capacity and the team working on the site might just be a bit too small for all the tasks.

Also the relation to the community is not the greatest lately. GOG has a habit of putting things life that typically include one or two really annoying features (Galaxy bundled in offline installers, public profiles which cannot switched to private, videos that auto-play). It's almost as if they lost touch with the needs of the user base somewhat. Their working mode seems to be to deliver medium quality and then slowly fix a few issues. Quality control should ultimately be management responsibility, I think.

Also, in general I also wonder why the fixes take so long. Look for example at nice tools like Adalia Fundamentals, GogRepo, MaGog or Barefoot Essentials made by individuals and see what kind of development speed they have where sometimes you give some feedback or propose some enhancement and only days later it's implemented. Obviously they cannot work the same way and the GOG website is much more complex, but I wonder if there are additional things holding them up? For example, they could (mistakenly) focus on new features or fixing things that are not broken, while neglecting to fix things that are broken. For example, the auto-play of the videos is probably very quick to fix technically, if only you can decide to fix it. I imagine right now, management of GOG is weighing all the pros and cons of auto-playing videos and that might take a long time.

I've seen websites that basically had a public beta test for this and put the new site in front of only a certain percentage of users to get feedback before making the transition. For some time you can probably run two different versions of the site simultaneously.
That's probably what GOG thought for themselves and hoped that most of their customers would think too. Judging by the feedback in this thread, which might be biased somewhat towards people having problems, it might be that many customers do not want the videos to play and have difficulties not scrolling over a picture while wanting that.

I know I have problems and it happens to me accidentally so many times that I try to avoid that section of the site (basically all except the forum and my games library). Maybe I'm too clumsy.

I have read everything elcook wrote and sadly saw that none of the problems I hated about the new design will be changed.

There are so many games I'd like to buy and increase my catalog already with 600 games. However, I can not feel the motivation to do that when the website looks like a 10 year old school project, hurts my eye and made it cumbersome to find the information I need. My time is precious. I do not want to spend 10 minutes trying to find something I need while I could do it in 10 seconds before.

That's fair, but I'm not entirely sure that GOG has the labor force to pull such a thing.