Hey everyone,
So recently as many of you have noticed, there has been an increase in accepted game requests over the last few months, through the support hub and series mods. This is really great for the future of speedrunning with these growing communities, but there need to be a change to the site to allow for these games to exist and have activity. I'm making this post to propose my idea of genre tags/filters being reimplemented into the site, as well as the current state of the unofficial tag (and why it should be modified).
There are over 26k leaderboards on the site now, and the only real way to discover games current is:
a ) The most active/runs page b ) The latest added games page c ) A friend or community member suggests a game
There are two big flaws with 2 of the 3 methods of discovering games that I mentioned. The most active games page tends to stay stagnant, which leaves many platforms and genres unnoticed to new users on the site. The latest added games page used to be useful, until the recent influx of accepted games. Now, a game is in the first page for no longer than a week before it's bumped off the page.
Here is my solution. Create a series of set and defined genre tags, similar to the platform tag, and allow these to be co-filters with platform tags. To be more specific, sub-genre tags may be a useful implementation as well. Here is an example.
Let's say a user is looking for a mobile racing game. Under the games page, they would first change the sort to android, followed by setting the genre to racing, and let's say, the user sets the sub-genre to "rally". This will give the user the exact results they are looking for, instead of sifting through game pages for hours.
Making sure there are set genres and sub-genres will be key, instead of user submitted text fields like was used in the past, and just like platforms, sub-genres could be requested through the support hub. It would also be highly advised for every game submission in the future to require genre and sub-genre tags, just like the platform tags.
This is a big problem with game discoverability as of now. Games that should be receiving this tag (roblox games, custom content, fan games) are not, and this is either due to series mods abusing the system for their games to be more accessible, or the user submitting the games are not checking the correct filter, for the same reason as stated above. There need to be stricter enforcement of what games receive this tag. On the other side, mobile and web games should be removed from the unofficial tag list, as these should really be reserved for low quality/low effort games (such as scratch), not a universal standard for every mobile and web game (and DLC content, but this is a case by case issue). Why does this matter? Games, such as roblox which have hundreds of games in their series, flood the android, PC, and other such platforms list, making it impossible to find true mobile and pc games.
Tl;dr there needs to be stricter enforcement of these tags from series mods, and site mods should also begin to look into this aspect more extensively.
I'm posting this thread to hear everyone's thoughts before making a support hub suggestion, so I'm curious what you all think of this idea, and its possible benefits to the future of searching games on SRC.
-VyPr
Edit: I hate Markdown
I agree because I rarely find games I like to speedrun because of them being like the 12,583th game on speedrun.com and hard to find.
Another small detail, but that it also affects the searching, is that if you sort by player or runner count it only counts Full Game runs. For example, if you sort by player count, it will say that this game ( https://www.speedrun.com/angry_birds_pop ) has 0 total players, even though there are actually 36 players, but they all did runs of ILs. This happens on every game that either doesn't have a full game category, or that no one has done a full game run of it. It can make things a little bit confusing if you are searching for games using these parameters.
And regarding the same thing, it really doesn't make sense to sort by player/run count if it's only going to show me +50 pages of games with 0 players. Let's say I want to check games that have more than 50 players. There is no way of looking that up unless I click on the "Load 50 more" button 200 times until my page freezes because of how many games it's showing at the same time.
It would be great if either it showed an option to do a more detailed search for these variables, or if it the games would show up in different pages in a similar way to the forums, instead of having them all appear indefinitely on a single page.
Yeah I agree with you on all of these things. I feel like the current games page could be retooled to be a leaderboard of the most popular games on the site if you catch my drift.
The current state of tags is one of the reasons why I get a lot of the games I mod untagged. I don’t really find it fair when a bunch of roblox games and fan games are untagged yet stuff like mobile games are. So yeah.
im still new to speedrunning and i mostly stick to seterra, but i agree. the website layout/design isnt terrible but its still not great
I usually find them using the "newly added" filter. However, browsing through the older ones usually takes a while and is a very slow process indeed.
Theres a huge amount of leaderboards that are practically lost. Boards with almost no runners, that have been on the site for long enough and where the runners arent active are virtually impossible to find. One way I have to find games is “profile surfing” where I click on a users profile, look at all of the games and when Ive seen and written down the good candidates I go to one of its lbs and click on a random user. However the site is too big and if a game was only ran by 20 people put of all of the users in the site the odds arent that good and even good games can be forgotten
A way I find games is by looking through different series but a lot of the games on src are not in a series and are almost impossible to find
Would also be nice is after searching for platform / tag, the list can be sorted alphabetical or by number of follows, etc.
This feature actually does exist, and can be found under the "Edit game" button (e.g. https://www.speedrun.com/ccc/editgame/tags ), along with the engine, developer, and publisher. The issue arises in the fact that these tags are completely useless at the moment since there is no way to sort games by tag; if I'm not mistaken it isn't actually possible for normal users to view that information.
@SioN the random game URL is more for fun, its pretty useless if you are looking for anything specific, such as a racing game.
@PullMatrox yep, this is another big issue as well. That's why I've given up on searching for anything other than "latest added". Its also a bug for the most runs filter, where seterra should be #1, but its run count on the game page is greatly reduced.
@RENI I do the exact same thing as well, I've untagged all the mobile games I mod because its unfair for all these other games to get away with not using the unofficial tag
@Kkntucara I think something like this is what could bring these long lost leaderboards back from the dead, and, more importantly, give new users an easier time finding their first speed game
@dha I like the idea of stacking filters on top of each other to have the best results displayed on the site.
@zir0nic In my original post, I said that the old genre system should be discarded. This is because the mods of the game manually type in the game genre, so any misspellings would hurt the searchability of the game (example: fps and first-person shooter)
@dha You can currently mix & match the platform and the title/activity/age/etc. selections. For example.
I like the idea of a curated genre/tag list, so hopefully this gets some traction.