Why are we limited to ignoring a maximum of 10 tags?

[Overwatch]

I have said it before, and I will repeat this for your benefit Steam.

Every inch of your store page is valuable.

Showing me games that I will absolutely, under no circumstance purchase, is money out of your pocket.

Limiting me to 10 tags in my ignore list means that 50% of the games you show me are something I just have to click through. I'm not going to buy them.

And you don't have infinite space. You have a few highlight sections. And they are mostly a waste of space.

If I WANT to go out of my way to find something to buy, then it's not a problem. But that's not how YOU want this to work. You want to "discover" some games to show me, in the hopes that I will buy something on a whim. And with your current system, you are wasting effort/bandwidth/store front space.

The silly thing is, you KNOW the tags I want to ignore. You have a list that suggests tags based on my frequently ignored games. And this list is 22 tags long. You already know I want to ignore all 22 of them.

The 10 I'm ignoring now is the set that includes the highest percentage of suggested games. I can't make it any more efficient for you. And the results are still only 50% effective.

Let us ignore more tags.

You will sell more games if you know what NOT to show us.

[Washell]

Letting people exclude too many tags would cost them sales too, by not showing them games they would buy. My guess is they decided 10 was the happy medium.

[Tito Shivan]

The system is designed for focused blocking. Not to allow users to block a massive number of items (it's unpractical and prone to errors)

Originally posted by Overwatch:

Showing me games that I will absolutely, under no circumstance purchase, is money out of your pocket.

Steam will tell you why it's showing you any given game. Looking at that information will give better results than adding more tags to ignore.

Originally posted by Overwatch:

You will sell more games if you know what NOT to show us.

Thing is negative feedback isn't really useful. The system works better if you tell it what you want to it to show you than what you don't.

Wishlisting, following games, or the kind of games you play offer better feedback than any game you mark as blocked.

It's easier to tell the cook what you want to eat than all the things you don't.

[Overwatch]

I'm not saying we should have an unlimited number of ignores.

But right now, the tag system is inefficient. The company putting their game on Steam adds their own tags. And they can put whatever they want on there.

Example:

Fighting
2d Fighter
3d Fighter

Some games only have one of those tags. Ignoring "Fighting" only blocks about 70% of the genre.

We ALREADY have to waste 4-5 of our 10 just to block the avalanche of asset-flips and other low-effort garbage.

15-20 seems more reasonable.

If someone is never going to buy a Sports, Hidden Object, Clicker, or some other pretty clearly defined genre of game, then why show it?

Originally posted by Washell:

My guess is they decided 10 was the happy medium.

You give them FAR too much credit.

• There is literally a section of your profile that indicates what languages you speak.
  
• I have 3 selected.
  
• But about 4/10 of the games for EVERY Discovery Queue that I get have none of those 3 languages for the dialogue, text, or even the interface.
  
• I even get a GIANT warning telling me that the game is not available with any of my selected languages.

I couldn't play those games even if I WANTED to.
Steam knows it. And it would be a SIMPLE fix.

So right now I just have to run scripts that bulk ignore things.
I might even be blocking things accidently.
But It's better than me having to wade through a giant list of things that Steam and I BOTH know I don't want. And the feeling of having so much garbage shoved in my face all the time usually just results in me leaving without buying anything at this point.

I shouldn't have to have this...
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2469857877

[Overwatch]

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

It's easier to tell the cook what you want to eat than all the things you don't.

This analogy doesn't hold up. Steam is not a Cook.

But let's stick with the food angle.

In this case, Steam is a menu with every food item from every restaurant.

And you can only exclude 10 tags.

The first few obviously go to food allergies. You aren't going to order that stuff. Hopefully you don't have to waste all 10 choices...

Then, maybe you know you don't like Japanese, fried food, or fish.

Are any of those 10 left?

What about Cilantro? Licorice? Durian?

How about $1000 burgers? You like burgers right?

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

The system is designed for focused blocking. Not to allow users to block a massive number of items...

If I walk into a place that only serves Burgers, fries, and milk-shakes, you can pretty safely assume that I'm going to order one of those things.

But Steam has every kind of game. It doesn't have the benefit of knowing that I'm never going to order fermented meats or jelly preserved fish, or anything with milk unless it let's me exclude that category.

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

Steam will tell you why it's showing you any given game. Looking at that information will give better results than adding more tags to ignore...

Steam already knows what tags I should be blocking. It SUGGESTS I block tags based on the kind of items I frequently block. There just isn't enough room.

And it CLEARLY isn't paying attention to preferences if it is suggesting games that have MULTIPLE tags in the list that it tells me I should be blocking.

And having Steam tell me WHY it suggests a game isn't useful if I can't block those reasons.


Blocking 10 tags is not enough.


I'm not suggesting a complete overhaul of the suggestion algorithms (Although. Yes please.)

I'm saying that

• If I own 1000 games.
  
• 0 have the "Sports" tag.
  
• And I have 700 "Sports" games in my ignore list.
  
• AND Steam suggests that I ignore the "Sports" tag

Maybe I should be able to ignore that category.

There are more than 10 categories of games. Many more. Blocking entire categories that you will never purchase isn't a problem.

But go ahead. Keep suggesting the latest NBA game to me. Who knows. I MIGHT buy it...

[Start_Running]

OP WHy not spend some of that energy telly the system what you want as opposed to what you don't want.

[Nico]

They are enough to hide anime and pixel games

Would be useful to hide games with little reviews too

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by Overwatch:

• There is literally a section of your profile that indicates what languages you speak.
  
• I have 3 selected.
  
• But about 4/10 of the games for EVERY Discovery Queue that I get have none of those 3 languages for the dialogue, text, or even the interface.
  
• I even get a GIANT warning telling me that the game is not available with any of my selected languages.

That section is not about games, it's about content

When possible, display content in this language

That's for UGC and the Steam interface. It doesn't affect which games are shown to you. It's also important to note the 'when possible' part.

Originally posted by Overwatch:

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

It's easier to tell the cook what you want to eat than all the things you don't.

This analogy doesn't hold up. Steam is not a Cook.

But let's stick with the food angle.

In this case, Steam is a menu with every food item from every restaurant.

And you can only exclude 10 tags.

The first few obviously go to food allergies. You aren't going to order that stuff. Hopefully you don't have to waste all 10 choices...

See how negative feedback is not very useful?

You got a menu with every food item and you went into it applying negative feedback, unsurprisingly it was not very effective.

You could instead go the other way around and highlight the items you know you like from that menu. And maybe leave the negative feedback for very focused things like as you mentioned earlier, food allergies.

Originally posted by Overwatch:

If I walk into a place that only serves Burgers, fries, and milk-shakes, you can pretty safely assume that I'm going to order one of those things.

But Steam has every kind of game. It doesn't have the benefit of knowing that I'm never going to order fermented meats or jelly preserved fish, or anything with milk unless it let's me exclude that category.

You can still order Burgers, fries, and milk-shakes here.
Steam doesn't need to know what you won't buy. It wants to know what you will (or may).
Again positive vs negative feedback. That's why stores have wishlists and not 'IWontBuyItEverLists'

[Overwatch]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

OP WHy not spend some of that energy telly the system what you want as opposed to what you don't want.

I literally don't understand why people keep bringing this up.

I want to be shown new and/or interesting games that I don't already know about, from any genre that I'm willing to play.

I'm not talking about searching for games. I already have a solution for that.

I'm talking about landing on the main page, and not having 1/2 of the games it suggests for me be stuff I'll never buy.

NOTE: without the 10 tags I'm blocking now, I get 9/10 of the ones I'll never buy.

Why is this hard to understand.

I don't ever want to see a "sports" game. Done. End of story. It's wasted space for Steam. And wasted time for me to move past it. Everyone loses.

Repeat that last statement for 21 other "base" level tags.

[Overwatch]

Originally posted by Grand Ayatrollah:

i literally dont know how to block this one dudes games.

Open the store page for one of that developer's games.

On the right side, click the link to go to the developer page.

On the dev page, click the gear icon.

"Ignore developer"

[wuddih]

Ignoring half of the store is why you have a bad store experience, they forgot to put a limit on there.

[Overwatch]

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

That section is not about games, it's about content

When possible, display content in this language

That's for UGC and the Steam interface.

If you have a language selected in your profile, store pages for games that are not available in your selected languages will have a GIANT warning telling you that the game isn't available in one of your languages.

If you remove any language selections, there is no warning.

So no, that option isn't exclusively for the steam interface. And if they are going to bother to use/maintain code that will dynamically modify their page using that data, they may as well use it to improve their conversions.

I happen to know quite a bit about this topic. Showing people things they can't/won't buy is considered a poor idea.

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

See how negative feedback is not very useful

I'm going to stay polite here, and I'd do so even if you weren't a mod.

Please stop.

You clearly don't know what that term means if you read my post and still think it's applying Negative Feedback.

This is a simple case of a search on an exclusion based sub-set. The suggestions algorithm uses purely positive feedback. (It shows you games it thinks you might buy, based on similarities to things you have already bought/played)

Further, negative feedback is often a holy-grail for "suggestions" based algorithms. It is incredibly hard to collect data on, but the value is exponentially higher than positive data because of how humans make decisions.

As an example, knowing that I have previously eaten a burger, fries, salad, and sushi is much less valuable than knowing I hate ice cream, when suggesting a meal. Paring down the possible answer space is always more valuable in these cases than adding to it. Much much more valuable.

Look. I've I have actual experience developing suggestion algorithms. I happen to actually know what I'm talking about here.

That does make me an atypical user. But it doesn't actually detract from the value of my advice/question.

[Overwatch]

Originally posted by wuddih:

Ignoring half of the store is why you have a bad store experience, they forgot to put a limit on there.

How so?

Are you suggesting that my experience would somehow be improved if I was shown MORE game I won't buy, or are from companies I refuse to do business with?

Every one of the 10 tags I'm blocking improves my experience. Which is why I want to block MORE.

[Nico]

You can try all the steam labs or browsing games from https://steamdb.info/sales/

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Overwatch:

Originally posted by wuddih:

Ignoring half of the store is why you have a bad store experience, they forgot to put a limit on there.

How so?

Are you suggesting that my experience would somehow be improved if I was shown MORE game I won't buy, or are from companies I refuse to do business with?

Every one of the 10 tags I'm blocking improves my experience. Which is why I want to block MORE.

Yes, for YOU.

But that's not the point. Valve has to accommodate for as many people as possible. You can't please everyone.

So they most likely have exactly as you've been told already - kept it like this because it not only gives a happy medium but is satisfactory for smooth running and pleases most people.

This is quite obviously not far from the truth, otherwise this would be quite a common thread on here, and this is the first time I've heard of it.

The thing is this - empathy. It ain't all about you.

As Valve are operating a store, granted it's very large, and with a huge range of variance. But they must accommodate for EVERYONE. If you run too many tags to block content it WILL lead to errors and a complete mess. That's just how sorting works.

So sorry, but we can't give you the answer you WANT to hear, only what is reasonable.

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by Grand Ayatrollah:

half the store should be under one tag "recycled shareware" to make it simpler to sort out. they should only be using 1 tag. i cant even block anime and pokimons because i have to block 10 cent action games and 20 cent adventure games and broken strategy games.

I wonder why some users seemingly get so exposed to titles they feel forced to block when I rarely find them when browsing the store or go through a recogerán queue. And I have almost all filters off (3 blocked tags & around 50 ignored games, adult filters off)

I went through a discovery queue and that's what I got:
ETS 2 DLC
Vermintide 2 DLC
Dyson Sphere program
Nier Replicant
Turnip boy committs tax evasion
MotoGP 21
Merge Nymphs (adult only title)
The tenants.
Tale Spire
It takes two
RE Village
Root

No game ignored (I'm not thing to see then again anyway), one followed.

As you see I'm getting pretty run of the mill recommendations and my storefront is quite similar. Wonder how differently other people use the store to have the storefront so filled off products they are the least interested in.

Originally posted by Overwatch:

You clearly don't know what that term means if you read my post and still think it's applying Negative Feedback.

Almost every time I've read users in the forums complaining they were being exposed to massive amounts of 'crap' they always turned out the user made a generous use of either the blocked tags or an abundant number of ignored games instead of focusing in providing information on what they were pleased to see.

Hence why I call it negative feedback.