Option to not show ignored/owned games @Store homepage

[StormTehSinner]

I usually like browsing the stores homepage in Steam, but since it gets changed more and more towards featuring specific games or some "the community likes" BS, it got extremely bad for me. Like 90+% of all games shown I've already bought or set to "Ignore".

Pls give us the option to not show ignored or owned games on the stores homepage. I'm ignoring those games for a reason and still stuffing them in my face won't change anything.

Here are some pics how my "User Experience" looks like on the stores homepage with 3000+ games on the "Ignore"-list...

https://postimg.cc/gallery/KZX5csj

[[bin]zwieda]

THIS.

There are a lot of suggestions over and over again, how to possibly change the userexperience back for the better.

There seem to be a handful in here, who are able to stand a reasonable discussion. But some seem to try to stick to the actual "status quo", as if someone would like to try to steal their wifes and molest their dogs. Stubborn attitudes like that would have kept mankind still sitting in their caves ever since, as any kind of development could mean some apocalyptic havoc. Maybe. Who knows.

Try to think a bit bigger. Take a breath or a fart or what ever may be some kind of relief to you.

Design decisions, having been met 5 to 10 years ago may have been necessary due to technical limitations in the past. Hardwarespeeds are growing exponentially over the years, bandwitdh more linearly. Trying to forcefully stick to the one-so-only-truth for lifetime may work in other industries, but nowhere related to technologies.

So, feel free to free your mind and join in the search for possible, realistic solutions. Drop that negative thinking or please just step back. This here won't be stopped by any "nonono's".

Cheers.

[cinedine]

binzwieda の投稿を引用：

So, feel free to free your mind and join in the search for possible, realistic solutions. Drop that negative thinking or please just step back. This here won't be stopped by any "nonono's".

And what's the point of looking for "solutions" if you completely ignore the other sides reasons and intentions?
You will never be able to not see ignored titles in a curated or strongly themed list. Because that goes against their point.

Which value has the topseller list if you ignore the first 30k titles on it?
Which value has a curated list of 100 titles if you ignore every single one of them and then not see it?
Steam is a store. Their main goal is to make you spend money. Which also comes with questioning your decissions about not wanting something.

[obliviondoll]

cinedine の投稿を引用：

You will never be able to not see ignored titles in a curated or strongly themed list. Because that goes against their point.

Yes, you can. And no, it doesn't. And if the list gets cut down to 0, you can simply NOT SHOW THAT SECTION, and you can handle the decision of how much of the list to display client-side without adding load to the servers. They dump the whole list, and a client-side check hides the ignored items.

Which value has the topseller list if you ignore the first 30k titles on it?

If there's a top seller list that's meant to show 20 games, cache a list of 50 and include the first 20 out of those the user hasn't ignored. If there's less than 20 out of that 50, just show the non-ignored ones. And if the user actively dislikes all the top selling games for some reason, THERE IS NO NEED TO KEEP SHOWING THEM THOSE GAMES. Because they specifically want to NOT see them. So just skip the top sellers portion of the page.

Which value has a curated list of 100 titles if you ignore every single one of them and then not see it?

It has value to the people who do want to see it. Whether you see it or not, it has no value if you've ignored every game in that list. If it would be a waste of space and scrolling time, why force that wasted space and scrolling time on the user when you can instead edit it out CLIENT-SIDE for no additional cost in server resources?

Steam is a store. Their main goal is to make you spend money. Which also comes with questioning your decissions about not wanting something.

Or alternatively, if they want to be more successful, comes with LISTENING to customer preferences and doing the best they can to provide recommendations they HAVEN'T been explicitly asked to stop shoving in our faces.

When you walk into a store, and there's a popular brand of shirt in the window and it happens to be red, and you ask the person at the counter "hey I want a red shirt but not like the one in the window", if they grab the one from the window or an identical one of the same shirt from a shelf and say "what about this?" are you going to:

1. be happy they disregarded your request and instantly buy it?
2. be annoyed at them for ignoring what you asked for?
3. immediately walk out and find a shop where the staff aren't idiots?

If you treat that as a survey and collect answers, and more than 10% of people go with option 1, I'd be surprised. I'd be tempted to say 5% if I trusted you to find a statistically significant number of responses. I'd actually expect a reasonable survey to find something like 4 or 5 times as many people willing to walk out of the store instantly as there are who will instantly buy the item they specifically asked not to be shown right before being shown it.

[[bin]zwieda]

Maybe new UI's blinky flashy style tries to trigger some super secret new brainwashing technology into our mind to force us all to choose nothing but 1s. Thank god, amazon sells aluminium hats against this all. But some won't know that, as they don't know how to handle their user prefs there in detail.

Oh Gaben, oh Gaben, say, what have you done...

Edit: maybe 4: you go to an internet forum to write tons of text, trying to explain in the most creative ways, why the shop is doing perfectly fine, only presenting this unwanted red shirt, as the customers preferences must be ignored. Those pretty shirts want to be sold, as if there was no tomorrow. Stupid customer, you have no idea, what's good for you. So, buy a second one, too, in case you should forget, that we know better than you, what you need. Don't hesitate or there's a mob coming after you, telling you, the shop is always right. Now move along and let us "convince" the next victim... oops... uhm... customer!

[StormTehSinner]

THANK YOU @obliviondoll! I couldn't have said it any better!

But there's one thing I also have to address.

cinedine の投稿を引用：

Which value has the topseller list if you ignore the first 30k titles on it?

Just show #30,001-30,020 and the person ignoring the first 30k titles is happy to still get a list with the best of the rest. I - for example - ignored over 3k titles now, but Steam can still recommend me around 43k games and even far more stuff if I include DLCs and what-not. Something like a topseller list shouldn't be ANY problem. If the search-function can show me a list of all games, sorted by top-selling and EXCLUDING the ignored games pretty much instantly, then there's no problem WHAT-SO-EVER to use it on the stores homepage in the same way.

A store front is absolutely useless if there are people who won't get anything recommended.

Of course it's more work than a list of fixed titles, but that's something you should expect from the biggest game launcher there is. Especially if they already managed to do just that in the past!

[cinedine]

StormTehSinner の投稿を引用：

A store front is absolutely useless if there are people who won't get anything recommended.

Exactly. A storefront is absolutely useless if it shows nothing. Or just games the users have not yet ignored. Unlikely? I advise you take a look at all the great "my discovery queue only shows trash" threads from users who have ignored 99.9 % of games of the whole catalogue. User who will then complain about the store page only showing trash.

It's quite simple: you can't win them all. And the way it works now is Steam's compromise for users who can handle seeing things they don't like. That's why you still have an endless list of recommended titles, both on sales pages and on the normal store. That's why Steam promotes using the discovery queue during sales.

[[bin]zwieda]

Once a man just did, while others were too busy, explaining, what seemed to be impossible to them...

[StormTehSinner]

cinedine の投稿を引用：

StormTehSinner の投稿を引用：

A store front is absolutely useless if there are people who won't get anything recommended.

Exactly. A storefront is absolutely useless if it shows nothing. Or just games the users have not yet ignored.

If it shows "games the users have not yet ignored", than it is NOT useless. Those are still games the user probably haven't seen yet. Do you even think before you write? And yes, I know, you just want to over-dramatize the whole situation and imply that all those extremely picky people (like myself) just ignore anything without any consideration or selection process.

cinedine の投稿を引用：

Unlikely? I advise you take a look at all the great "my discovery queue only shows trash" threads from users who have ignored 99.9 % of games of the whole catalogue.

I seriously doubt there are even a couple of users who actively ignored like 80+k titles.

[cinedine]

StormTehSinner の投稿を引用：

cinedine の投稿を引用：

Exactly. A storefront is absolutely useless if it shows nothing. Or just games the users have not yet ignored.

If it shows "games the users have not yet ignored", than it is NOT useless. Those are still games the user probably haven't seen yet. Do you even think before you write? And yes, I know, you just want to over-dramatize the whole situation and imply that all those extremely picky people (like myself) just ignore anything without any consideration or selection process.

cinedine の投稿を引用：

Unlikely? I advise you take a look at all the great "my discovery queue only shows trash" threads from users who have ignored 99.9 % of games of the whole catalogue.

I seriously doubt there are even a couple of users who actively ignored like 80+k titles.

There are. More than a couple.

Anyways, yes I do think before writing. I do think about both sides. And how it would show in edge cases.

And no, a store page only showing things the user is not interested in because they haven't ignored the products yet is not usefull. That's what the discovery feature is for. A storepage showing products which other users have interest in to make you think twice about them is useful. A storepage showing you that Ignored Game #144 is a top selling product and makes you look deeper into it is useful. A storepage showing you games your friends want to have even though you don't is useful.
Thinking that user preferences never change and that everybody has looked into the products and has made up a valid opinion about them before putting them on ignore is detrimental. Because this store will run out of things to show you sooner or later.
Having an empty store front featured in a youtube video slacking how you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up the sale this time is detrimental.

Your solution is none. It's trading in complains from 'people who see ignored products' against complains from 'people who only see trash or nothing at all'. Oh yes, it's helping you. But how does it change the bigger picture?

[Tito Shivan]

StormTehSinner の投稿を引用：

I seriously doubt there are even a couple of users who actively ignored like 80+k titles.

80k titles might be long of a stretch. But in almost every single thread complaining about the recommendation engine in the forums I've found the user complaining had an ignore list easily ranking in the thousands.

When you put so many titles in an ignore lists the chances of cross-pollinating tags raises to 1 (Any game the engine might consider appropiate for display happens to have a number of matching tags with games you've choosen to ignore) And it simply starts 'throwing things at the wall to see what sticks'

That's why they're called recommendation engines and not blocking ones.

And considering there's been for some time automation tools for things like going through the discovery queue for the free Steam sale cards that can be applied to add a large ammount of titles to the ignore lists there's no actual correlation between having a large ammount of ignored titles and such numbers being manually added into those lists (aka: Click 'not interested 80k times')

Back in the old days of getting spammed with hundreds of friend requests a day users developed tools to import 'black lists' of users into your ignored users list without having to manually add hundreds of Steam accounts. The lists grew so massively people were hitting their limit on ignored users (without of course adding thousands of users manually)

So TLDR: There's a sizeable ammount of users with large ignore lists, specially considering such tasks can be largely automated.

obliviondoll の投稿を引用：

How about Amazon? I can block sellers or brands and have their products not show up. Ever. Storefront, searches, everything.

Just to reiterate, Obliviondoll... I'm still interested in how to do this on Amazon, can't still find the option to do it so. If you could please show me.

[obliviondoll]

Tito Shivan の投稿を引用：

obliviondoll の投稿を引用：

How about Amazon? I can block sellers or brands and have their products not show up. Ever. Storefront, searches, everything.

Just to reiterate, Obliviondoll... I'm still interested in how to do this on Amazon, can't still find the option to do it so. If you could please show me.

I'm going to have to admit, I made a mistake. I don't use Amazon much, and when I do, I primarily use it for book shopping, alongside a local second hand bookstore website. And it was actually the latter site which has easily-accessible "block" functions for titles and individual sellers. The site layout is similar, and the format of having most products being sold by users rather than the storefront itself directly. But I was thinking of the wrong site, so that's my bad.

I still recall using this kind of feature on a number of sites.

And, more importantly, on the actual core topic here...

Tito Shivan の投稿を引用：

StormTehSinner の投稿を引用：

I seriously doubt there are even a couple of users who actively ignored like 80+k titles.

80k titles might be long of a stretch. But in almost every single thread complaining about the recommendation engine in the forums I've found the user complaining had an ignore list easily ranking in the thousands.

I have, so far, marked 297 titles as "ignored", and FREQUENTLY have issues with this.
LESS
THAN
THREE
HUNDRED
...is all it takes for your system to break. When your company has known for years that users routinely DO ignore titles on the order of 2 - 3 THOUSAND in some cases.

That's not a "me" problem. That's a "you" problem.

Tito Shivan の投稿を引用：

When you put so many titles in an ignore lists the chances of cross-pollinating tags raises to 1 (Any game the engine might consider appropiate for display happens to have a number of matching tags with games you've choosen to ignore) And it simply starts 'throwing things at the wall to see what sticks'

That's why they're called recommendation engines and not blocking ones.

And considering there's been for some time automation tools for things like going through the discovery queue for the free Steam sale cards that can be applied to add a large ammount of titles to the ignore lists there's no actual correlation between having a large ammount of ignored titles and such numbers being manually added into those lists (aka: Click 'not interested 80k times')

And... again...

obliviondoll の投稿を引用：

cinedine の投稿を引用：

You will never be able to not see ignored titles in a curated or strongly themed list. Because that goes against their point.

Yes, you can. And no, it doesn't. And if the list gets cut down to 0, you can simply NOT SHOW THAT SECTION, and you can handle the decision of how much of the list to display client-side without adding load to the servers. They dump the whole list, and a client-side check hides the ignored items.

Which value has the topseller list if you ignore the first 30k titles on it?

If there's a top seller list that's meant to show 20 games, cache a list of 50 and include the first 20 out of those the user hasn't ignored. If there's less than 20 out of that 50, just show the non-ignored ones. And if the user actively dislikes all the top selling games for some reason, THERE IS NO NEED TO KEEP SHOWING THEM THOSE GAMES. Because they specifically want to NOT see them. So just skip the top sellers portion of the page.

Which value has a curated list of 100 titles if you ignore every single one of them and then not see it?

It has value to the people who do want to see it. Whether you see it or not, it has no value if you've ignored every game in that list. If it would be a waste of space and scrolling time, why force that wasted space and scrolling time on the user when you can instead edit it out CLIENT-SIDE for no additional cost in server resources?

Steam is a store. Their main goal is to make you spend money. Which also comes with questioning your decissions about not wanting something.

Or alternatively, if they want to be more successful, comes with LISTENING to customer preferences and doing the best they can to provide recommendations they HAVEN'T been explicitly asked to stop shoving in our faces.

When you walk into a store, and there's a popular brand of shirt in the window and it happens to be red, and you ask the person at the counter "hey I want a red shirt but not like the one in the window", if they grab the one from the window or an identical one of the same shirt from a shelf and say "what about this?" are you going to:

1. be happy they disregarded your request and instantly buy it?
2. be annoyed at them for ignoring what you asked for?
3. immediately walk out and find a shop where the staff aren't idiots?

If you treat that as a survey and collect answers, and more than 10% of people go with option 1, I'd be surprised. I'd be tempted to say 5% if I trusted you to find a statistically significant number of responses. I'd actually expect a reasonable survey to find something like 4 or 5 times as many people willing to walk out of the store instantly as there are who will instantly buy the item they specifically asked not to be shown right before being shown it.

Solution.
Provided.

Reasons why it's a better solution with it.

Counter-arguments? Well, there's that blank list of reasons why you shouldn't allow users to have control over their experience again. But there's a reason it's blank.

[StormTehSinner]

cinedine の投稿を引用：

Anyways, yes I do think before writing. I do think about both sides. And how it would show in edge cases.

Oh really? You do think about both sides? Sorry, but it seems... even though you try, you still miss my side.

cinedine の投稿を引用：

And no, a store page only showing things the user is not interested in because they haven't ignored the products yet is not usefull.

You just can't know if that's the case! Your argument here is nothing but YOUR OPINION. I do care to see any games I haven't ignored yet, because I might be interested. Just because a game isn't popular and pretty much unknown to like 99.9% of all users doesn't mean it "surely will just be ignored too". Not all people just go with the mainstream. Everyone has his/her own taste and sometimes the taste is so far off the mainstream that those people might find real gems in those completely unknown games, while ignoring most of the top selling ones.

cinedine の投稿を引用：

A storepage showing products which other users have interest in to make you think twice about them is useful. A storepage showing you that Ignored Game #144 is a top selling product and makes you look deeper into it is useful. A storepage showing you games your friends want to have even though you don't is useful.

Of course that might be true for some people, but not for all! And I'm one of those who WILL NOT find it useful at all! I DO NOT CARE if a game is popular! I DO NOT CARE if a game is top selling! I DO NOT CARE if my friends want or have this game! It doesn't change anything for me when it's popular amongst friends/community. I look at a game and when I'm sure that I don't like it at all, I'll ignore it and that's it. There's no need to show me these games again.

cinedine の投稿を引用：

Your solution is none. It's trading in complains from 'people who see ignored products' against complains from 'people who only see trash or nothing at all'. Oh yes, it's helping you. But how does it change the bigger picture?

No, no, no... It's not just helping me. It's helping everyone who is LIKE ME. It would be a solution for everyone who is firm with the ignore-decisions he or she made. Of course there will be some complains from 'people who only see trash or nothing at all' with it, but that's why I've asked for an OPTION. So people can decide for themselves. And that also is the most idiotic thing in my eyes when it comes to this topic. I'M ASKING FOR AN OPTION FOR GODS SAKE! And all of you who are constantly against it wouldn't even be affected AT ALL, since an option is something you CAN TOGGLE if your heart so desires! You don't have to use it, so why the f*** are you even arguing? There are a few people here who kinda like my suggestion, that should be proof enough that there will be people who would like to have that option!

[[bin]zwieda]

Nonononono.
You are wrong, obliviondoll.
But just in a single detail, as you said you were wrong.
;)
It´s about ignoring on Amazon.

Login to your account -> "your recommendations" -> improve your recommendations"

Amazon has this stars-rating system, to show, how much you like something, more or less. Also, you have this "I prefer not to use this for recommendations" checkbox, which will totally ignore the product.

So, it´s wrong that you were wrong because you were right all the time.

So, dear incredulous mob, may i introduce you to the not-so-impossible dream: an online-shop, using a smart technology to improve the userexperience.

Steam just offers the ignore feature. So, if it is known for so very long that using just an ignore list is too much of a problem for the steam-store, to be able to offer reasonable user recommendations, why wasn´t it improved years ago?

Telling people over and over again to be kind of dumb or the true base of the problem, as they use an officially implemented feature in exactly the way, it was implemented for, is close to ...

you name it.

#OldUiMatters

[[bin]zwieda]

StormTehSinner の投稿を引用：

I'M ASKING FOR AN OPTION FOR GODS SAKE!

Absolute best version, yes!!!
Let the store act "as it´s now" by default, but give us an OPTION to select, if we want to use the ignore list - on our own "risk" to maybe miss a nice game - by using our ignore lists permanently and everywhere.

For hells sake, there could even be a new sub-section somewhere, like, "dear customer, you ignored some games, a lot of people like, may we present them once more, so you maybe will reconsider some of them to un-ignore".

But do NOT slam pages full of user-ignored items into ones face in the first place / in an totally central position of the store layout.

In any store, a smart company tries to attract customers by things, they are possibly interested in. The maybe-not-so-interesting stuff needs to be sold, too... but present it in an non-central area of the store, a bit more in the backrows.

All that personalized, adapted to the user.

Is that so difficult to realize?

#OldUiMatters

[[bin]zwieda]

Is this just me or sheer luck or has there really been some "secret change" for the store front?

I don´t get any already ignored games in "FEATURED & RECOMMENDED" or in "SPECIAL OFFERS" anymore.

It seems, if a ignored one would be displayed, the placeholder for the game stays empty. This results in something like displaying 2 1/2 pages with games, 1 1/2 empty pages in the section. So, already ignored games seem to be sorted back, to first display "not ignored" games and then simply leaving the space empty, which would be filled by "already ignored" games.

Does anybody else get this result too?

Well, It´s much better like that, as annoying stuff is not visible anymore for me.

Could it be, Valve has really changed something about this?