[Suggestion] Random Game Picker

[BigBlueWolf]

Totally not necessary, but might be fun.

I was thinking that it would be great to have a utility on the site that will randomly pick games from any defined list you give it.

Example:
Which list do you want to use? [Unplayed Games]
How many games to select? [6]
Press the button and 6 titles are chosen.

Using any list the user has defined for him/herself would allow curated lists based on genre, length, unplayed SG wins, or any other subset to their liking.

[Narayan]

Check how much of the functionalities you're interested is already implemented here:
https://servc.eu/rsg/

If you click on "Filter by category" prior to clicking on 'Go!" you'll get to set some options like unplayed or genre. As for picking certain amount of games - just press the "choose again" several times for other picks.

I've been using this random game picker from time to time and imo it's decent enough.
However I don't know how useful it would be for people with colossal libraries, or with large "won't play" lists or who just idle games (would probably nullify the "unplayed" toggle).

Although it would be nice to have it implemented into BLAEO site, I don't think it's feasible right now, as mandrill has barely any time for anything and from what I remember he wanted to rework the wins syncing issues first and probably other backend stuff.

Also filtering by length is wishful thinking in general, unfortunately for me as well, cause I find this really useful. First - this type of information is gathered manually by user submission and two main stat sites that gather info about it - AStats and HLTB are far from perfect. HLTB has a larger database (many of the more obscure games don't seem to be that accurate though) but even they don't cover everything. AStats seems to have more info missing, but at least their times don't look like they were submitted by speedrunners Here is mandrill's script that fetches AStats times onto BLAEO page if you're interested to use it as a band-aid for now

[BigBlueWolf]

The site you're pointing at is definitely the right idea but is confined to categories that BLAEO members don't get to define. For instance, there's no way to have it pick only from my SG Wins list.

WRT length, I wasn't stating the script should be intelligent enough to figure out fine details of games as such. Merely that if someone wanted to create a list of short, medium, or long games to pick from, they can do so on BLAEO already. The random pick part is only an extension of the ability to craft your own lists.

[ShandyAndy]

I'd second this suggestion. It would be useful to pick from SG Wins or my own backlog category.

[Narayan]

I don't deny that having it all implemented onto BLAEO would be useful, and I would be happy to use it myself. It's just that I don't think it will be feasible to do in the near future.

For now I resort to crude half-measures like http://www.miniwebtool.com/random-picker/ for the wins list or other custom ones. Like for example - I open SG Wins (or other list), set the view to list, hide completed and beaten, copy what's left, paste it into that random picker (it picks by line, so the dates, achiv stats, etc just look ugly in there but are not considered separate entries) and then press "Pick a Random Item" several times if needed

[mandrill]

This would definitely be useful ...
But Narayan is right, it will be at least one more month until I'll have time for anything (or land line Internet access :/) ... Anyways, I miss working on the site, so when I'm finally settled I'll see how fast I can burn through all the good ideas.