Steam Curation!

[eot]

I feel old, I just use Steam to download and launch games. I don't make wishlists, 'follow' games, write reviews or level up my account and I don't go to the store to discover games, I just go there when I know there's something I want to buy.

[Malfsyde]

Not about curation, but the queue thing that suggests games to you apparently sometimes will show games because they are popular sellers or have a high metacritic score.

 

Boo-urns. I have over 100 games in my library, can't they mostly recommend stuff on that basis?

 

Meh, I think it's a fair that sometimes you may find something outside of your comfort zone that you like but couldn't extrapolate from your existing history of purchases/wishlists etc.

 

Using Metacritic as a basis should definitely be scrapped though. Just... stop.... at least give the option to customise on what criteria it calculates recommendations, in case someone wants it weighted for Metacritic for some incomprehensible reason.

[Twig]

 

I feel old, I just use Steam to download and launch games. I don't make wishlists, 'follow' games, write reviews or level up my account and I don't go to the store to discover games, I just go there when I know there's something I want to buy.

You are definitely old. At least one-thousand and two years old, by my estimate! Maybe even as old or older than the end of time!

[SuperBiasedMan]

Meh, I think it's a fair that sometimes you may find something outside of your comfort zone that you like but couldn't extrapolate from your existing history of purchases/wishlists etc.

 

Using Metacritic as a basis should definitely be scrapped though. Just... stop.... at least give the option to customise on what criteria it calculates recommendations if someone wants it weight for Metacritic for some incomprehensible reason.

 

There are absolutely sometimes games outside of that, but at least for me personally I find that I need a real recommendation for that from someone. If a game is unappealing to me at first glance, I'll move on if it's steam suggesting it because the vast majority of games will fall into that category for me.

[JonCole]

I wonder if there's someone who actually doesn't use Steam for buying and downloading games, but instead just uses it as a chat client, research tool for buying games physically at Gamestop, and just buys trading cards and makes badges because they look cool.

[Malfsyde]

There are absolutely sometimes games outside of that, but at least for me personally I find that I need a real recommendation for that from someone. If a game is unappealing to me at first glance, I'll move on if it's steam suggesting it because the vast majority of games will fall into that category for me.

 

Yeah I think that's what's useful about Curator lists. It is recommendations from an actual person for actual reasons that they can justifiy, rather than some algorithm designed to sell you more stuff that you will never play.

[Apelsin]

Not about curation, but the queue thing that suggests games to you apparently sometimes will show games because they are popular sellers or have a high metacritic score.

 

Boo-urns. I have over 100 games in my library, can't they mostly recommend stuff on that basis?

 

Doesn't it do both? Saw that DoTA had a checkmark saying something along the lines of "Recommended because of: POPULAR".

That would suggest other things could be used as criteria as well

[SuperBiasedMan]

Doesn't it do both? Saw that DoTA had a checkmark saying something along the lines of "Recommended because of: POPULAR".

That would suggest other things could be used as criteria as well

 

Yeah, it does both but Iit seems like only a third are based on my library and wishlist while 2/3 are just hot things on steam.

 

But I think having done a bunch of the recommendation queues has made it pay more attention to what I liked. Maybe a wishlist of 12 things was too few?

Edited September 24, 2014 by SuperBiasedMan

[Justin Leego]

Sure. I can't remember what it said the reason was. I do remember that it was not because it was "popular" or a "top-seller" which were not useful heuristics for my hipster-taste.

 

Heh, fair enough! I was pleased to see recommendations based on wishlist choices. Those were interesting, and a lot more so than the often very odd genre or playtime-related suggestions.

[monkehhh]

Who curates the curators? The Steam Curator Curator.

[clyde]

I really think that discoverability has improved with this update. I just browsed Steam while I ate dinner and I'm finding stuff that is interesting to me in the Recommendation section. I am so overwhelmed with the amount of games I want to play (not just new games on Steam). Every once in a while it hits me that there are multitudes of games I would very much enjoy, that I will never play. As far as content goes, I don't think things have ever been better in the video-game world. I still haven't finished Blur's campaign (which is awesome). I wonder if this is what it will be like when civilization figures out cold-fusion, and full automation, post-scarcity economies.

[Dewar]

I really enjoy that you can follow games now. I've been able to trim down my Wishlist to things that I really want to buy, and then follow games I'm somewhat interested in but undecided. I went and added a bunch of curators as well, and that's been pretty cool so far.

[syntheticgerbil]

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/bgb/curation

I love this.

 

Is Monopoly on Steam? Can you add that?

[SuperBiasedMan]

The studio that makes Sunless Sea has an interesting list

 

http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6856422-The-Echo-Bazaar/

 

 

(make sure you read their quotes about the games)

[Problem Machine]

So I think this whole implementation is shitty for reasons I don't feel like talking about here and I dunno if it's going anywhere.

 

But I made a curation page anyway cuz fuck it.

 

edit: Also Jon Blow's curation descriptions crack me up.

[Korax]

Before this update I kind of broke the recommendations system. Every once in a while i would go through its list a few times, throwing things that looked interesting on my wishlist and setting everything else as "do not recommend." Eventually the list was only ever populated by things that were on my wishlist, often with the melancholy tagline of "Maybe it's time to buy it?" So I started marking all of those as "do not recommend," and eventually my list became barren. Something would pop up every once in a while (usually because I had recently added to my wishlist), but it's been largely empty for some time.

 

Since the update, I've gone through my "Discovery Queue" four or five times, and the only thing I've discovered is that every single game in the queue was "popular right now," and if I want to actually discover something, the ways to do so are buried even deeper than they already were.

[Dewar]

On the first day, I went through and added about 20 curators, removed 40 things from my wishlist and "followed" them instead, and ran through two sets of 12 recommendations that mostly came up with what's popular now and set most of it to not interested. On the second day, the list of 12 that I got was pretty awesome and I found 3 things on there that I ended up following. I guess it's working for me?

[Nachimir]

My recommendations are 70% "Games you intentionally didn't buy".

 

I've been busy working on a show while this has been announced, and several developers have pestered me to make a curation page. I haven't yet, because it's something I want to think about more.

[SuperBiasedMan]

From what I can tell, Steam seems to mostly care about what you have in your wishlist and follows, maybe your library too. It actually doesn't care what you've said you don't like, that barely factors.

 

I've gotten better results since I started bulking up my wishlist to 30+ games, though I'll probably change that to follows since I'm using the wishlist the same way I always have, as a list of games that worked in their initial pitch but I want to find out more about them before I might buy em.

[Dewar]

So pop in and flag them as not interested?

[steinersteiner]

Don't forget: Dishonored Idle Thumbs

[BadHat]

Made a group with a few friends I play stuff with: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/6864644-Michael-Shannon-Fanclub/

 

There's a few dumb in-jokey reviews in there because we're mostly doing it for fun, but most of them are things we've genuinely enjoyed. Not totally sure how I feel about this update yet, but writing these short reviews is a lot of fun somehow.

[SuperBiasedMan]

So pop in and flag them as not interested?

 

Flagging stuff as not interested doesn't affect the suggestion algorithm at all according to Steam, it just removes that one specific game from your suggestions.

[Dewar]

Right, but if it's a list of games "you intentially didn't buy" those are ripe for flagging as not interested.

[SilentBtAmazing]

I wonder if there's someone who actually doesn't use Steam for buying and downloading games, but instead just uses it as a chat client

Jake "video games" Rodkin?

(Edited to remove game playing references in the quote)