I also hardly use the chat and I wouldn't be sad if it wouldn't be there anymore. But I also think there is a fair argument to be made, that it's kinda sad that apparently one p.o.s. can have so much power, that they can get a feature of this page being removed, which doesn't feel great. Especially since the current incident did start in one of the forum threads (as far as I know). So it does feel kinda weird to get rid of the chat (but I also don't know all the details that happened there). But then again, it seems no one would miss chat if it were gone.

Lastly I also want to add (and that might sound weird) that overall I think this was a positive experience. I am glad to see that behaviour like that won't be tolerated here and hopefully people feel welcomed and included.

You slightly misunderstood - the point is that, when you see somebody's review, their score is rounded into your system - which may or may not create some confusion about what they actually wanted to rate the game as (75% rounded into 8 etc)

Also having a single system for the game's average score would just help the consistency.

You still have your own system on your profile, and scoring systems would stay the same

To word it another way:
*I* want to see *my* scores in *my* scoring system, *other* peoples' scores in *their* scoring system, and the global score in a global 0-100% percentage system

Dude, I got that and while admittely having a review score be displayed slightly different is odd, my point was if the argument is about wether a game review is supposed to be a 7.5 or 8 or a global score being a 82.5 or 8.3, I take that as an argument to get rid of reviews entirely. So make it even rougher - just binary. Just kidding.

But back on a serious note, I also argue about consistency. Because it isn't consistent if I set the score display a certain way and then have these being displayed in another way at some part of the page with multiple different display options. While I am pretty sure the actual system underneath it with the necessary math is the same for everyone, just displayed differently (but people can correct me if I am wrong in this regard).

Yeah it does now thanks lol
I feel like the statistics should use a unified 0-100% score system for everyone though, and only your own scores should be rounded, alike to how AniList does it (going to take my friend for an example):
- He has a 1-5 star system (with no halves)
- When he goes on some anime's page to see the score, it shows a percentage score, so like 83% or whatever even though he himself would have that as a 4/5.

I honestly don't like this. Personally, I feel people can be too obsessive with review scores and personally I prefer having rougher scores, instead of those being broken down in detail into something like 82.5%.

Also wanting to add, someone mentioned if we could have ratings on the completion page and I think this might be a really interesting idea to see which year/month was really great - on a global and personal level, instead of just seeing the number of completions. Here is a very rough mokup with some imaginary values.

I was just looking for some games to play by browsing most popular on HLTB through search bar. What I've noticed is that when I choose a platform it will show most popular games that are released on that platforms by global stats.

For example, selecting Mobile as a platform will show that one of the most popular mobile games are Resident Evil 8, Star Wars KOTOR or Death Stranding that have little to no players on mobile platform. Additionally, mobile isn't even shown in HLTB stats of these games due to low number of reviews/players.

My suggestion is to change the most popular filter to show the most played games by the stats of a specified platform and not global statistics from all the platforms.

This is honestly a good point. Sometimes when looking up certain platforms there are some games on the top that you wouldn't associate with that platform - like Tomb Raider games for Game Boy advanced or Call of Duty for Nintendo DS. So it feels a lot of time you have to kinda skip a block of games that aren't really popular for a certain platform. So sorting popularity games for a platform based on the use baser of the game on that platform might be a good idea.

If the page-count of the thread is equal to, or lower than 5, automatically take the reader to page 1.
If the page-count is greater than 5, automatically take the reader to the latest page of the thread. Also make it a bit more clear that the reader is on the latest page, or they may think they are reading page 1 and be confused as to why the discussion is out of context.

Hmm, I don't think I like that one.

You would have a linkt/button into a thread and it would sometimes put your users on the first or last page, which would have this kinda unexpted behaviour, which would lead to irritation ("Why am I on this page instead of the other one? Previously I landed on the other page!").
Now you would have to explain that "rule" to the user, but I personally I wouldn't know of a good solution to convey this info. If you put it as text somewhere people would ignore it (that happens surprisingly often). A tooltip would be kinda annoying, since everytime you want to click on a thread title, you would have to wait this little moment for the tooltip. And if people know about this rule, there would still be that moment of being like "Alright, will this link lead me to the start or the end of the thread? Let me check the reply number, do the math how many pages there are and check if that is higher than the threshold." Surely as an alternative you can do it time based or show the number of pages, but the users would still have to check that number and remember the threshold, just to know if the thread title would lead them to the first or last page.

Overall I don't understand how this should be better than just using the 'Jump to last page' button on the right side on the screen. Personally I would prefer if those buttons were bigger, so it's easier to click them.

Finishing up another game before I jump in, but time limits scare me. Is there a high penalty if you flop the first time?

There are basically no time limits in this game. It's more like you find a new "crime scene" in which you walk around for around a minute and then you unlock a new scene, while you can always revisit the previous scenes with no time limit. It makes sense in that regard, that you will uncover a lot of the mysteries after some time and you are not supposed to solve everything in the first round.
EDIT: Just wanting to add - I think you can't actually add any solutions to your in game log during the one minute walk around. It is really just there to get a first impression of the scene.

But also, admittely it's been over 5 years since I played this, so my memories could be a little foggy.

On a side note, this is an amazing game. After Paper Please this game made me say that the developer Lucas Pope might be a genius.

I also had this recently (last month?). I logged some times, but they didn't appear for quite some time.

Wondering again if it would be possible to add an option to filter our lists (backlog, completed, etc.) by a collection, like we can with platforms & storefronts? For example, games like Hyrule Warriors, Link's Crossbow Training, or Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland don't have "Zelda" in the title, so they don't show up when searching my lists for "Zelda". I could edit "Zelda" into a custom title for each one, but it would be way more convenient (and cleaner) if I could just choose a collection from a drop-down menu. I made a rough mock-up to show what I mean:

Honestly, about the emulation topic I personally think the current solution is totally fine by using the original console release or the device the game has been played on.

However, the idea by CJP sounds great. Obviously since there are over thousand of collections, it should be reduced to followed collections, but this would also add an additional incentive to follow a collection and there could be so many use cases - having collections for genres or developers or other stuff to filter.

I think I found a minor error about the review breakdown in the Stats page. Here in case it's not old news:

When I go to the stats page, select a year and also select "Games released" everything seems to update correctly except the review breakdown (which I assume is still on "Games completions"). The same error seems to occur when selecting "Games cataloged."

Here two screenshots





So far I played 5 games that were released in 2023, which I rated at around 8 to 10, but the review breakdown shows my reviews of the games I played in 2023

Site Update:

User Games List
- Bugfix: Properly switch user to first page of results when filtering on a higher page.
- Bugfix: When switching to another users list from yours, it will now switch to the correct list.

Awesome!

I don't know if this is old or maybe a mistake on my part, but it seems if a game tab has multiple pages, the filters don't work anymore.



My complete games are at around 800, so I have two pages. On every other game tab with less games the filters seems to work fine.

EDIT: I guess I am doing something wrong with the screenshot, here is a direct link:
EDIT2: Nevermind, I used the wrong URL

Well, then, I would love to take

This War of Mine
Tokyo 42

if you don't mind.

So the last few month I played a lot of older games for PS2 and stuff and I realized, some of those games have an in-game timer which a lot of time is way off than the actual time, since the game doesn't track "death times" (since the player is back on the title screen and has to reload the save file) or runs slower or has some other reasons. So this also means some of the times here are also a bit off.

Long story short, maybe it might be helpful if there could be a checkbox and a little icon for the Completion Categories, if the user used an in-game timer (similiar to the 'Replay' or 'DLC' info)?

Have you tried the Reorder button in the upper right corner?

I hope you like this new formatting, I know some people will struggle with the timing tools being shifted to the right but I think it ends up making more sense, especially on mobile. As always, let me know what you think!

Just on the first view, I think I honestly don't like the new layout. And I think it might be because of the timing tools being on the right side now. It seems counterintuitive, as additional tools are mostly on the left and this is also the case on this website, if you are looking at the full stats page of a game. The tools to add a game on a collection and/or list are on the left. So you go into the full stats page with the tools on the left, then into the submission edit page with the tools switching to the right, which breaks with the layout of the previous page.

It also seems clicking the 'Add' button to add a manual time makes the page do a little jump, which feels kinda annoying.

Oh wow, it is indeed. Man, I did not know it works like this. Was that always like that? Maybe the wording could be different, like "time left to beat" or something. Now I am curious how the average time to beat works, but I also never play more than one game at a time.

Nothing major, but it seems there might be something fishy about the calculation of the average time? Currently I have FF5 in my list which has completion times of 30 to 40 hours, but an average time of 3 hours

I joined Steam 2007, when the Orange Box with Team Fortress 2, Portal and Half Life 2 with those episodes was released. Since I was a console gamer at that time, I still bought PC games via retail, which included Counter Strike: Source and Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. It was way later when I actually bought a game on Steam, which was the re-release of Alien vs Predator in January 2010. Shortly I preordered Bioshock 2, as it came with the first game as pre order bonus. Back then they had really cheap deals.

Some precisions about my retirements...

@mockturtle

You're one to talk, how do you retire Pigsy's Perfect 10? It's like three hours! MAX!

This one I did not "retire" as in "I played it a bit and didn't like it." It's more like I felt like I really liked Enslaved but wanted to move on to other things. And since the DLC wasn't continuing the main story, I just decided I wouldn't play it.

Final Fantasy II, I don't blame you, that game is tedious. I do wonder if I'd feel different now that I'm older, though.

Yeah, I'm sure you'd feel the same way now. It's sad because I really tried (played 15 hours). I really loved the music and story too, but the gameplay mecanics are just bad.

How does one retire Tetris DS? It's not like there's a story. You just kinda... Tetris until you're done.

Tetris DS has many different games, each with deferent goals. I didn't feel like it was fair to put this one in my "Completed" list. I just played and had fun with all the different games and stopped playing. I have many other retired games like this. Alto's Adventure and Grindstone are two games I really liked, but their nature made it hard to beat.

@juanfrandm98

As I'm a great Dragon Quest fan, DRAGON WARRIOR III? It hurts... For me, it's the best of the first trilogy. It's true that the NES version could be too old, but I played the Switch version a couple of years ago and had fun. I'm pretty sure that the next Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake will be great, so give it an opportunity when it comes out!

I just grew tired of grinding RPGs. I beat both DQ1 and DQ2 on the NES and while I admire their novelty in the genre, I got annoyed by the grinding, but also how obtuse everything was. I did play DQ3 for 5 hours before accepting that this type of game isn't my cup of tea. I much prefer "simpler" RPGs, like FF4 or Nostalgia on the DS where grinding is not really a thing and where your characters level through normal gameplay.

Damn, Dishonored. One of my favorite games.

Yea, honestly, I prefered the previous x/5 view with a 10 point scale (so having something like "3.5/5"). Somehow I feel more stressed with the x/10 view, but having only 5 points is also too limited. Yea, I know, it's a really silly thing to complain about :>....

It seems I found an interesting bug.

So my Metal Gear complete collection has one follower - BoiGh0sT. When I go to their collections and the followed collections, I can access my Metal Gear collection. However, I can't edit my collection, but I can follow it. My collection has two followers now, which is fine. However, when I unfollow my collection, that collection has 3 followers.

It seems following and then unfollowing your own collection via a follower profile adds two followers to the follower counter of the collection.

That Final Fantasy collection is crazy.

Here is my collection for Mega Man:
https://howlongtobeat.com/user/Le_Don/lists/11585/Mega-Man-Complete-Collection

Arkane Studios Complete Collection
https://howlongtobeat.com/user/Le_Don/lists/11584/Arkane-Studios

I am thinking about making developer focused collections, but there is a valid argument being made how games are made by teams and not single personalities (well, if we aren't talking about certain indie games) and how this cult of gamin auteurs might be actually problematic. Not sure about it.

Besides that I might also start a collection of Mega Man games.

I was about to report the same problem. Changing the sort order of a collection doesn't seem to work anymore.