I've been with this site since 2001. I had my ups and downs, including an abysmal year during which I didn't make it to Top 50 (2008). But it can be safely said that I am a true veteran of MobyGames. That's why I don't hesitate to open this thread. Let's criticize. And let's do it this way: if the same thing annoys everyone, it should be dealt with. I hope the admins agree.

So here is a small list of mine.

1. Platforms are not added, even though tech specs are on the wiki. Why? I'm sure everyone has different favorite platforms "hanging" there. Mine: FM Towns and Sharp X6800.

2. Is it me, or does anyone else hate those "Limited Edition", "Collector's Edition", "Bloody Same Edition Except It Has A Teddy Bear" entries? Why is that when I'm searching for one game I have to crawl through hundreds of those? Why can't they be merged together with main entries?

3. Certain submission for certain platforms are dealt with almost immediately. Other submissions for other platforms take forever to be approved. It's become truly grotesque now.

Entering credits is incredibly tedious. I did it once, and don't intend to ever do it again. I guess it's just a matter of getting used to it, but there has to be a way to make it more comfortable (don't ask me, though =) )

You'll never walk alone. :-)


I'd certainly appreciate it if all submissions would be dealt with within, say, four weeks. But this is a volunteer project committed to quality, so what do you think the Moby gods should do about it? Hire Sciere and Xoleras as professional approvers?

I only have one actually, despite everything else.

What features are currently being worked on, considered, needs input...etc.
One can only whine so much before boring one self. :p

Or anything in the realm of public relations. :p

Yeah. Touchy issue, but really my only complant. Granted, it's all volunteer work so I can't actually complain about the approvers. But is it fair to complain that the "request to become an approver" list doesn't seem to be kept up to date? There are some popular systems that I've seen my submissions take a loooooong time to get looked at. I've briefly considered volunteering, but all of those systems' positions are filled.

The request for approver list is very up-to-date actually and gets a direct feed based on the number of approvers for each platform.

We do have a lot approvers that have gone MIA and thus I'll be "purging" some of them out within the next couple of months... look for openings possibly in Jan.

Your number 3 is a big reason why number one is a problem.

Your number 3 is a big reason why number one is a problem.

You mean FM-Towns and other platforms are not added because approvals are too slow anyway?

Point 2: I've suggested working like Discogs in this aspect - while every different release with a different catalog number has it's own entry, they are all grouped under a "main" entry. I'd probably use something similar for compilations.

Point 3: perhaps an automated paging system ? Everytime an entry sits on the queue for more than a month, all approvers for the platform would be notified to do something about it. I know that approving can be a pain in the arse, particularly obscure stuff where MG would be one of the first to document properly a game, but even escalating for an higher power would be an improvement over letting them rot :p

I'd add: - The page layout needs a revision. I'd welcome a more horizontal layout.

- Adding credits still messy. Many games have basic credits (producer, programmer, artist, sound/music, wtc), yet to add them the worst part is trawling slowly over dozens of "co-director of foreign product development assistant" roles.

- For a user-created database, I find MG lacks a lot of user-created content. Other than reviews, there's very little users can add. Let users create lists of 20~25 games, give the list a title, a description, a small summary for each game, and then allow other users to vote on the quality of the list. I usually look for those "best *platform* games you never played" lists - and considering MG has plenty of folks who are well in the know, we could have some killer lists.

-We have one of the most complete databases around and a working collection management system, they aren't integrated that well. Where are the pages for "most owned game/platforms", for instance ?

- finally, groups are a mess. they range from actual series to completely different games with common elements. for instance, if someone is looking for a game in a series, he has to go to the group and click individually. Ii we had a "series" thing, we could add a widget somewhere and let people browse directly to the previous and next games.

I find Discogs to be a bit cluttered, preferring rateyourmusic's design (scroll a bit down to see the releases), but the general idea is the same :P. I like the idea of having tags for games like Limited Edition/Uber Edition with Free Pretzels/Collector's Edition instead of creating new entries.

Yeah, in design it's a lot better, but following the same idea, as you've said, It's a pretty elegant way of indexing things, balancing between being complete as well as perfectly manageable.

This is a pretty old site now, I'm sure if it was being rebuilt from scratch it would be much better.

>This is a pretty old site now, I'm sure if it was being rebuilt from scratch it would be much better.

This is pure anarchism :)

Let's see what we can do from the point of view of social theories:

Communist revolution: users of all countries, unite. Equal rights to admins and simple contributors. Fight the rotten approving class. MobyGames points should be divided between users.

Social reform: free points for those who can't contribute for health reasons (laziness). Equal opportunities - anyone can become an admin if democratically elected. Freedom of speech: users can't be banned from forums.

Capitalism: approvers are working for admins, who own MobyGames but do nothing. Admins give them points, but collect all the points from simple contributors.

Fascism: Sciere becomes the Supreme Leader of MobyGames. Every screenshot must have his portrait.

Nazism: MobyGames above everything. Everyone who is not part of Moby should be enslaved. Final solution for GameFAQ users.

Or religions:

Catholicism: Users should confess every week to an approver how many screenshots they've taken from other sites. Corn Popper can't be wrong.

Protestantism: Read the MobyGames FAQ. Brian loves you.

Judaism: MobyGames were chosen among other game sites. Don't worship an admin.

Islam: Whether you get your contribution points or not - who are you? Nothing in the face of Moby, the Merciful.

Buddhism: Those who submit for contribution points will stay in the sansara. Those who submit because they are happy to see more games on the site will return once more. Those who submit with emptiness in heart, calmly, without passion, will achieve nirvana already in this life.

Confucianism: Confucius says: "If an admin is just, users submit games willingly. If users submit games willingly, MobyGames thrives. Users receive contribution points, approvers approve new entries, Heavenly Sciere is in balance with Earthly Moby".

Daoism: Moby that can be described with words is not Moby. The only Moby is the Moby of not-submitting. Stop adding new games, feel the Moby inside.

Ah, yeah!

I hate it when I see games like Crash Bandicoot 1, Crash Bandicoot 3 or Super Mario World being listed under both Playstation 1 games, Playstation 3 games or SNES and Wii games. That makes it sound like it has been reworked or something when it really has only been made available for download. I would like to see those entries deleted. If it's just the exact same game redistributed, then don't bother adding it here. So on that point I truly agree with you.

I also agree with you on your third point. I feel that on Playstation 1 & 2, at least for me, the approvers do take their time before either rejecting or approving something. I have some release info for Crash: Mind over Mutant still pending, and it has been pending since July.

If we were to follow that route, well, we'd have to delete all those SNES to GBA ports we have, because they're basically the same game.

Besides, some of these ports do have some extra features. Wii games get manuals, savestates, and some bugfixes.

I hate it when I see games like Crash Bandicoot 1, Crash Bandicoot 3 or Super Mario World being listed under both Playstation 1 games, Playstation 3 games or SNES and Wii games. That makes it sound like it has been reworked or something when it really has only been made available for download. I would like to see those entries deleted. If it's just the exact same game redistributed, then don't bother adding it here.

I like knowing every platform under which a game is playable even if there are no big changes. Perhaps in the future "emulated re-releases" could be toggled off in the search.

These are already tracked via tech specs (Wii Virtual Console, PSOne Classics), so it could be done.

That could be a solution, and I hope that it is implemented sometime in the near future.

What annoys me most... hmmm... Well, I would say the interface and layout. Now I love the cataloging on this site, which is the main reason I signed up, but just the look of it is so dry. It seems way too retro for my tastes, and almost too dull. We should make the site more.... uppity. Kind of like a GameSpot or Destructoid. Now granted its not really akin to one of these sites, but at least they have an attractive interface that is intuitive and doesnt hurt the navigation. It pretty much draws people in. Which cant really be said about this site. Truth be told, first impressions of MobyGames were pretty meh, but I took a shot and found some really interesting things on here, and some games I completely forgot about.

If you click on your user name at the top right and select "Change account information / Preferences" there will be a "Theme" option at the bottom of the page, which allows you to change the appearance of the site to an alternate design. It probably doesn't address your concerns, but it is a second choice.

Personally, I prefer the retro MobyGames design to sites such as GameSpot, but it seems to be a common enough complaint.

Yes I understand the themes option, and I have mine on Dark, but I was talking not only about the theme but the actual interface itself along with the theme

Agreed! Way too much visual noise at GameSpot style sites.

You really mean this, don't you? :) But see, it's just that many people here didn't grow up thinking that GameSpot or Destructoid did something sane in their design and navigation, so I suppose not too many will agree with you.

Having said that, I didn't say that the Moby design and navigation is perfect.

I concur. Those fancy sites, designed for the "Vista is my 1st system evr!" generation are visually confusing and cluttered. Add few blocks of ads and you're lost! Remember: those sites are made for people looking "what's hot today". Moby has a huge database for gaming history researchers so it should retain current "lite" interface (at least as an option for us, die-hard, hardcore, no-i'm-not-gonna-change people).

Is that July 2009? I have some credits for amiga platrom which have been pending since July 2008

There's a lot of discussion about that listing behind the scenes. Currently it is still unresolved.

That actually is an annoyance of mine. There seems to be a tendency for approvers to leave things in the queue while they are discussed or investigated behind the scenes. I never see the "escalated" status used anymore (maybe that's just me) while other items sit for months at a time (like requesting deletion for that damn false trivia about Urkel in the Die Hard entry).

If there's a question or further proof needed, why not kick it back to the contributor to work out, explain, research, etc? It's their points anyway. I would certainly prefer to do all the needed work for my submissions so it's complete for the approver.

I dunno who approved that, but it sure wasn't me. :P

Here, this should cheer you up. :D

ETA: Hm, it appears that the trivia was sourced from the Angry Video Game Nerd's review of the game. This thread says so anyway.

Yep. That was my guess, and what I said in the correction notes. Urkel's even in more colors that the NES could display in the AVGN video, and the font's different. Screenshots, or it didn't happen :P

Right, that one's been fixed. Certain (correction) queues have an incredibly load and very little eyes to go over them. I got a hold on the developer corrections queue now and intend to work my way up, but it's just a lack of time.

Certainly this is not your case, but there are cases in which I fear sending back to the contributor and never hearing from him/her again. Sure, delaying the approval also can send contributors away, but in the first case we have a slighter better chance of actually getting the info entered to the database.

For me it is that games (and systems) are always listed with their US release titles, no matter where they actually originate (or where I live). This is especially annoying when for example a Japanese game was released in most countries with their original title, and only the US for some reason got a different one. Since there are far more non-US residents than US residents, this makes the information inaccurate for most people. In some cases this even leads to wrong statements. For example, the Mega Drive game 'Langrisser' was released as 'Warsong' in the US, and later ported to the PC Engine, but only in Japan. But the Japanese port is still listed under the US title, even if it was never released under it.

From what i've heard this is a technical limitation, but I would be really glad if that could be addressed in some way. Since I'm a computer scientist I thought about helping with the coding, but I have of course no idea how much work that would be.

You can click on the release date and get release info for different countries, if it has been added.

I know you're served up cover art based on your browsing location, so I wonder how hard it would be to do the same with game titles...

Correct me if I'm wrong but this also apply to ratings, like I see PEGI displayed by default because I'm in Europe?

it's planned to have titles shown by region but that's later

Unfortunately that thing is broken. I'm in MEXICO, why the hell do I get European cover art?! If anything we should be getting US cover art, as we get many games meant for that region anyway.

That's because you speak Spanish, that's an European language! =P

Isn't it just that if there's no art for your region, it shows whatever was contributed the earliest for the game? That's how it's always seemed to play out for me, anyway...

I've submitted US artwork (because pretty much 99.5% of my collection is from the US, the rest is from Europe or Japan), and later when someone submits European artwork... I get European artwork. It's annoying.

Maybe someday we could have an option in the preferences to turn it off? Or to force, say, US covers as preferred ones?

I sometimes find this thing annoying, too, as often the only game cover submitted for my country is... magazine cover (for covermount releases). I hate whole front pages of a magazine being submitted as "game covers"! The media itself is OK with me, as long as it's not another "100 demos + one old game".

I would like to see an option to force European titles and covers to show first for all users who are from Europe. A similar thing would of course apply for users who are from North America or any other part of the world. I always get annoyed when I see Rollcage Stage 2 renamed as Death Track Racing, just because it was released in North America under that title.

.........

That doesn't make much sense because the game WAS released as Rollcage Stage 2 in America.

On the Playstation!

Or perhaps an option "depending on the country of origin"? So if the title was developed in Europe, the first would be Euro title, but if it comes from US... get my meaning?

I'd only get Japanese cover art that way. :p

Absolutely no consistency in approval guidelines. I recognize that there are a lot of different interpretations of different guidelines. I'm just venting my frustration that I just had some stuff WIP'd back (after languishing for about a month in the first place) with a reason that was inconsistent with earlier approvals which sailed right through.

When Rabbi Guru asks me something like this:

Are you sentient? Do you dream of electric sheep? Who is your God? Did you kill your God? Why did you kill your God? Why are you here? What is your purpose in this existence? Are you happy? What is happiness? What is joy? Define love.

Is it possible to feel annoyed with a binary neocortex? How does it feel to be annoyed in the world of 1's and 0's? Or are you a balanced ternary creation? Well obviously unbalanced since you killed your God. Speaking of which, why did you kill your God?

Agreed that special editions should be listed as alternate packages and only listed separately if there is different game content (i.e. Game of the Year Editions).

I am annoyed by the screenshot display in gamegroups. If you look at a group, it will show sample shots of games in the group, but it only uses the first shot, meaning usually all your samples are just title screens.

The review format. I would write a lot more reviews if we didn't have to stick the bloody good points, bad points system as it's much better to write about these things in conjunction with each other.

Genre classification. I can look for games with "first-person" and "shooter," but a large number of these are not first person shooters. They are 3rd-person shooters where you can go into 1st-person to look around such as Metal Gear Solid.

Yeah it would be a lot more useful if you could search for A and B and not C.

I very much agree. The genre classification should be seriously looked at. For example 2D/3D is missing, yet isometric is there. And even the more vague genre tags "3rd person/1st person" are used prominently.

Just as an example, I was looking for a 2D platform game, but if you start looking here: http://www.mobygames.com/browse/games there is no hyperlink to here: http://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/x,21/

Also, I would be very much in favour of pictogram's for the genre notation, so icons with puzzle, fps, 2dplatform etc. This way you can see what kind of game it is in one glance. I mean something like those pictogram's on the back of ps1 game packages.

Another thing that annoys me is when i upload a .zip full of images the name of the files aren't uploaded and there i go naming the files again :( This thing really &%#$@§ me off.

My personal annoyance is lack of uniformity in game descriptions. I really hate the kinds of descriptions that drone on and on about the story, way too long and without ever mentioning about what the gameplay is actually like. Also, I think it would be good to add a "in one sentence" part of the description, a short description that sums up the game, short enough to show in a search-results list and things like that.

And I agree with the already mentioned:

* Special editions should not be listed as separate entries, instead they should be separate packages of something like that.

* Games should not be listed as normal PS3 or Wii releases when it's in fact just a "emulated re-releases" or "available through backwards compatibility". I mean, if you follow that kind of logic, every single GameCube game should also be listed as Wii game.

We don't list games "available through backwards compatibility."

What are you talking about?

I seem to be in the minority; I prefer separate entries for special edition releases. I do think there should be an option to exclude them from searches and when viewing groups, however, as they can clutter things up rather badly.

You're not in the minority. I hate having to bunch up special editions with regular releases in other databases.

Same here

I agree on the lack of uniformity but that is the side effect of having so many contributers all with there own personal writing styles and experience with the game, so there is not much that can be done. I don't agree with the in one sentence though as lots of games cannot be described that way. If you are looking for a game just open it up to see if it what you are looking for.

There is only one way to fix that, and that is to change the description to make it better.

The license of games should be available to add. Example: GPL, creative commons, freeware, shareware etc

There is a tech spec that does exactly that, but not in this complexity, though.

We cannot even search for freeware games :( One more thing now that MMOs are becoming more and more famous freeware + cash shop, should be included in the business models.

Sure you can. Go to the game browser, select your platform, then select "Business Model".

http://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/windows/tic,16/

Or just search for the tech-spec in the search.

What if a game was first released commercially and later made freeware? What should be listed under tech-specs for that platform? Original or current status?

Current status + trivia detailing the current status, I'd say.

Well, now it's original status + trivia handling the current status.

When my posts vanish out of nowhere. :-(

I'm starting to get annoyed by the poorly conceived polls. Who authorizes this? Sometimes concept is fairly OK, but the execution... for example the poll about using handheld games in the potty featured answers "nope" and "no, it's gross". That's "no" twice! Some people would benefit from marketing classes where they'd be taught on the subject of creating well structured polls.

It's about fun too, doesn't all have to be serious, besides we're getting low on polls... only about 32 in the queue... so not many for the next year... so if anyone is going to submit any keep in mind you won't see it for months.

I didn't suggest dropping all silly ideas altogether, it's just that approvers could tweak the polls so that they make more sense. The world is big, maybe even this silly question mentioned above would be useful for some... err.. behavioral studies ;-) but this assuming the poll is structured correctly.

If you want more polls, move mine up the queue, this may encourage me to write another (hint, hint).

what would be good is if the polls don't disapeer as soon as you post them! sorry no caps 2day...

They don't ?

Hey! My caps now work, just gotta press shift... Ok maybe it's just my pc but I swear I post polls and they just vanish. Same as my posts really...

What exactly do you mean by "posting polls"?

When you post polls on to mobygames. Must I explain more?

They go into the queue. They'll show up on the front page once their time has come.

You can still view them in your approval status page.

If you're still on the threshold of this community snarky remarks about regulars used to a certain jargon will certainly boost your karma around here. You submit polls. We reject them.

Most likely, none of them were actually rejected. After the approval they are lined up in a second queue to be posted over time (automatically).

Is it possible to know where in the queue a poll that I submit is? If not, could that be made possible?

nope and probably not

The quick search just received an update that was most needed. Now I think it's time that the moby users search should be updated. Instead of just being able to search for moby users through their "about me" section, we should also have the ability to list all the users and filter them according to their country of origin and the amount of contribution points they have.

The problem is that my polls are rejected by mobygames, that annoys me quite a lot.

Interesting, may I ask why you'd need that?

Well here is a list of all the users in order of their contribution points.

http://www.mobygames.com/stats/contributors/p,40/

Including flags for country of origin.

NUMBER ONE IN MEXICO WOO