Make a New Forum: "Games to Add to the LFG Game List"; just duplicate the "Suggestions & Ideas" thread!

People shouldn't have to waste a suggestion just to see the games they want to play added to the Game List.

I think a full forum might be overkill, but I also agree that the current system of using this forum seems inappropriate. Personally, while I understand the idea of an "other games" category, I think it's poorly implemented. Right now, "other" provides no information and makes it hard to list or look for new or unusual systems, because they're all under the same tag. Similarly, it makes it hard to see if, and how much, interest there is in these systems signal interest as a player. I think a good solution would be to reformat the other tag so it becomes "Other Game (Insert name here)". This way, it still only takes up one tag and people can search through all of the "other" games, but it also lets people clearly see what the actual system is and search for just that system. This would also make it easier to automatically keep track of how many people are actually playing a system and have a script that automatically adds it to the list (or flags it for addition) if that number crosses a certain threshold.

Very true. Please consider adding a vote, if you have one available. ^_^

Unfortunately, I am out of votes.

Top Secret would be a bonus....seeing that it is a TSR game like D&D, Gamma World, Marvel Superheroes, etc.  Just to name a few.  These should be default settings IMHO

It would help a lot more if you added a vote.

Tenacious Techhunter said: People shouldn't have to waste a suggestion just to see the games they want to play added to the Game List. Note: Games are not added to Roll20's Game List drop-down menu directly according to Suggestions votes. However your Suggestion comments could have some positive influence on the "community attention" and "post often" factors. It seems that the leading way to encourage a Game title to be added is to play the game and offer game sessions in the Looking For Group system, using the system title in the Title, Description, and Keywords, while categorizing the game under "Other Games" listing in the drop-down menu. When a growing number of Roll20 games are offered for a system title under Other Games in this manner,&nbsp;it becomes more visible for the Dev Team's consideration. Here is the current statement in the Roll20 Wiki Documentation about how games are selected for the list, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Looking_for_Group#Other_Ga" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Looking_for_Group#Other_Ga</a>... The games dropdown menu exist to help standardize the options available (example: 4E vs. 4th Edition vs. D&D4, etc). No matter how many games are listed, some may not make the cut. Games are added to the list periodically.&nbsp; If you feel a game should be listed, encourage your community members to play and post often. The more community attention a title receives the more likely it is to be added to the list. Your suggestion to make improvements or changes to the way games are added is valid. Feel free to add specific features that you think would help with deciding which game systems to list.

Well, it's hard to say. If it were up to me, we'd just "kitchen sink" the whole thing, and put them all in, with a hash option for catch-all issues with subtleties in system variation. Maybe use a page on the wiki to let users manage the list themselves, and to let the community decide how to lump things together and when. But the Roll20 devs don't seem to want to do that, and conceding to their users is something they tend to be against. So ultimately, we're forced to find a way to let the community make clear which thing to add next, so as to avoid chicken-and-egg problems, but also to allow the Roll20 devs the opportunity to pick and choose among proposed options, as they seem insistent on doing. And since it's the devs ultimately doing the picking, it doesn't make much sense to propose something they have less of a chance of cooperating with. We know they're at least sort of willing to use the suggestion forum. So it only makes sense to duplicate it completely, rather than customize something.

Personally I'd prefer if the game list was like the tags - enter whatever you want, with autocomplete for the entries that already have been entered by anyone else (chosen from active games). This would make the list huge, potentially listing many games multiple times (if somebody made a typo, etc), but the autocomplete would limit this. The list could be moderated once in a while to merge duplicates.

That's nice on the interface side, but it says nothing about the back-end side; if they wanted to do things that way, they would have done it that way back before there was a game list. The fact that they didn't makes it pretty obvious they don't want to do that sort of maintenance. Leaving the work to the community is a better option, but they would have to accept support of that, which they won't, for their own reasons. So we're left with us telling them what to include, and them deciding among those choices which they'll get up off their asses for. :P

Bump!

A dedicated system that takes user input - maybe even limit to paying users only - and ranks them by votes for entry into the system. Then periodically (say every 3 months) the devs could look at systems with a high number of votes, and add to the list - with the ability of denial if something weird or "trollerish" gets upvoted (which really shouldn't happen if limited to paying users.) &nbsp;Just a thought.

Weird or trollerish??? You mean besides “Maid RPG”??? Which is already in there ?!?!?! Seriously, their criteria for inclusion and exclusion are... baffling ... The advantage of just duplicating the suggestion thread forum is that it already works, so they don’t have to develop it; the only problem with it is that then they are beholden to the community to actually do those inclusions. So long as they aren’t being deliberately rigid about this, it’s a win-win... unfortunately, I suspect that they really are being deliberately rigid about this. Also, could really use that vote, Sherm.

Hello again, GM's and Players of the game that you would like to see listed and find that game in Roll20. A good tip is, try to use the Matching Keywords field to make these games searchable. For any EXAMPLEOFA RPG &nbsp;GM, what you want to do is include the keyword phrase "Exampleofa RPG" or whatever the title or most-catchy and commonly known keyname for your game might be: in the TITLE of your game, and also in the 1st paragraph of the Description text, and also under Edit Tags on your My Games page of Roll20. For the GAME in the drop-down, use "Other Games". Then, the game will come up under "Find A Game" if the searcher types your game-terminology in the Matching Keywords field, like this: <a href="https://app.roll20.net/lfg/search/evil" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/lfg/search/evil</a> In this way we can start to build a community of game listings around that game, and that is what usually leads to game titles being added on the drop-down list. Wiki docs for this, <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Looking_for_Group#Other_Ga" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Looking_for_Group#Other_Ga</a>... If you feel a game should be listed, encourage your community members to play and post often. The more community attention a title receives the more likely it is to be added to the list.

That is certainly a good suggestion in theory, but with “Other Games” coming in at #4, clearly, the process the devs are using to add games to the roster has failed . “Other Games” shouldn’t show up until about #21 or so; keep adding games until that’s a true statement... or just let the community do it, as I suggested.

The big problem with the "Other Games" is that when people put together games, many of them don't realize they really need to put the name of that game in the title.&nbsp; Instead many of them just put the name of their campaign/scenario in the title.&nbsp; Unless this has been changed since I've been away, the search option seems to only search game titles and not the description.&nbsp; That unfortunately means it is often hard for folks to find games for a particular "Other Games" system since many people don't know how to properly list them.&nbsp; The current "Play more games of a system if you want it listed" idea doesn't really work that well given the failings of the current "Other Games" option.&nbsp; It's somewhat a self-fulfilling prophecy.&nbsp; Roll20 doesn't list certain games because they aren't played enough, but those games aren't played as much because they aren't listed.&nbsp; I know that isn't 100% the problem, but it contributes greatly.&nbsp; Frankly I don't see the problem with a comprehensive master list given that filtering a list as a user types is a problem that was solved years ago.&nbsp;

Thaddeus R. said: &nbsp;the search option seems to only search game titles and not the description.&nbsp; The search does look in the game description, I've found that from experience and testing, but it seems unclear how it weights the words that are there. Keywords near the beginning of the description seem to come up the best. Games also have Tags that the GM can edit on your My Games page, and these might also be picked-up by LFG search (unconfirmed). The best to get a keyword (like say, "Spacefaring" or "dungeon crawl" or an otherwise unlisted Game Title), would be to use the word in the Title, in the starting words of Description, and also put it as a Tag just in case that helps too. Turns out I said the same thing 1 month ago, 3 posts up, FWIW.

The games dropdown menu exists to help standardize the options available (example: 4E vs. 4th Edition vs. D&D4, etc). No matter how many games are listed, some may not make the cut. Games are added to the list periodically. This ensures obscure listings gain greater visibility when sorted via the Other Games option and helps keep away “empty” search listings for underrepresented titles. If you feel a game should be listed, encourage your community members to play and post often. The more community attention a title receives the more likely it is to be added to the list, but the Suggestions forum is not a viable route for getting a game on the games dropdown menu. I'll be closing this thread and releasing the votes.