Thanatos_Prime

I'm only one vote Vloshko and I voted correctly.

I'm deeply saddened that this slipped by the mods, I appreciate that you're willing to move them back.

Good thing you asked us about this before attempting to move or delete any of them. If you had put in several hundred moderations to delete and move games before posting this you would have ruined some moderators evenings .

I'm not sure Parenthesis or brackets break the parser any more, dashes are to be avoided. Please don't migrate any games from any platforms they are in. If you believe it should also be in Arcade create them there as well but DO NOT move or delete games out of the approved Platforms. In many cases we have Launchbox branded videos on how to set platforms up, such as the Sammy Atomiswave video, if you remove them from the platform that video just became useless. Do know that it takes a lot to get a platform approved so if it is there, it is for a reason. If someone has taken the time to add casino and fruit games I say leave them.

Jason, I think the thrust of what Vloshko is asking for is to have a field where you can put an informative website link that will allow users to say, "Go here to learn more about this game". Currently people try to use the Wikipedia field for that and we've been cautioned that this is for image retrieval and not for links to websites outside of Wikipedia.

I think fanart "proof" may be onerous and unenforceable and rejecting if no sources given only makes sense if you can't find any info yourself. The good thing about the database is that eventually it will all come out in the wash. Mistakes made today, intentional, or through carelessness or inattention will be fixed eventually. I don't think we want to grind moderation to a crawl when often the best thing to do is work to help people attain the vision of the platform that they seek. When in doubt, with the exception of deletes, it might be best to trend towards saying yes in the majority of cases. I looked at the math at one point. I've moderated over 300,000 items, and I've said "No" around 6000 times and I think I'm relatively tough. Statistically that is a margin of error. I'm here to mostly make sure that someone doesn't go nuts deleting stuff and to try to catch the big stuff. Anything that tries to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction maybe isn't serving the folks that use the product in the best way. I don't want to be a petty dictator or part of a quorum of them. I'm not saying you are either, but rigid rules in a crowdsourced environment often leads to unhappy users and drives away those creative enough to make this all hang together and be beautiful. That said, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that still tries to abide by that set of guidelines and I salute you that you take them seriously.

So what does a day pushing the Launchbox grindstone look like for you? Is this a 9-5 gig or can you fit your work around your life a bit more?

I don't feel qualified enough to comment on the SCUMMVM games, I do remember seeing discussion on it in various places and when it happened, it happened all at once. I'm fine with it being a category of it's own my only peeve with the process is that some people just changed platforms on games instead of making new entries. Ok, it is a SCUMMVM game, but it is also a Commodore game or a DOS game and when I import my DOS games I want them to be identified in that process. Speaking of pet peeves, this one is really starting to tick me off. It is kind of like the submitter is trying to find out the absolute minimum they can put in and have the game approved, with a link for us to do the rest of the work, I suppose.

Starting at about 9:15 PM Pacific time on 7/24 and since, all attempts to work with the Launchbox Games Database have resulted in an, " Error occurred." message. This includes moderation, account access and new game entry. Obviously, I'm hoping it is something minor and easy to fix. The database is amazing and I miss it when it is unavailable.

I think "Not Rated" is for games that have not ever been given a rating for that platform, pre-1994 games are Not-Rated as are many current independent and web titles. We've always been encouraged to use BBFC, PEGI and CERO ratings in the past and convert them to ESRB as well as converting K+A to E. But I am certainly open to discussion, this as libertarian a process as I've ever seen and that is part of the charm.

I found this ESRB conversion table, I was hoping to find out if anyone disagrees with any part of this:

It would make sense to see if we can work to get the FM Towns into the database first. I know there are limited people that can get that done. Perhaps @Jason Carr can be of assistance in this, though I have no idea how many other people have systems clamoring to be part of the DB that might be ahead of you in line.

I see a lot of people marking games as Cooperative that are not cooperative. If you have two people playing against a common, computer foe then it is cooperative. Head to head is the opposite of Cooperative, it is competitive. Putting a jigsaw puzzle together is cooperative, as is Trove multiplayer and most D&D party play (unless you count the competition vs. the Dungeon Master). If you are competing for a score or head to head it is NOT cooperative, it is competitive. Doom multiplayer can be cooperative if you only fight the monsters, if you do a death-match game it is not cooperative. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

As long as they are correctly marked as Fanart, I can't see anyone having any issues with them. They look great to me, fantastic work!

Thank you, great tools and playing with them now!

That would be fantastic, yes please!

I eventually rejected the cassette images. They were submitted as real cart images, were squashed looking as mentioned as well as having the template itself look malformed (the top cuts should be laying flat on the top of the cassette ) and were uploaded for a bunch of games that already had media images. Someone had obviously put a bunch of time into them, so that's unfortunate and I felt a bit of a hypocrite declining them while simultaneously approving a bunch of SNES boxes, also purported to be real box fronts where the user was "fixing the Nintendo seal to the correct one", but that was my choice.

There are several people working on the C64 games, but up until recently I was really active. I finally got back around to Z and am giving myself a bit of a break for the moment. (And adding some games from really unrepresented platforms ) If you are still needing help, please let me know how I can assist. Either way, thank you so much for your work.

Wowzers, thank you for doing this and for the information, this will certainly change how I'm doing things and make my input a little less frustrating for others. Thanks again.

Ok, I have a question I'm hoping to get help with. Lately, another fine contributor, who I am deeply thankful for, has been adding more than one set of boxes for a single region. I was, probably mistakenly, operating under an assumption that there could only be a single box set for a single region like Europe or North America and was putting later European releases under a single country, which didn't feel completely correct. Functionally, how will this work with Launchbox if there are two sets of European or North American boxes?

My understanding is that the WikipediaURL is used to pull pictures into Launchbox as a fallback for images so it should not have any websites in it except Wikipedia websites. Youtube playthroughs of the game are perfect to my understanding. Anything that spoils the game too much should be avoided. If I have a choice of videos I try to pick the one that best represents the game, has good quality images and is family friendly, since you don't know the age of the person who might be clicking that link.

Any thoughts, @Jason Carr?

My 2 cents: For Mods I would think we'd need to be really selective (they do call Doom Wads and Megawads, shovelware for a reason), in the same way that a Romhack that simply changed Mario to Luigi wouldn't rise to the level of an entry most Doom wads shouldn't but I could certainly see having entries for those Megawad collections that had CD releases and those that significantly upgraded video, or something like the 25th Anniversary Edition. For collectors edition, I was told that we should focus on the game itself. If the Collectors edition updated video or added more game modes then it would be a new entry. If it just came with a cool set of things external to the game like books or key chains then it doesn't rise to the level of an entry. Overviews can be all of the above, use what you have and if someone comes along later and can improve it then fantastic. I'm often dealing with text adventure games that predate most professionally written synopses, where box copies are nowhere to be found at the moment. I'll play the game for a bit and try to write one up myself, and if someone can find an old magazine article or box description I would welcome my entry being completely overwritten by a better one.

My thoughts exactly, thank you!

Ok, I hope I can express this question correctly. I see people deleting Fan Art Backgrounds because they have text of any kind in them. To my knowledge the only kind of text we are on the lookout for are watermarks, website logos, uploader images or website icons for other websites. Am I incorrect?