New quests for discovering games!
We’re pleased to announce our new “Game Exploration Quests” for the Explorer Class. Now you can earn rewards and achievements as you explore and discover new games to play!
Dedicated page for game exploration quests
Learn everything you need to know about how the Game Exploration Quests work and see which group of games are “explorable” for the month.
The link to this page can be found in the drop-down menu of the “Quests” tab in the main navigation and is called “Game Exploration Quests.”
Great to see a new group of explorable games! However, newly rated tips aren’t being counted towards my exploration of any games. I also had an hour glass not count (possibly linked to the fact that I didn’t get the XP for it since I had already clicked on several today).
Thought I’d let the bug-fixers know about it.
Should we feel bad if this idea makes us feel like we need to write reviews “within the exploration window” in order to get likes for our review and tips? If one of my old games gets chosen next time, I’m considering deleting an old review with 20 likes to get one that should easily gain more like 60 (judging from the choices this time). Or do I hope that people will actually scroll back to older posts? Does this artificially inflate some reviews, rather than help people find well-written reviews? I don’t know if this is good or bad, but I feel like it is changing how I might choose to interface with the site.
And, just saying, I enjoyed doing some exploring!
@Rob Exactly, and while one would think that we’d see lots of new reviews/tips for explorable games, we haven’t for Airlines Europe or Uncharted — the two games that need them. An extra exploration step for writing a **valued** review or tip should provide additional incentive to get more good content written.
One matter arising, Jim: this thread has ticked along for quite some time after it fell off the front page. Would it be possible to have a feature where we could subscribe to news items, so we can more easily watch these interesting discussions?
@Ray, that sounds good but I reckon there’s a pretty strong incentive to write a good review or tip for explorable games already. You can pretty much guarantee that there will be a lot of people rating the most recent reviews on these games.
Actually, come to think of it, making a game explorable is a great way to get a game populated with reviews, etc. As long as the game has been around long enough for people to have played it a bit, anyway.
I think the “played” exploration step seems out of place and is an easy exploit. For those who have played a game, why not make them work a little for the step by encouraging them to write a review or tip. Writing a good one will require a bit of exploration of the rules to explain it properly. To stop exploits of bogus reviews/tips, just don’t count any review or tip as fulfilling a exploration step until it gets 10 or 15 “Yes” votes from others. In addition, there currently is little incentive to write a review for a explorable game because you can’t vote for your own (though it will get a lot of votes if there aren’t many others for the game).
@ Rob Harper, for a few hours the requirements for the petroglyph achievement were lower than they should have been. Seven users were able to get it, but now it is set to 15 games needed. Don’t worry though, once we launch the next set of explorable games, everyone who’s participated thus far should be able to complete the petroglyph achievement!
In terms of games that aren’t possible to complete exploration… we wanted to test these new quests out on a variety of games to see what the results were, so it’s been very useful to see what’s happend throughout the month. It’s always amazing to see where the community takes the features we add!
@Marvin, we’ve been working with the exploration quests from the programming side, try refreshing the page a couple times, or emptying/resetting your browser cache. Let us know if that doesn’t work.
So, today(June 19th) at 1:24p.m.(CST) I tried to check on exploration quests to answer a question. None of the tabs(explored or explore) showed up on any of the games. I tried accessing the games through the news article, the quest tabs and on the game directory. None worked. Is this a bug or something going on?
So I make it that there are still two games (Uncharted and Airlines Europe) which I can’t finish exploring as there aren’t yet enough reviews. Given that there seem to be some people who completed a 10 game petroglyph quest, someone must have been able to complete at least one of these games. Is there some clever trick?
As a matter arising: should games be only made explorable after they have been around a while and collected some reviews and tips? I imagine when things settle a bit round here, most footfall is likely to be around the newly added games (only a hunch). Perhaps concentrating on making older games explorable could be a useful bit of encouragement to rummage around games that have been here a while.
I’m really loving the exploration quests. Honestly, I love the idea of anything else I can do on the site. I’m exploring games I wouldn’t even consider before, but now I’m spending lots of time looking into them. Well done, dev’s!
The exlporer quest tabs are not showing up currently on the various gamecompleted and incompleted(quests).
Anxiously awaiting some reviews on “Uncharted” and the next tutorial. You show us how to set up the game and then don’t show any game play, that was cruel… 😉
Fun new activity for the site! Makes you go deeper into games you might flick by a bit quicker. Just finished my first exploratory 😛
I have been having fun with the explore quests. I am glad to see the site is continuing to expand in new ways.
@Millhouse – Remember, the site saves your exploration progress. So when you’re out of hourglass clicks and you are researching a particular game to learn about it and the hourglass click is what you’re missing to complete the quest, come back tomorrow and click it then. Your other progress will still be there. 🙂
Got a thought. Ive used up my allotted clicks on the hourglass today. When I am on a game Im exploring and still click it, it does not count toward exploring. It seems that it should since I am exploring the game and reading the things like a good boy. It may not be possible though with the matrix.
[update] The number of steps you could complete by rating reviews and tips was not correctly stated on the Exploring Games page. It’s been corrected.
Reviews: Up to four reviews that you read and then rate will count as exploration steps.
Tips: Up to three tips that you read and then rate will count as exploration steps.
In my case, I love learning about new games, so exploration is right up my alley! Except for the fact that access to play those games I explore is not at all guaranteed. I am probably the primary games purchaser in my group of family and friends, but even if I wanted to I can’t afford to buy every single game out there that looks interesting simply in order to try playing it.
So add me to the group of people saying “no” to the play requirement. While, I agree in principle that the only way to really explore a game fully is to play it (and generally play it more than once), the fact of the matter is it isn’t always practical or feasible to do so. Budgets, both in terms of money and time, are limited and finite things.
@ Jeremy: Thanks for the tip. I was able to fully explore a couple more that I’d been stuck on. 🙂