So... What's the plan for VGC going forward?

[TruckOSaurus]

spemanig said:

TruckOSaurus said:

Apart from the small fixes and features that I can do on week nights after work, I have many bigger projects that I think would be great for the site. 

- Bringing back the Prediction League. With Machina being reliable when it comes to keeping the numbers up to date, I think this would be a perfect tool to get the community involved in the numbers once again. For that to work, the HW situation would have to get better which pretty much means ioi (Brett) would have to give Machina control over the HW numbers. Worst comes to worst, the Prediction League could start off based solely on SW numbers at first.

- A mobile version of the site. That's a huge one. Both in amount of work required on my part and in the potential payoff for the site. In 2016, not having a mobile version is almost a crime. I don't have access to the site's stats but just from the comments on here, I know there's a whole lot of people navigating this site on the phones even though it's quite horrible to do so right now which tells me that a mobile version would be incredibly beneficial to the site.

- Bringing back to game DB. Before I know what I can do about this, I have some homework to do. VGC currently gets its data from GameWise but I'm not sure exactly how the transfer goes through. I think the first steps would be to bring back functionalities like the game collection having recent games and then I'd look into whether or not bringing back the adding/editing of games is possible.

Thanks for the clarification. Specifically with the Prediction League, can you delve into more detail with what that is? To me, it sounds like just a forum contest like many of the ones we already do. While I agree that it would be a perfect tool to get the community involved with numbers, isn't this something the (other) Ambassadors could do just as easily? Why does it specifically need your skills? Or am I misunderstanding what it is?

Also, what exactly is wrong with the game DB anyway, functionally? 

The Prediction League was an official forum contest, you could bet VG$ (what we had before points) on the upcoming game releases and latest hardware numbers. When the numbers were updated VG$ was awarded according to the accuracy of the predictions. This was all done automatically, meaning the prediction were stored in the site's database, the results would automatically change your VG$ total.

A forum version of the Prediction League was already attempted in the past but it's way too much work for the person running the league and even for the users wanting to play. Interest died down very quickly. The project I have is to bring back that automated version of the prediction league.

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Edit: Forgot to answer about the DB. We used to be able to add games to the DB ourselves, add release dates, cover art and other details. GameDB admins would go over the information and if everything checked out it was added for everyone to see. This had the huge advantage that our game DB was always up to date as users would rush to add a game the moment it was announced, all games had their respective cover art and release info.