Official Greenlight Topic for CW3

[knucracker]

Awesome... thanks.

[knucracker]

This morning all of the comments on CW3 at greenlight are gone... Wonderful.
Over 300 comments all wiped out.

What appears to have happened is that someone posted a comment on the most recent announcement.  When that happened the count that showed in the game's tab started showing "1" as the comment total.  If you clicked that tab, all of the 300+ comments would still show.

This morning I deleted the single comment under the most recent announcement hoping all of the comments would return.  All the comment said was "Nice".  Now all comments are gone... 
Can you say "greenlight platform bug"?

Hopefully, they are still in their DB and can be restored.

[knucracker]

Well... awesome.  I wrote to Valve about the comment issue and they fixed the problem and wrote me back just a few hours later.  I honestly wasn't expecting that.  So props to them for support...

[MadMag]

puh... Great!

[knucracker]

Now, things are getting interesting....
The recent greenlighting of 50 games cleared out some space for other games to move up.  Plus, something is promoting CW3 at greenlight and the visit volume has increased.

Right after the recent 50 games were greenlit, CW3 moved into position #72.  Because of the increased exposure it has now moved into position #55.  This position will no doubt bounce around... other games come in, they catch their own exposure waves, some drop out...  so we will see how things evolve over the coming weeks.

[Michionlion]

Nice!  We might have a chance in the next batch!

[SandwichKed]

Plus, something is promoting CW3 at greenlight and the visit volume has increased.

This is just a theory, and I don't know anything for certain about the guts of Greenlight:

The bump in your graph is coincident with two events. 

1. The event which was under your control was your updating of the CW3 page.  Though I thought I remembered your changing some of the page text in December, the Colonial Space availability announcement was the first announcement you put in the system since dropping the game there back on November 4.

It would make some sense that announcements/activity would refresh the "preference" level for a game showing up in our evaluation queues.  A game that is showing something new should get more eyeballs than some vaporware that got posted months ago and was never updated.  They can keep this from being abused in a number of different ways, the least of which would be a project getting crappy vote ratios doesn't get the same pop from an update as something that has a healthy profile.  And it would make sense for overfrequent updates to be penalized.

If this is the case, then I would recommend:  Find something - anything - to announce there a week or two after the current burst flattens out.  Maybe get someone to do a gameplay demo and narration of some of the basic CW concepts and add the video to the page.   And announce it.  This is a good idea anyway, since the creeper itself is a bit... static if you don't know what you're looking at and while all of us veterans are suitably impressed by your screenshot selection people coming at this with no experience have been leaving some less-impressed comments from time to time.

If you're putting together a demo game, that's another thing to announce when it's ready.  Or if that's going to take too long put up an announcement and link to, say, one of your CW1-derived demos (I suggest User Space) at Kong or wherever.

(And update your demos to include direct links to the greenlight page, not just CW3-is-out links.)

2.  The other obvious event which tracks with the current burst is simply the bump into the top 100.  Getting to the top of the heap could trigger queue priority elevation to get the people who haven't even seen it yet to vote.  A sudden rush of disproportionate no votes at that point would indicate that someone was gaming the system to get to the top, and a smart algorithm would push your ranking down in response.  ...I don't think it works that way, but it's possible.  In which case enjoy the ride.   :D :D :D

[pawel345]

Weekly update of greenlight status? :D

[knucracker]

We're in the top 50.... so good progress so far.  The numbers can bounce around, but things are headed in the right direction.

[thejoe66]

let's hope they greenlight another batch of 50 games for the start of the next mouth if that does happen and your game do not inconvenientley bonce around you should be greenlight  ;D

[Kilobyte]

Wow, i should check this thread more often... also YAY :D Now lets just hope best :) The recent updates made me quite happy

[knucracker]

We've moved up just a tad in the rankings to #39 currently... and if you look below you might note that we are entering an interesting time this week or next.

The funny thing is that my wife was asking me earlier today if I thought CW3 might be greenlit soon. "Maybe", I said.  "What day of the week would you guess?", she asked.

Having worked with developers and tech types my whole life, I said "Tue, Wed, or Thur".  "Why?", was her response.  "Because they work M-F and you don't do anything on Friday you might regret Saturday morning.  And you don't do anything on Monday because you don't remember what you were doing on Friday until Tuesday".

So I've looked back at Steam's announcements over the last year and noted how many titles they greenlit, the dates, and what day of the week.
Here are the results I found:

Num Greenlit	Date	Day of Week
4	May 1, 2013	Wed
6	May 16, 2013	Thu
5	May 31, 2013	Fri
7	Jun 13,2013	Thu
11	Jun 28,2013	Fri
16	Jul 24, 2013	Wed
15	Aug 8, 2013	Thu
100	Aug 28, 2013	Wed
25	Sep 18, 2013	Wed
32	Oct 2, 2013	Wed
37	Oct 16, 2013	Wed
100	Oct 29, 2013	Tue
40	Nov 12, 2013	Tue
100	Dec 4, 2013	Wed
50	Jan 7, 2014	Tue
50	Jan 21, 2014	Tue

What conclusions can we draw from this (within reason)? 
- Something changed in Aug of last year.  They suddenly got serious about increasing the volume they were handling.
- Since that change, they had always greenlit on a Tuesday or Wednesday.  Before that date they were on Wed, Thur, or Friday.
- They tend to greenlight every 2-4 weeks.

[Grauniad]

It's easy, before August, they were in an internal beta and released when they had a new build. Now they're in production and they're releasing on the most common day for changes to take effect. Tuesdays or Wednesdays. Gives them the best shot at fixing messes before they have to work on weekends without pay. :)

[knucracker]

50 more titles got greenlit today... as you might predict from looking at the previous greenlight totals.  CW3 was not in this batch, despite being #34 at the time the batch was greenlit.  That means we are now #6....
As I have always suspected, they look at more that just placement based on votes.  What, who on the outside knows.  I suspect it might be time in the queue... but that's a guess.  At least 5 other titles had more votes than CW3 but also didn't get greenlit.

On the good side at least I can now get back to work since I don't have to worry about integrating steam API's for at last a couple to three weeks :)

[pawel345]

Too bad :( But being nr 6 might get more people to the greenlight site and here.