Discussion - Now Playing Decay (Patreon)

Heya Backloggers!  It's been a weird month for us, but things are finally calming down a bit.

The boring news is I've spent most of my time lately fixing unexpected bugs caused by switching to locally cached game collections. The good news is it seems to be taken care of now and I'm really digging how things have shaken out. For you it means less load times and eventually offline collection tracking, but for me it makes working with the data much nicer.

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But the real topic of this post is the Now Playing list. If you've looked around the Backloggery you may well have run into some users with dozens and dozens of games in their now playing. I've never really understood it, but whatever makes you happy. What makes me happy is not having to scroll past a huge list to see the rest of the page, so I've always planned to implement a cutoff in the remake.  You can see this below, condensed on the left and expanded on the right.

Larger Image 

I'm not set on the cutoff number yet, but I think 5 games looks nice and balanced. Whatever the number is, I'm going to allow a little excess, because clicking a button to show just one or two more games feels silly.  So for example, if the cutoff is 5, then you wouldn't actually get a "show more" button until you go over 8 games in your now playing. Gives you a little wiggle room that way.

You'll also notice the Now Playing decay is making its first appearance in the remake. I'm curious what people think of it.  For those that don't know, if you leave a game on your now playing without updating it for over two weeks, it'll "decay" and become faded out until it's updated. It's an admittedly weird feature, I don't think I've seen anything like it elsewhere, but I still like it after all this time. 

It's meant to keep your now playing "honest". To make you stop and think, "Am I really still playing that game?"  But I have little idea what people actually think of it. I've never seen much talk about it. This was originally going to be a Power Poll, but I feel like a poll is putting too many words in your mouth on this one. 

So what do you think of now playing decay? Love it, hate it, mildly useful?  Maybe it's made obsolete by having a "Paused" priority?  Or I could easily make it more varied, like slowly fading a game out the longer it's on the now playing instead of a binary on/off.

I'm adding a simple yes/no poll for a broad overview but I'm curious to read what people think.

Assuming no more computer monitors melt down on me, I'm hoping to be back next week with another update, so stay tuned!