Lifebar.io - Your gaming life visualized

@ka_tet19: On the topic of following critics and personalities, how does one see the list of people they're following. I can't seem to find that page. I feel that is something that should be easier to find. Like say on the right menu of the activity tab or the "Connections," page.

You are right, it should be easier to find and more accessible. Right now to find members/personalities you are following we have it buried in your profile under Abilities - Spy, which we know is not obvious at all (we may have taken the character profile gimmick too far):

We need to do a lot of work on the profile page to make it more scalable and user friendly. We thought the character profile concept would be an interesting approach, but if it starts to effect user experience we may have to reconsider or at least tone it down.

I like the idea of surfacing that information somewhere in the Activity feed. That is something we'll have to consider.

@linkorius: thanks for reaching out us! If you think we need to add Wii style "Please take a break" message everyone now and then, we can accomodiate you :)

In regards to right click + new tab, that is great feedback. We have heard a few others request the option. The way I implemented it, it was strictly using javascript which doesn't really allow the browser to know what is going to happen when you click on it. We can certainly look into modifying it. Please let us know if there are other areas you think that kind of functionality would be helpful.

Yeah, adding the possibility to right click + new tab on any item would be a really nice added feature, but I know your site is still in Alpha, you surely have bigger fish to fries at this point =P

One thing I've noticed is the Skill graph is lacking in terms of variety as it excludes a lot of games that are not RPGs or action oriented. May I suggest you add a 'Athletics' skill for sports games and maybe a 'Wisdom/Intelligence' for puzzle games? That's only a suggestion, but I think it would make for a more comprehensive skill graph. Thnaks for reading!

Right now the Skills graph is just surfacing your top 5 experienced genres (which are pulled from the GB wiki). You are right though, we are coming to find that this graph looks very similar for most people since there are so many games that fall under the same genre (Action, Action-Adventure, etc...).

For example, look at the similarities between the two of us:

Me	@linkorius

You can hardly tell a difference, except I apparently experience more Platformers while you experience more Role-Playing games. This information is not very interesting, but it was something that we didn't find out until we started to get a large enough user base that could provide us with the data for us to see for ourselves.

These are exactly the kind of data visualizations that we plan to refine as we uncover what information might be interesting, and what might not be. I am glad that you pointed this out, as it shows that you are at least paying attention to the results and seeing the lack of diversity. That just gives us more motivation to dig deeper in order to reveal some unique data points.

We are hoping to incorporate much more GB wiki information soon, such as themes, characters, concepts, etc... We first wanted to work with the basics and build out from there, but we are getting to a point where we think that might be a reality soon. If you have any other suggestions, we would love to hear them. It might helping browsing the information that GB collects on their wiki to see what we have to work with. We have been surprised by the amount of raw data they capture, and are excited to find different ways to analyze it.

We are hoping to get GB community thoughts on our latest experiment in data visualizations available from within each Game Profile. Here is an example of Fallout 4 based off my experiences.

• Are there any in particular that are more interesting to you than others?
• Are there some that need to be more fully developed?
• Are there any that are just completely pointless?

Any feedback would be appreciated, as this community has been very influential in the development of Lifebar.

@rewphus: The site keeps improving every time I visit. I'm really enjoying it. My latest thoughts:

• "My Inventory," page should ignore the word "The," when sorting by alphabetical order.
• A feature to change the sorting would be nice
• as would be a feature to change the look into a simple list, rather than icons/thumbnails etc. Like a "clean," option.
• It'd be nice to be able to change pins right from my profile. When I'm on my profile, instead of editing what's pinned from there, I have to use the site search to visit the page of the game I want to pin.

I really like the new data features. There's something about the line graphs, though, that is not connecting with me. I feel like there might be a better way to present it but I can't quite figure out what that way might be. I'll keep thinking about this when I look at the data. Nice work!

Edit: Treating Xbox 360 game store and Xbox 360 as separate platforms is weird. Whatever system you're playing on should be the platform category, regardless of where the game was obtained.

Edit 2: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is listed as just "Modern Warfare 2," while all the other titles have the "Call of Duty:" preceding their subtitle. Also, I can't remember if I added this suggestion before, but under the "completion," dropdown menu, a Platinum/All Achievement type selection would be nice. Maybe give those games some kind of outline/border in the "My Inventory," page.

Edit 3: When adding a game experience, right above the "Tier," selection it states "Choose a tier relative to other games you have experienced in 2010," while clicking on a tier reveals that the games included in the comparison were games released in said year (not the games I experienced said year). Personally, I prefer it showing the games it currently shows (by release date) and would suggest just changing the wording on the experience page to "Choose a tier relative to other experienced games released in XXXX"

Hi @flashflood_29, thanks for the kind words!

We are drastically changing the "My Inventory" area to fall in line with the new Collections functionality we are hoping to roll out very soon. We will make sure to take all of your feedback in to account, as I believe it is all valid, we just might have to iterate on when we can roll out at one time. The largest change we plan to make is to eventually allow iterative updates to your experiences directly from the inventory/collection areas so that you don't have to navigate to each game profile in order to update your thoughts on a game.

I also have a hard time quickly deciphering what some of the graphs are trying to tell me. We will continue to play with different visualizations in hopes of finding something that resonates, but this is just our first crack at it. One thing I would like to start conveying at Lifebar is more of your experience spectrum, or timeline with a game. Meaning we want to create the ability to easily update and track your experience with a game from the first time you picked it up to the platinum trophy popping up on your screen, not just simply assigning a final tier encompassing the entire game. We haven't been able to really nail that workflow quite yet, however, but we are hoping that once we do we will be able to provide much more interesting visualizations and not treat them as similar to review scores, which is ultimately what we want to separate ourselves from.

Regarding the different platforms and game title inconstancies, we are actually taking all of that data directly from Giant Bomb. I don't believe we have the ability to change the titles of established games, such as Modern Warfare 2, but hopefully we can work more closely with the admins here at GB to help improve the wiki both with the help of the GB community and users of Lifebar.

Good catch on the inconsistency with the labeling of experience/release year. I will have to talk to @ka_tet19 about that one, because I am actually leaning towards redesigning how that works all together. To kind of tie in to what I was saying earlier with how we want to portray your experience as something that can change over time with a game, I don't like the idea of just assigning one final tier to a game without any sort of flexibility. I wold prefer more of a gradient that doesn't have to be tied to one single experience, but that concept and UI could be very confusing and difficult to pull off, so it may take some time.

Thanks again for all of your feedback and we are very happy to hear you are enjoying the updates we are making. We have plenty more in store, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Sorry for all of the quoting, but I wanted to make sure to address each comment, one by one:

You can now login with Twitter, Google or Facebook

Steam Imports just went live, so you can import your Steam library and we will automatically organize your games in to two collections, Steam Played and Steam Backlog (games in your Steam library that you haven't started yet). We have posted some more detailed instructions on how to import your Steam library here.

@hatking had a great idea, that a lot of Duders agreed with, so we implemented it! With collections you can now easily add a game with a click of a button, and the best part is, when you go back to that collection, you can iteratively fill in your XP details, without having to fill in a summary. We aren't really advertising that feature yet, because a summary is still the first thing that shows up from within the game profile, but we will be making changes to that soon.

You should be able to do this with collections now as well. When you are viewing a game, you can simply click the Add to Collections button, and you can create a brand new collection such as Completed or Rented, right from the same menu.

As you can see from the list above, I have even created a couple collections to keep track of Quick Looks and Unfinished in 2016. I found this a great way for me to make sure that I have seen everything I want to see coming out of GB, while tracking my thoughts on each game I watch. You can also follow collections of others, so when a new game is added, you are alerted in your Activity Feed.

This is getting us one step closer to where we want to be with Lifebar, and we are hoping to officially launch in to beta at 2D Con this weekend. If there are any Midwest Duders out there that have a chance to check it out, we would love if you stopped by our table to say hi. If not, hopefully we can find another time to meetup if you drop a line in the Midwest Meetups thread.

@rewphus: Rad. I've been thinking about getting back to this app lately, and this might be the sort of news that gives me that push.

Sweet. Haven't checked it in a while, those changes seem cool. Thanks for the heads up!

@rewphus: I'm having a hard time getting the Steam import to work. I have my Steam vanity ID (http://steamcommunity.com/id/itsHumanity) which I'm putting into the field there but it's just not accepting it. Is there some trick or..?

You are just putting "itsHumanity" in to the field, correct? When I tested your ID, it seemed to work for me. Does this look about right?

If it's still not working, do you mind telling me which browser you are using?

@rewphus: Ahh see I was putting in the entire URL. Now it worked fine although I could swear from the way the form is designed it seems like you're meant to put in that entire Steamcommunity.. url thing.

That's a good point, we really should be able to accept either format. I'll see if @ka_tet19 can add that in. Let me know if you notice anything else with Steam Import or Collections in general that we can improve.

Inspite of what the GiantBomb crew says, E3 is awesome! While it may have to change to be relevant, having this kind of zeitgeist of news, anouncements and trailers is unrivaled all year long. I love it! With our latest updates on Lifebar we are hoping to capture what everyone is thinking about all the news. To do that we have done a few things:

• We have built custom Collections on our Discover tab that will let you quickly enter your thoughts about all of the games that got announced at Sony's, Microsoft's, Ubisoft's, Bethesda's and EA's press conferences. Every game that was announced or shown are in those collections to help ensure you didn't miss anything.
• We added a "Watch" tab to game porfolio's like Horizon:Zero Dawn and Prey that will higlight trailers and other video coverage so you can watch and enter your thoughts right away.
• The activity feed will also link back to the trailers and content that other users have seen so you can quickly enter your thoughts that way too!

Brad recently mentioned that E3 is like Christmas for a lot of gamers and I couldn't agree more. It's fun and with these changes we are hoping your excitement (and disappointment) can be quickly captured on Lifebar and shared with others. We are in beta so please provide feedback if you think something is broken or simply could be better!

We just finished creating the E3 2016 - Giant Bomb Trailers collection, that is up to date as of this posting, with all 112 games that the wonderful crew here at GB has posted an E3 2016 trailer for so far.

If you are like us, you might be having a hard time keeping up with all of the great video content coming out of GB, so this is a good way for you to keep track of what you have watched, and even bookmark the games you are the most interested in so you can get notifications when there are new trailers, release dates, reviews, etc...

Let us know what you think!

Also, you should also be able to add your entire Steam URL in order to import your Steam library now. Thanks for the feedback @humanity!

I know most of us are gathering materials to make it closer to the center of the galaxy right now, but maybe in between space trucking & pirating everyone would be willing to take a look at the most recent changes we have made at Lifebar!

The most recent update represent changes that will be a spring board to the future of Lifebar. We now have a proper onboarding process when you first sign up to help you get started. This helps us personalize the Discover area of Lifebar so you will see more things that will pique your interest. You will get suggested videos (quick looks!), games that are trending, new releases, suggestions for interesting game collections that others are building and more.

The personalization of Discover is a big improvement, but the thing I am most excited about with this update is the addition of what we are calling "Reflection Points". Previously, the only way to add information about your experience with a game was by giving the game a tier and writing a short twitter length summary of what you think about it. Now, with Reflection Points we are asking specific questions about a game that I think will be interesting for your own personal use, but also let you compare to other users across the Lifebar community. To start, the Discover area will have a daily reflection point for the community to rally around. Once we have more reflection points they will be surfaced in the game pages themselves. Here is a preview of some of the Reflection Points coming soon:

Overall, it's another step to make Lifebar the best place to save and share your time with our favorite hobby. As always, we would love to hear your feedback!

Quick question: I got a notification that a user is now following me. I'd like to follow them back but have no idea how to get to their profile because of what appears to be a bug.

If I click the icon on the left, a window with follow/activity/profile buttons comes up. I click on Profile but am sent to http://lifebar.io/#profile//undefined instead of a real user page.

@theps2collector: Thanks for reporting the bug. I will DM you to get a fix ASAP.

@ka_tet19: Reflection points sound great!

Not sure if this is intentional but in the inventory of games, a period after a letter brings the game to the top of the list. I feel like games titled like F.E.A.R. should be ordered as FEAR. Also, being able to filter the inventory by more than just tiers would be great (console, year, etc.). Just as a personal aside, "inventory," is a weird word for list of games you've completed. I don't have a suggestion for something else at this time, though.

@flashflood_29: Thanks for the feedback! We have had some requests similar to yours about the way the "inventory" is sorted. We have been looking into some alternative approaches to how the profile works and how the inventory gets implemented all together.

And I agree about the naming we used for it. We have been straddling the line between being game-centric with our titles in the profile and using the obvious title for what it is. In this case, probably should be named something else. Keep your thoughts coming!

@ka_tet19: Hey, just looking for a general update on your guys' work. How's the progress? How's the site's traffic and health? What's the outlook like right now? Any plans in the works?

@flashflood_29: Glad you asked! I have a big update that will be rolling out soon. This update is going to be a pretty substantial change that I think will have some great additions as well as some restructuring of existing ideas. There has been so much good feedback over the last 12+ months, both explicit and implicit and it was clear some concepts weren't working as I had hoped and needed to be scrapped, while others needed tweaking.

To be honest, traffic is up and down, but that hasn't deterred me from continuing to build something I think will be great. I apologize for going dark on this project for as long as I have, but I promise there are some big changes coming. I will be notifying existing users with what to expect very soon and I will update this thread once the changes are live in production.

@ka_tet19: So, no more actual profile pages is kind of an odd change. As an upstart website (that I could see becoming popular, eventually) I find it odd that the profile page is gone now. There's not much social interaction so just having your own page to go to for all your personal tracking viewing seems like the best idea, for now. Without it, it just feels like the site is only there for the social aspect.

@rewphus@ka_tet19

Well fellas looks like the the ole' lifebar.io site has given up the ghost. If this is it, it sure was fun while it lasted. No worries I understand that life gets in the way of these things.

Is there any chance you could send me my rankings list? Pretty proud of how many games I managed to actually rank. :)

I know I'm super late to this, but I'm really, really sad that Lifebar is no more. I had high hopes it could grow into a video game version of Letterboxd. I hope it comes back someday, because it was a great website.