An understandable staple of gaming and news sites in general, the go-to fluff piece on a slow news day, I personally am beginning to find top list becoming a growing pet peeve. Not for their very and often trivial nature, but how they are being utilized.
While possibly an issue with coding, the first thing that comes to mind when going to the source of an N4G submission concerning a top lists with a single entry on a single page regardless of the list being five ten fifteen and more entries comes off as being exploitative. An impolite method to artificially beef up traffic numbers, taking those numbers to advertisers to get higher prices for ads. Essentially to reduce visitors to data farmers, more accurately data farm animals, with the crop being site hits.
Well I say enough's enough.
Now I am not calling for a full on end to the practice of lists - that would just be plain stupid - but what I am requesting now is an attempt to call to task sites which do one-entry-one-page lists. As I've stated in posts before there's nothing wrong with lists broken into multiple site-pages, in fact I frequently visit Cracked.com for their 5-entry lists which are two pages, but unlike Cracked which offers amusing mini-essays for each entry to back up and explain the points, I want to deliver notice to sites that have top thirty lists and past a short opening paragraph - if that - support said list-entry with less than a full sentence of non-reason.
Quite frankly what I would like to see happen to sites which engage in such practices on N4G, is that they no longer be on N4G. That they be voted off unless they change their ways. Nothing wrong with a top ten list being broken into three entries per page with number one given its own as a way of presenting tension, besides of course the loss of six site-hits. Even two entries per page is alright, so long as there are non-vapid statements supporting what will likely be an in-game pic seen millions of times before.
I would also like to present some suggestions to get things started, but since I also reckon that many of these sites know who they are and already have reason to flag this call of common courtesy, logic and free will versus being treated as farming chattel, I don't want to give them more so I wont. I suspect that if this does get approved there will be plenty of suggestions in comments.
To summarize: Vote one-entry-one-page Top Lists off of N4G.
We were expecting problems with mod support, but there are a lot of other issues.
This is why you get the GOG version on gog you can select the version of the game to download.
On pc fallout 4 fallout new vegas and skyrim are all broken on steam because they all got the same "next gen" update.
Skyrim dec 2023
https://www.pcgamer.com/sky...
Can not find new vegas but anyone that modded it knows the script extender there was also broken
Not accidental, they want modders to stop modding their older games to force them to mod Shitfield.
There doing the same on starfield with a mods store and blocking mods
There goal is like blizzard and what they did with fallout 76 you make mods they can sell and you become a slave.
On skyrim they have "trusted" mod devs now basically a badge that lets your mod on the store you get a crumb of the sale when someone buys it.
lol to the disagrees, the last Skyrim update broke mods too. They've been trying to kill mods to monetize them in creation club for years, it's not a stretch that they purposely put out patches just to break free mods.
The disagrees are from people who have common sense. They aren't trying to kill mods. Most mods for any game will break with a new update because they rely on files/code that have been changed. This isn't new. Even with Bethesda this would happen way before the creation club. Mod support is literally one of the things that got Bethesda to where they are, and they're one of the only devs that releases comprehensive mod tools for each of their games.
Over 14 GBs and doesn't change much at all? What? Taking up that much drive space for a pathetic 'remastering' is shameful.
Par for Bethesda.
LOL people are actually expecting massive improvements or something? From Bethesda?? the same people who released Skyrim multiple times and the all look like shit? THAT Bethesda? are people for real?
The ps5 version doesn't change a ton but from my small playtime it's enough to make me want to replay it just to have it running at 60.
A side note to this my PS4 version no longer boots after it's "update" so I guess that's what it feels like to own a Bethesda game on PC
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
A voice actor from The Coalition's third-person shooter series, Gears of War, has hinted at a new game announcement coming in June.
Hopefully Microsoft will go back to the original story line and get away from that woke nonsense from the last Gears game Gears of Woke! But were talking about Microsoft so all the betting money is on more of the same woke nonsense.
The Locust trilogy concluded with Gears of War 3. I don’t get how Gears 4 and 5 are “woke” .
Awesome. I'll put this article on my "Top ten articles about top ten lists" list. ;D
I agree with the main notion of what you just said. Top Ten Lists used to be interesting because they were infrequent and well-written. Now, they are:
1) Mostly common knowledge or super-obscure
2) Too frequent.
3) Exploitative.
The two sites that have caused this Top Ten proliferation are N4G and Zergnet. Most smaller sites these days are part of the Zergnet network and basically, the only articles that get accepted into their system are Top Ten lists.
Sorry, bro. Great idea and all, but, for the most part, the admins ignore any suggestions users make. You'll be neither the first nor the last to complain. Aside from some site redesigns, it's been the same for years. N4G never really changes. Your nobility is nice to see, though.
Have to be careful, though, of who you end up banning from N4G based solely on that (and we have enough topic that come up on this site that people don't think before posting or acting on as it is). That site that could post a top 10 like that could also be a creditable site that would otherwise get good stories, or it could be a site that needs the exposure and clicks to get into that threshold, and when it's hard to GET that exposure or anyone to actually read what you're posting (because of fanboyism or spite or whatever else), you're going to need to do something to get people to click.
Yeah, they might be fodder and might exaggerate the clicks, but it might be a necessary evil for some sites that need to get exposure and/or revenue from somewhere in order to survive.
It's a good idea, but we need to think it through and make sure we're not just getting every single person who dares to do a list with that tactic in mind (especially when N4G is the only real good site of its kind).