Hey hey people, i hope this doesn't sound pity. We made Karawan for LD49 and of course would like it to be played a lot, and get a lot of feedback. Luckily, it is one of the most rated games on ldjam.com, so we got a lot of great feedback already. However, on itch it is listed as one of the most unpopular games of the jam, so it's not discoverable at all. If i filter by tag for "ludum dare 49" i couldn't find it (2027 results). If i limit the search further to an additional "strategy" tag, i can find it - at place 96 of 97 listed games.

Please don't get me wrong, i have nothing against any of my games being unpopular. It just looks from the outside, that this is not working correctly.  These are the stats so for - from my point of view, rather popular for a jam game, with most of the traffic coming in from ldjam (compared to the 10 other ludum dare games we made before that). When you have a game listed high on "popular", of course the stats are much higher - but we don't get these visits right now.

Does anyone known if this is a bug, or if the game is flagged somehow? It was actually among the popular ludum dare 49 games, until i uploaded a browser playable. Could that be the issue?

Edit: for reference, this is how it looks like

The 4 games that are directly above "Karawan" have 0, 1, 3 and 5 ratings on ldjam. Karawan sits at 85. So the game that says it's not finished and has 0 ratings is more popular than Karawan. Please, it's driving me crazy, i'm so invested in this game :D

This also seems to affect other games, like "Trauma", one of the most popular Ludum Dare 49 games. It is among the top rated on itch, and has over 120 ratings on ldjam (so got played a ton). Still, never to be found anywhere in "popular" on itch. I don't get it.

I don't know for sure, but it seems like popularity is connected to recent views/plays, with older views/plays having much less weight and ratings possibly not having any weight at all. 

You're right with that, but all the ludum dare games have the same age of a few days. Today Karawan got around 300 views, still rock bottom of the list, never moving an inch no matter the views. So right now, it got plenty of very recent plays, but it's still one of the most unpopular. I removed the linked youtube trailer since the other games rarely have one, but that didn't change a thing i think.

Hello, sorry for the inconvenience. The sorting algorithm has a lot of moving parts so sometimes it can be difficult to identify what exactly is going on with so many other games in the mix as well.

Do you recall if you initially published a blank page for some time before going back and completing the rest of it?

(I also triggered a reset for the popularity calculation on that specific page, so the next time the ranking calculation happens in the next few hours it should be adjusted if it was previously stuck)

Thanks

Hey leafo, thank you for answering, i really appreciate that!

I don't recall 100%, but i think i published the page first and added the downloadables about an hour later (ludum dare has a 1 hour submission window after the jam ends). Writing, Screenshot and style wise, the page stayed empty for another 14 hours or so, because the jam submission was in the night and i went to sleep then. What's really strange about it: the game did show up high on popular on the first day (5th October), and only dropped to bottom until the next day, if i'm not mistaken.

The ranking is adjusted now and shows up sensibly, thank you so much! The hot phase of the jam is over, but i'm just glad it got resolved :)