First Appearance data being pulled in incorrectly.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that Tifa Lockhart was first introduced in Final Fantasy: All The Bravest. Knowing that this makes no sense, I decided to check on Barret's page, too, and he got the same treatment. I can't even edit these things back to normal. I'm assuming that instead of pulling in the earliest release, the First Appearance data is pulling in the most recent release.

Are you trying to say that Mario didn't actually debut in Super Mario Bros. 2?

I saw that to on the Steam Cloud page, it said that commander keen was the first game to have steam cloud and now it says TF2.

@forcen:

I think that one's because the logic would be faulty either way. Maybe we should just go back to the old "enter it yourself" system, since cases like these could screw it up.

@video_game_king: It made some sense before at least, commander keen is probably the oldest game that uses Steam Cloud.

@video_game_king: I think a good system would be to automatically determine the date - but the system should still allow for editing, if it's actually incorrect.

Disappointed that this isn't some sort of meta-blog post.

Give it time.

I think the problem is the way that the list is sorted. In the old site, the games that didn't have any release dates showed up at the top as the latest games, while the games with the earliest release dates were at the bottom. Now in the new site, however, all these games without release dates have now been moved right to the bottom.

When the new site first launched, this wasn't a problem, since the "first release" would point to the game with the earliest release date. Since yesterday, however, it seems like there's been some kind of bug that's been causing the"first release" to just point to the game at the bottom of the list, regardless of what the release date is, so it often ends up pointing to games that don't have any release dates.

I think this is probably some kind of bug that needs to be fixed soon, because up until yesterday, it was working fine, pointing to the game with the earliest release date. I think it can be resolved just by putting it back to how it was a few days ago. However, I think it might be even better if we just list it in the order it was before in the old site, where the games without release dates were at the top, which made it easier to look for the games with the earliest release dates at the bottom.

I've noticed that on the Wiki search pages, the first appearance for each shows up correctly, pointing to the game with the earliest release date. However, when you click on each one, the First Appearance on the page itself often incorrectly points to a completely different game, usually one without any release date at all. I think it probably is just some kind of bug that needs to fixed.

Yep, Mario is "correctly" identified as debuting in QIX if I look at the list of all characters. Interestingly, the API returns a third, completely different game as the first appearance. The API says Mario debuted in Mario Family.

Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong. Based on release date the site thinks he debuted in QIX. On Mario's page it says Super Mario Bros. 2 was his first game. The API says Mario Family is his first appearance. We have a problem here.

@lordandrew: That's another problem that only manual entry can resolve, since the one with the earliest release date isn't always the correct one, as later versions of the same game could include characters/objects/concepts/locations not found in the original release. Nevertheless, I think these entries should, by default, point to the game with the earliest release date (instead of pointing to a random game with no release date at all), but at the same time allow manual entry to correct it for cases where the earliest released game isn't the first for those particular cases.

*Bump*

Hasn't this issue been resolved yet?

I've noticed this first on the Elevator masking loading page. (that's actually not the name of that concept)

@winternet said:

The thing I don't get is... when you go in and view all 26 results on that page, it shows Mass Effect 3 at the bottom, with the correct release date. Yet right above it is Resident Evil, with an older release date. Why? This isn't in chronological or alphabetical order. Is it sorting these pages by the order the games were entered into them? I'm so confused.

Edit: Actually, upon looking at the rest of the list, it appears to be in chronological order, the only out-liar is Mass Effect 3, which gets pushed to the bottom for some reason.

No, it is in chronological order. It's just Mass Effect 3 that is not in the right place for only god knows what reason.

Ah, I figured out the reason why. It seems as though the "first release date" field must have been empty for Mass Effect 3 at the time, which pushed it to the bottom of that page.

I recall hearing about a bug soon after the site transfer where a lot of that sidebar data was lost for various game pages, so that may have been the case here.

Basically, though... the reason the release date still showed up in the game list for the "elevator masking loading" concept is because it was pulling that data from the earliest date on the releases page.

What I don't get is... if it can pull that data from the releases page, then why don't we just let the pages pull from that data for the "first release date" field and simplify everything?

Fixed the auto-generated first game appearance for each of the categories in the browse, detail, and api; should be out on Monday.

For the user-entered first game appearance, that decision is up to Dave.