Battlefield Bad Company 2 is odd and confusing

[dgibbs64]

Describe the bug
The new name change for Battlefield Bad Company 2 from bfbc2 to bbc2 is odd and confusing.

I recommend either keeping the old name of bfbc2 which is the known shorthand name of the game (All Battlefield games shorthand are known as bf* for example bf2, bf3, bf2142 etc) or renaming it to something battlefieldbc2 might be more appropriate. I can see that new rules have been created for naming which is great. However in this case it doesn't seem to work and bending the rules might be a good idea in cases like this.

[cetteup]

I totally agree that names should be somewhat consistent within a game/franchise

Arma is another weird one as it stands. Just Arma: Armed Assault is "aaa". Arma 2 - Operation Arrowhead is "a2oa". Arma Reforger, however, is "armareforger". Meaning by looking for "arma" in the IDs, you'd find some Arma games - but not all. The sorting also does not help, since different games of a franchise will be sorted to totally different positions due to how different their names are.

I know incorporating franchises into the naming convention is difficult - especially since what is a single game now may become a franchise down the road. But maybe there's a compromise somewhere.

[podrivo]

You can still use old ids by adding the checkOldIDs when querying servers. More here.

[dgibbs64]

The old id's will eventually go away so that is not a solution. My suggestion (while v5 is still in test) is to review the game IDs to see if they make sense to humans and appear consistent. If it's hard to guess what the game is just by looking at the gameid then there is a problem. Using the new rules as guidelines rather than hard rules you must abide by. Otherwise, you will end up with some gameids that make no sense to people. @cetteup gave some good examples of this issue.

I have similar issues with LinuxGSM and I tend to go with what feels right but based on some basic rules

[podrivo]

There was a PR (#487) to add game aliases for a more user friendly approach, but the discussion hasn't evolved, as we had to focus on other stuff at the moment.

[CosminPerRam]

We have decided that we should standardize GIDs, and while doing so we established (rust-GameDig#108) some rules of how they should be formed, as until gids refactor merged into node-gamedig (#415) they were decided pretty much at random and personal preference (by the person that made the PR), some games ending up with nice ids, some not and others with weird ones.

I'm thinking that gids shouldn't really matter, as if you were to select from a drop down list what game you want to query, you wouldn't let the user select from the ids, but from the names.

The sorting also does not help, since different games of a franchise will be sorted to totally different positions due to how different their names are.

So would sorting by game name instead of id help here?

However in this case it doesn't seem to work and bending the rules might be a good idea in cases like this.

We cant really 'bend the rules', as doing so for a game would be wanted to do so for another, and another, and so on. It would also break CI gids testing.

A middle ground to this (between strict gids and game names) would be something like @podrivo mentioned, adding another field that would represent a popular name for that game, and be able to query by that, or maybe directly by the name. thoughts?

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have better readable gids, but the problem is that we really cannot create a set of rules that makes all game names into nicely ids.

[CosminPerRam]

@dgibbs64 @cetteup any opinions related to my last comment?

[MrWook]

@CosminPerRam I'm just curious—why did you decide to use abbreviations for game names instead of slugified game names? Using slugs would completely eliminate issues with rules, duplicates, and incorrect ordering.
Sure some of them would be pretty long like grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-multi-theft-auto but does it matter?

[CosminPerRam]

why did you decide to use abbreviations for game names?

The library originally used abbreviations, and the person that did the PR pretty much decided on their own on what the abbreviation would be, now we got a system for those that we can also test.

instead of slugified game names?

I haven't thought of this, at a glance this looks like a solid option, I'll look into it, thanks.

some of them would be pretty long [...] but does it matter?

No, I don't really think it does.

[podrivo]

I'd argue that a big name like that would be hard to use on a daily basis by users!

Sure, it's not that big of a deal if you set this once and let it run, or if we're doing our internal tests for development.
But for users, it's sure not good to use!

We can definitely have the official ID like grand-theft-auto-san-andreas-multi-theft-auto, but we should also consider adding an alias for easier use, like gta-san-andreas-mta. Same goes for the Battlefield Bad Company 2 ID.

My point is having something that considers more the user perspective!

[xCausxn]

Most programmatic users I don't think would care whether its long or short, just that it is concise and logical.

I think the short names/ids are more confusing to standard users, which is why in most UI's / User Facing implementations the name of the game is usually used.

That being said, some slugged games would be loooooong

[mmorrisontx]

I know I totally missed the boat on this, but it's very odd to totally break backward compatibility for something as trivial as an ID list. You can choose whatever you want as the primary id for standardization, but why not just support the old IDs forever? Disk space is cheap, engineering time is expensive.

[CosminPerRam]

Well said, considering that even when we changed from v4 to v5 we didnt had any ID collisions, as long as we dont have any after another potential change, we wouldn't have a reason to completely remove them (the migration document mentions that they'll be removed eventually but we dont have to).