[M] Genre classification

[TheDoctor]

An idea I had to help people have an idea of what certain trials are like before playing them is adding a genre classification system to the trial manager. For instance, if a trial was like a typical AA case, you could classify it as a "full trial." If the case only takes place in the courtroom, you could classify it as "courtroom-only trial," or "tutorial case" depending on the difficulty. If a case is not like an Ace Attorney game at all, you could perhaps classify it as a "Visual Novel" or the like.

Also, if you want to take the tone of the case into account, you could add classifications such as "lighthearted," "parody," "satire," "grimdark," etc... to the mix. This way, if a users want to browse the trial list (as opposed to the trial showcases), they can decide what kind of story they're in the mood for and filter the list accordingly.

This is mainly to help users find out a little bit about the cases they're browsing through if they don't want to look through the case showcases.

[Phantom]

I'm down with that

[E.D.Revolution]

So, basically another database change with another improvement of the search engine. To be honest, that search engine should be upgraded first.

[kwando1313]

So basically... Adding tags to trials?

If so, could we also do like user-classified tags? Granted, there are some logistic errors I can see with that (such as some users being jerks and putting on bad tags), but it's still a nice option to have, given the fact that is viable.

[E.D.Revolution]

That would be viable, but you still need to configure the search engine and the database to accommodate for those tags. Still requires an upgrade of the search function.

[TheDoctor]

Also, if there were to be user-classified tags, I'm sure they'd have to get moderator approval first.

[Reverie]

Thing is, they should probably be pre-defined rather than user-made, because with the latter, it could turn out... well, like Steam did, and even with moderator approval, the tags would still be inconsistent. Someone could tag one case with "grimdark," but another person could come across a different trial and consider it "sad." If we had a pre-defined category for "Grimdark" trials, then the person searching for the trial could easily get to any trial with that tag, rather than thinking of multiple ways to reword it to find the tag someone was thinking of.
...Eh, I hope that made sense...

[Unas]

So, basically another database change with another improvement of the search engine. To be honest, that search engine should be upgraded first.

Not sure what you mean : right now the V6 search engine does pretty much everything that it can while using the V5 database (the V6 search engine actually already does more than the V5 one did). I think most upgrades to the search engine depend on a database update to add search criteria.
(Though if you have any specific suggestion in mind, please let me know)

What is most lacking, I think, are new search criteria for people who don't know exactly what trial they are searching for but only have a general idea of what they'd like to play. That's where the suggestions here come handy, and I like them.
In particular the idea of tags : indeed, creation of new tags would be subject to admin approval, but that's not really a problem.