Throughout the years that I've developed Completionator, I've tried to focus on creating good / useful features that help support the core goals of the site: video game collecting and video game playing. One thing I feel I have done a very poor job of (and as a result, the site does a poor job if it) is engaging the community and really trying to encourage users to visit the site regularly. Sure, we have the forums, but I'm talking more about things / features that could bring a unique experience to the site. I've been noodling with various ideas for a while now and actually started working on one of these, but scrapped it early on. Some of these have probably been mentioned in other threads, but I'm consolidating them here to try and get some feedback on them.

Game Club / Challenges
I originally called this the "Game Club" which would have been something users could participate in every month or so. A game would be selected (not sure how) and everyone would play it for the month. This is something that can be found on a number of sites and is a pretty fun way of bringing the community together. After thinking about it for a while, I didn't like the idea of having ONE game at a time that the entire site plays. At least, I didn't want that to be the only one. The main problem is game selection. If there are 100 users that are interested in participating, and a game that only 25 of them actually own and haven't played yet is selected, then we more than likely lost out on a lot of participation. So my thought was to provide "Game Challenges" instead of a "Game Club". These challenges could be started by anyone on the site and anyone could join (or maybe limit it to only friends or invite only, not sure). That way you and your friends could play a game together and have a way to track progress and communicate. We could still have a site-wide game challenge that essentially covers the game club idea, so this is more of an expansion on that original idea. I was planning on integrating with the playthrough and completion features to help promote them while users complete challenges. The main issue I see with this idea is given our small userbase, I'm not sure any challenges would be undertaken.

Monthly Quota
The idea here is that we have a quota of sorts. This would be a site-wide goal for new users registering, completing games, adding games to collections, etc. There wouldn't really be a reward for meeting the quota, though it'd be cool to eventually give away keys or something if a developer / publisher out there was interested in sponsoring of sorts. I thought maybe each month there could be a theme, so like "Tomb Raider Month" would provide bonus points for completing or adding Tomb Raider games to your collection. I don't think this idea can co-exist very well with the game club / challenges mentioned above and to be honest, seemed a lot more interesting when I first thought of it a month or so ago :P

Achievements
This is something that I've been interested in doing since before the site was launched. As you complete games, add games to your collection, etc, you would unlock various achievements. These wouldn't really do anything, so they'd be kinda like Steam Achievements. This would just be a fun, passive feature to watch as your collection grows. I don't plan to have any sort of ranking system or provide "rewards" to hopefully ensure data accuracy.

Goals
Everyone collects different things and I thought it might be neat to have goals so you can track your progress towards them. For me, I've casually been trying to get a complete NTSC collection of Sega Saturn games. It'd be awesome to see how close I am to achieving that goal. But goals may not just be for collecting games, it could be for completing them. So like we discussed in another thread, maybe you want to complete all (or most) of the Metal Gear games. You could create a completion goal, pick any number of games, and then track your progress towards it. These goals could show up on your Overview page or something.

Motivation
This is another feature I've been interested in since well before the site launched. The idea here is if you're viewing your friend's collection and see they haven't finished a certain game, you could motivate them (kinda like poking in Facebook?) and maybe tell them why they should play it. I'm not totally sure how this would work, but that's the general idea. I could see some sort of integration with the aforementioned goals.

Friends List Integration
Right now, if you add someone to your friends list, only two things happen: 1) they show up on your Friends page; 2) they show up your activity feed. I'd like to do more with this feature, but I'm not entirely sure what. I like the idea of comparing collections, so you could see games you both own or something like that. Maybe highlighting stuff from your friends when viewing the details of a game? I'm not really sure what to do here, but there's something.

Emails / Help
I'm fairly pleased with the feature set we have now, but I don't think many users know about them or know what all they can do. In an effort to spread the awareness, I thought I could put text on screens to explain what the feature does and how it works. Depending on how large these are, you could dismiss / minimize them or something. Another thought was to send a summary of functionality once a user registers so they at least have an overview from the beginning. This would probably be an email, rather than a screen on the website.

Alright, I think that's it for now. Please let me know what you think about any of this or if you have any other ideas, I'm certainly open to suggestions!

I wrote a few quick queries and assuming they're correct, here's some rough statistics on site utilization:

309 users have activated an account
272 users have entered at least one game into their collection 88%
12 users have entered at least one playthrough 4%
85 users have entered at least one completion 28%
25 users have entered at least one game into their wish list 8%
25 users have entered at least one forum post 8%
92 users have logged in 7+ days after they registered 30%

Being an achievement addict, (I use a much less polite term normally,) having another source of achievements in my life would be both terrible and great, haha.

I think some kind of comment system for friend pages would be a nice feature to have, you could integrate it with the Motivation idea you mentioned. Leave a regular comment, or leave a comment and pick a game to associate with it if you want to say: recommend, issue a challenge, or some other idea. Not as helpful a feature for a smaller site, but when this site grows and there are more people using it, I could see that idea take off.

The goals idea sounds like it would integrate with both the list feature and/or the wishlist feature, depending on what kind of goal you were setting (playing and/or collecting.)
Are you thinking something along these lines?

Goal - Play Metal Gear games
- Under a new Goals tab, create new "Playthrough" goal.
- Associate new goal with an existing list (gets it's name from the list and gets what games to include at the same time)
- Set goal condition (finished/completionated)
End result: Gives an "x out of y games complete" status.

Collection goals would be hard to do, I think mostly due to multi-platform games. If you could tag wishlist items like you can with collection items, maybe something like this?
- Create new "Collection" goal
- Associate goal with wishlist tag (again, gets name and game list)
- Set goal condition (in collection + specific platform)
End result: Gives a "X out of Y owned" status.

The game club thing is something I'd be interested in playing around with a bit, but without a huge population to pull from as you've said, the odds of people participating are slim to none unfortunately. I think it's a wait until later feature. It's too bad, because I really enjoy challenges of various kinds in games. Maybe something a handful of people could test out right now, but not really for widespread usage yet.

I must admit, the achievements feature is kinda selfish for me because I think it'd be really fun to build hehe :P

I know we've discussed a commenting system of some sort in the past and I really like your idea of being able to post "special" comments, like the motivation and challenge ones. I think having something like that provides a nice foundation for other interesting features that have yet to be discovered.

Regarding goals, I hadn't really thought through the UI for what all would be integrated. I agree that using the lists for playthrough goals would make it pretty easy to implement and would encourage (no, require) usage of the lists feature. It could almost be a....playlist?

I definitely need to think more on the collection goals. I think maybe adding wishlisted items to custom lists so it works like the playthrough goals might be the way to go since it would be consistent and make sense. The only issue I see here so far is if you want to have a goal of owning 100% of the NES library. You'd either have to manually add all of the NES games or there would need to be a bulk way of adding games to the wishlist.

This leads me to another idea I had and I think I mentioned in the Giant Bomb thread a while back (maybe not though). I think it'd be cool to see how much (% wise) I own of a given platform and region. So I could definitively say (assuming the Giant Bomb data I'm importing is 100% accurate, of course :P) that I own 75% of the Sega Saturn NTSC library or whatever.

Do you think any of these features are worth pursuing before the pricing integration? That's kinda what I've been thinking would be the next big feature, but if there's interest in any of these, I can always change gears :) Especially since pricing integration is going to be a doozy!

I'd like to see an option added where a person can keep their collection private. I've looked around the site but I didn't see that option. Did I miss it somewhere?

@NovaNapoleon - There's an icon in the far-right of the header that links to here: http://www.completionator.com/Account/MyAccount

There should be Privacy option towards the bottom that you can set to Private. That will prevent others from accessing your collection, overview, completions, etc. You will, however, still show up in the "Recent Completions" widget on the home page and if you browse to a game, you will still show up on the Owned, Backlogged, etc tabs. I've considered suppressing these and replacing the name with "Private" or something, but haven't done so yet. If you or anyone else with a private account wants to weigh in, I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Regardless, if someone clicks on your name in any of those locations, they'll be greeted with a "This profile is private" message, much like Steam.

As someone who uses the private profile setting, I don't mind too much that my name shows up in the recent completions since the link back to me does end up showing a private profile at least, but I think a lot of people would prefer total anonymity if they aren't using public profiles. I think having the widgets display "private profile" or similar would be great since it still allows for site activity to show without compromising someone's privacy whatsoever.

It would be neat if we could select whether or not our user name appears in lists for each separate game. That way we could block all, part, or none. I don't think I've seen any sites that allow that. They usually only allow you to block everything or nothing...

Achievements are coming soon...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudbase.production/4ff56441-87dc-41a7-b95b-8f0b9fe71686/cheevos.png

Achievements are now live! This is mainly just the foundation, so there's a new page where you can track the ones you've unlocked. There are quite a few hidden ones, so those won't show up until you unlock them. The logic for checking to see if an achievement is unlocked has been applied throughout the site, so let me know if you see any performance hits from how the site was before. I plan to optimize this further, but this was good enough for now (I hope). I have lots of ideas for future achievements, but again, I just wanted to get the infrastructure in place and get some feedback before going any further.

Let me know what you think and happy hunting!

Also, there are 43 achievements that are wired up :D

43? Holy crap, haha. Here I was looking at my 15/18 that were showing thinking "Wow, moho_00 really went all out to start!"

Dang. I've got 16. The hidden ones are evil! I think you need to do like Sony does and still show the hidden ones but don't show what it takes to get them. At least you would be able to tell they were there but still not know what has to happen to unlock them.

Another couple recommendation:

A site/app I use for checking in beers I drink has badges. Same thing as achievements, but what they do is they use a level system for the badges. So every five new beers you drink for a particular style, it levels up. The max level on any badge is 50, but it keeps the clutter down on the actual number of badges you see on the page. Plus, it also has a progress bar so you can see where you are with regards to that badge.

For instance, if you are on level 3 and are 2 away from level 4, you'd see the progress bar as 18 of 20 and actually have a notched bar with the total you've drank.

Also, they do special badges. For instance, drink a beer on Halloween. Get a badge. Drink this specific beer in a specific time frame, you get a badge. It gives you incentive to drink during times you wouldn't and drink stuff you normally wouldn't.

Just ideas.. :)

I thought about showing all of the achievements and for the hidden ones, just disabling the tooltip, so pretty much what you described. I kinda like things being hidden too though (Steam does this for certain, generally story-based achievements) to add to the fun. I might modify it so the "common" hidden ones show up, but the real surprises just have to be found...

At some point, I'd like to display an icon or something so you know when you unlock an achievement. The perfect solution would be an awesome "achievement unlocked" message that immediately pops up, but that would require a pretty big architectural change / addition that just isn't worth the effort right now. But I could at least show an icon, much like when you have pending friend requests. So that'll probably happen...at some point.

I do like the idea of badges or something where you get points for each achievement. Not sure what that would do, maybe just display on your profile like Steam. I'd also like to display your recent achievements on the Overview page, as well as maybe a count of your achievements. And another potential addition is to display your count next to your name / picture here on the forums. Speaking of which, I've considered having a tooltip kinda thing when you hover over someone's name on the forums (and possibly elsewhere) to show a snippet of their details, like total games owned, completions, achievements, whatever.

Hi all,

would it be manageable to create a "forum signature widget" of sorts to share part of the profile with the outside world, like so :

http://i.imgur.com/dX9umJo.png

@WLCD - Believe it or not, that's something that's been on my list for a looooooong time. In fact, it was added to my task list on 3/1/14, which is two months before we were in public beta haha! It's one of those tasks that seems like it'd be fun to build and neat to have, but keeps getting pushed down the list. But it's on there