NOTE: The whole point of the Development Updates forum is to bring potential site enhancements to the community to collect feedback. I can't guarantee every feature will be implemented or everyone's request will make it in, but I'll strive to include as much feedback as possible. If a feature makes it beyond the "idea" phase and I start working on it, I'll provide updates here, as necessary.

One aspect of the site that I wish could get more utilization is completion times. I think this data is valuable and just neat to collect / view and can help when choosing to buy and / or play a game. I know there are other (bigger) sites that collect it, but I think it's an important part of what we're trying to build here.

The idea for bounties is to encourage users to play certain games and ultimately enter a completion time. I would set up a handful of games at a time that users could accept a bounty for. Only one user would be able to accept the bounty on a game and a user would only be able to accept one bounty at a time.

Bounties would be displayed on the front page of the website. If you've accepted a bounty, you would be able to enter notes as you work towards completing it (so the community can follow your hunt!) Once you've finished the game, you would complete it through a special interface that would complete the bounty and enter a completion time. At this point, you would be eligible to accept a new one.

If you aren't able to complete a bounty for any reason (maybe you hated the game, it was too hard, you don't have enough time, whatever), you could opt out at anytime. That would allow another user to accept the bounty. Any notes you made would likely be removed (not sure yet on that).

So what games would have bounties? I have no idea, but it would be a wide-array of games across different genres, eras, platforms, etc. I would be looking to the community for help in selecting them. I don't want to pick a bunch of random / obscure games that nobody owns, but I also don't want a full set of the biggest games out there.

For enhanced functionality, I thought each bounty could be assigned points or something. So if you complete a bounty, you would get let's say 50 points (just throwing a number out, no idea what it would actually be). Maybe the longer the bounty stays unaccepted, the points grow. These points would do absolutely nothing other than show up in your profile or something, kinda like achievements. My only hesitation here is I don't want this system to turn into a contest so we end up with garbage data with users just completing bounties to get points. I'm not implying that our awesome community would do this, I'm only saying this because it's always a risk when you "game-ify" something.

This would be a completely separate feature from the game club / challenges that we've discussed before. I thought this might be a fun, unique feature that doesn't require lots of community involvement since only one user can accept a bounty.

As our community grows, we could add more available bounties, so it could scale pretty well.

Oh and I thought as different real-world events happen, we could add associated bounties. So like with the new Star Wars movie coming out, we could add a few Star Wars games as bounties. Or maybe next year in the weeks / months leading up to the new Zelda game, we could have bounties on a Zelda game or two.

Overall, it's just meant to be a fun way to work play through games you already want to play. The site would merely give you incentive to play a particular game over something else :)

I think this sounds like a pretty amazing idea apart from one thing. If the idea is to collect completion data, why restrict it to a single person? You would think that having multiple people trying to claim a bounty would generate more data, and thus be more useful. I don't think you'll completely avoid the "garbage data" that would pop up if you added a points system to it, as there is already garbage data in some entries that I've seen (like 9000 hour completion times on multiple games. Seriously, just sort and see.) At least by opening it up to the masses, instead of only one, we can at least work to average out the crappy data to get to something more meaningful for the game details page averages.

As long as the point system is purely for fun and doesn't result in any tangible rewards, there's no big issue. Otherwise, you'll need to have some kind of verification system in place for people to "prove" what they're doing or face the wrath of a lot of angry folks when someone DOES game the system.

Really like the idea of doing themed bounties! Might coincide with game sales events too, since people could snag some titles on the cheap.

If your goal is to collect data, I would suggest add a scoring system to the completions in general: (arbitrary numbers ahoy!)

5 points - Add full completion data to a game you (as a user) don't have a completion for yet (New data is best data!)
(optionally) 3 points - Add another completion time to a game you've already done (Something for folks who do multiple playthroughs)

I wouldn't add a "bonus" for being the first to add completion data for a title that has nothing entered site-wide yet. This would be encouraging bogus data as someone attempts to be "first."

Now as for bounties, let's say every month the site comes up with a list of 5 (or however many games) listed as bounties. These could be double value during that month for a user's first and subsequent completions (ie: 10/6 points.) If it's popular enough, and the traffic comes along, could add "flash" bounties that only last a week for maybe even triple score. As it is now, I don't think enough people who would participate visit daily for a weekly thing to be feasible, but who knows. Lots of variations on what could be done here. If something goes the whole month without a completion being entered, it could carry over to the next month with an increased bounty, like you suggest.

As for selecting what gets bountied? Lot of different methods to choose from:

AAA games
Indie games
Classic games
Weird/Obscure games (these would be good for the increasing bounty idea over time, probably!)
Specific Genre games (A puzzle game will likely take a lot less time than say, a huge rpg)
Specific platform games (older platform games would also hang around a while, for increasing bounties I bet)

Extended Concept: If you're looking to collect data and encourage interaction, you could always extend the point system to a wider variety of things:

• Completions
• Ratings
• Difficulties
• Maybe even the Review/Thoughts system you were talking about?

I'm just now getting back into following things after multiple family emergencies last month (LOOOONG month), but I just wanted to chime in and say how very very much I love this idea. Dhobo's suggestions seems pretty valid on my first read-through, and I do like the idea of having that spot for review/thoughts that moho brought up before.

So, two thumbs up for the concept from me. For what that's worth. ;)

The main reason I wanted to limit each bounty to one user was to encourage the use of status / progress updates (kinda like a mini blog) as you work on the bounty. I'm not sure how realistic it is to get people other than our core to do this, but that's where I was coming from. The idea though was to personalize the challenges and encourage people to be a part of the community (while also getting us some data). On the flip-side, having multiple users on the same bounty provides a reason for users to communicate, just in a different capacity, so I think the goal is still met.

I think if we allow multiple users to accept the same bounty, there's very little separation between this feature and the mythical game club / challenge thing. That's not necessarily a bad thing and maybe it makes more sense to have bounties as "promoted" challenges or something. I don't have to build out the whole challenge functionality at this point, so the scope could remain just on the bounties / "promoted" challenges, but at least the infrastructure would be in place (since it would be very similar, if not identical). I'm not saying this is a bad thing and in fact, I think it makes things easier on me AND gets us more functionality (and still promotes community growth), so it's a win-win-win.

Collecting data is definitely one of the goals, but encouraging community engagement and getting users to visit regularly is a big goal as well. I've been trying to think of unique ways to grow our community and this one seemed fun.

I love the idea of having a points system that goes beyond the bounties, so for "normal" completions you would get points as well. I don't think they would be used for anything other than to be displayed on your profile and maybe a leaderboard on the Stats page. There could be achievements for getting a certain number of points as well, but nothing tangible like keys or anything.

I think doing monthly bounties makes sense and it allows us to have big games like RPGs, but also a few smaller games. I agree that weekly and flash bounties probably aren't something that would work just yet, but if the feature took off, it could be fun.

I also think getting points from rating, difficulties, etc is a great addition! It encourages site usage and hopefully gets more data collected so our statistics are more accurate.

Overall, it sounds like this is a promising feature, so I'll do some more noodling and feel free to share anymore thoughts you have on it!

@penumbren - Welcome back and I'm sorry to hear that :( I hope all is well now and you can relax and enjoy the upcoming holidays!

Could always open up a new section on the forums for the game challenges? Maybe start a thread for each game that's up for challenge and link to that thread from the main page. People could post their progress if they want to there and talk about the game in general.

I've been working on the bounty feature tonight and I should have a very rough sneak preview sometime tomorrow. This will be a barebones release and it won't include any form of the points system just yet. I'll pick a few short games that we can use as pilot games, so if you have any suggestions, let me know. Oh and I hope everyone is able to participate too ;)

This feature integrates with several other features (mainly playthroughs and completions), which is a little different than most of the features I've been building. That's the main reason I want to get something barebones out in front of you guys so we can try it out and see how it is. I'll post the list of things I plan to add as well, so you can have an idea of where it's heading. Of course, depending on the feedback you guys have, we can change up the functionality / priority as needed.

So stay tuned!!

Sounds good moho_00, I'll be a bit distracted with the PSX event streams and news coming out of this weekend, but I'll make time to participate!

Alright everyone, the Bounty pilot is now LIVE! I've selected six games that should be nice and short, so hopefully we can get some activity on them. I have an extra key for Crimzon Clover, if anyone wants to participate and doesn't have that one yet.

Keep in mind that this is a barebones release for now and is purely intended to pilot the system I've put in place. We'll see how things go and I can tweak it as needed. I also have a lot of things on my list to really flesh out the functionality. Here's what I have so far (listed in no particular order):

• Come up with actual bounty types (right now all I have is "Retro", which doesn't even fit the games I've selected...so you can kind of ignore it for now.)
• Display the game name and / or box art when you're accepted a bounty (in the modal)
• Display an icon / text on the Home page next to a bounty, if you've accepted or completed it
• Display an "ending soon" icon / text on the Home page for bounties that are ending soon (maybe within 5 days? Not sure yet)
• Add a help icon / popover / tooltip / text to explain how the bounty system works (hopefully it's intuitive, but I'd like to add something..let me know how easy you guys think it is to follow)
• Wire up some achievements related to bounties
• Add a flag to denote completion times that are "invalid" (@dhobo, you mentioned this in one of your posts and it's something I've been wanting to do for a while. There will probably be an admin page to manage this, but maybe not out of the gates.)
• Add an option to cancel a bounty (not sure if this is really needed since nothing happens if you don't complete a bounty)
• Add a new forum option for display spoilers (since users might be discussing story elements and such)
• Add a "My Bounties" page so you can track the bounties you're currently on and past ones
• Add a "Bounty Search" page so you can find bounties (current and old)
• Admins should be able to create bounties without having to manually do it, which is what I did for this round :P
• And finally, a points system!! This will apply to other aspects of the site (rating, difficulty, etc), but I want to wait until we have the core bounty system finalized before tackling it

So the general flow is this:

• Click on a bounty on the Home page
• Click on the Accept Bounty button
• Select your platform and submit the modal
• (At this point, a playthrough will be created and tied to the bounty you just accepted)
• Play the game
• Track your time, if you want, using the playthrough that was created
• When you're done with the game, complete the playthrough

The playthrough feature hasn't been widely used, so I'm certainly looking for feedback there if you guys have any. You don't HAVE to enter your time, so if your game tracks it (like a lot of RPGs do) or if you just use the Steam timer, you can enter your final time when you complete the game.

I think that's it, so have fun and let me know what you think so we can finalize this sucker!

Oh, one last thing! I set the current six bounties to expire on 12/13/15, but I can change it, if necessary. This is a pilot run, so I want to get as much usage as possible. If you have any game suggestions, let me know.

enjoying this so far
how often will new bounties be posted?

That's a good question! I think once I polish the system a bit more, most bounties will be active for a month. For longer / shorter games, that time period might change a bit. I also like the suggestion of "flash" bounties that might pop up out of nowhere and last for a short amount of time (though these would probably be shorter games).

I would prefer if they were released in a more staggered manner, rather than all at once at the beginning of a month or something. I think once we get into a flow, maybe new bounties pop up every 2-3 days. It also depends on how many people we can get to participate. The more activity we have, the more bounties we'll need to ensure everyone can find something they want to play. So with that in mind, be sure to let your friends know about the site!

Feel free to post any suggestions you might have for the bounty feature, or games that might be good to hunt!

ahh, i see, i understand

Here's my first stab at defining the rules for the points system that the site will be using. The following list contains the actions that will net you points:

• Specify a rating for a game 3 points
• Specify a difficulty for a game 3 points
• Enter a completion 50 points
• Enter 5 forum posts (rounded down) 3 points
• Achievements (maybe at some point, but they would probably have individual point totals, so I'll ignore those for now)

A couple of notes on the completions. I'll be adding a flag to indicate whether a completion time is valid or not. This will help weed out the bad data we've accumulated so far. This is something other, similar sites provide as well, so I think it's appropriate for what we're trying to do here. For now, I'll just manually set this flag, but as the site grows, I'll add an admin feature to handle this and probably a way for users to report possible bad times. If your completion has been marked as invalid, you will receive 0 points for it. It will also not be included in aggregated statistics, but it will still show up in your list. So you can continue to use this feature like you are now (I know some users enter 00:00:00 and that's fine), the idea here is to keep the data from being skewed.

Also, if you enter multiple completions, you will get points for EACH completion (assuming they're valid, of course). This is to encourage additional playthroughs, speed runs, etc. If we run into an issue with users just logging a ton of completions to rack up points, I can adjust this rule.

Now, if you enter a completion for a game while it has an ACTIVE bounty, you will get some bonus points. The amount of points you get is based on the bounty type (the thing that's currently a placeholder showing "Retro"). Each bounty can have ONE type specified and the options are listed below:

• Normal (The most basic bounty, lasting for a generous amount of time.) 25 points
• Flash (These will be a little more rare and will last for a shorter amount of time.) 50 points
• Weekly Steam Sale (Not sure this will work, but the idea is to have a bounty each week for some game on the weekly Steam sale.) 25 points
• Pilot (To encourage usage during our pilot run, as well as reward the early adopters of the system! Not sure how long this will last, but it will apply to all of the bounties posted so far.) 50 points

In addition to the type, a bounty may or may not have a "bonus" on it. A bounty could have multiple bonuses or it may not have any. These bonuses are to provide incentive for games that might be harder to track down, longer to play, more difficult, etc. Yes, these are completely arbitrary and most are relative, but I will do my best to apply bonuses appropriately.

• Retro (Older games, probably nothing later than Dreamcast) 25 points
• New Release (New games, probably stuff within the last 2-3 weeks) 25 points
• Difficult Game (Generally viewed as difficult games, so Dark Souls, Mega Man, etc.) 25 points
• Large Game (Games with a lot of content, so most RPGs) 25 points
• Obscure Release (Games that might be harder to track down, such as older console releases that don't have re-releases or digital releases) 25 points

I'm sure the point distribution could use some tweaking (especially the bonuses), but I wanted to get my thoughts in front of you guys sooner rather than later. I MIGHT be able to start working on the points stuff this weekend, we'll see. I want to get the other feedback and remaining bounty tasks knocked out first.

My only recommendation would be to change those 3s into 5s.

Rationale? I like simple numbers. It matches up better presentation-wise with the points offered via bounties. Also reduces the disparity a wee bit.

I want bounty stuff to show up in the activity feed. Starting one, finishing one, etc. Maybe also say the points as well when your activity corresponds to something to where you earn points.

Will there be a leaderboard or anything?

@jwcooley - Getting stuff to show up in the feed is on my list, should be able to knock it out this weekend. And yes, I think we'll have a leaderboard as well, though I'm not sure where it should go. It seems like it needs its own spot, rather than just sticking it on the Statistics page.

@dhobo - I like your idea for changing the 3s to 5s. Simple is better :)

I've also come up with another "bonus", which I'm calling "Poorly Received", but I'm sure there's a better name. This would be for games that have poor reviews, like Superman 64 and E.T. I'm thinking these would carry a 50 point bonus since they're probably not going to be very fun, but someone might be interested in giving them a go. These would not pop up very much since most people aren't going to want to play them.

Also, I think the "Difficult Game" and "Large Game" bonuses should be 50 points instead of 25, since they're going to be more demanding on the player.

Another idea I had is we could have events like "classic NES bounties" where a bunch of bounties within a particular theme pop up. These would be listed under a separate bounty type (I think) and would probably carry a bonus. There's lots of stuff we could do with this. Classic NES, Classic Genesis, Horror games (for Halloween, of course), etc. I don't know that I'll be able to have everything in place, but I thought a "12 Days of Christmas Bounties" would be fun. So the 12 days leading up to Christmas, there would be a new bounty that would last maybe a few days. Of course, it would be limited to very short games.

And perhaps an achievement for completing all games in a "series" or something...

As with the other site features, I think our main challenge is going to be getting others to join in the hunt!

Put Silver Surfer NES as a bounty... It'll never leave, unless someone cheats or lies. :P

Poorly received sounds... sterile.

• Loved by Few
• It's so Bad. (The Wizard reference, ftw)
• Bottom of the Barrel
• Worst of the Worst

I was thinking of maybe a spoof name for it, if you had something along the lines of:

• Iron Will Bounty (for long and/or especially difficult game bounties)

you could have the

• Iron Stomach Bounty (for games that are nauseatingly bad)

I remember Silver Surfer from Nintendo Power, ha!

I love the name "Iron Stomach Bounty". That sounds about right if you're going to play Superman 64. Maybe I shouldn't pick on that game since I haven't actually played it. But I do own it :P

Oh it lives up to its reputation quite nicely. Friend of mine had it, eventually he traded it to some poor shmuck who didn't know any better for a copy of Mario Party. lol

Any thoughts on what these "points" should be called? I was thinking "Completionator Points" or "Contribution Points", but certainly open to better ideas.

I'd personally avoid any combination of words that could be shortened to CP.

Might be too retro, but you could always use a generic gaming term like Credits, Score, Lives, Extra Mans, Energy, HP, MP, Exp/XP, etc...

• Completionator Credits
• Completionator Score
• Participation Points (Heh, "PP")
• Participation Score
• Participation Credits
• Completionator Exp or C.Exp

Been a long day, so I'll give it some more thought when I'm less exhausted and can devote more brainergy to it.

I think I might have found something that needs to be fixed. I entered a completion for the play through tied to the bounty. When I did, I chose NOT to archive it because I was planning to add it again but underneath a different area of the completion section (since I do have intentions to play through it again). Since I didn't archive it, it was still showing that I had accepted it but not completed it.

Other than that, I LOVE the bounties! :)

Nevermind - I just re-read some posts. I see the points are for any completion, the bounties are just bonus material.

I actually have somewhat of a schedule for the next couple of weeks, so hopefully I don't over-saturate the bounty population. I don't think we'll get above 10 (which is what's posted now), but let me know if that's too many, not enough, etc.

My goal is to wrap up Neighbours 2 this week and also finish Dead Island Riptide just in time for vacation to start.

I think after that, I'm going to start the Quake Mission Pack 1.