In light of some recent feedback around completion times here and here, I figured it was time for me to throw out some other ideas that have been rattling around in my head since it's all related.

Playlist

Let's start with the playlist feature that's available on the Profile page. This currently does what it was originally intended to do, which is provide a way for you to explicitly order the games you plan to play. While there's no limit to the number of games you can have on your playlist, I've found it's generally more for the very near future as things can change over time. Some potential ideas for this feature are:

• This feature currently has a very limited amount of space available on the Profile page. Does it make more sense for it to be moved to its own page and maybe have the Profile just show a sub-set (like say, the next 5 games on the list?)
• By moving it to its own page, I think it opens the door to displaying more information, such as the average completion time, average community rating / difficulty, etc.
• We could also add buttons to each entry, such as creating a new Playthrough.
• Over time, it might make more sense to retire the backlog flag on collection entries and rely solely on the playlist to define a user's "backlog". While it's handy to have your collection also be used to identify items in your backlog, there are plenty of scenarios where things NOT in your collection are in your backlog. I think having very defined content areas (i.e. collection, wish list, completions, playlist / backlog, etc) with integration between them would ideal.

Playthroughs

The next logical step after setting up your backlog (whether it's from your collection entries or the playlist) is to start working on playthroughs. We've beefed this feature up a bit over the years, but there's still room for improvement.

• A minor change I'd like to make is to have goal groups collapsed by default. This should help a lot with playthroughs that have a large number of goals.
• When you start a playthrough, possibly have a new textbox for collecting your initial thoughts / reason for the playthrough. This could be something like "I'm planning to do a full achivement / trophy run" or "I've always wanted to try out this series, so I'm starting with this one." This will make more sense later on when I get to some other potential new stuff
• You can already post a new game thought directly from a playthrough, but it just gets tied to the game and not your playthrough. I could change that so you could always be able to get back to them.
• We're still piloting goal templates for Patreon backers and that feature is defintiely coming, but I'm struggling with how to manage them at the moment, so it's kind of on hold.
• Add a textbox for seconds on Playthrough time entries

Completions

When you finish your playthrough, it's time to enter a completion and that's where the majority of the potential changes exist.

• Currently, when you enter a rating or difficulty, it's tied to the GAME only. What I've long wanted to do is tie this to the GAME / PLATFORM combination. This is a pretty significant change as it touches a lot of things and I'll need to write a script to back-fill data. But it really needs to happen.
• The Add / Edit Completion modal needs to be a little friendlier and allow completions to be entered without any time associated with them. These completions would go in the same repository as the ones with time, which means they would show up on your Completions page. But they would NOT impact the average completion time statistics throughout the site.
• For completions that do not have a time (or are 00:00:00, which are currently excluded from aggregation), they would not show up with the other completions on the Game Details page. But I would a new section for completions without time so users can still be recognized.
• This was mentioned in one of the threads I linked up above, but I started on implementing a way for curators to manually mark completion times as invalid if they were really extreme. I think this would be a great option for us to have since it provides ultimate control over the integrity of completion time aggregations, but there's simply too many other priorities for the curation team at the moment. I might at least finish implementing it since it can co-exist with everything else and we can at least take care of the very extreme times.
• In addition to the average completion time, we could use a (trimmed) mean as well.
• We've talked about the possibility of adding reviews to the site in the past and it never seems like there's enough interest in it. That's probably still the case, but I'm still intrigued by the idea of providing the option to users to enter some review-esque data while entering a completion. The first part of this would be a standard review textbox. And when I say "review", I'm thinking things more like what you see on Steam, GOG, Amazon, etc, so a paragraph or two. Additionally, we could have a global set of checkboxes that you could use to further define your thoughts on the game. Each checkbox would have some text associated with it and an icon (if I can find enough that make sense, ha!) I don't know what we would actually include here, but some ideas would be: 1) Great soundtrack; 2) Immersive; 3) Innovative / unique; 4) Ultra violent / gory. So they could be things related to the technical achivements, gameplay / idea, thematic elements, etc.

Gaming History

With the completion data you've entered (even without the above changes), the site is capable of putting together sort of gaming history for you. Obviously we don't have that page at all, but it's an idea I've had for a while

It's for this reason that I thought having an initial thought collection when you start a playthrough could be neat. You could see what you originally said before starting, which could be what you plan to achieve with the playthrough or just a reasoning as to why you want to play the game, followed by the details of the completion (how long it took you, when you started / finished, how many time entries, how many goals, etc), and then finally the review data you entered. I'm not sure how all of this would come together and it might not be a terribly useful thing to add, but it at least seems kinda neat to be able to look back at a previous year or whatever and see what all you played with full details (assuming you're utilizing all of the site's features).

Challenges

While we're at it, I'm going to throw out another idea that I've shared with curators in the past. This is by far the biggest feature / change in this thread and I'm going to keep the description intentionally high-level to gauge interest (but I have lots more detail available!)

The overall idea is to provide "challenges" for you to complete. To complete a challenge, you would need to enter a completion for a certain set of games. For example, there could be the "Classic Tomb Raider" challenge where you have to enter a completion for Tomb Raider I, II, and III. Upon doing so, the challenge would unlock, much like site achievements do. You could sort of think of them as multi-game bounties that never expire. I'm not sure if points would be involved and I'm not sure if this system would replace bounties / missions or if it would co-exist. You would be able to "favorite" or somehow target the challenges you want to try and complete. We would start with a large set of challenges and then look to add them at regular intervals (monthly, quarterly, whatever makes the most sense).

So there you have it, a whole bunch of potential changes for the site! Let me know what you think on any and all of the items that interest you and feel free to throw additional feedback out there on the impacted site areas.

Not sure this completely relates to your gaming history idea, but would be cool to have like a "year in review" snapshot at the end of the year that kinda summarizes your activity on the site, games you've added to your library, completions, least favorite, most played game, most favorite game, bounties completed.

overall i like the ideas you've posted in this post and look forward to seeing some of these in the future :) (really like the challenges, playlist ideas)

This all sounds promising and I like it. I would mention that maybe removing the backlog flag and using just the playlist as your backlog would, in my case, give me a playlist of over a thousand games that I don't really want to go through and manage (putting games in order of what to play). I like having just my backlog number and then a list of games that I choose from my backlog to say ok this is what I want to tackle next (which ideally would only be a few games).