I normally don't make any posts but recently Gamejolt has been updating their platform with new features which is cool but most of the features are either extremely flawed or annoying for me. So I wanted to talk about them and suggest some ideas.

(Some are crossed out because I got clarification by a Gamejolt mod. Thank you very much for that comment! )

Firesides

Firesides is a feature where you can talk with friends or stream things like development progress or just play games. It's a neat features, definitely something that's pretty cool to have but there is something about them that is pretty annoying in my opinion. It's the actual firesides display. On the right side corner of the main feed you have firesides (On browser) and there is one problem with that display that I really don't like and it's the fact that there is a lot of firesides from strangers or community's that I'm not in and sometimes they display in large windows while playing. I don't really like that since it's pretty distracting when I'm looking at posts from my feed so I want to suggest an idea for people like me that don't really like so many firesides from unknown users.

Suggested Firesides Setting

I think it would be cool if in the settings you could toggle an option called "Show Suggested Firesides". If you have it on then you would get suggested firesides from other users that you don't know or community's that you're not in as it is right now, but if you have it off then it would only show firesides from people you follow and community's that you're in instead of cluttering the fireside window with people you don't know.

Well, that's about all I wanted to say about firesides so now I would like to move onto

Quests

Quests are a recently introduced feature in Gamejolt which allow you to get stickers by interacting with the community with such tasks as liking posts, voting in a poll, and most importantly, giving stickers to a post.

The Flawed Balance

With my experience with the stickers quest, it is extremely unbalanced. For example, you get a task to place 5 stickers in posts but when you actually complete the quest, it gives you 3 stickers so you've just completed a quest where you had to place more stickers then you got. I think that is a very scammy thing to do. I think the quest should give you the same amount of stickers you placed or 1 more because right now the quest is pretty useless because you're just gonna get scammed out of your stickers anyway.

That One Figurine Quest

In the FNaF community there was a quest where you could win a statue by sending a link to a friend that doesn't have a Gamejolt account and the more links you spread to your friends, the higher chances you got of winning the figurine. That system is EXTREMELY flawed since a person isn't prevented to just make throwaway accounts to increase their chances of winning. Maybe I'm wrong and it had a limit, but I'm pretty sure you could just send an infinite amount of links and increase your chances

Friends

On Gamejolt you can send friend requests to users and if they accept, then you're friends and you may chat privately about but there is a real issue with that feature.

Unfriend

There exists NO unfriend feature. This is an extreme flaw in my opinion. If for example you send a request to who seems a nice guy and he turns out to be a toxic asshole, there is no way to unfriend them and you have no way to get rid of them. I personally never encountered this issue but this seems extremely an important feature especially if you want your platform to be friendly. Now you could argue that you can just flag the user but Gamejolt needs to take time with other flags and try to improve new features or add newer ones so it's not always a solution to the problem.

Misc Complaints

This section is going to go over some of my other, smaller complaints about Gamejolt and a way to fix them

XP is Useless

The XP system has been in Gamejolt for a long amount of time but even though it's been there for so long, it's never been actually been used for anything. I think it would be cool if for example the more levels you have, a badge could be display on your profile to say that hey! this user has gotten to like Level 10 or the more XP and levels you have, the more chances of having stickers by liking a post. As of the recent update to the interface that you get when clicked on your profile picture, the XP and level systems have been removed so this complaint is now outdated.

Automatic Liking of Posts or Comments

Whenever you make a new post or comment it automatically likes it for some reason? I might be the only one who's bothered by it but I find it kind of annoying removing the like from my post or comment every single time.

Community Search Feature

There is no search feature in the discover community tab and I find it kind of annoying. For example, I wish to find if perhaps a community for Plants VS Zombies exist but I can't just check it by searching, but I need to scroll through hundreds, maybe even thousands of community's that I don't care about just to see if maybe that community exists

So this is about every single thing that I wanted to talk about here so well, thank you for reading this post and have a great day!