Periodically, I receive a pop up when entering Gamespot with a survey asking me to rate the information and the overall state of this website. The most important, I believe, are the suggestions. You have the opportunity to send them for a one-in-a-billion chance of them reading what you have to say and actually implement whatever sounds reasonable. I generally spare a few minutes to write down what I think would be good improvements for the betterment of Gamespot. Since I don't think they take anything of what we send in consideration I'll post here what I'd like to see.

It's also completely about my personal preferences, people might think something doesn't need change, I respect that, but everything here will be from my own point of view, not necessarily taking the community in consideration as a whole.

1: Bring back the emblems on first page. I know a lot of people don't care about them, I sometimes couldn't care less as well, but there's no denying that, as much as achievements on consoles or PC, they have their charm. Having them on front page like it used to be years ago was something of great pride for many emblem hunters out there, and an incentive to go after them, after all. Even the 10-emblem-shown system has its problems, most of the emblems on the list do not change, like the collector and tagger emblems, instead of showing the latest ones the person received.

2: "Now playing" that's actually worth something. As in with the date you played such game, when you started playing or finished it. It used to be bad as a list with all games listed in alphabetical order. One aspect was good though, it showed the current game you were playing on your personal profile page. Right now I don't even think this feature exists anymore, but it had its purpose and if treated right could become a pretty interesting feature to make people spend more time on the website.

3: Fix the blocked words. How are we supposed not to use the word clas.sic in a video-game website. I don't know the technicalities of this, but there must be a way around this. I recently found out that you can't also use ru.sh, as in Goldru.sh, because it tells you some words are blocked for foul language. I had to go cutting my gigantic Team Fortress 2 blog post in bits to figure out what word was causing it. No small task I must tell.

4: Create a more convenient way to upload pictures. Gamespot could be much more complete if it prized users who added content to it. Of course no employee will waste his time uploading pictures or videos for that obscure NES game, but someone could do it for you. I don't even know if Gamespot would have the rights to do it, but I'm sure users doing it wouldn't be too much of a problem. If anything is wrong then let the user who uploaded deal with it, and delete whatever infringes with copyright, no problem. Much of the lack of content would be extinct with this.

5: Work on gameplay for most games on the database. A video-game website has many utilities for the general visitor, one of the most frequent is checking on games before making a purchase. One of the best methods to know if you'll like the game or not is seeing it in action. Gameplay for popular games like Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3 is easy to find, but when you're confused about buying or not that niche Nintendo DS game things get complicated. As a serious video-game website and actually being one of the biggest on the planet at it, Gamespot should really have people working on content like that.

6: Implement counters that actually work. I remember a time when my video counter was stuck for months, maybe years. I don't get as much visits here as I do on Youtube for example, but from what I could tell years inactive would be strange even for the very limited views they get. The profile counter is another clear example of how counters freeze out of nowhere. There was a time when the counter started working again, but now it froze for years with no hope on the horizon for it to get back on. The counter is probably discontinued as of now.

7: More freedom for customizing profiles. No, I don't want to turn this into a MySpace for games, I don't have a MySpace account, I also don't have twitter nor a Facebook account, but having more options for making you channel on Gamespot unique is always welcome. I do, however, have a Youtube profile, and taking the old channel design as a model it could work on Gamespot, having the option to select link color, background image, font, and all that.

I stopped using the forums so I'm not exactly into what the demands over there are. There can't be many though.

Some people have stressed that some features on Gamespot should have gotten more attention, like reviews. They complain about them not being on the front page of games' pages anymore, you need to actually click on user reviews to check them out, a while ago we had the latest ones posted featured on the front page of the game review. I have conflicting thoughts on this matter.

In one hand it really hampers the quick glance of an eventual visitor to give in and click casually on a review and read it, most of what we do on the internet comes from the flashy urge of convenience, if the reviews are easy to spot, more people will read them. On the other hand it also attracts lots of trolls who would be more than willing to do what they do best, troll. If someone wants a more diverse, less technical point of view, he should look for it, the audience will be much more focused and willing to feedback accordingly.

Another common complaint about user reviews is the fact it doesn't allow images, HTML, badges, or even commentaries from the crowd. I couldn't care less for any of those. User reviews shouldn't attempt a professional look. They're supposed to be well written, yes, but not overdone. Anyone looking for this kind of stuff should just make a blog and post them there. I can see why people would want that, but writing them is enough for me. As for commentaries, it would be sad if they allowed that, especially since the community is so immature and prone to trolling. Posting a negative review for a game only to get bashed with endless commentaries such as "U DON LIEK THIS GARME YOU RONG! THIS GARME IS BETTER GAME OF ALL!!1!" is certainly sadder than democratic.