What if the website featured achievements that you can earn when you finish certain tasks in games or around the website? For instance, winning the monthly and weekly contests, posting a topic that gets x amount of views, posting x amount of times, making x amount of layouts, etc. Achievements could be worth viz, depending on the difficulty of the achievement, in which people could display achievement icons in their profiles for people to see and get a better idea of how long and/or how supportive of the site they have been.

It would also be nice if you could use Viz to do more things, such as custom icons and forum themes, animated names, gift items, cheat unlocks for games, and auctions. As far as animated or colorized names go, to differentiate between administrators, forum mods, male/female, etc. you could use male/female and other symbols.

Also, it would be interesting if the equipment and levels you obtain with Viz and with posts on the forums could be implemented into some sort of flash or forum-based game. I have noticed that equipment and levels do not seem to serve much purpose other than for status and for looks. People may be more pressed to buy equipment and to gain experience by making quality posts that way.

Finally, I realise as a web-designer myself that cost of the website is based on bandwidth, therefore adding to the site in any way causes the site to require more bandwidth, therefore making it more costly. Sponsors and advertisements generate revenue, but you would generate more revenue if you had deals going with your sponsors, so that when people watch an ad, fill out a survey, sign up with a website, or purchase a product from an affiliate, they get Viz. In doing so, you generate more revenue from sponsors to use to power the site, hire crew (professional crew generally do not work voluntarily, but if you can find volunteers, that's great also), and increase bandwidth so that the site can grow. More growth means more players, more players means more revenue for the site, and the cycle continues. Although I admire David for programming most if not all of the site himself, and all the work that he does, as websites expand, I realise that more and more people working for a website are required, so if and when that time were to come for him, the extra revenue would be highly useful in obtaining more programmers.

Anyway, this suggestion thread is becoming lengthy, so I think that is all I will post for now. Thank you for your time and consideration in advance, and thank you for making online emulation free and accessible.

Almost every feature your brought up is already a feature. For name colors, there are differentiated name styles. David's name is gold. The administrator (which he stepped down recently, so there isn't one) is white, Global Mods are brown (red for female Globals), mods have a solid line above and below their name, RGR Staff have one solid line below their name, Trusted members have a dotted line under their name, and male users have blue names and females have pink. 

The equipment and levels are just for show now, but a Battle Arena is a future feature where those will come to use. It is just not on the top priority of things to do right now.

For achievements, we have stuff like that. Every 3 months, there is a Tour de Vizzed where you can get jerseys for different daily events which are: most word count, most posts, longest posts, and most posts in 1 hour. The person who has the most points at the end of the month has the rainbow badge (look at legacyme3's username to see what that looks like) for an entire month. On the other months, there are posting competitions called VCS. 

David already has monthly Retro Game Room contests (3 different ones a month), which you can get a good amount of Viz for placing in the top 3. He has a Hall of Fame that lists all the users who have gotten 1st places in these competitions and orders by number of 1st place victories. 

You can compete for high scores for any game in the Retro Game Room at anytime. You can see everyone's rank on the game's page. Also, on your game profile, you can see a complete list of every game you have submitted a score to and what rank you are in that game. Soon, there will be speed runs and game completion tables on your profile as well (should be done later this month). 

As for using Viz used to unlock cheats for games, that is impossible. The ROMs (games) are not made here, so there is no possible way to go in and customize them to allow you to buy cheats for the games. The games are purely how they are on the real cartridge, the exception being hack games, but even those cannot be customized to be interactive with your Viz. So that just isn't possible. 

Viz can also be spent int he Vizzed Market forum where you can play forum games or even try to buy online/offline goods with your Viz. 

rcarter2 :

Actually to correct you, admin is a light brown/orangey color. Geeogree got white as his custom color which overrides the admin color.

Also, Site Staff have a solid underline AND dotted overline.

Otherwise, you got it.

legacyme3 : Haha, thanks. I just don't remember Geeogree not being white except for when he stepped down. And my bad on the Site Staff. Been a while since I was just a RGR Staff

Well, thanks for the info guys. Some of these ideas I just thought I would throw out there, wasn't sure if they had already been established or taken into consideration before. As for colored names, I meant it would be nice if you could choose your own custom color for viz, and since currently many ranks are marked by color, mark the ranks instead with icons or symbols.

I am aware of ideas for the battle arena, but I meant more like a web or forum-based game, where you could fight enemies, pick up/sell loot, and roleplay in general.

I wasn't entirely aware of how Tour de Vizzed worked, but it would be nice if there were a badge collection or trophy case of some sort that you could feature on your profile for show, if that isn't a feature of it already. A lot of people like collecting and showing things off; I've noticed on a lot of other gaming websites that features such as this are popular.

I understand that roms could not be altered to interact with viz, but if the site were to feature flash or java based games specifically programmed to do that, then you could offer unlockables for Viz.

GuardianZack :

The only way to change your custom color is to donate a big amount.

As it stands it looks like that 250 dollars is where it's at. As for icons/symbols... I honestly would rather keep things the way they are. Doesn't make sense to go to that when what we have makes sense.

You do get something like a trophy if you participate in the monthly Retro Game Room competitions. Ranking in the top three of any of them will be shown on your Game profile and you get rewarded vizzed for them.

When you win the top amount of a jersey in the Tour de Vizzed you get to keep that jersey for the next month. Plus in your profile it shows how many of each jersey you have won.

So we do have medals/badges. Also if you post a lot there are 'syndromes' starting at 25 posts. This only goes for one day though.

Then you have milestones like how many years you have been on here, how many posts you have made 1k, 5k, 10k and so on.

Also it would be bad to change the name color system this late in the development of vizzed. Everyone is used to the job level system. You already can personalized yourself a lot with profile picture, profile background, post layout background, chat picture, and ranking image.

As I see it we don't need to add on to any of these things. This site is pretty decked out. You really can't find a better site.

Though I bet you were thinking of getting badges for games like on other gaming sites. But you still do get those with participating in the monthly competitions. Now instead of 2 there are 3 so more chances at getting a reward!