So, a while ago, I noticed how I’ve been mostly playing single-player games or some League but alone. Due to a lot of things that happened, I had to cut ties with one very toxic individual and most of our common friends are forced to play with him instead of me as “siding with me” would create Drama. All in all, I do have friends offline that don’t play video games and I figured it’d be cool to maybe find some new people to potentially play League or Deep Rock Galactic with – or any games at all. Fast forward, I stumbled across an app called “Noobly“. “Find gamers, meet friends”, it says, and hence, I gave it a go!
At its core, Noobly is a social app designed to help like-minded people to find each other, chat and play video games together. To do so, you set up a profile with a profile picture, your username, age, timezone, bio, game times, tags, and badges. In Noobly you essentially add tags to your profile that display on what platforms you play games (i.e. PC, PS4, mobile, Switch, etc.) as well as what games you play. The game tags aren’t complete by any means but you can always suggest games to the developer using the contact e-mail. The main attraction, in my opinion, however, are the badges. You can buy badges using coins that essentially display your interests or things that you want to showcase. In my case, I’m a chill person that is into digital art, anime, tea, and that likes to have a drink now and then. I also am part of the LGBTQIA+ community and hence got the Pride Flag in there… and well, I mainly play support, so there’s that tag, too. Using up to ten badges, you can be really creative with showcasing who you are.
The coins needed to purchase these badges are earned by interacting with people, essentially? By inviting people, you earn ten coins and if they accept the invitation that earns you further 50 coins. This way you can essentially amass enough points to get some badges just by using the app itself, which is an interesting system for a social app. I believe you can also support the developers and purchase coins if you want to. There are a few ads that play here and there but overall, it’s all quite tame in comparison to other apps.
So, onto an issue that I have with the app: Idiots. There are people on the app that are only there to promote their Twitch channel or stuff like that. You can report those quite easily and if enough people report a person for being a bigot, rude, toxic, self-advertising, or whatever… they get flagged. That’s great! You essentially see a HUGE warning sign on profiles that have been flagged and know that you gotta be careful. But again, there is still the issue of idiots being around. You can set up badges that say that you’re in a relationship already or that you’re only looking for friends. Some people don’t respect that, though, which is an issue that some people told me about. Similarly, a friend I met there mentioned in her bio that she doesn’t want to be called pet names like “cutie”, “sweetie”, “baby”, etc. and people still do it because people are dicks that don’t read bios. Hence, it can be a very frustrating experience for some people but for the most part, people have been kind on there at least to me and I made some great individuals.
But some people there are just not interested in conversation, I guess. Like, I’ve talked to people and gotten single-word responses to questions for a rather long time. “How are you?” – “Good” – “Cool” – “Yeah”. I mean, I can bore myself to death with some people and talk a whole bunch with others. That’s just the way it is with people in general but it can be a tad annoying and frustrating when you have games and interests with people in common and you’re both there to make friends but they just don’t feel like it. I’m glad I met the people I did but after the initial excitement, I ended up giving people my discord name and just leaving it at that.
Apart from that, I’d like to say that the design of the app is fleak but the performance is a bit… meh. There are bugs like messages vanishing or not getting displayed correctly. Images get butchered completely and on top of that, the app slows down at times. Overall, I found my experience with it quite interesting and enjoyable but certain people can put a dampener on your experience. I originally wanted to just talk about Noobly being a thing but I guess I kind of ended up reviewing it. I’d recommend trying it out but I’d also say that you’ll have to take every encounter with a grain of salt. There are assholes on there or people that just lie about stuff and it’s essentially like Tinder in that regard, which can be quite annoying.
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.
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