Posted by Sanya Weathers on Friday Aug 29, 2008 Under Market Trends
Warning: This column contains the kind of linkbait that can waste entire days. While all links are technically safe for work, they are not safe for productivity.
Xbox Live declared this the Summer of Arcade, and we here at GamerDNA have been watching and thoroughly enjoying the action. And by "we" I mean "the other guys on the team" because frankly, I sucked at arcade games when they required me to pour in quarters, and I still suck at them. I have the reflexes of an elderly tree sloth, and the nervous system of a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. The combination means that eight year old girls peer up at me in pity, and say, "Boy, you’re terrible," in tones that sound like "Boy, is that skin condition catching?"
This week we’re starting a regular feature on the blog where we take a look at what our members are saying about the games they play and the experiences they had. This week, I decided to go right to the well to look at the genre that I love most - the First Person Shooter.
Posted by Imran Malek on Wednesday Aug 27, 2008 Under News
ChannelFlip.com’s games editor Katharine Fletcher recently did a piece on Social Networking for Gamers. Always saving the best for last, Katharine features gamerDNA.com at the end of her video. You can check out the video below:
There’s a lot for the spotlight Katharine and welcome to all ChannelFlip viewers who found us through the video!
Posted by Imran Malek on Tuesday Aug 26, 2008 Under News
This week was a big push on OpenID preparations. For those of you that don’t know about OpenID, it is essentially a way for you to keep the same login name and password accross a myriad of sites (LiveJournal,Yahoo, and SmugMug are three good examples).
The plan is that every existing and new account on gamerDNA.com will serve as an OpenID. With this ID you can log in to your gamerDNA profile and other OpenID enabled sites, and you’ll soon be able to use it to access all of the sites on the gamerDNA Alliance. So in the near future, your profile will be accessible at:
<member name>.gamerdna.com
It will be one, simple URL to remember. Unfortunately, This does introduce a few issues that we will be tackling this week and next.
We will be emailing guild/clan/group leaders who have been inactive for three months or more explaining they will have to change their subdomain (<shortname>.gamerdna.com) if it conflicts with an active member. You do NOT have to change your guild/clan name, just your URL (the <shortname> part mentioned earlier. You will be given an easy form to do so.
We will email members that have been inactive for three months and notify them that they have to change their name if it conflicts with an active guild using an easy form as well.
If you are an active or new member, and your name conflicts with a guild, than the member will be asked to pick a new name using an easy form.
If you have a user name with any characters NOT supported for use as a subdomain, (something like !| H@voc |!) you will be prompted to change your username to something valid on your next login. All usernames must be numbers, letters, or hyphens… no other characters, no spaces.
These restrictions have already been in the product for all new members and guilds (except for underscores, as there was a bug) since the beginning of August, 2008.
Ultimately, we are doing this because it creates a really simple way to link people to groups and members… and it allows us to leverage OpenID in some new an innovative ways, which you will see in the future.
If you guys have any questions about the whole process, feel free to field them over to support@gamerdna.com!
The member challenge performance issues have been fixed and the gadget put back on the member home page.
RSS Import experiences will now run regularly. You can put in any RSS feed and it will automatically pull it into your Profile page. This allows you to pipe in content from other places where you contribute and aggregate it all together.
When auto-generated blog entries use member names, we are no longer assuming the case of the username. They go in as-is, and if that means that a sentence starts with a lowercase letter, that is how it is. This is based on user feedback to see their name correct.
New games added to your DNA will now respect the watchlist flag correctly.
Cleaned up the formatting of long game names in the panel so they wrap without breaking the layout.
AKAs are now set to Public by default instead of friend’s only to encourage sharing.
Guild Hosting Enhancements/Changes
New Warhammer guild theme, Spoils of War - Destruction!
Fixed the More smiley button on the guild WYSIWYG pages.
For guild sites, the nav will now highlight properly when you are on an active section.
Disabled the bartle pie chart/flash component until the new one is ready running off the new data.
General Site Enhancements/Changes
The homepage now displays information about the Bartle quiz with an action button to get started.
All PlayerVox articles have been republished to the company blog for their new home. PlayerVox was an old GuildCafe online publication. You can find most of them in the category: Gaming Industry
Added an icon for Braid. If you aren’t playing it, you should be!
Proper paging added to the Message of the Day in the header so that it helps with site performance.
The footer for the site has been rebuild to properly display in all cases.
Repaired a small bug in the nav that prevented game lists from loading in the DNA panel.
Fixed an issue where the footer was covering up the comment section for images.
Removed Tags from the blog feed on the homepage so the display is cleaner.
Turned some headers into links on the alliance homepage.
Cleaned up some formatting of the quiz results page.
Fixed some grammar in the XFire auto-blog entries.
If you didn’t know, this week marks one of the most significant weeks in gaming with PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo. For those of you lucky gamers that are going to be there for all fun, gamerDNA has a limited supply of tickets to our own PAX Party. You’ll get to hangout with some of the people behind gamerDNA, play Rock Band, and enjoy Free Drinks at the bar. So, if you live in or around Seattle or are going to be there for PAX, here are the details:
WHO: Any gamerDNA members who are in or around Seattle during PAX
WHAT: A gamerDNA party featuring free drinks, Rock Band, and awesome people
WHERE: The Grand Hyatt Hotel
WHEN: 7:00PM-Midnight on Friday, August 29
WHY: Because you’re awesome!
We do ask that you RSVP for the event because tickets are limited, to do so, just let us know through our support page! We’ll see you in Seattle!
Posted by Sam Houston on Tuesday Aug 26, 2008 Under News
With only a few days to go, I’m excited to announce officially that gamerDNA will be at the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend. While we won’t have a booth at PAX, you will be able to find Jon Radoff, Steve Sopp, Russell Miner and Sam Houston roaming around the convention floor and checking out all the excitement of PAX. gamerDNA will be making the rounds the entire weekend with gamerDNA t-shirts in hand, so if you want one and see one of us don’t hesitate to talk to us and let us know by messaging us on Twitter or private messaging QforQ on gamerDNA.
We will try to "live-tweet" our adventures at the Penny Arcade Expo using our gamerDNA twitter account as well as Sam’s twitter account. If there are any pictures of video taken you can count on those being put up on this blog along with a wrap up when we get back next week.
Here at gamerDNA we love Team Fortress 2 just about as much as everyone else does: A lot - Which is why everyone here in the office was pumped to find out that we now have our own Team Fortress 2 Server! Just connect to 8.9.6.209:27015 and you’ll be in the fray with all your gamerDNA buddies! While you’re at it, why not add Team Fortress 2 to your games collection? Then, when you stab me in the back you can write about it so that all the world can see how you embarrassed me in front of my coworkers!
Want to get an idea of what your fellow gamerDNA TF2 fans will play like? Make sure they’ve taken the FPS Playstyle Quiz so you can now how they’ll react when the going gets tough. And hey! While you’re at it, join the gamerDNA Steam community!
Posted by Imran Malek on Monday Aug 25, 2008 Under Behind the Scenes
Last week we showed you a few screenshots of the upcoming Warhammer Online theme for our group hosting system. Those screenshots were themes that were tailored for the Order faction of the game. Today we get a quick glimpse into the second set of skins, the Destruction set. As you can see, they are a lot more "sinister" than the Order themes, so those of you with a mean streak and/or destructive tendencies can feel at home.
So, in case you weren’t counting, that brings a total of six brand new themes coming into our absolutely free guild hosting system. You can change the theme any time you want, so why don’t you try some of our great existing themes before we launch the Warhammer Online set! Once again, thanks to Zel for the great looking themes!
Do you have a request for a new theme? Why not send us a message and let us know what YOU want!
Finally, for those of you in the Warhammer Online beta, add the game to your gamerDNA and write an experience telling the world of how you play the game. Here’s an excerpt from gamerDNA member Midnight Piper:
The scenarios can be a blast, and the battlegrounds are always fun - even though most of the action consists of the dominant group driving the smaller group to their spawn point and then camping the spawn point’s exit until they lose enough people/the enemy gets enough reinforcements to return the favor and camp the opposite spawn point’s exit. Sieges can be really fun, but again come down to who has the larger force. In each case the fun is in the moment to moment battle with other players more than battling for an objective - it’s usually pretty obvious whether you’re on the winning or losing side.
A long time ago, in a world with trolls, elves, and chain mail bikinis, it became clear over time that people did not play games for the same reasons. Perfectly nice players would get tossed out of guilds for not raiding enough. Terrific players would not be invited to join guilds because they didn’t talk during their probationary period. And of course, the fault was with the player being bounced. He didn’t play the right way. This being one of the earlier MMOs, people took such philosophical differences very… personally.
By "personally," I mean "threats to drive over to your best friend’s house, hauling your mother from that worthy’s bedchamber, and making her sorry she brought you into this world."
As you can see, very little has changed, when it comes to reasonable discussion between gamers of a certain flavor on the internet.
However, the internet gives as well as takes away, and one of the things the internet gave us back then was the Bartle Test. I won’t go into explanations of it, its strengths, or its weaknesses here. Suffice it to say that while crude, your score broadly reflects your play style, and you are most likely to enjoy running in a pack of other people with a similar score.
Since we at GamerDNA are the hosts of this venerable test, we periodically dip into the data bucket to see what patterns and trends may be forming. Here’s the latest snapshot for your enjoyment.
All data was taken in the last 60 days. Also, please note, being a "killer" means your highest score is in the Killer category, and so forth. Incidentally, I had our data man, Steve, run the numbers a second time, to only include people whose top score was at least 10% higher than their second highest score. In other words, these results show the games played by people who were definitely their primary category. While I’m sure there are people who are equal parts, say, "socializer" and "killer," we’re focusing on people who have a strong preference for one over the other three.
TOP FIVE FOR KILLERS:
(I mention killers first because frankly, everyone else will just read the whole article, but killers are more likely to skip the other sections until they find their own, and we’re all about player convenience here.)
The spread between the bottom three was negligible, with AOC just ahead. There are nearly twice as many WOW players as AOC, and there were five times as many people playing WOW as LOTRO in this category. Still, seeing LOTRO at all in the Killer category is fascinating, given that this title’s PVP is not widely celebrated.
This category has the biggest spread - WOW was far and away the top game in this category, with six times as many players as the fifth most popular title - and more than four times as many as the second place title. It’s not even close. If you’re a Bartle achiever, you are almost certainly playing World of Warcraft as your primary game.
I find it fascinating that with such a dominant title, you have a lot more room for surprises in the rest of the top five. I’m not surprised POTBS appears here, as it definitely has a lot of elements that would appeal to the achiever mindset. I’m also not surprised to see not one, but two shooters in the top five list. Again, with one incredibly dominant MMO title, many achievers won’t have time to play more than one - and an easy on, easy off game like a shooter scratches a gaming itch when the gamer doesn’t have several hours to spare.
CoH had the smallest number of people playing out of all the games listed in today’s article. The spread was not as dramatic as it was for killers and achievers, with four times as many people playing the top game as playing the fifth place game.
Well, if you’re a socializer, your preference simply isn’t as strong for any particular game. In fact, I’d venture to say that you’re playing whatever your friends are playing. SWG doesn’t even appear in the Top 20 of Achiever games, but it made it to fifth place on your list. The spread in this division is not wide at all, with only six percentage points separating WOW from SWG.
The Bartle Test is very popular among MMO players, so the results are a bit skewed toward MMOs.
But just for fun, Steve ran the numbers for Rock Band. And this was the biggest shocker I’ve had all week. You’d expect Socializers to love this game, right? Closely followed by Achievers?
It’s actually Killers who love Rock Band. They are represented in higher numbers than their percentage of the general population would predict. The other three categories were equal to or below their percentage of the population.
Keep that in mind the next time you think about talking trash at the guy holding the plastic guitar…
Posted by Imran Malek on Thursday Aug 21, 2008 Under Behind the Scenes
Here at gamerDNA we try to make sure that we keep up with all of the latest trends in the industry, and one huge game that’s only a few weeks away is EA Mythic’s Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Accordingly, our intrepid theme architect Zel has been hard at work at developing some great looking themes for our group hosting interface.
This theme is so big that we’re going to have a total of six skins for it, three for the Order faction and three for the Destruction faction. This week let’s take some time to preview the three Order skins.
The skins are, from left to right "High Elven", "Dwarfen Stone", and "Dwarfen Gold" (on the bottom). Cool, eh? The theme and all six skins will be available very soon, but for now why don’t you visit the group hosting page and create your own FREE clan, guild, or group site.
P.S. Stay tuned to this blog because we’ll be showing off a lot more Warhammer Online content as we get closer and closer to the game’s September 18th release. If you haven’t already, hurry up and add the game to your own gamerDNA!
Posted by Sam Houston on Wednesday Aug 20, 2008 Under News
As we get closer and closer to the Christmas season, publishers are ramping up their releases of games which quickly turns in to an overload of great games coming out. In the next month alone we have Rock Band 2, Star Wars: Force Unleashed, Mercenaries 2, Spore and Warhammer Online releasing, all games that have a large amount of fans behind them and a lot of excitement. Before I get ahead of myself, let’s talk about games that came out this week.
This week Too Human has released (August 20th), a game that has been development for an epic nine years by the development team at Silicon Knights and published by Microsoft. The release hasn’t come without it’s controversy, with mixed reviews coming in early this week about the game. Since the game just released today in most stores our data isn’t really there to indicate if Too Human will come out of the game with a splash or a thud. Whatever the case may be, it will be interesting to see how this pans out. My bet is that this game will be a hot topic for weeks to come.
Team Fortress 2 has been in the news this week because of their free Heavy Update to the game, which added new maps as well as new weapons and achievements to the Heavy class. Valve has stepped it up another notch by allowing everyone to play Team Fortress 2 for free this weekend. If you haven’t already, check this game out, it is one of the best online multiplayer FPS’s out right now.
Last but certainly not least, the drums of WAR have begun as we get closer and closer to the release of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The excitement for this MMORPG has increased with the developers dropping the NDA for the game, the announcement of the Warhammer Online release date and finally announcing that Open Beta starts on September 7th. At gamerDNA we’re very excited about Warhammer Online, so you can count on some fun and exciting WAR announcements coming in the coming days and weeks. Next week we’re hoping to launch a free Warhammer guild theme, so stay tuned and check out our free guild hosting in preparation for the new custom theme.
That about wraps it up for this week’s update. Soon we’ll be talking about our new Warhammer Theme as well as our upcoming visit to the Penny Arcade Expo next week. See you next time!
Posted by Trapper Markelz on Tuesday Aug 19, 2008 Under News
Hey everyone. It is that time of the week again. Build time! This build focused on a lot of quiz cleanup. Once we see things running live, there are often tweaks to make based on how things behave at scale. But there are also a few cool features.
Member Profile Changes/Enhancements
Tweaked the badges page in the profile section to have more information.
The quiz master achievement badge has been reset. In order to qualify again, you have to take all 4 of the quizzes.
Implemented a new gamerDNA Trait signature image file. Get to it in your Badges page of your profile… You can chose between four versions, each emphasizing one of the quizzes with your results. Here is an example of it using mine:
Made some tweaks to the Twitter and Last.fm boxes on the profile page.
Fixed a problem where item lists in the character pane of the DNA panel were all linking to the same item description (the One Ring). They now link to the proper descriptions.
Guild hosting changes/enhancements
A new images roll-up has been added to the guild hosting. It is activated by default, and available via the image gallery tab. Any images uploaded into a gamerDNA profile and attached to the guild will appear on that page.
The guild leader can also add a picture strip to the guild homepage showing the most recently added pictures.
Cleaned up the guild hosting pages so that the buttons are readable in all cases and template selections.
General Site Changes/Enhancements
All Bartle results for existing members have been converted into the new system so that retaking is not required.
Any call to a game with no icon will return a default icon.
Added new footer links that point to the B2B site.
Built out OpenID Login and trust pages for the identity provider. (can’t see this yet but soon!)
On the quiz landing page, clicking the quiz title now takes you to the quiz homepage.
Made tweaks to the company blog including redirects, some side bar gadgets, some new plugins, etc.
When Darkfall was added, a data issue was preventing the theme picker from working properly. This has been corrected.
Fixed an issue where IE7 was sometimes failing to display the quiz results page.
Fixed a bug where users who were giving respect were not getting the proper fame. It has not been corrected to give fame in the correct manner.
Made multiple tweaks and enhancements to the quiz results pages to clean up text wrapping, positioning and some more general copy.
Made some SEO enhancements to the member page so they will appear better in search engines.
Made some of the forum icons transparent at the request of the user community!
Fixed a rounding issue in the quiz system to make the test results more accurate. You will need to retake your quizzes to take advantage of the higher resolution.
The numbers of people reported to take the quizzes was not right. We corrected the counter.
Fixed an issue where the next button was jumping around on the quiz page when some answers were selected.
Quiz badges now properly display the avatar. The issue was that the sizes and file types weren’t uniform, now there is a process to complete that correctly.
Note: In order for your badge to show the avatar for a quiz, you must visit your results page and that will re-generate the badge correctly
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Fixed some typos in the gamerDNA bot quiz responses at the request of the user community.
Fixed a few display bugs in the Activity feed.
Added the mini profile popup to the quiz results pages, so that mousing over a gamerpic shows the user profile information.
Fixed an issue in quizzes where the meta-takeaway was not reporting consistently making it seem like your traits were changing. It now sorts correctly.
Corrected an attitude question that said GuildCafe… should be GamerDNA.
Fixed some 404 errors on the homepage for images. These were hidden images that couldn’t be seen.
Coming down the line
A lot of outstanding issues here… but things everyone should continue to be aware of:
Blogs will be converted into experiences and turned off.
Users will be prompted to rename themselves if they don’t conform to OpenID naming standards
We are aware of performance issues and looking into them.
Guild Roster updates eminent.
Still working on the search engine performance and bringing it back.
Working on challenge gadget performance and bringing it back.
Posted by Jon Radoff on Tuesday Aug 19, 2008 Under News
The world is changing. No longer are games limited to a small subculture of computer enthusiasts. Games are part of the cultural mainstream… But what do we know about the diversity of gamers–geographically, demographically, psychographically? And what can we learn about how people relate to each other through the media of games?
GamerDNA has proposed a presentation on this subject at the upcoming South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. If the subject interests you, please vote for our entry at this years conference clicking here: GamerDNA SXSW Presentation — and voting it up. Comments are also very welcome and helpful, as they’ll help the panel committee understand why the panel is important.
This is also an opportunity to raise the profile of the people who make up the GamerDNA community–because we’ll be talking about our own members and what we’ve learned about games and gaming from YOU. Be a part of shaping the way gamers are perceived by the industry!
Posted by Trapper Markelz on Thursday Aug 14, 2008 Under News
Darkfall Online is not even released yet and it has a huge hardcore following. Most of its draw comes from the promise that it hopes to be a truly massive universe completely centered on PvP. No release date has been given at this time, but that hasn’t stopped many of you from creating guilds and clamoring for your own custom theme! You have asked, and we have answered:
If you want to customize Darkfall, it has has slots for 4 images that can be replaced with your own, to randomly change the image in the top left corner. By default the theme has 4 different dragons in that position by default. You can also replace the 4 large background image as well… the only thing static are the gray boxes with boarders and tribal edges. So have fun with it! Leave any feedback in the comments!
Dream of Mirror Online features a fun and beneficial “personal relationships” system. Everyone, in some way, depends on others, and when you nurture those relationships, you’ll not only make great new friends, you’ll enjoy the benefits of having someone to back you up in any battle, and perhaps even some exclusive special abilities as well.
In Dream of Mirror Online, your characters are able to develop three types of close human relationships: Teacher and Student, Friends, and Lovers. Anyone can develop these relationships, but other relationships are predestined - depending on your birth date and your Chinese zodiac sign, you’ll be connected to certain players by the red string of fate. You may find yourselves to be relatives, rivals, or even a true love via these fated connections - and who knows what may happen after that? It’s all up to your initiative!
The theme comes in orange or blue, sun or moon and displays one of up to five DOMO figures at random. The randomizing images is a new feature and this is the first theme to take advantage of it. You can also customize it even further so that it works with other similarly styled clan/guilds. Enjoy!
Posted by Jon Radoff on Tuesday Aug 12, 2008 Under Market Trends
The following slideshow is from the presentation that I gave at Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2008. The title of my presentation was, “Megatrends in Video Gaming,” with the audacious subtitle of “Can Videogames end War?” I presented evidence that we’ve gleaned from GamerDNA about the increasing social and global nature of games. Will people be more prone to seek peaceful real-world solutions with the people they’re engaging in virtual competition with? What do you think?
Some of the games used in the analysis include: Rock Band, Guitar Hero III, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto IV and Call of Duty IV.
Posted by Trapper Markelz on Tuesday Aug 12, 2008 Under News
The following are all the changes that were made for our latest build. It was a tough build. We added some new routing rules for various features which caused all sorts of problems last night. We were here until 4am tweaking things and are still catching them all… but progress is being made. In the meantime, you can explore a few things:
Profile Enhancements & Changes
Added ICQ as an AKA that you can specify in your gamerDNA panel.
A message was added to quiz section of the DNA panel temporarily to explain where the quizzes have moved to (in case people are looking for them). This will be removed later.
Added the ability to add a level to Guild Wars characters in your DNA Panel.
Fixed a bug where experience embellishments were being blocked in some cases.
Fixed a bug where users who were giving respect were not getting the proper fame. It has not been corrected to give fame in the correct manner.
Hover for WoW characters in the DNA Panel fixed for Safari users.
Previously, if you deleted an image there was no feedback that the delete happened. It now notifies properly.
Fixed an issue where the guild theme styles were conflicting with the DNA panel when adding a character.
New badges section added to the member profile page that holds all your dynamic quiz results sig images.
General Site Enhancements & Changes
New B2B site has been deployed, it isn’t live yet, but will be shortly, focusing on the GamerDNA Alliance and providing additional information about the program and members.
We removed the Guild Radar gadget from the guild directory so we can redevelop it with the new quiz system data to be more accurate and relevant. It will be making a return shortly.
We Added a new page option for guilds. If your users have Xbox Live gamertags, you can enable a sub-page to your guild that lists out a wall of GamerCards. Check it out by going to the “pages” tab and activating it! It looks like this (my test guild as an example):
Cleaned up some design in the Games page of the guild hosting management to better match the current site style.
Cleaned up some design on the guild hosting management screens for the pages configuration.
Special characters in character names now display correctly in on the guild rosters.
Fixed an issue where the cursor was not activating in the guild charter textarea. Users had to switch to the non-rich editor… however that has now been fixed.
That is it for now! We continue to crank on some tweaks from last night, so if you have problems hitting the site, it might be us.
Posted by Trapper Markelz on Tuesday Aug 12, 2008 Under News
We are launching a new quiz system today… we are still tweaking it and will be doing more announcements about it as we create some more integration into other parts of your profile, but for now you can take the new quizzes and get some new signatures for your results. The quizzes have some new components:
Quizzes are no longer in your DNA Panel… they are on the Quizzes page.
Every quiz you take, gives you a dynamic signature that is available in the badges section of your profile. Check mine out!
Every quiz you take contributes to your gamerDNA traits. As you take each quiz, the resolution of it gets better and better, and as we add more quizzes we hope to make it more and more accurate. Here is what your trait panel could look like. We will also be introducing a dynamic signature for the trait panel as well shortly.
There are numerous traits in the system, and as we add more quizzes to test other behaviors, we will add them. In your GamerDNA traits, we display the top six traits that you show the largest propensity towards. This is refelected as “More” or “Less” of that trait. So if you are more inclined to certain things, that trait is “+”. If you are less inclinded to certain things, the trait is “-”.
When you complete a quiz you also get players with similar results that match you, and you also get lists of games that potentially match you as well based on your results.
If you are not registered, and you take a quiz, but registering afterwards, your results are saved… so if you are an unregistered member, you can still give them a try! You do have to be registered to use the dynamic signatures.
So go take some quizzes! I hope everyone has fun with the new system. As I said, we will be ramping up adding quizzes as we go a long and hope to offer a dozen or so quizzes eventually that test across all sorts of genres and behaviors. As always, we are interested in feedback!
