Archive for September, 2008
TF2 Community Night – The Second Coming
This Saturday, October 4th at 7:00 PM EDT, gamerDNA invites to our second Team Fortress 2 community night! All are welcome, and gamerDNA admins will be on staff to make things a bit more … interesting (those who remember the last community night will know what I’m talking about!).
So come on down! We’re hosting it once again on gamerDNA’s TF2 server.
We’ll see you there!
Warhammer Online Character Data API
Just moments ago gamerDNA launched our Warhammer Online API service, one of the first services that is a part of our gamerDNA Helix Platform. The Warhammer Online web service gives community developers access to character data information from Electronic Arts’ RealmWAR website. This is the same API that gamerDNA used to create our Warhammer Online signature generator that we launched last week.
The character data API gives developers access to every character that has be inputted into the gamerDNA system through our Warhammer Signature generator page on our website. A player’s character name and server name, along with your unique gamerDNA API Key, gives you access to the Warhammer Online API web service.
Today we have also opened up a new section of our forums called "Helix Developers/API", which will become a central hub for all discussions about the gamerDNA APIs we currently provide and all APIs we roll out in the future. Community developers are encouraged to use this forum to collaborate on projects, ask questions, and give feedback on our APIs.
How to get your gamerDNA API Key
gamerDNA Warhammer Online character API web service information and documentation
If you are a community developer and you have built something exciting for the Warhammer Online community, please email us at community@gamerDNA.com for a possible feature on gamerDNA.com
Experience Roundup – Female Gamers Edition
Female gaming isn’t some kind of nebulous concept somewhere out there in the ether of Barbie Horse Adventures and The Sims, it’s everywhere, and this time we’re highlighting some of the coolest experiences on gamerDNA for this edition of the gamerDNA Experience Roundup.
Spore, DRM, and the Reason For the Rage
The answer to last week’s question: I’m crazy.
Okay, I might not be, but the data isn’t going to back me up, here. (Last week, I said “I have a hypothesis that there’s a generation gap here, as well as a number of people unaccustomed to MMOs and DRM in general.”)
September 22nd Release Notes
Hi everyone. This week was a pretty big build for us… as it brings us closer to our mission of providing a unique gaming identity across a growing alliance network of sites using OpenID…
It is also pretty cool that your gamerDNA profile is available from xxxx.gamerdna.com!
Here are the full notes from the build:
Profile Enhancements/Changes
- All members (and guilds) can access their pages by going to xxx.gamerdna.com! Share with your friends!
- Contacted the final set of members that need to change names due to conflict with guilds.
- The badges have been changed to use a .PNG extension, so that they are more versatile and behave with their transparency correctly.
- Fixed an issue where the member name was not displaying on sub profile pages.
- Google maps have been removed form the profile due to the new domain name scheme not allowing for a google map license per sub domain.
Guild Enhancements/Changes
- We changed the layout of the guild image page to use larger thumbnails so that they are easily visible and fixed some IE7 browser issues.
- Corrected more issues in the editor that were causing lots of extra spaces and broken links. We continue to fight the battle on this.
- Found an issue where some themes had the wrong default values specified causing background images to not appear. Also repaired some small issues in the theme switcher that would cause blank values to be saved.
- Fixed an issue where the image gallery on the guild page was not obeying the size of the page and breaking the layout.
- If a guild is disbanded, you will no longer be able to access the old pages by guild id number or short name.
- Any older guilds that were never given short names, have been back-filled to have them as required by the new sub domain requirements.
General Site Enhancements/Changes
- New Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning signatures launched at http://www.gamerdna.com/warhammer-signature/
- OpenIDs are now supported for registration. If you want to create an account without a password and use an existing OpenID that you have, you can now do that at gamerdna.com
- OpenID is now supported for login. If you have an existing member account, you can login and associate your openID to that gamerdna account.
- New forgotten password page implemented. It no longer uses a popup.
- Quiz result pages have their content added back in, with a new flag to flip them off for performance reasons.
- We had to remove the DNA Active strand from the homepage for performance reasons. We moved a few elements around until we can implement the new homepage design.
- In some cases, using spaces in your name would break registration validation and cause user confusion. This has been repaired.
- Fixed performance issues around uploading an image.
- Fixed performance issues around selecting an attitude.
- Until we can properly populate games into the list with enough information, the search bar in the upper right is restricted to only finding "Tier 3" games. These are games we have specifically promoted within the system for use with guilds.
- If you try to submit the first answer of a quiz without an answer, it no longer breaks.
- Corrected some typos on the registration page and quizzes.
- We are now truncating the game name on the character DNA panel to prevent strange wrapping issues in the small list space.
- Changed the help text on registration to explain that hyphen are allowed.
That’s it this week! We have a really ambitious week, hoping to get some pretty serious and awesome enhancements to your member homepage in for Sept 29th. Look for those on Monday!
Warhammer Online Signature Generator
Today we are excited to launch our Warhammer Online signature generator. Warhammer Online players now have the ability to create dynamic signatures that display live up to date character data based on the North American Warhammer Online RealmWAR character page.
Here are examples of our two signatures, one for Order and one for Destruction.
How you can get your own free Warhammer Online Signature:
- Sign up for gamerDNA.com (if you do not already have an account)
- Sign in to gamerDNA and go to the following link Warhammer Online Signature Generator
- Put in your character name and server name for that character and click submit.
- Now you have your signature with the provided HTML and BB Code so that you can instantly use it as a signature anywhere!
*Note* We currently do not support European Warhammer Online servers due to the fact that a European RealmWAR website has not be created by Electronic Arts/GOA. If/When a website is created by the publisher that publishes this data we will support European players ASAP *Note*
Edit: We now support European Servers!
All our Warhammer Online signatures display your character name, your class, rank, reknown rank, server name and guild name (if applicable). This is all done for free for all members of gamerDNA without the need to download any client that watches your gaming. Just plug in your character name and server name and you’re ready to go!
Finally, don’t forget that you can win one of five 60-day free game time cards for Warhammer Online if you take part in our Warhammer Online contest that ends this Sunday. All you have to do to win is add Warhammer Online to your profile or play WAR via Xfire, add a screenshot or experience to your profile. For all the details check out our Warhammer Online contest announcement.
Check back in the near future for some more very exciting announcements for Warhammer Online players as well as more contests. Make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed or our email notifcation so you can know as soon as anyone else does!
DRM and Spore
Even if you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that despite one of the best-executed marketing juggernauts in history (and a legitimately awesome game), the big story around Spore has been the Digital Rights Management kerfluffle. Sure, every major media outlet has been trying to carry the carefully pre-packaged drama about how Wright wants to make you into an atheist’s Intelligent Designer. Something like that. I dislike wasting my precious time with choreographed controversy, so I’ve barely paid any attention to that meme. You can find that “story” in Time Magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and more.
A more authentic story is that customers are a raging ball of hate for the way EA chose to handle the DRM issues.
We have been “Kotaku’d” (Site Issues)
Updated: 2:07am EST Saturday
Today has been a very exciting day with our announcement of gamerDNA hitting 500,000 quizzes being taken on our site. Along with that announcement, we’ve been receiving some great write-ups on various gaming press sites. The most recent write-up that we received was up on Kotaku, which had many great things to say about gamerDNA. Welcome to gamerDNA Kotaku readers!
Earlier today we had some trouble keeping everything up and running because our servers were getting slammed from Kotaku readers checking out the site. Right now it looks like everything is running well and the site is holding up, so please feel free to check out all the features on the site that you may not have been able to reach earlier due to site issues. We’re very excited about our 500,000 quizzes milestone and we’d love for you to check out the quiz system enjoyed by so many people.
In the future you can monitor our gamerDNA Twitter account to keep up on any news and announcements we have from gamerDNA, as well as any site issues that we may encounter in the future.
