Archive for October, 2008
Double Dippers: People Who Play Two MMOs
When a new MMO launches, everyone turns and looks at the previous Big Game to see how badly it’s bleeding. After all, massively multiplayer games are all consuming lifestyle games, right? People only pay for one. Therefore, subscription MMOs are playing a zero sum game – if Carebears Online has fifty subscribers, Fluffy Bunnies Online has fifty fewer than they did before the Carebears launched.
gamerDNA Fallout 3 contest
This week brings the long awaited launch of Fallout 3 and gamerDNA would like to celebrate this fantastic game with a contest for some game swag. The Grand Prize winner will win:
1- Large Fallout 3 T-Shirt
1- Fallout 3 Survival Guide (only available at PAX!)
3- Vault Boy Stickers
To participate in this contest, all you need to do is add Fallout 3 to your profile, upload Fallout 3 screenshots, enter a Fallout 3 experience entry,or play Fallout 3 via Xfire, Steam or Xbox Live.
To participate in this contest, all you need to do is:
- Register for a gamerDNA account
- Play Fallout 3 while signed in to Xbox Live, Steam or Xfire between October 31st 12:00am PST and November 7th 11:59pm PST. It doesn’t matter how long you play, just play at least one time to be entered.
- Anyone who is already a gamerDNA member who plays Fallout 3 during that time period is automatically entered.
- Upload Fallout 3 screenshots, add Fallout 3 to your profile, or enter a Fallout 3 experience entry
- You must be at least 18 years old and live in the United States.
- Contest winner will be chosen at random and notified via gamerDNA private message.
Do all this between October 31st 12:00am PST and November 7th 11:59pm PST and you could be a winner!
Good Luck!
October 27th Release Notes
We are right in the middle of a huge update to our games data… we thought it would be ready to rock this week… but there were still a few things we want to tweak before we unleash it upon the gamerDNA world. So instead of a full build, we rolled on some hotfixes for various bugs and small enhancements.
Group Hosting Changes/Enhnacements
- Added the ability to add multiple people to a group invite before sending so you do not have to do them one at a time.
- Made some fixes to guild sigs including the centering of the avatar, the size of the slogan, text alignment, the addition of the member name, and some font fixes throughout.
- Added a new guild theme called SniperVision! Designed to cater to FPS fans, Sniper Vision features two distinct styles to choose from which are available under the advanced option settings as "Rusted Metal" or "Night Vision" versions. Also this theme allows the replacement of every image it uses so you can supply your own graphics to completely customize this theme.
- The hosted group urls are: http://yourgroup.gamerdna.com… many users were passing out these links as http://www.yourgroup.gamerdna.com… this use to not work, but it now will.
- A new stories gadget has been added to the guild sites. The top 10 latest stories for your guild will now appear in the gadget on the homepage. For an example see http://gamerdna-war.gamerdna.com
- Fixed a bug where all members of a group where showing as unclaimed.
- Corrected duplicate ranks that were showing up in the guild members tab.
- Fixed an issue where group pages (custom ones) were missing their titles and there was no method for changing them.
- Fixed an issue where choosing your existing theme would break your theme with a blank background and missing css styles. Now if you click "Choose" on your existing theme, it will remain.
- Fixed an issue with CSS design problems in the frostmorne guild themes.
- Cleaned up the layout of the guild Image Gallery and the pix strip with the approve buttons… still needs a bit more work though to integrate into the themes.
- Changed the default group emblem image to be a new version that blends in better.
General Site Changes/Enhancements
- Made some search enhancements to better handle no results with some possible options based on "sounds like"
- When you perform a search, whatever you select in the drop down will be saved on the results page… it won’t reset the search box anymore.
- Corrected some layout issues on the game pages.
- Fixed an error that was causing profile pages to crash in some instances.
- Fixed the broken links in the search results for groups.
- Added some performance improvements so the login box loads faster in the header.
- All generated sig images will not make a request for 10 minutes after initial query. This will save round trips to the server for performance.
Member Profile Changes/Enhancements
- Created a new layout for the badges page of member profile to accomodate the wide badges and a smaller ad format.
- There use to be a link on the guild list for a game. This link is no longer valid because some guilds are associated to multiple games… The guild link is in the profile, but not attached to the game directly.
- Xfire occasionally incorrectly reports very small game time, if the total is under 0:15, it will post a generalization, not the exact time.
- All COD4 multiplayer Xfire game titles are merged into COD4. They will no longer appear as duplicates.
These next three builds are going to be pretty crazy… we are all over here cranking towards some pretty cool changes. Stay tuned.
New Group Hosting Theme – Sniper Vision
Remember when we previewed our Sniper Vision theme for you? Well, Zel got a little sidetracked with our great looking custom group signatures, but she’s back on the theme wagon and the first thing to show up is our enhanced Sniper Vision theme, featuring two styles in one!
The first style is the Rusted style which offers an eroded, almost post-apocalyptic look.
For those who prefer something a little more covert, we’ve got the night vision theme, perfect for tactical shooter fans who prefer to strike when the sun is down.
Want to start using these themes for yourself? Give our 100% free group hosting features a try! Got any questions about our themes or anything else on gamerDNA? Let us know!
Check out our new Stories Gadget!
We didn’t have an official "Build" this week, but that doesn’t mean that we still added some nifty new features to the site – the stories gadget!
The stories gadget allows group owners to have a rollup of all the stories and experiences that are associated with your group – just make sure to select your group from the drop down menu when you’re entering your experiences!
Horde vs. Alliance Data Smackdown!
As promised, we’re back this week with a better breakdown of Horde/Alliance. Also, this week we’re going to try hosting our charts OURSELVES. I would like to congratulate the readers of the GamerDNA blog for collectively crashing the Chartgizmo server by hammering the everloving heck out of our pretty charts. A big salute and a hug to Steve and Sam, who redid the data from scratch (taking into account all the new people who came over to add their voices to the data). And, um, an apology to Chartgizmo. Sorry, guys. I didn’t mean to love your service to death.
October 22nd Release Notes
Here are the notes from Monday’s build. As always they are a little delayed because we had to clean up a few things (and continue to clean up a few things). Funny enough, during the build day we were published on WoW Insider which made it double fun dealing with new features and new amounts of traffic! Never a dull moment over here!
Profile Changes/Enhancements
- All games played over Steam now appear in your profile if you have the AKA added.
- FriendFeed is now supported for publishing your gamer activity automatically!
- If a game is marked as ANTICIPATING in your game list and we see you play it off a network, we reset the status so that it appears in your QUEUE for you to mark if you liked it or not.
- If you have your Sony Playstation Network AKA added, the PSN card will now appear on your profile at the bottom of the right column.
- Fixed an issue where the social media feed was truncating when it saw a & or =.
- If a user tried to click "upload" without adding an image to the field it will properly validate and no longer throw an error.
- If a social media feed had only one item, it will properly use a singular or a plural.
- Repaired some missing text from image upload activity sent to the social media feeds.
General Changes/Enhancements
- Made some edits to the registration confirmation to better explain some new features.
- Updated the initial private message users receive when joining to showcase new features.
- Added a new Tools drop down to position the Developer API and the Warhammer sig generator. Anything new we put together can live here for more visibility.
- Made performance improvements to everywhere that we display experiences, speeding up counts for things like paging.
- The Alliance co-branded registration is complete. It will allow sites in the alliance to link into our registration system using OpenID.
- We moved one step closer to having over 40,000 games in the system for use in your profile and in groups.
- Groups link was taking users to the wrong page. Routing fixed.
- Fixed the quiz results to only return 5 games instead of the dozens it was returning in error. This was due to an API change that altered the count default.
- Solved a bug where registration would let you submit even if the validation did not pass. The Registration did not complete, it would simply refresh… but it was unclear what was happening. This is now much clearer.
- Corrected an issue that was causing errors in some cases when trying to log in from the member sub domain pages.
- Added Sorcerer class to Warhammer game information.
- Fixed a scenario where the global nav header was appearing on the wrong side of the page for some users.
- Added a min-width to the nav bar to prevent it from collapsing when the browser is re-sized to be too small.
Group Hosting Changes/Enhancements
- New customizable signatures launched for use with your guild/clan/group!
- Permission system extended to the image gallery for guilds to give guild leaders control over image posting.
- Curse WARDB support for Warhammer Item markup added to all forum pages in the site (public and group).
- Cleaned up some CSS bugs in the group layouts.
- Changed the functionality for managing the time that you play and ensuring that it appears correctly in the guild directory. Also fixed the time zone popup.
- Fixed a long standing issue in the Age of Ownage themes where it was not using rounded corners correctly.
- Made some more tweaks to the guild editor so that it is showing in IE7. We added a show/hide button so that if it doesn’t load, users can at least manually load it.
- Fixed up the roster to work better with IE7.
Our next big goal is to work on more performance issues… do some clean up on the group invite process… and complete the roll out of our new game database which impacts many places in the site
GamerDNA launches custom group signatures
This weeks build introduced a number of enhancements, and one of the big features that we just rolled out is our dynamic guild signature system. Now you and your clan, guild, or group members can have a customized signature that let’s everybody know about your group on gamerDNA. Here’s an example from gamerDNA’s own group – Team gamerDNA:
