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Arcade Sale this Weekend

Gamerscoreblog.com announced a nice but short sale on a few arcade titles this weekend:

On top of that, four Xbox LIVE Arcade favorites will be available for half their regular price this weekend. Small Arms and Zuma Deluxe will be 400 points (regularly 800), and Gauntlet  and Dig Dug will be only 200 points.  Buy them beginning at 12 AM GMT on Sunday, September 2 (5 PM. PDT on Saturday, September 1) and continuing through 11: 59 p.m. GMT (4:59 p.m. PDT).  Don't miss out!

We don't normally post info like this, but half off is a pretty good deal, and since it's such a small window I didn't want any interested party to miss out.  Also posted on Major Nelson, with nice time conversion links and all the goodies.  I'll be buying a couple of those, will you?

Code Night Results

Code Night rundown! w00t!

S00per Sekret!: Trapper spent his code night working on some secret things. That's really all I can say about it, you just get to hear about stuff that I worked on.... Sorry!

Support Pages:  We have a few tools we build for ourselves to make support easier. I mainly needed to add a way to correct records if for some reason we miss a day for a gamertag.  We missed records for a few gamers, and we are still investigating why this is happening.  So we built a quick way to replace the missing info in our internal pages. We are looking into adding more redundant pulls and smarter recovery for this when we get the new hardware.

Gamerscore Distribution Charts: There are a slew of issues with these charts, mostly around arcade and retail titles with added achievements passed the previous score limits.  I made some temporary changes, but they are going to be in flux a bit this week as everything gets rewritten.  You may notice some different numbers and distributions throughout the week, as stuff gets changed on the fly.  All the charts should be getting some love in the next couple weeks as these have been neglected.  You guys just love your badges too much to concentrate on these...

Speaking of badges: no updates this week for genres.  We got lots of feedback and want to set some clear rules on what goes in and doesn't go in a badge.  Even at PAX I had people asking for different genres (PMS Kitty really wants her movie genre), so we want to get this done soon, but with travel and stuff, I just don't want to rush it and not do it right.

That's it, it doesn't look like a lot but I really needed to play catch up and do the support pages right, so we make sure data is getting in there and we aren't creating future issues.

Things running slow, 8/28/2007

Things are running a bit slow today... for some reason, our hardware is having a hard time on Monday running the badge processing and the weekly recap processing at the same time. This is a rather new development, as it has always been this way...

The result is that the blogs are just now starting to process so everything is fairly behind schedule. It will all shake out, although we might have to cut the badge processing for today if it drifts too far into the evening to give everything a chance to catch up.

Never fear though... for the last few weeks Steve and I have been working to secure funding and quotes on a complete hardware upgrade which should bring a new level of performance to the website. We are now closer than ever. If all goes well, we might be getting brand new hard-core servers and have them up and running in the first few weeks of Sept. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Welcome Halo 3

It is official... Halo 3 appeared for the first time on our site today. I am sure it will appear a few more times right? ;) Who was the lucky soul who unleashed it upon the 360voice database? Why it is Frankie... but I bet we all knew it would be him.

Look who is at Pax 2007

Fatty Chubs aka The King (or maybe the crown says Princess?) has been spotted at Pax 2007 in the Gamerscore blog photos... 

Update 9:00pm CT

Fatty Chubs has been playing a lot of interesting games... check out his blog.

Code-it Tuesday time

Man, things have been rough around here lately... we are rapidly outgrowing our hardware which is causing all kinds of joyous problems... so we are continually fighting fires these days. We plan to upgrade as soon as humanly possible. These days, it isn't an easy process because our database is so big... and besides we are looking at some pretty beefy stuff and want to get the specs right. In the meantime, here are some new features/tweaks to show that we aren't completely slacking!

  1. New blog processing order
    The blogs use to process in order of registration... so the oldest members got their blogs first, the newer members, later in the day. I have switched this to now factor in your community involvement. I don't want to give away the formula, cause I don't want people manipulating it... but I am confident that the most active community members will get their blogs within the first 10 minutes of daily processing. You will still have to clear your cache to see them... but you will have that option.
  2. New Leaderboards: Completionist
    There are a set of five (5) new leaderboards that rank you by your completion percentage. To keep it somewhat fair, we broke them into 5 levels by the numbers of games that you play. It isn't perfect, but let us know what you think.
  3. Boosted the Watch list to 20 spots
    Everyone was asking for it so we decided to do it. You now have 20 spots available for your watch list. To use the watch list you must have a forum account.
  4. Genre Changes
    Fatty Chubs decided to shake it up a bit this week with some genre changes. I think this is only the second time we have removed a game from genres. Give us your feedback.
    Sports - Added Madden NFL 08
    Puzzle - Added Hexic 2
    Race - Removed Import Tuner Challenge.
  5. A few new blog sayings
    Cluskevird sent in a few sayings so I worked those into the Personality Processor.

So that is really it for new features... most of our work has been in the area of data fixes... as we get bigger and bigger... even the smallest little discrepencies snow ball out of control and you all call us on it! So here are some of the things we were playing with this evening:

  1. Game stat cleanup
    People had been reporting situations where their points and achievements weren't up to date. This should be pretty much cleaned up. Remember it takes a full 24 hours for any games you played to fully update across all your stats.
  2. More tweaks to manual game data fixes
    If you submitted game data fixes, we were having some problems with the right info going to the right places. Let us know if you submitted game data fixes and they still aren't there, even though they are showing APPROVED in the history section. Let us know via the contact form.
  3. Investigating missing records from the 16th
    The queries to try and rip through the database and find everyone just aren't performing... so if you are still missing entries around 8/16, use the contact form and let us know! We will fix it on a person by person basis it only looks like a handful of people.
  4. Presence downtime
    Over the last few days presence (which we use to track demo/beta/backcompat gaming for anyone with a forum account) has not been working very well. We rebooted the server and are investigating the issues. It should be on track now (for tomorrow), but we will have to keep an eye on performance. We hope to build some automated reporting to let us know when it fails so that we can catch it sooner.

So it has been a busy and productive night... many more nights like this to follow. Steve and I are also planning a code weekend for September. He will fly to Chicago and we will code for 48 hours straight to knock out a few bigger items.

(to leave comments, click the title of this post)

Update 8/22/2007 7:12am  CT

Tiger 08 hasn't been released yet and has been removed from Sports for now. It was added, but you correctly pointed out that it hasn't been released. That slipped in on accident.

A new "my blog settings" link

A few people have been emailing in, having problems finding the "Blog settings" link that appears when you are logged into your forum account. This link will now appear in your "Links & Community" section if you are logged in, and you are viewing your own blog. The link will also be in its current location so you can find it on any page.

What is this blog settings thing? If you have a forum account, you get access to special customizations for your blog. Sign up and check it out!

A special thanks to syndelin for the idea!

New 3VCE: Fshguy

Fatty Chubs and I would like to announce that Fshguy has been awarded a 360voice Community Expert  (3VCE) badge. 3VCEs are people that have been recognized for their contributions to the community.

Fshguy has been active in the forums every since joining. He has created the ever-popular Badge calculator and has been instrumental in helping us extend our web service API.

If you are wondering what this 3VCE business is, check out the FAQ.

No Badges on 8/15

A nice big cherry on top of a rough day, I get to announce there are no badge updates today.  We had to kick the server around a bit, and get stuff going again and the badges were the first thing sacrified.

Sorry guys, hopefully all our love and care spent today with the servers, will mean a smoother day tomorrow.

Things are running slow

For some reason, things are still recovering from the problems on Monday. Everything that is running is running really slow. I think the database server just needs a nice reboot... so we will try and do that after the jobs finish today.

So if you don't see your entry yet, never fear... it is on its way... it is just shy this morning.

Update 4:45pm CT
If you haven't noticed, we have had some more issues today with stability. Technical explanation: The disk I/O on our server is the bottle neck... database reads and writes back up... the web server connections back up... things start to hang... and the site cascades into madness from which only a reboot can cure. Our current vendor does not provide RAID as an option... so we are looking at more drastic short term measures... I will keep you posted on what we decide to do.

The results of Tuesday code night

Not a lot to see here... we can't really call it a "coding Tuesday" when we have been coding non-stop for the last two days recovering from the small Xbox Live hiccup this week and taking the opportunity to try and revamp a few things to protect us in the future... there are many different types of coding... some where you replace existing stuff, some where to build new stuff, and some that you do, and then have to throw away because it was a dead end. We have had lots of dead ends lately which means less new functionality for all of you! We did do a few things though:

  1. Genre changes
    Fatty Chubs only has one genre change this week... Spyglass Board Games was added to Social.
  2. Gamerscore Leaderboard change
    There was a thread in the forum where it was suggested that we remove people who are not actively playing their Xboxes from the leaderboards so that people who are actively using their systems can be recognized. So we thought we would give this a try and gauge some feedback. If you haven't used your Xbox in the last 30 days, you will NOT be in the gamerscore leaderboard. Let us know what you think of this change. If you are removed and you want to get back in, just play your Xbox!
  3. Added validation to game data fix form
    The form for submitting game data fixes did not have any error checking built in. If you submitted it without required fields, it caused an error. I have added validation now. Remember, you have to have a forum account to submit data corrections!
  4. Data model cleanup
    We went through our data environment and removed a ton of tables that were old/not being used and just taking up space and causing confusion.
  5. Replication madness
    Replication (the process that moves data between servers) went down today very hard... it was an error I had never seen before and I just recently got everything back in the green... there is still some small data sync to do... but I will take care of that over the next few days once things calm down with the servers.
  6. Caching experiments
    I have been playing around seeing what is left that I can possibly cache to make things run better. This is a very hit and miss process. Sometimes caching things doesn't behave how you expect and it actually causes more problems that it relieves. This was the case with RSS a few days ago as I tried to convert it to run off the blog cache and ended up making performance worse... so I had to back that out.
  7. Stuff we can't talk about
    We are always working on lots of things that can't be announced yet because we don't know if they will work. I personally spent about three hours coding something that I can't really announce at this time... but it should be fun when I can.

So yeah... it doesn't look like we are doing much... but I assure you we are... hopefully it will all pay off soon.

(to leave a comment, click the title of this post)

Why did we create 360voice?

I was looking through some old feeds and came across an Achievements 101 article over at Xbox360fanboy.com by Knuckles Dawson... it perfectly captures why we made 360voice in the first place:

Upon my return home with my streak intact, I picked up TMNT, for two reasons: First, it has been recommended by you readers as an easy 1000, a secondly, the value of the Achievements allowed me to get my cumulative Gamerscore to end in a 4, in time for me to hit 44,444, and then find an opportunity to even in out close to 45,000.

Read more

Do you see it? See how he linked to the specific day where he got the scores 44,444 and 45,000? Both of those moments, now locked in time. There was no way to do that (automatically) with a gamer card before 360voice was on the scene. Every gaming day is now linkable...  You can point people to a certain moment when you did certain things. It makes your gaming more bloggable... (is that even a word?)... and sure... we could have just done a page of stats per day... that would be so much easier that building an entire Personality Processor to wrap it in blogeriffic text... but where is the fun in that? Steve and I like to take the hard road! :)

Lots of linky goodness

Here is the time... when we... 360voice... link back... to all... of you...

The Mixed up world of Cluskevird
The Power of Groups - Some people may think that violence is the only way for people to take notice, but from a simple little experiment it is proven again that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Simple Duck

"My 360 was orgasmic on Saturday, but then Sunday when I tried to cuddle afterward he got all “step off”."

Chimps with keyboards

"...where it really comes into it's own is the RSS feed. I subscribe to the feeds of a few friends and it's a perfect way for me to see what they've been playing recently."

Kwynn's Space
"Of course if they didn't give me a badge for getting to 100 days I probably wouldn't have done it."

ShaperMC
"So, yeah, kind of stupid, but I wish that I had done it before."

Mr. Achievement
"360voice.com is the most unique Xbox Community site on the web."

John

"It's really wasted so check it out!"

Graemef.com

"My Xbox360 is feeling so neglected that it's started blogging!"

Nate's Nation
"360voice is a good way to keep track of your gaming friends’ habits (if you’re into that)."

Vee to the L O is Back
"...my 360 blogs about me and it loves me YAY!"

Unruly behavior
"Thanks to 360 Voice, my XBOX 360 has something to say about me each and every day."

Buttonmashing.com
"My name is Dark Reyule, and I am an achievement addict. I’m not sure when it happened… well, OK I know exactly when it happened. According to chart on my 360voice.com blog..."

Thanks everyone! It is always fun to see our name in virtual print. It never gets old. If you keep talking about us (in a good way!) than I guess we are still doing right by you all.

Problem with Feeds last night...

It looks like there was a problem with the feeds last night. It looks like we only got 75% of the member data before the data locked up and stopped sending. We are looking into the impact. Right now, blogs are on hold for today. We will investigate and get up as many as we can. Streaks will most-likely be turned off for today due to the lack of data.

Updates to follow...

Update 8:46pm CT
From what we can tell, it looks like the massive Bioshock load was possibly impacting the feed performance. We have some code in there to timeout if the feed request for a user takes too long, and simply retry after a few seconds, but for some reason that timeout was not occurring. But it does look like things were running pretty slow after the big Bioshock demo announcement and it degraded our service right when we attempt the nightly pulls. We are doing our best to get it cleaned up, but it still only looks like 75% of you are going to get real entries.

Update 10:43am CT
We almost have the data patched up the best we are going to get it. It took a little longer than normal, but we are almost ready to start running the blogs. We won't be tracking any ignore streaks. This means that if you played today (or Xbox reported you did in time) than you will get credit for the streak. If xbox live did not send your data, you WILL NOT lose your streak. As always, email us if you have a problem with the results of the processing.

Update 11:52am CT
Based on a comment in this blog entry, we won't be running ANY streaks for anyone. This is so that people don't move around in the leaderboards... We don't want a situation where someone moved ahead of someone else because they were lucky enough to get their info for the day. This wasn't an issue before but because of the leaderboards, we probably shouldn't increase any streaks. Thanks for pointing this out.

Update 1:20pm CT
Sorry everyone, it is still going to be a bit until the blog entries are there... some other issues cropped up and we decided to fix them first. Thank you for your patience. I will update when the blogs are running.

Update 4:28pm CT
Blogs are FINALLY running.... craziness... Our hardware is pretty maxed out at this point. Just doing the processing that we needed to do to get things semi-back on track too WAY longer than it should have. Believe me... we are going to rework this whole thing... the primary issue is that with Xbox Live being hung around midnight, our backup feed pull was messed up too... so when that happens we have to manually piece together who got data, who didn't, and then create holder records for the missing people, etc. etc. It is a complex chain. With a little time, we can write some automation to make it much easier to recover next time. Every outage is a learning experience!

If you don't see an entry for yourself, don't panic... we will be taking another pass after the first round completes to fill in the stragglers.

Welcome back Game Data Correction!

It has been a battle, but we have finished our improvements to the Manual Game Data Correction system. What this allows you to do, is IF you have a forum account, you can submit corrections that need to be made to your game data at 360voice.

When you register your blog, we only get the last 16 games you played from Microsoft, so if we are missing any of your past games, you have two options:

  1. If you still have the game, just put it in the Xbox and play it one time. The next blog entry will pick up all the missing achievements.
  2. If you do NOT have the game, use the manual game data correction tool.

You get to it by clicking the "blog settings" link in the upper right of the page when you are logged into your forum account.

Please note. You CANNOT submit arcade games. If you are missing arcade games from your profile, you have to download them and play them. We do this so there is less to have to verify. So have fun getting your profiles up to date! We will do our best to verify and submit the requests in a timely manner.

One more special note. If you submit multiple game data fixes, they ALL must have the correct lastPlayed dates, achievements, and gamer score, otherwise your entire set of submissions will be denied. So watch the typos! We don't want to see you wasting your time!

Blog delay

Today there is a big of a blog delay for some people. There was a part of my new code that checks gamerscore and I didn't account for situations where people have gamers in their watchlist that are no longer correct or active, thereby returning a "null" gamerscore... and computers don't like when you try and convert nulls to numbers so it was crashing.

So I fixed it and now the blogs are re-running... it should complete in an hour or so and then everything should get back on track.

The first code night in awhile...

It has been far too long since Fatty Chubs and I have gotten to write a little code together. While we didn't get everything done that we wanted (*cough* game data fixes *cough*), we got a good selection of things in that we have been meaning to add.

  1. Renamed the Style badges to Gamer, Elite, and Jedi.
    We were getting lots of feed back that people with 25% of the completed achievements, didn't like being called "Dabblers" so we decided to switch up the badge names a bit. Are you an achievement Jedi? Not many people are...
  2. Created an API for the top 20 most popular list
    A few people were asking for this (if I remember right). So if you are interested in tracking the most popular, you can now get it from our API via an XML feed.
  3. Created the Streak leaderboard
    With so many crazy people landing streaks past 365 days, it was high-time that we start looking at where everyone else falls on the list. Go check out the streak leaderboard. It also appears in the leaderboard gadget on your blog so you can easily see where you rank. I pretty much figure that this will be a support nightmare for us as we already get lots of people who lose their streaks... so PLEASE PLEASE read the Streak Guide to keep your streaks alive. And if people at the top of the list can do it, I know you can to.
  4. Blogging about the Watch List
    So this is some cool functionality that was sparked by a forum thread by Jimy bananas. Your Xbox will now make periodic comments about the people on your watch list and their gamerscores. Look for it on any day divisible by the number 5... so on 8/10 will be the first one for people. It has been awhile since we added new blog content so this was fun to work on.

So thats it for now! It is late and we will probably turn manual game data fixes on tomorrow... a few more tweaks left on that one... so look for it soon and you can all submit your missing games so that you can get the badges that you should have!

We also have some super-massive things brewing over here... so even if it looks like we aren't working on anything, I guarantee you we are... oh man are we ever.

PSonic, Streak Legend.

When we launched streaks over a year ago I never imagined they would be as popular as they are today.  One gamer in particular PSonic, has really set the bar for streaks, and I had to get into the mind of someone who could go over a year without missing a single day playing with his beloved Xbox 360.  So I wrote up this interview for PSonic who currently holds the record for the longest streak.  Also if you want to delve deeper into this mad man's mind, you can read his self told, "Confessions of a Video Game Junkie".

So Psonic before I start grilling you on your streak, I have some basics to get out of the way.

Q. How did you come up with your gamertag?

My gamertag is based on P for my first name, Patrick, and the rest is somewhat obvious - Sonic the Hedgehog.  I got the idea several years ago from a friend of mine that managed a GameStop (Babbages at that time).  His name is Jim and he used "JMario" as the basis for his e-mail address.  I liked the idea so I used it.

Q.  What is your favorite Xbox 360 game?

Project Gotham Racing 3, although it has been a long time since I've played it.

Q.  What games are you looking forward to coming out?

Project Gotham Racing 4 and Tiger Woods 08

Q.  How long have you been a 360voice member and how did you find the site?

I've been a member since May 1, 2006.  I found the site thanks to a post on Major Nelson's site.  I've been enjoying the site ever since.

Q.  Did you think it would take a full year to be the sole streak leader?

I really had no idea how long it was going to take to be the sole streak leader.  I was determined to keep it going until it actually happened.  The person I thought was going to provide the most "competition"(if you can really call it a competition) was MysticWeirdo.  Because of this whole streak thing, he's on my friends list and he's a very good guy and very dedicated gamer.  He takes the time to write FAQs for games he plays and is very helpful on the xbox.com forums.  Because of a glitch at some point, myself and one other person gained an extra day over Mystic Weirdo and 2 other people.  If not for that, I know for a fact that at the very least, Mystic Weirdo would be tied with me to this day and there would be no sole streak leader.

Q. What are some of the extremes you went to keep your streak this past year?

How long do you have? Contrary to what people might think, I DO go on vacations and other sorts of trips. I have 2 small children (ages 5 1/2 and 4) that keep me plenty busy.  I don't just sit at home every day waiting to turn on my 360.  I just make sure that wherever I go, my 360 comes with me.  Since the streak began, I have played in Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina (my home state), North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. 

One time in Florida, I had to spend around 90 minutes on the phone with the hotel's internet tech support to get the internet connection working.  All was finally well and I was able to get on and play.  My wife and I didn't realize until later that the air conditioning vents for the hotel were right outside our room.  It was not a good night's sleep.  My wife wanted to change hotels and I convinced her to stay in the noisy room because of the hassle I went through just to get the internet working for my 360.      

My father unexpectedly passed away in Indiana in early February of this year.  Although I didn't take my 360 with me on this particular trip, I did take a memory card with my profile on it.  I stayed with my sister and they have a 360 at their house.  I logged on their 360 during the week or so that I was in Indiana for my father's funeral.      

The best example I can give comes from the course of the last 2 1/2  months.  I started bar review classes in Columbia, SC on May 14, 2007.  This was a 9 week class that lead up to me taking the South Carolina bar exam (I've actually been licensed to practice law in Wisconsin since 1992, but moved to South Carolina in October 2004).  I had this great place to stay - it had a 50 inch plasma tv on the wall.  One problem:  no internet connection and no chance of getting one in the unit in which I was staying.      

I managed to find an open wireless signal in the building with my MacBook.  I then had to test it out with the 360.  The big issue was access.The only way I could access the signal and not get caught was to take my 23inch LCD tv and my 360 up on to the roof of the building and then down about 75 yards to where I could catch the signal.  From May 14 to the end of June,I had to repeat this process every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in order to go online and keep the streak.  On Thursdays, I would travel 150 miles back home and play there until I drove back on Sundays.      

Starting July 1 of this year, I stayed in Columbia straight through to the end of the bar exam with ended on July 25.  That meant that I had to climb to the roof every one of those days.  At one point, the wireless signal I had been "borrowing" stopped working.  I scrambled and found an area in downtown Columbia that provided free wi-fi access.  I then found an outdoor outlet and plugged right in.  I did get some very confused looks from people as I'm sitting in the middle of a downtown area playing video games...  I had to resort to this on about a half dozen occasions.

Q. Are you planning on ending your streak anytime soon?  Maybe take a vacation or are you going for two years?

I really don't "plan" on ending the streak any time soon.  I may have it taken away from my by Mother Nature.  The internet tends to go down where I live whenever there's a major storm. I've been able to work around outages, but you never know when it might prevent me from keeping the streak.  Otherwise, I intend to keep it going for as long as possible.  I have 2 trips to Milwaukee planned for September of this year and January of next year.  I'm sure the 360 will come with me.

Q. What features do you want to see added to  360voice around streaks?

Even though I understand that streak badges are not static, I would certainly be in favor of a static badge for certain lengths of time for the streak.  I think a good place to start would be, hmm, I don't know, a static badge for playing 365 days in a row? ;)

Q. What's your next Xbox 360 related goal?

My short term goal is to make it 75,000 in gamerscore.  Long term,I'd like to keep the streak and eventually get to 100,000.

Wow sounds great! Thanks for taking the time to respond.  Good luck keeping the streak alive! 

Missing blog entries?

We have received a number of support emails about missing blog entries. If your entries are missing, scroll to the bottom and click the "Reset Cache" link. This will allow you to destroy and rebuild the cache that servers your blog. We use this because it makes the load on our servers much lighter on our database server. Normally we wouldn't subject you to such techie things, but we figure since you are all gamers, you can handle it!

I am looking at ways to resolve situations when the cache files don't seem to delete. But in case I fail (and it is quite possible since I am a flawed human), there is always the reset cache backup! Also leaving a comment on a blog or on your own blog resets the cache as well... so that is also an option.

Getting back to normal...

I am all moved into my new house and things are getting settled, so it is almost time to start focusing on 360voice again! I know there is a lot of functionality we have been promising this month, and it is almost there... some big things have just come up that have forced us to move a few things around. Thanks for your patience every one! We hope to reward it soon!

Most popular blogs reset

July 2007 has come to a close... the most popular blogs were:

  1. Mr Achievement *
  2. Major Nelson
  3. jcnet *
  4. GameSpotting *
  5. Sufoor
  6. StripClubDj
  7. cc99999 *
  8. ChangeAgent *
  9. Rance6
  10. PSonic *
  11. Zumafire
  12. m4rk0551 *
  13. barbieri
  14. Mrs Achievement *
  15. MagicMe
  16. Fatty Chubs *
  17. COBAIN x87x *
  18. andyg8180 *
  19. the dren *
  20. Roncore

I see a bunch of new faces! That is great stuff! We might have The Order of the Nelson to thank for that... ;)