Old Spice Experience Challenge, personalized!

Steve and I are happy to announce the "big feature" that we have been working on for the past few months. It is a story that starts over a year ago with us getting a mention in the Washington Post, which lead to some helpful contacts, which lead to more contacts, which lead to some conference calls, which then resulted in more conference calls, pitches, paperwork, lawyers, creative discussions, LOTS of coding (did I mention lots of coding?)... and BAM!... here we are...

360voice is happy to announce the BETA launch of a new gamer score challenge feature, sponsored by Old Spice. For the complete rules and requirements, check out the Terms & Conditions.

In short, you create a challenge... pass the code out to the people you want to compete against, and see who can gain the most gamer score during the duration that you have chosen. While the challenge is active, you will get daily blog entry updates, a progress chart, and a way to trash-talk your rivals. Oh and did we mention there are some badges and a challenge leaderboard?

So jump right in and check it out! Create a challenge and invite your friends, or check out the challenge board for active/complete challenges that have already taken place during our closed alpha program.

Remember, this is a BETA! Our goal here is to make sure everything is working behind the scenes... Things will get much bigger when we turn on prizing challenges! Yep that is right!

Soon you will be competing in challenges for real prizes! Old Spice will be helping us give away tens of thousands of dollars in prizes... there will be hundreds of prizes to compete for with your friends each week!

Disclaimer on prizes: No purchase necessary.  The Old Spice Experience Challenge prizes are open to residents of the 50 US/DC, 13 or older at time of entry & who have a 360Voice Full membership & have an Xbox 360 Live Gold membership at time of entry.  Void where prohibited.  Begins 12:01 AM PST on 12/5/07; ends 11:59:59 PM PST on 3/14/08.  See Official Rules in December for details.

Watch this blog for more details shortly!

It is going to be a fun holiday season and we at 360voice would just like to extend a sincere thanks to Old Spice for choosing to invest in our site and our community. We would also like to thank the team at Play for helping us make all this happen. Cheers guys and gals!

Also a special thanks to the ALPHA Test team who helped us the last month with 'Project Red Rabbit':

3VCEs
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Community Members (First wave)
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Community Members (Second wave)
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(if you read down this far) Enjoy the new feature! Click the title of this post to leave a comment about your initial reaction to the Old Spice Experience Challenge BETA, powered by 360voice!

Update 3:57am CT

Added a prize disclaimer to the above post.

Comments

[Jcnet]

This thing is a blast, I encourage everyone to spread the word and give it a try, it breathes new life into gamerscore hunting ;p

[DaKing240]

I can't even begin to explain how impressed I am at this, taking a great idea, getting corporate sponsorship to benefit the users, and bringing it to the site in such a way that it blends in perfectly with the existing 360voice... congrats!

[Trapper Markelz]

@Daking240 - Thanks man! It has been a long fun road... still a month to go to the full launch... but it is fun to at least get this out and be able to share what we have been working on. We haven't had time to focus on very many other areas of the site... and I hope this shows why and that it will be worth it!

[SoupyC]

The Alpha was very fun and I encourage EVERYONE to try this out at least once. Just look at my gamerscore graph over the past month or so to see the difference it made for me!

It's fun plus, if you get competitive, you gain huge amounts in a short time! Win, win situation I say! =)

SoupyC

[Vice Destroyer]

That sounds cool. I wish now that I hadn't played all the easy games to death. Should have saved them for just such an event. But I just have one question. Is this competition only for residents of the US, or is it open to the whole world? UK specifically?

[ZaaM IT]

Had a look at completed challenges, wow this looks pretty cool. Thumbs up CA and Fatty! Now if only I would plan to play anything else than Halo 3.. :P

[Trapper Markelz]

@Vice - I will say that prize-based challenges will only be available to US residents. Open (non-prize) challenges will be available to anyone anywhere! We would love to offer prizes to anyone, but legally it is far to complicated for Old Spice to do that... they are forced to only offer prizes to US gamers only.

More information about this (and why) will be published as we get closer to the prizing launch.

[JamJez]

YEAH!! I am SOOOO excited for the both of you. =) I'm sending your link to everyone I know (gamers and non-gamers alike.) You both ROCK!

[MarvMitts]

Wow, This is gonna be fun for sure, I took part in the origianl old spice challenge with Xbox, so i'm looking ofrward to it for sure...

Great Job!

[DeaconBlade]

just got the news from Fatty. pretty kick ass guys....this will surely help me with a personal gamerscore battle i've been waging with an industry friend of mine :)

i'll spread the word to my peeps ;)

[ArcSphere]

This sounds like 12 kinds of awesomeness.

[Jcnet]

"

@Vice - I will say that prize-based challenges will only be available to US residents. Open (non-prize) challenges will be available to anyone anywhere! We would love to offer prizes to anyone, but legally it is far to complicated for Old Spice to do that... they are forced to only offer prizes to US gamers only.

More information about this (and why) will be published as we get closer to the prizing launch.
"

And as many of us should remember that participated in the old spice challenge through xbox.com earlier this year that restriction also applied when Microsoft sponsored the challenge so no one get the impression this is just a 360voice restriction ;p

[nastradamus123]

sounds cool, looking forward to the prize challenges

[FunkyMonkeyBass]

What a suprise! But I should have know you would start it the very day my mail in my 3rd 360 for the red ring of death. Hopefully I get it back in time to catch the end of the Beta.

[Andre]

Digg: http://digg.com/xbox_360/Old_Spice_Experience_Challenge_is_back

[Mr Achievement]

Just when I thought H3 had killed my competitive edge... Along comes a great idea that loops me back in!

Thanx to everyone involved in this great idea!

[Griff009]

Spectacular. Well done. This is what we've been waiting for. Thank you!!!

[DjDATZ]

US only for prizes? C'mon...

Oh well...I already have more than 10 games lined up to whore out...I just don't have the time to do it.

[Rexpower]

Simply Fricken Awesome. Can't wait to see the prizes / prize structure

[TX Eegras]

How long until we get an RSS feed?

[Trapper Markelz]

RSS feeds are out there already for some things. There are RSS feeds for all your challenges and each individual challenge (updates and trash talk).

Web services will be released in Dec... as they are still under flux.

[dtcarson]

This sounds like a great, fun idea!
One question: when it goes live (out of beta), will challenges still be invite-only, or "open to all" (or first 50, etc). I'll admit I don't have a huge Xbox Live presence or a huge friends list, so invite-only seems like it would be rather limiting.

[Trapper Markelz]

@dtcarson - No it will always be private challenges... but people post them all over the forums! There is a whole forum for posting invites, so check that out!

http://www.360voice.com/forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=23

[Fafhrdd]

I think these challenges are awesome! Thanks for everything guys!!!