360voice Dev Blog

CoD4 Community Night Winners

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the CoD4 community night this past weekend. It was a great time. I have to say Saturday night ran the best. We played Old school matches almost the entire time, and the games were all close and exciting. Thanks to everyone who made it enjoyable. Now onto to the T-shirts.   

The following people who joined us and won Call of Duty T-shirts (chosen at random) are:

Monky Spit
Mister Biceps
Bomber37
meowgodofcats
CrazyCougar
KINGxSAINT

Congrats again to those folks!

The following people have won 360voice shirts for playing CoD4 during the weekend:

UrStuck
cl0ak3dstrang3r

I can see why CoD4 is still near the top of the XBL charts. It is a solid title when you have a good group of folks playing... Even when I was holding down the bottom of the leaderboard at times.

Call of Duty 4 Community Night!

Update: All spots for the community night are filled, we are at Max capacity.  If you couldn't join us, you could still be eligible for a chance to win a CoD4 shirt, just by playing CoD4 this weekend.  Full details below.

Listen up soldier!  It's time for a 360Voice Community Night and we're going to be fragging each other in Call of Duty 4.  Clean that gun and check your ammo, this month we'll be having not one, but two Community Nights along with an entire weekend dedicated to COD4.  Not only that, we'll be giving away official Call of Duty 4 T-Shirts throughout the game sessions and weekend, compliments of Infinity Ward's FourZeroTwo

Join us on Friday July 25th or Saturday July 26th for our 360Voice Community Night to play some multiplayer COD4.  We'll be playing on Friday from 7:00- 9:00PM EST and Saturday 8:00-10:00PM EST.  If you would like to join us, please put your gamertag in this form sorry all spots filled.  Please only sign up for one day only, as we want to be able to play with as many people as possible.  Attending this event will earn you the plays well with others badge and the chance to win some 360Voice and COD4 t-shirts.

If you can't join us on Friday or Saturday night, you can still play COD4 and have a chance at a prize.  Any registered member of the site that plays COD4 any time between  Friday July 25th and Sunday July 26th, will be eligible for a chance to win a COD4 t-shirt. Special thanks go out to Infinity Ward and FourZeroTwo for the fantastic prizes.  That's right you can play multiplayer or single player, and as long as you are connected to live you are eligible.

Make sure you look out over the weekend, you just might see FourZeroTwo playing alongside you!  See you online!

Official Rules: To be eligible for the weekend t-shirt drawings you must be a registered member of the site, must play COD4 between 01:00AM 07/25/2008 EST and 11:00PM 07/26/2008 EST (while connected to Xbox Live and having all privacy settings disabled) either single or multiplayer. To be eligible to win a t-shirt during the 360Voice Game Nights you must sign-up for your desired date and play at least one game with a 360Voice staff member.  Members will be chosen at random throughout the game nights and game weekend.  Please check 360Voice.com the week after the contest to see if you won!

E3 Wrap Up

Last week during each of the E3 press conferences, we held chats to kick off our new IRC powered chat room.   All were pretty fun, and the chat room is now a permanent fixture if you want to come hang out. 

We gave a couple T-shirts away as well the winners are:

zZ Dr K Zz and Cogo2112

Congrats and thanks to everyone for joining us, and you should have received a plays well with others badge as a small token of our appreciation.  (Yes we have to bribe people to hang out with us). 

I don't really want to turn this into a commentary of how the companies did at E3.  But personally I think Microsoft did very well and by far the best of the show. If their only down fall was that it was a bit uneven at times, trying to appeal to everyone.  But I can respect them offering something for everyone, as the on stage demos up front were great, the new party system and Netflix looks rad, and there were same great looking retail and arcade games announced.   I also got a playable Too Human demo, which is sweet, you should check it out. 

So I am already looking forward to next year, hopefully we will see you all then.

Conversion complete

I just wanted to let everyone know that I think I found everywhere that Old Spice was mentioned and have completed removing it from the challenge feature. So if you are in a gamerscore challenge and you see "Old Spice" anywhere, feel free to shoot me an email.

Thanks to everyone who was sending in the support emails!

You will also notice the challenge badges are a shade of green now... mmmm xbox green... actually it is less xbox green than it is green bean green... I also replaced the ship with the letters "GC" for gamerscore challenge. I was working on an icon and man... I don't know but my icon making skills have been tehsuck(tm) lately. So letters it is. You can check out all the challenge badges on the scoring page.

Genre Updates

Got in a few genre badge updates tonight, we wanted to get a few key titles which have had a good number of folks playing them into the system.  Here goes all of these are additions:

Music - Guitar Hero Aerosmith
Racing - GRID
Puzzle - Tetris Evolution, Word Puzzle, and Buku Sudoku
FPS - Bad Company
Family - Kung Fu Panda

I left a few games out that had different titles in different regions (except Sudoku) until we can come up with a solution for these titles.

360voice Community Podcast - Episode 06

MP3 File

Subscribe:
http://360voice.hipcast.com/rss/360voicecast.xml

I bet you thought we weren't going to do one of these eh? Fooled ya!

If there was anything that you could call an E3 podcast for 360voice, this would be it... we start the show off normally, with a few more people... and then we end with our 2008 E3 predictions. Enjoy!

Show notes:

1. Introductions - ChangeAgent, Fatty Chubs, Squidpunch, QforQ... the normal cast of characters, but it is growing!
2. What are we playing? - Lots of non-Xbox stuff... the game industry is big! People like GRID though.
3. What are we working on? - Microblog fixes... Damn hackerz... Old Spice is gone...
4. Game data stats - Fatty Chubs geeks out.
5. What is happening in the community - Props to 3VCEs, check out community showcase... and thanks for being awesome.
6. E3 predictions! Get them while they are hot!
7. Bacon is a vegetable.

I edited this show while I was on vacation so I cannot be held responsible for any craziness... I was low on sleep.

 

E3 Madness

Regardless of how scaled back E3 is these days, it is still a fun time for the industry and a fun time for gamers! We get a bunch of high profile press conferences... packed with announcements... preceded by speculation...

We have re-opened the E3 Forum... so go post about the news!

We will also be hosting a live chat during some of the E3 conferences... giving away some T-shirts (and the contest winner badge!)

Monday, July 14

• 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET - Microsoft

Tuesday, July 15

• 9:00am PT / 12:00pm ET - Nintendo
• 11:30am PT / 2:30pm ET - Sony

Here is the information for the chat, via the GamerDNA IRC server:

http://irc.gamerdna.com/irc.cgi

I also replaced the live chat link to point to this IRC server (in the drop down site nav) since this is the room we will be using... and hanging out in from time to time.

GamerDNA bar at the top of the pages

You will now be seeing a top "GamerDNA" network bar at 360voice.com. I just put it up today, to describe our participation and shift towards a site that is powered by the underlying gamerDNA technology that Steve, myself and the whole team are building.

Just to reiterate... while GamerDNA.com is a community site that exists at a platform agnostic level, the real secret sauce is the deep data technology that we pioneered at 360voice and are now scaling out to multiple platforms, games, and communities. In order to create the ultimate gaming profile in the same effortless way that we do for Xbox gamers at 360voice, we have to generalize much of the back end technology... that has been a lot of the work that we have been doing lately, that and just getting the website in order so we can begin scaling out all the different sections.

The network bar might get some tweaks as I go, and I still have to go and add the new include to all the parts of the site... but I just wanted to warn everyone about what you were seeing.

(click the title of this post to ask any questions)

End of the Old Spice Sponsorship

As many of you have already noticed, our sponsorship with Old Spice and the Experience Challenge ended on July 1, 2008. It was a pretty exciting ride... tons of work... tons of fun... tons of challenges...

Old Spice (Proctor & Gamble) was a great sponsor to have. They let us run with our creative vision of what things should be... we had lots of freedom to build a gamerscore challenge system that we would all enjoy using.... and many of you did enjoy it!

Why didn't they renew? In the end, they liked the program and liked working with us, but wanted to stick with some more traditional channels... we can't blame them... the economy is shaky... the fact that they went with a crazy-small community website to begin with always amazed us! It took some real forward thinking, and we are glad those people were involved.

In the end, missing the renewal isn't a bad thing... Steve and I are getting pulled in dozens of directions, and while it is sad to see that section of the site turn from Red to Green... we will always have fond memories for Old Spice and what they did for this site.

(If you have any kind words about Old Spice, click the title of this post to leave a comment)

Top 20 Most Popular for June 2008

Wow, it is crazy to think that July is upon us! My how time flies when you are having fun! Here are the top 20 blogs for June.

1. the dren *
2. ZOIG
3. Major Nelson
4. DreadfulCorpse
5. Fshguy *
6. ChangeAgent *
7. ZeroDesolation *
8. Mightymango *
9. squidpunch *
10. Stallion83 *
11. Mr Achievement *
12. PSonic *
13. jcnet *
14. Fatty Chubs *
15. GiantBombing *
16. Misha LinGhan *
17. BB GUNNER
18. Lawl Pwned *
19. Hypothermia
20. StripClubDj

Look at all those crazy peoples! Congrats all.