360voice Dev Blog

Maintenance Happenings - No Badge Updates

Running some maintenance today and tomorrow. As a result of the added load on the database, badges will not update today. Things will resume tomorrow as normal, and calculations for streaks and the like are still running, just the badges won't reflect any changes until Tuesday evening.

We are working on a badge update as well, which will appear in a few days after maintenance. As part of this we will be adding a genre and a collection and doing the normal maintenance around genres.

Also rolling out a change to Auto-Challenges. Starting this Tuesday (if all goes well) when Auto-Challenges are populated, you will only be included if you played a least one day the weekend or Monday before. So for example if I played on the 24th or 27th (and have auto challenges turned on), I will be included. However if the last time I played was the 23rd, I would not be. This is intended to make the challenges more competitive in that it's people actively playing, and playing online.

Small enhancement to the Games Q&A just put online

Well everyone hop over to mmgiggas2's blog and say thanks for this suggestion. I am sure there are others of you had the idea and/or suggested it as well, however his comment and twitter message to me first, so he gets the name in lights this time. 

I just put a full question page online, one which will show you any questions asked about any game on the site, so you can find the questions that are being asked, and you can answer a bit easier - and without going to every single game to find what questions are available.  Just look under the "Games" navigation item for this new page.

So hop on over, check out what questions people have, and what answers you can give, and while you are at it, head over and answer his question about The BIGS, which is what gave him the idea in the first place.

Good night everyone, and as always feel free to click the title of this entry to leave a comment.

Games Pages Now With More!

Ever have a question about a game, but don't want to post it on the forums?  Maybe you want to keep it specific to a single game, like "What is the main difference between COD4 and COD:WaW?".  Whatever your fancy, you now have the ability to post questions, and answers on the game page for any game on 360voice.

One more thing there is also a new setting in your Email Notifications Settings (login required), which gives you the ability to enable or disable email notifications when someone posts to a question you either created, or have answered.  By default this option is on, however if you want less email from the 360voice hamsters, you are free to turn it off!

So what are you waiting for?  Why not start some game driven discussions, find out what makes people like COD:WaW so much to make it the top game this week, or maybe why Halo 3 even after all this time still hangs out in the top 3....I am sure you can think of something guys and gals...enjoy.

As always, comments or questions, just click the title and leave your comments if you wish!

Put your gamerscore chart on iGoogle!

Nelez decided that he wanted to have his gamerscore chart on his iGoogle page, so he made a gadget that uses the one from 360voice.

If you want to add your gamerscore chart to iGoogle, do it now!

Thanks Nelez!

More API Updates For You Ninja/Samurai

I just threw together another API for you guys to keep the hunger for XML data under control, and like other recent API updates it is for collection data.  I am sure you guys will come up with some interesting tools based on the evolution of collections - I have faith!

360voice.collection.history
Description: Get a history of the changes for a collection

Arguments:
id (optional)

Sample:
[single collection history]
http://www.360voice.com/api/collections-history.asp?id=1
[all history aka collection master history]
http://www.360voice.com/api/collections-history.asp

Don't worry all you non-warriors of XML, we have a little utility in the works for you too that should help you keep your streaks, and your gamertag data in sync as ChangeAgent just mentioned a few days back.  Look for that soon....ish!

Badge pages updated to include collection info

Ever wonder what games you need to play to get one of those fancy new collection badges?  Or maybe you still don't have the original collection badge?  Well we just put a new update online which will give you the list of all games that you have to play to qualify for the collection based badge.  This is true for all of the collections except the collection master, because the collection master is the having all the games for all of the collections the list might end up getting long enough it wouldn't look right - so if you are working for the collection master, you will have to look at the other collections individually first. 

With this change also provides 2 new public API to get the list of collections, and the games on those collections- so who knows one of those Ninjas or Samurai will come up with some even more interesting tools to track your progress.  I know a few of them have some ideas in the works, and were asking for the API so keep your eyes peeled. 

You know the drill, click the title if you want to leave a comment, and enjoy!

Collection Badge Fix

We made a fix to collection badges, to resolve an issue with them going away on folks. It was coded outside the badge process to test timing, and badges were being cleared out from the previous day before these were inserted. This should now be fixed, and they should stick around for you, until you no longer meet the conditions for the badge.

We also added the Master Collector Badge, for those that have completed all collections.  So Check out those crazy folks.

Finally some additional thoughts on the future of collections. We may move towards collections that are updated dynamically each day, without any notice.  So you would need to keep up with the games in the collection, through a master list.  We would want to have an API in place before this, so the superstar API ninjas could come up with something better to track them.  So just throwing that out there, for any thoughts you folks may have.

Badge Update Finished

Badge update is now ready to go, and will tonight. 

We have added a new badge type, collections. You can view the details and give feedback in this forum thread. We did a test run last night, but the full run will go tonight.

Also there have been some genre changes. The following are all additions:

Family - Prince Caspian
Fighting - Mortal Kombat vs DCU, Super Street Fighter 2 THD, Smackdown vs RAW 2009
FPS - Far Cry 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Gears of War 2, CoD: World at War
Hack and Slash - Castle Crashers, Kingdom under Fire, Star Wars Force Unleashed
Music - Guitar Hero World Tour, Lips
Oddball - Dash of Destruction
Party - Scene It? Box office Smash
Racing - Midnight Club LA
Retro - Golden Axe, Double Dragon
RPG - Fallout 3, Fable 2, Infinite Undiscovery
Sandbox - Saints Row 2
Social - Domino Master
Sports - FIFA 09, NBA 2K9
Strategy - C&C Red Alert 3, Tom Clancy's EndWar

In addition we have added to new genres, Action/Adventure and Survival Horror. You can view the lists by following the links.

UPDATE - Jan 05 09, 10:20 EST - Okay there was an error running the new badges last night.  I made a mistake entering the new badges into the DB.  Guess I am a bit rusty adding new genres.   So folks will have to wait again until tonight.  Sorry for the extra suspense.

UPDATE - Jan 05 09, 23:40 EST - Badges are finally done, I think they look better, let me know.  If you want to see what you have in the current collections, fshguy has you covered (without an API even).  Also Dog of Thunder has the current suggestions for changes compile and updated in this thread.  Check that out, and post comments and suggestions in the badges forum.

Badge Update Impending

Working on pushing an update out for badges, although since there are small code changes involved it actually won't effect badge calculations until tomorrow as I test and update.

Badges today may not run as normal I will post an update when I find out more.  The changes effect only genres and I will post a list of changes once everything is working and finalized.   there won't be major changes, but I wanted to let people know in case they notice any wonkiness.

UPDATE: Badge did run as normal yesterday (12/31).  Look on schedule to have all the new code run today, just fighting bugs elsewhere then will jump back on to get everything in place. 

UPDATE - 19:06 EST 1/1/09:  Badges won't run today.  Need the processing time as I am working on fixing Prince of Persia (arcade versus retail bug), and I need the server processing time to go fix old records.

Blogs now with added Bragging Rights!

Ok before you laugh at how low my weekly gains are, please remember that I am busy cranking away at code for you folks.  Here you have it a new bragging rights entry should be shown on your blogs.

Keep in mind this stat is only based on information from today's weekly recap and on, its pretty much impossible to properly back fill the data to drive this stat.  So if you had a bigger week previous to this week, sorry - but just get an even bigger week next week!