360voice Dev Blog

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.

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 Days Played for games

I made a small change this morning to the Top 20 Days Played on each game page... There are many cases where people are tied on those little leaderboards...  so to break the tie, I am sorting it by gamerscore descending. So if you and a bunch of people have the same number of days played, the rank is by who has the highest gamerscore.

So if you dropped some spots due to the tie breaker, go score some points!

Question: Does anyone use the Directory?

Here is a question for the community:

"Do you use the Directory?"

I am talking about the user directory that is up on the nav bar... the issue is that it is an HTML scraper's dream... those pages just get pounded day in and day out and I have to imagine people aren't really bringing up all the "S" tags just to find their friends... so my thought was to maybe turn that section off (remove it) if it isn't really being used. With the search box you can find any friends you have. I never personally use it... so I was just wondering... we built it because we had the tag search.

I am interested in feedback.

IP Banning today

It seems that the database/site issues are still in play today... it seems we are under some sort of attack both from an HTML scraping standpoint... and a SQL injection attack stand point... I am watching the logs and pretty much banning anything that looks fishy... by fishy I mean hundreds of simultaneous requests to non-API pages... and anything with funky querystrings.

If you get banned... and you are legit... email us at mail@360voice.com... but I doubt that is the case... so if the site seems wonky, this is probably why.

Update 2:11pm ET

Ok, so Steve found some fancy ISAPI filters that I added to the server to hopefully block all the madness... what effects they might have on other sections, I am not quite sure yet... so if you see something broken, let us know in the support forum.

New ads... on various pages.

Today I will be deploying some new ads to some of the pages. The most jarring will be a new 300x250 ad on the homepage and the blog page. I know that we all hate ads... but given that 360voice is now part of a for-profit start-up... we have to play our part to help out the mothership.

The exciting part, is that 360voice is actually quite effective with its advertising. Because our community is so vibrant, we actually make up a pretty good chuck of the ad money that is gathered... so you can all be proud to be apart of a significant cog in the wheel! :)

Seriously though... I am well aware of how advertising is perceived on the web... but you can take comfort in the fact that the advertising that will appear in these blocks will be as targeted as possible... we are working with a company called Intergi that fills all the ad inventory from GamerDNA... and they do a pretty good job... so while it all won't be gaming specific, it should be stuff generally targeted at gamers.

So I hope everyone doesn't revolt... remember that Steve and I are working on these sites full time now... and we have to feed our families... and while the ad money doesn't go to that directly, it does help us in our goal to build a viable company.

(click the title of this post to leave any thoughts/comments)

Database issues

Hey everyone... we were running a database query and it decided to take over THE ENTIRE SERVER.

It actually started melting the silicon on the board... things were moments from catching on fire.

(I might be over-dramatizing this)

Anyhow, we are working on resurrecting it from the dead. Stay tuned.

Update 9:53pm CT

Things have been pretty smooth after a database server reset... don't know what that was... but it was lame! Hopefully all good now. :)

Oops

So... Funny Story... I am sitting here with ChangeAgent and Squidpumch at 11:00PM EST....  Playing some GRID and we got an IM from FragmasterWolf asking if the blogs ran today.  A moment of nervous shock hit me, as I asked ChangeAgent where his computer was.  See, the 3 of us have been hanging out all day, rescuing Squidpunch from burning subway trains (no joke), eating grilled foods, playing Rock Band, and generally enjoying the down time and conversation.

So I wasn't thinking that yesterday I set the jobs to run manually to make sure nothing was missed with the outage.  However I never turned it back on, and no one was at the terminal pushing the buttons to make it run.  So the hamster fell off the wheel and no one was there to put it back on.

Sorry guys, catching things up, everyone will have blog entries, just no badge updates or leaderboards for today.

Jobs Delayed Today

The jobs are delayed today, due to a server maintenance issue.  Shouldn't be any data loss or miss blogs, but to be safe streaks are going to be disabled (for what you played or did not play Thursday 6/13/08), you still have to play today.

Will update when I know more, thanks for your patience.

Update 12:27PM PST - Blogs are currently running.  Things are a few hours behind today, so things like Badges will be very late this evening before updating.  Things look okay, so I hope everyone's entry is going to be pretty accurate.  In other news all 360voice folks (ChangeAgent, Fatty Chubs, and Squidpunch) are in the same town right now... trouble.

GTA IV falls to CoD4, and Arcade Action

For the first time since GTA IV has launched, CoD4 has surpassed it in total players yesterday. It lasted 44 Days which is a pretty good amount of time at the top, unless you are CoD4 which almost completely dominated the #1 spot for 170 days before losing it to GTA IV.  That's half of an entire year! Could it hold the spot again until November when another major FPS title is released?  A year or more of holding it down in the top 1 or 2, is an amazing feat in the console world where gamers quickly move onto the latest game.

In the arcade world neither new title sold well enough to break into the top 10 games (trials are not figured into this total).  WOTB: Commando 3 faired the best, taking the #1 spot for arcade games, beating out Uno, which is still going strong as the top played arcade game of all time, and still the top this month.  I am sure the promise of Street Fighter HD beta, helped convert a few sales.  Frogger 2 on the under hand, didn't break the top 10. But that didn't stop at least one arcade nut called Zebrasqual  from finishing off all the achievements in a day.

Weekly Recap Optimization

Every Monday your Xbox will blog a recap of the previous week's play.  Some of you might have noticed that these have been appearing very late Monday or even Tuesday morning.  There is a particular piece that has been causing us problems, and that's the new game recap.  If you have played new games that week, your Xbox will mention them. However this is just too intensive on our system.   So the bad news is we had to turn it off.

The good news is it will be back in about two weeks.  I think it's just too valuable/fun of a feature to do away with, so we are going to do a bit of database rework and make it work.  But because we have to make these changes, it's going to take a day or two to get the DB change in, and then we need a full week for it to populate the data.  As an additional benefit this is going to bubble up a new piece of data for us to play with, so I am guessing Squidpunch will find a cool place to use it on the games list.  Nothing major, but new data is always good.

Update: Recaps finished in record time today, and badges are done as well.  Going to be making a database change, so you might notice very sluggish blogs sometime between 6:30-7:30 EST.

Small outage at 8pm ET, Jun 6 2008 (Thurs)

Hey all... there will be a small outage tonight at 8pm while we disconnect some old hardware that we are no longer using. You might notice 5-10 minutes of downtime... so I just wanted everyone to be warned!

If anything crazy happens and the outage increases, we will post more blog updates about it.

Job's delayed today

We have been having some performance issues with the weekly recap entries that are created on monday's... the job is taking WAY too long for some reason... and it is slowing down all the jobs on Tuesday... which then slow down all the jobs on Wednesday... today one of the jobs ran over midnight, never completed, caused some other jobs to hang... and we just now corrected it so everything is way behind schedule.

Steve is flying in a plane today and won't have a chance to really look at things until around 3pm ET... so when he gets settled we will take a look at what is going on.

So, sorry for the delays... we will be working to figure out the issues.

Update 11:00pm ET

Before I head off to bed (after playing a little Age of Conan first) just wanted to drop in and say that the jobs finished up so everything is all set for tomorrow.

Scheduled Maintenance/Downtime

We have a scheduled maintenance window on our database servers today, for around 5:00PM EST.  We expect a small downtime of 5-15 minutes if all goes well.  Once back up, you won't notice any changes, but it will help us with some performance tweaks and future enhancements to the site.

So if we appear to be gone, or sluggish today, thanks for your patience.  We will hopefully be back...  server maintenance makes me nervous, I hope no bunnies get in there and nuke something.

Update 10:40am ET

Alright so... it looks like our scheduled downtime at 5pm actually happened RIGHT NOW! (yay)... it looks like they upgraded our servers way before we were ready... not the jobs are hosed... replication is down... freakin' rad. So we are trying to bring it back from the dead. We will update as we know more.

Update 12:34am ET

Still working on it... I (Change) had to rewrite the challenge updater due to changes in mySQL 5.0 and that is running... we will probably have to reg blogs. Everything else is on hold until we can get replication back up... they are still dragging their feet on it... so... things continue.

Update 1:12pm ET

Replication is back, so comments, microblogs, and other content entries should start appearing soon!

Update 2:54pm ET

Replication is caught up... so any content you have added should be there. Blogs are running... a little over half complete... so we are slowly getting back on track. If you notice any issues, please report them using the contact form so we can fix them!

Things getting back to normal...

We had been having some data issues recently that were affecting people with R and Q gamertags... about 1000 people in total. I believe those are all cleared up now. If you are missing entries, unfortunately we aren't going to be able to get those back... but if you lost a streak, let us know and we can fix you up.

Steve is working on some steps to correct the problem so we can detect it easier next time.

Top 20 Blogs for April 2008

This month was unique because we changed the calculation of how you can become most popular... it use to be you only got credit for hits to your blog homepage... this month we started counting every hit to each individual item where you leave comments... so this shook things up a tiny bit, giving people with lots of comment traffic an advantage over people with simply large home page visit counts.

1. the dren *
2. Major Nelson
3. Stallion83 *
4. porschephiliac *
5. ZeroDesolation *
6. Powderblue Kes
7. ChangeAgent *
8. jcnet *
9. StripClubDj
10. PSonic *
11. GiantBombing *
12. Fshguy *
13. Mr Achievement *
14. Fatty Chubs *
15. Mightymango *
16. Sneaky Condor
17. Misha LinGhan *
18. syndelin *
19. SoupyC *
20. SheNaniGenz 510 *

So there you have it! Congrats to everyone who made it on the list!

I can't take it anymore...

A while back we proclaimed that we wouldn't be fixing anymore streaks... we did this because... well... most people have no problem keeping their streaks... but for some reason a segment of the population does... some people we fixed their streak two or three times... We thought putting a stake in the ground against streak resets would be less support, but it turned into more work as we had to crush the dreams of people and then explain over multiple emails that their dreams were remaining crushed...

So Ok, Ok, Ok, Ok... we will fix your streaks... jeez... the sob stories we are getting lately are enough to make you cry... So if you play... and you lose your streak unfairly... submit a support request and we will check it out... please don't abuse this... pretty please?

And if you lost a streak recently... we will investigate and repair that too... send requests (as always) to support@360voice.com.

And for the record, PSonic, MysticWeirdo, the dren, Croaker111, TotalSOLO, D0cman88, VVV WHUMEISTER, peters8570, PMW1718, Lord Kayne, Frostbite, AcidicWolverine, MANNYFR35H, David Creech, salazaar99, sh0cktrooper, dynyr, Spidey987, jcnet, tbon5 and everyone else on the streak leaderboard OWNS you all because they never seem to need streaks reset! :)

Xbox Live Outage April 21st. Streaks will be saved!

There is a scheduled Xbox Live outage on Monday at 2am Pacific Time. The outage is planned to last for 8 hours. Major Nelson has a little post about it:

On Monday April 21st from 0200-1000 PT Xbox Live will be offline for maintenance. As a result, the ‘My Xbox’ section of Xbox.com will be unavailable, and the Xbox forums will be in read only mode (you won’t be able to post.) The remainder of Xbox.com will be available.

Read more

Regardless of the fact that we are protecting streaks... I would suggest everyone attempt to play after Xbox Live comes back! That is always best for your Xbox... regardless of an outage they get sad if they don't remember!

To clarify, this means that if your April 22nd blog says that you didn't play, don't believe it... it will tell you as much in case you forget.

Fatty Chubs spotted at the MVP Summit

Our own Steve (Fatty Chubs) has been spotted in the flickr feeds at the MVP Summit in Seattle this week. Check out his impressions of Ninja Gaiden 2... if you have any questions about what he is doing or seeing, head over to the forum and post a comment.

Meanwhile, Squidpunch and myself are sitting here being jealous of his Redmond adventures... OK we aren't that jealous... it is more that feeling when everyone is eating ice cream and you finish before your friend and then you think, "Man you are lucky because you have more ice cream... I wish I had more ice cream."

That is exactly how it is.

GTA IV appears on 360voice for the first time

I was peaking around the game stats and noticed that Grand Theft Auto IV has been played by someone with a 360voice account for the first time. Who is that lucky gamer?

Powderblue Kes' Xbox - Apr 9 2008
Powderblue Kes hit the switch and fired me up yesterday... his total gamer score is 50,659.He rallied GTA IV, and did it while marvelling at the framerates and stellar particle effects. 

Read more

Comments aren't enabled or anything on their blog... and I would refrain from bombarding them with live messages... but it is cool to see that the game is close!

(click the title of this post to leave a comment about GTA IV)

 

Content Creation Challenge Update

Just wanted to ping you all that the Xbox 360 Content Content Creation Challenge presented by Nokia is still happening! Keep making those themes and voting. Remember, it isn't just about winning, it is about putting yourself out there... any quality submissions could be contacted for publishing! So don't be deterred by some of the more popular entries.

Some of my recent 360voice favorites!

Xbox Invader by RuJoshin

Fire and Ice by Ten Stitches

The liquid Myst by nickspensive

Head over and vote for some 360voice themes!

March Game Stats

Call me a geek, but I find game statistics for 360voice fascinating.  So I thought I would share a wrap up of the March game stats.  First, starting with the most played games. Ranked by total gamers for the entire month.

Top Games for March
(name - total gamers)

1. Call of Duty 4 - 337,712
2. Halo 3 - 219,884
3. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 - 126,381
4. Rock Band - 110,531
5. Guitar Hero III - 91,554
6. Gears of War - 64,714
7. Army of Two - 56,235
8. Lost Odyssey - 45,489
9. Mass Effect - 39,158
10. Bully Scholarship Ed. - 35,171
11. Forza Motorsport 2 - 32,162
12. Burnout Paradise - 29,525
13. FIFA 08 - 26,492
14. The Orange Box - 26,356
15. Rainbow Six Vegas - 26,095
16. Frontlines:Fuel of War - 23,641
17. NBA 2K8 - 21,707
18. Condemned 2: Bloodshot - 21,403
19. N+ - 21,295
20. Assassins Creed - 21,070

A few facts that I like from this list...

1. Call of Duty 4 although still number 1, lost about 1000 players per day since February, or about a 15% drop in players, where as Halo 3 has no drop in average players per day, since February.
2. The oldest game is Gears of War (17 months old), with Rainbow Six Vegas (16 months old) not far behind, followed by Forza 2 (10 months old) and Halo 3 (6 months old).
3. The list contains a game and it's sequel, Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2.
4. FPS was by far the most played genre, followed by Music, then RPG.
5. N+ an arcade game, just made the list, which is very rare.

Speaking of Arcade games here is the top 5 arcade games for the month

1. N+ - 21,295
2. Brain Challenge - 13,866
3. UNO - 13,045
4. Geometry Wars Evolved - 10,842
5. Texas Hold'em - 8,709

Finally not to focus on the negative, but the least popular games of the month were Screwjumper! for arcade, and BOMBERMAN Act:Zero for US Retail titles.

Well that was a lot of fun (at least for me) if you have any feedback, or want to geek out of over stats, here might be a good place to do it. 

(if you have a comment about these stats, click the title of this post to leave a comment)

Game Name Changes

Not a code night, but I did manage to get some code written today.  In the past we haven't been able to respond quickly when games have changed names.  For example Samurai Warriors 2, recently had a name change to Samurai Warriors 2 XL.  So for some people it was displaying twice in their game list as two different games, even though it was the same title.  This caused all sorts of strangeness with stats and badges.

Today I wrote a script to push these through quicker, it's still pretty intensive, but we should be able to respond in a few days, versus weeks or months.  We also went through and ran this for Samurai Warriors 2 XL and Blue Dragon.  Everything looks good, so if you played the Japanese Blue Dragon or SW2 early, your profiles should be updated.

Let us know if you see anything weird, or there are other title changes now or in the future we need to update.

Update: Gary Leeds pointed out a name change for A-Train HX as well, that has also been fixed.

I have gone into hiding...

Happy April Fools everyone! This is that joyous day of the year where you cannot trust anything that you read on any site. I personally really hate today... I am a very optimistic and excitable person and therefore gullible when it comes to this sort of stuff... so I prefer to just go into hiding and come out when all the craziness has passed.

We have nothing crazy to report for April Fools... you will have to find your insanity elsewhere!

Xbox Live outage tonight 2am-5am PT

Xbox.com is planning an outage tomorrow. Luckily (hopefully) this outage starts well after we finish our nightly pull, therefore your data should be ok. We will be pausing the jobs until we wake up in the morning... just to look everything over and make sure we didn't miss anything... so your content will be delayed, but it should be captured. We will update more if anything super-funky happens... but at this point, we don't anticipate problems...

...but we have said that before. :)

Content Creation Challenge Changes

Remember that Xbox 360 Content Content Creation Challenge presented by Nokia? they have been making steady enhancements to the site throughout the contest. Most recently you can now filter by affiliate! That means you can jump directly to all the great 360voice affiliated themes that people are submitting making it easier to find them and vote!

Some of my favorites submitted by 360voice users include:

360 Freedom by morton819

Xbox Buttons by FuzzyBear

Tree by destruktive87

Go vote them up today!

Some people have raised the issue that just voting for your community site isn't in the spirit of the competition. Disruptive Publishing has ensured that it isn't about the "best" theme... sure the votes will pick a winner, but the overwhelming response to this contest will bring other opportunities. In their words:

We want to officially let everyone know that while there will only be one “winner” in terms of overall highest score/votes received, the reality is that we have been overwhelmed by the huge number of extremely high quality submissions across the board. Any user who is submitting quality content (and is getting reasonable interest in terms of voting) will stand a good chance of being contacted by DP for future publishing opportunities, regardless of whether or not they top out the overall leaderboard. At the end of the day, this program is about you guys telling us what you want to see, and clearly that’s not limited to just one item! So, while there will only be one grand prize winner, there are a lot of people watching this contest and opportunities *will* emerge! Keep the quality material coming!

So even if you don't win... or don't get a TON of votes, put your content up there! Who knows where it might lead! So upload and vote VOTE VOTE!

MS dealing damage against cheaters

Many have asked us, "Why don't you do something about the cheaters on your leaderboards?" and our answer has always been "We are waiting for Microsoft to do something about it." It looks like the waiting is over. Major Nelson posted about it... but his site is down... so here is 360sync's quote:

1. Resetting the entire Gamerscore for an account to zero
2. The account will be unable to regain all previously obtained achievements and Gamerscore, however, the players will have the ability to gain future Achievements by earning them fairly, like the majority of the Xbox LIVE community does.
3. The account will be clearly labeled as a cheater for the community to view on xbox.com. You can see an example here. In dash, the personal view of the gamercard will be labeled as well.

Read more

Eye-balling it this moment, it looks like 7 out of the top 20 on our Gamerscore leaderboard are going to drop off... so this will have an impact going forward. Because there will be new scenarios where completely valid tags could have their score zeroed out... we aren't 100% positive that this won't break certain things around the site. If you see something funny, please send a support msg so we can look into it.

While I am sure there will be questions about the judge/jury/executioner process, I think this is a great day for gamerscore enthusiasts everywhere. It will bring much more rigor to the system and hopefully recognize those that earn their points the good old-fashion way... by playing the game.

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

Content Creation Challenge Update!

If you haven't heard, 360voice is participating in the Xbox 360 Content Creation Challenge presented by Nokia. Have you submitted a theme? Have you voted on any themes? If not, GET UP ON IT!

You don't have to submit themes to help 360voice on the community leaderboard, you just have to register, affiliate yourself with the site, and vote vote vote!

Just as a reminder, if you submit the winning theme you get:

(1) Prizes – Blu-Ray DVD player, (1) 42’ LCD 1080p TV, 5.1 Digital Surround Sound Home Theater, Nokia N81 Phone (5) XBOX 360 Video Games (ARV: $2499.99)
(1) Prize - Winning theme will get published by DP
(1) Prize - Winner will receive a royalty payment contract from DP for future content

There are some pretty great themes up there though... go check them out!

Link dump... DELETED!

So I was right in the middle of a huge post of all the people linking to us for the last month... and then my daughter walks over and pushes the button on the computer... nuking the whole thing! Ahhh kids... :) I can't even recreate it because I store them all in my Google Reader (with a star) and as I put them in the blog entry, I take off the star so I know which ones I have blogged about... so I guess this post is lost to the ether!

A special thanks to everyone who linked us! Sorry I can't return the favor this month!

Kitchen Sink Wednesday

Tuesday is normally code night... but we didn't really get anything done because we were fighting a few fires.

1. Sending out all the Feb challenge month prizes
   This is turning out to be a bigger project than we thought... for one, the electronic point system that MS had online was taken down, so we had to fulfill all the prizes for MS points through amazon instead. PAIN! Also, we are having a hard time getting people to send us their addresses so the process keeps dragging. If you won something in Feb for challenge month (from a random drawing, not a challenge) please check your spam folder!
2. Encoding in microblogs
   We are having a problem where some game titles with special characters (At World's End, NCAA, etc) have characters that, when submitted through a microblog, it is breaking people's blogs causing them to appear blank. So for now, please do not microblog a game with a funny character in the title. This includes anything with a registration symbol, trademark symbol, etc. Squidpunch and I spend about 4 hours trying to fix this last night (with help from Syndelin playing At World's End so we could test) and we haven't figured it out... so the battle continues.

In other news, The Xbox 360 Content Creation Challenge presented by Nokia is going strong. Voting has not been activated yet... but get your themes up there! There are lots of great ones from the 360voice crowd. Head over, check em out... and plan your voting attack!

On the community front, go check out a fun interview that we did for dieselv2 did for his XBLCommunity site.

1) When did you start getting into gaming and what was your first game?

Fatty Chubs: As long as I can remember, Odyssey 2 was my first console, and I have owned pretty much every console since. My first great gaming obsessions were playing Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe (which is still a good game), and making levels for K.C.’s Krazy Chase on Odyssey 2 (a bizarre clone of both Pac Man and Centipede together).

Squidpunch: I used to play quite a bit on my Atari 2600, Colecovision, as well as some computer games on my TRS-80 that ran from cassette tape, so probably a bit over 20 years or so.

ChangeAgent: I started gaming as soon as I encountered technology. My real first memory of gaming was playing ET for the Atari 2600. I remember thinking it was a beta movie but it was an Atari cartridge instead. After that I jumped from PC to console, online and offline, back and forth through the rest of my life.

Read more

And finally, HeNanigenz 510 is trying to win the world record for biggest gamerscore challenge. If you want to be a part of history (and possible break the challenge feature!) join up! Here is the info:

Come one come all for the first of many Big Fracking Challenges or BFC. 30 days of over a 100 gamers is looking to build the biggest gamer challenge ever. Currently the challenge is the biggest to date on 360voice and they hope pass over the 200 mark before the start time.

ETA launch: March 21st 11:55pm Pacific standard time.

If you would like to join this huge challenge and possible world record (6 comments down) please click here.

Rules: Just log on your 360 on March 20th and please no game saving. All gamer scores are welcome. Any questions or comments check out the forum thread here.

So there you have it... the kitchen sink... drink water from it... and be merry!

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

Encoding issues

The feed that we are using for the microblogging, the same one that shows your online status, is giving us some encoding issues...meaning that some parts of the game titles are coming through corrupted. This causes the blogs to break. We are working on it... but encoding is the most difficult problem to track down... so you might see some funky things in your blog. Just wanted to warn you.

Final Challenge Month Winners

Challenge month is now over, and we have the last week of winners to announce.

Lets run down the daily point winners,

2/22: AquaRed
2/23: ShamefulFungus
2/24: Mental Politics
2/25: DempSee
2/26: juggalo1987
2/27: PrincessOats
2/28: DeadAim 007
2/29: smrmom

Each of those folks will be netting a cool 1000 Microsoft points for just being in challenges!  Next up is our personal pick, this week we picked the very last person to make it into a challenge in February.

skullz8 - In The Sub 10,000 Challenge

He was the last person to join a challenge before february was over, we thought that would be a fun little stat for the Tshirt this week.

Finally the big winner of the week... we randomly picked one name out of everyone that participated in a challenge this week to take home a customized Zune 80!  And that person is...

rice md!
(w00t!  CONGRATS!!!)

Thanks for participating everyone!  If you won a prize you will receive an e-mail from us in the next 48 hours for claim information.

Challenge Month has come to a close!

As you may or may not have known, February was Challenge Month... we launched the auto-challenges, we gave away tons of MS points, Zune Music players, T-shirts... and much fun was had by all. We will be posting a big recap of all the winners and everything as soon as we work through everything.

A special thanks to everyone for making gamerscore challenges a success. We know the system isn't perfect (we do the best with the data we get), and there have been some emotions running high, but largely we see people having a good time, duking it out with their friends for fun and prizes.

As you might also notice, the available prizes are slowly dissapearing from the system. At this time there are no plans to extend the prizes... so soon all the challenges will be for bragging rights only... this is not a total loss because you can still have fun with your friends and earn Challenge Score in the leaderboard and for the challenge badges!

So thanks again everyone. It has been a busy February. I hope everyone that won is happy and even if you didn't win, I hope you at least had a good time. As always, we listen to all your feedback, so feel free to leave it!

Blogs Delayed

Hey all... the blogs and everything will be delayed today. We had an error with our jobs. No data was lost, but  it is going to take quite a bit of time to bring our backups over and put everything back in place. 

We will update as things start to get back on track.

Update 11:02am

Just wanted to let everyone know data is still processing... normally this all happens at 3am when no one is awake... so it feels like it goes faster, but when you are sitting there watching it, it actually takes a long time. :) We should be able to kick everything off shortly.

Update 12:30pm

Challenges are finished processing and blogs are starting to appear for folks.

Update 4:40pm

Blogs are done... leaderboards are behind and badges might not make it today... recaps are running right now too.

Fighting the fight against spam

Lately comment spam has been out of control on the blog pages. Most of you won't see it because I wage an epic war in silence, wielding the power of the MYSQL database query analyzer to battle back the hordes of men's sexual health product ads, random strings of text, and poetry that makes no sense.

I asked the question on the forum if comments should be login only... the equivalent of throwing up a force field against the spam army... the overwhelming thoughts on the matter were "yes". Never mind that the only people that could respond were ones that were logged in... :)

So if you were someone who left comments without being a full member, you are going to have to upgrade for the fun to continue... but that has to be a small price to pay for a clean house right?

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

No Genre Updates tonight

We are working on getting back to regular genre updates, but with that said we won't be making any tonight.  With people still adjusting after last weeks major changes, we want to give another week for the feedback to settle in and people to work towards new badges before we throw any other games in, or possibly remove them. 

So get your feedback in on the last round, and we will try to incorporate it in next week.

Out of town

Hey all... just wanted to let you know that Fatty Chubs and I (Changeagent) are out of town for the entire weekend. Squidpunch is doing a great job holding things down... but if you see our Xbox's being sad and my forum responses lagging, that is the reason. I should be back in town and catching up on Sunday night or Monday morning.

Just wanted to let you all know in case you were waiting for something.

Update 7:37am CT

We will be posting all of the second week winners this evening. Due to travel we didn't have an opportunity to get it up last night... everyone crashed out early. :)

Challenge abuse/error update

When we dove in and looked at all of the active challenges, we found a few things:

1. There were a few people playing multiple accounts within challenges. For every instance we found this blatant, the challenge was removed, all the tags where removed and the IP address associated with these activities has been banned.
2. There were some people who were in a pending challenge, and also elected to join an auto-challenge. After their auto-challenge started, their manual challenge was launched by the creator. Because you are not allowed to be in two challenges at the same time, we had no choice but to remove people from the NEWEST challenge they were in.
3. In some instances there are now challenges with less than the minimum # of people required by the tier. We thought about canceling these out, but didn't feel that would be fair as it was our mistake that caused us to remove people and drop it under the required tier... so we are going to let those people ride it out.

So if you see any funniness in challenges, feel free to email us at mail@360voice.com and let us know. As the volume of challenges increase we are trying to stay on top of any cheating/account hijacking. Sorry for any confusion these clean up efforts cause. If you feel like you have been unfairly treated, you can always contact us and we will work with you to figure something out.

Closest challenge?

There was a fun forum post by Ten Stitches about the closest win in an Old Spice Experience Challenge. He found won that came down to a 2 POINT difference between 1st and 2nd place. Check it out:

Gamerscore Ballas
It was a heated competition for the entire 30 days, each gamer bouncing back and forth, trading the lead. In the end, IV Headsh0t VI was able hold on by only two points over jedi8955.

You know what the best part of this is, and why I feature it on the homepage? At the end of the challenge, the gamer that was beaten by only two points didn't freak out... didn't accuse the person of cheating... didn't do anything but post the message:

Dude, TWO POINTS.

Congratulations man.

That is some serious class right there. Congrats to you both for such an exciting challenge and for being good people.

Are you ready for some non-Madden football?

I am talking real football... as in, "Are you watching the Superbowl?"

If you are and want to hang out, jump in our chat room. Steve and I will be chilling out.

Update 9:35pm CT

Thanks everyone who hung out. That was a lot of fun. The conversation sort of went everywhere, which was hilarious. We talked sports, football rules, COD4, commercials, cars, cable companies, capture cards, Zune, Halo, junk food, movies, etc. Good times! It always makes me wish we did more scheduled chat events.

Everyone welcome Squidpunch to the team, officially!

Squidpunch laughing at Fatty Chubs
during code weekend.

The contracts have been signed... the souls have been sold... Steve and I would like to announce that David Larrabee (aka Squidpunch) has officially joined the 360voice team. Where we were two, now we are three...

It is always said that good things come in threes right?

Why Squid? Coincidentally, he was the very first person awarded the API Samurai badge. While 360voice  has grown, and Squid's own endeavors have accelerated, he has continued to be a strong member of our community, creating compelling content with the APIs and assisting whenever he could. We flew him out for a code weekend, and after that Steve and I knew that, if we were going to get some help, he was the perfect guy to provide it. It wasn't enough to just make him a 3VCE... we needed someone like him committed to helping us out... so we asked him to join up.

He will still continue with his personal projects... and there are many:

TheLiveEye

www.theliveeye.com

 

360friendspot

www.360friendspot.com

 

madden-stats

www.madden-stats.com

 

Rabbit Tracker: (360voice API)

http://www.squidpunch.com/supported-services/rabbit-tracker

 

Challenge Scout (360voice API)

http://www.squidpunch.com/challengescout/

 

Wordpress Plugin (360voice API)

http://www.squidpunch.com/supported-services/360voice-plugin/

 

360 voice Leaderboards (360voice API) - no longer online

http://360voice.wetpaint.com/page/360Voice%20LeaderBoard

 

Unscripted 360

www.unscripted360.com

Helps out as a mod, and some coding from time to time, most notably the "blog medals" http://www.unscripted360.com/medals-page/

 

360voice API to Standard RSS (360voice api)

http://www.squidpunch.com/supported-services/360voice-api-to-rss-format/

As you can see from that list, Squid is a very important person in the community. We are proud to have someone of his caliber on the team.

Funny story about the leaderboards... Squid built those before we actually had leaderboards on the site (and when we were using the wetpaint wiki no less), and we actually banned him (without knowing) because his server was making so many API requests to get the data! So even though we banned him at one point, we hired him. :)

Squidpunch has full access to everything... our database... our technology... our code... he will be cranking out enhancements just like Steve and I do, and posting in the dev blog when they become available. He will be involved in the strategic planning of the site... the podcasts, the code weekends, the code nights, and everything in between. He doesn't speak for us, but he speaks WITH us... We look forward to seeing him grow into his new role on our site. If you have a moment, stop by his blog and wish him well.

Welcome to the crew Squidpunch! We are happy to have you!

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

First Auto Challenge begins tomorrow!

If you have been wanting to join an Old Spice Experience Challenge, but haven't been able to get an invite or do not feel like creating your own, go into your profile settings and turn on your Auto-Challenge setting. Today is the last day to do that to get in on the first challenge. The rules are:

1. All normal challenge rules apply.
2. If you eligible for prizes, you will be put in a prizing challenge.
3. If you are not eligible for prizes, you will be put in a bragging rights challenge.
4. If you are not eligible for the tier/prize in the auto-challenge, you will be assigned to a bragging rights challenge.
5. We will attempt to group people with similar gamerscores in challenges.
6. We cannot guarantee similar gamerscores though, as it is dependent on the number of gamers available.
7. With auto-challenges turned on, you can still manually join challenges.
8. You will not be assigned to an auto-challenge if you are in an active challenge.

So go click the auto-challenge button and get in there!

Also remember that February begins Challenge month! Make sure you are in an active challenge at all times to win some rad prizes.

Updates are delayed

Hey everyone... challenge updates, blog updates, etc are delayed today. We are looking into the issue and will post updates as soon as we know what the deal is.

Update 7:22am CT

As of right now, streaks will be turned off. For some reason our data pull failed, and our secondary pull AND our backup pull. One could call it the perfect non-awesome storm. We are running a data pull now and will be manually inserting it to ensure the data is correct.

If you have a challenge that ends today, it will be a moment until we process it. So please be patient.

Update 3:25pm CT

Things are pretty much back on track. If you have any issues, please send them to mail@360voice.com. Remember, we disabled streaks, so if your entry is wrong, you should worry about your streak. A special thanks to Steve for talking this in the morning. I was swamped with meetings all morning and couldn't even take a peek at the updates until around 1pm... so yay Steve!

Winter-Een-Mas time... get your celebration on!

So I wasn't really aware of it until TODAY but it appears the holiday of Winter-Een-Mas is upon us! A special shout-out to Lobo BiZARro 3D for the heads-up!

Winter-een-mas is a holiday of sorts. More specifically, it is a celebration of video games and the people that play them. Video games allow us to do things, go places, see stuff, that we couldn't do in real life. They can be an escape from reality, a release after a long day, a fun activity with friends, or just an enjoyable way to pass time. They give us a lot of entertainment. So why shouldn't they be celebrated?

Read more

So now that YOU know about Winter-Een-Mas (try typing that 10 times fast), what are you planning to do?

I decided to spontaneously pick up a Sony PSP... see... I am not a total Xbox 360 Fan boy. ;)

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

Have you been in a challenge? We want your feedback!

We recently asked for feedback from people who haven't been in a challenge... well now we are flipping it the other direction. A survey company has been hired to gather information about the 360voice/Old Spice partnership. If you have participated in any challenge at any time, please take a moment to help us out:

SURVEY COMPLETE - thanks for participating

To sweeten the deal, if you complete the survey you will be asked for your gametag and email at the end. Provide those, and we will do a random drawing from all participants and award 4,000 microsoft points to a lucky gamer.

Thanks in advance for helping us out... it is really important that we get as many people as possible to fill out this survey. We will be using the feedback from this as well as all the great discussion in our forum to  help us decide where to go next. If you can please take the time,

Update 1/26/2008

Hi everyone, we were not aware that the survey blocked non-US and Female members. So we will do a SPECIAL drawing for the same prize (4,000 points) for anyone NOT ELIGIBLE for the survey. Leave this comment in any blog with your gamertag as the name on the comment:

I couldn't take the survey

We will validate that you were unable to take it due to the country and gender settings on your account when we draw for the prize. We will do this drawing after the survey numbers are complete. Email us if you have questions about this parallel contest.

Update 1/26/2008 8:42pm CT

Thank you everyone for participating. The survey is now closed. If you have competed in a challenge at anytime, please put the above text in a blog comment and you will be eligible to win the 4,000 points! Any country, gender, age is welcome! The only restriction for the drawing is that you have competed in a challenge at anytime!

Why haven't you joined an Old Spice Experience Challenge?

Since launching the Old Spice Experience Challenge back in December, we have seen our registration and site traffic shoot through the roof... however many of those people are never making it into active gamerscore challenges. If you are one of these people, we are greatly interested in hearing why. Head over to the forum and make yourself heard!

Why haven't you joined a challenge?

We are beginning to look at another round of enhancements and while we have some short term things planned in the coming week, we just want to get some good feedback from people not in challenges.

So click over to the forum and let us know!

PMS Clan battling it out in an Old Spice Challenge

Looking for a fun challenge to watch? Check out PMS Clan - Pandora's Mighty Challenge. Created by PMS Achievement for 30 days and a Game Fly subscription.

Wondering who the PMS Clan is?

PMS is a diverse population of women gamers from all over the world, playing multiple platforms. We are hard-core gamers, sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters and vary from ages, ethnicity and social backgrounds. Only one common factor can be found among us and that is our addiction to gaming!

Read more

You know it is a good community night when...

You know this site has grown when the tag that we use for a community night finds itself on the top 10 tags of the week:

1. YOUSTINK2 
2. Major Nelson 
3. Notwen 
4. trixie360 
5. Souljaboytellem 
6. DGgeoff 
7. www360voicecom 
8. jamzy813 
9. agent arenas 
10. steve519

Source: TriXie

Steve will be doing a write up of the event to announce all the winners, the prizes, and a recap... but I just came across this before bed and thought it was fun.

Xbox Live, current status, streaks still off.

Just to be safe, we went ahead and left streaks turned off again for today. I was trying to play live last night and was experiencing issues... and I didn't feel like getting a million support emails asking for streak resets!...call me selfish. :)

Also, the presence notification in the upper right of the blog has been turned off... this is due to performance against that data being poor and dragging down the site. I will keep monitoring it for improvements and turn it back on when appropriate. Because of the poor performance you will also see the LiveScore for challenges taking a long time as well... let me know if it gets excruciating.

Xbox Live issues... again...

As many of you have witnessed or have reported to us... Xbox Live is wonky again... wonktastic even... If Xbox Live was a pizza it would have wonkysauce all over it.

In all seriousness though, many of you have emailed in saying that you have been trying to connect and that your streak is in jeopardy... so just to be safe, tomorrow will be streak-free. So don't worry... if you Xbox says you didn't play, don't believe it.

The Old Spice Experience Challenge Strategy Guide

We asked the community for their top strategies in competing in the Old Spice Experience Challenges. Check out this fabulous set of pointers... whether you are a n00b or 7337, there is something in here for everyone:

1. Play with people you know!
   By playing with friends or people you at least know, the amount of hostile trash talk, cheating, dishonorable play, etc. will greatly decrease, leading to a more enjoyable challenge! - Fshguy
2. Only score as much as you need.
   Gamerscore challenges are like auctions... you only need enough points to keep the lead. Don't over score, as the points you spend in one challenge can't be used for future challenges. - ChangeAgent
3. Only use easy games when you have to.
   Save the easy games for last. Only use it when there is no other way out. - Donny NL
4. Plan your strategy in advance!
   Games wisely! For example play halo 3 until the final level and stop! When you really need it finish the fight and get a easy 375.....yep already used it up. - Davem3 TF
5. The lower gamerscore the higher the advantage.
   If you have a lower gamerscore you are more likely to have more games at your disposal - joining a challenge with higher gamerscore owners could be a great benefit to you. - squidpunch
6. Know your competition!
   Be wary of challenges with many members with a number of the "easy" achievements not yet gained. It is likely one or more will throw them into the mix. You must decide if you are willing to also use your easy achievements, or save it for another challenge in which nobody can counter your attack. - squidpunch
7. Leverage the power of the rentals!
   Have a Blockbuster Game Pass! Have a Gamefly Membership! - NaiLSONS
8. Leverage the power of the almighty dollar! (if you are loaded)
   Buy all arcade games and get every single easy achievement in each! - Nuffzx
9. Revisit old games to get points you forgot.
   Some of those old achievements which you might of found impossible back then may have become really easy as your "leet" skillz grow, or maybe they got patched and are no longer bugged? - T360UK SMILEY
10. Don't bother with online achievements.
    Online achievements are often much more time consuming to get. Aim for single player ones where you can control the timetable. - WolfWood37
11. Know the easy genres.
    Sports and Movie games = easy points.- ymiris
    Family games as a rule are usually easy... - Davem3 TF
12. Be true to yourself as a gamer. Integrity above all!
    Play games you love. Find or create challenges that are in your range. If you're a casual gamer, find a challenge for casual gamers and try not to break the rules set down by the administrator of the challenge. - housemdfan

If you have some strategies you would like to add, click the title of this post to leave a comment!

360voice wins Gamertag Radio's community site of 2007

Gamertag Radio has posted the winners of their annual Community Awards. Thanks to the votes of all of you, 360voice has been awarded community site of the year. Last year we were nominated, this year we took home the crown!

We were honored to be nominated this year with such a great group of sites, and it shows how healthy and vibrant the 360 community truly is. Oh, and thanks to JVB for announcing the category.

So head over and check out the show. Godfree and team put a ton of work into it with special guests and besides, you can hear Steve and I's acceptance speech where we spread around the thanks. If you want to jump to our acceptance speech, the community site of the year starts around the [30:00] mark of the MP3.

Top 20 Most Popular Blogs for December 2007

It was the last month of the year. There were a lot of familiar faces in the top 20 most popular Xbox blogs:

1. Major Nelson
2. jcnet *
3. the dren *
4. cc99999 x3h *
5. StripClubDj
6. GameSpotting *
7. Stallion83 *
8. ChangeAgent *
9. Fshguy *
10. Mightymango *
11. ZeroDesolation *
12. Von Dozier *
13. PSonic *
14. Misha LinGhan *
15. Davem3 TF *
16. HeNaniGenz 510 *
17. Mr Achievement *
18. Gary Leeds *
19. Cold Justice *
20. syndelin *

What will 2008 hold? More of the same or will some new community members rise in the ranks? I will say that when we started tracking this monthly back in April we have seen some good churn in the names. Do you have what it takes to crack the top 20 this year?

Save our streaks on the New Year!

Just a quick note, today is officially a "save the streaks" day. Things are looking MUCH better for Xbox Live, but there are still some places where people are missing data so for safety reasons, you will not lose your streak today for a non-play day. So consider it a Happy New Year gift from Steve and I :)

Tomorrow things should be back to normal though... so play those games today!