gamerDNA

As we get closer and closer to the Christmas season, publishers are ramping up their releases of games which quickly turns in to an overload of great games coming out. In the next month alone we have Rock Band 2, Star Wars: Force Unleashed, Mercenaries 2, Spore and Warhammer Online releasing, all games that have a large amount of fans behind them and a lot of excitement. Before I get ahead of myself, let’s talk about games that came out this week.

This week Too Human has released (August 20th), a game that has been development for an epic nine years by the development team at Silicon Knights and published by Microsoft.  The release hasn’t come without it’s controversy, with mixed reviews coming in early this week about the game.  Since the game just released today in most stores our data isn’t really there to indicate if Too Human will come out of the game with a splash or a thud.   Whatever the case may be, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.  My bet is that this game will be a hot topic for weeks to come.

Team Fortress 2 has been in the news this week because of their free Heavy Update to the game, which added new maps as well as new weapons and achievements to the Heavy class.   Valve has stepped it up another notch by allowing everyone to play Team Fortress 2 for free this weekend.  If you haven’t already, check this game out, it is one of the best online multiplayer FPS’s out right now.

Last but certainly not least, the drums of WAR have begun as we get closer and closer to the release of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.  The excitement for this MMORPG has increased with the developers dropping the NDA for the game, the announcement of the Warhammer Online release date and finally announcing that Open Beta starts on September 7th.  At gamerDNA we’re very excited about Warhammer Online, so you can count on some fun and exciting WAR announcements coming in the coming days and weeks.  Next week we’re hoping to launch a free Warhammer guild theme, so stay tuned and check out our free guild hosting in preparation for the new custom theme.

That about wraps it up for this week’s update. Soon we’ll be talking about our new Warhammer Theme as well as our upcoming visit to the Penny Arcade Expo next week.  See you next time!

Hey everyone. It is that time of the week again. Build time! This build focused on a lot of quiz cleanup. Once we see things running live, there are often tweaks to make based on how things behave at scale. But there are also a few cool features.

Member Profile Changes/Enhancements

1. Tweaked the badges page in the profile section to have more information.
2. The quiz master achievement badge has been reset. In order to qualify again, you have to take all 4 of the quizzes.
3. Implemented a new gamerDNA Trait signature image file. Get to it in your Badges page of your profile… You can chose between four versions, each emphasizing one of the quizzes with your results. Here is an example of it using mine:

   

4. Made some tweaks to the Twitter and Last.fm boxes on the profile page.
5. Fixed a problem where item lists in the character pane of the DNA panel were all linking to the same item description (the One Ring). They now link to the proper descriptions.

Guild hosting changes/enhancements

1. A new images roll-up has been added to the guild hosting. It is activated by default, and available via the image gallery tab. Any images uploaded into a gamerDNA profile and attached to the guild will appear on that page.
2. The guild leader can also add a picture strip to the guild homepage showing the most recently added pictures.
3. Cleaned up the guild hosting pages so that the buttons are readable in all cases and template selections.

General Site Changes/Enhancements

1. All Bartle results for existing members have been converted into the new system so that retaking is not required.
2. Any call to a game with no icon will return a default icon.
3. Added new footer links that point to the B2B site.
4. Built out OpenID Login and trust pages for the identity provider. (can’t see this yet but soon!)
5. On the quiz landing page, clicking the quiz title now takes you to the quiz homepage.
6. Made tweaks to the company blog including redirects, some side bar gadgets, some new plugins, etc.
7. When Darkfall was added, a data issue was preventing the theme picker from working properly. This has been corrected.
8. Fixed an issue where IE7 was sometimes failing to display the quiz results page.
9. Fixed a bug where users who were giving respect were not getting the proper fame. It has not been corrected to give fame in the correct manner.
10. Made multiple tweaks and enhancements to the quiz results pages to clean up text wrapping, positioning and some more general copy.
11. Made some SEO enhancements to the member page so they will appear better in search engines.
12. Made some of the forum icons transparent at the request of the user community!
13. Fixed a rounding issue in the quiz system to make the test results more accurate. You will need to retake your quizzes to take advantage of the higher resolution.
14. The numbers of people reported to take the quizzes was not right. We corrected the counter.
15. Fixed an issue where the next button was jumping around on the quiz page when some answers were selected.
16. Quiz badges now properly display the avatar. The issue was that the sizes and file types weren’t uniform, now there is a process to complete that correctly.

    Note: In order for your badge to show the avatar for a quiz, you must visit your results page and that will re-generate the badge correctly.

17. Fixed some typos in the gamerDNA bot quiz responses at the request of the user community.
18. Fixed a few display bugs in the Activity feed.
19. Added the mini profile popup to the quiz results pages, so that mousing over a gamerpic shows the user profile information.
20. Fixed an issue in quizzes where the meta-takeaway was not reporting consistently making it seem like your traits were changing. It now sorts correctly.
21. Corrected an attitude question that said GuildCafe… should be GamerDNA.
22. Fixed some 404 errors on the homepage for images. These were hidden images that couldn’t be seen.

Coming down the line

A lot of outstanding issues here… but things everyone should continue to be aware of:

1. Blogs will be converted into experiences and turned off.
2. Users will be prompted to rename themselves if they don’t conform to OpenID naming standards
3. We are aware of performance issues and looking into them.
4. Guild Roster updates eminent.
5. Still working on the search engine performance and bringing it back.
6. Working on challenge gadget performance and bringing it back.

The world is changing.  No longer are games limited to a small subculture of computer enthusiasts.  Games are part of the cultural mainstream…  But what do we know about the diversity of gamers–geographically, demographically, psychographically?  And what can we learn about how people relate to each other through the media of games?

GamerDNA has proposed a presentation on this subject at the upcoming South by Southwest (SXSW) conference.  If the subject interests you, please vote for our entry at this years conference clicking here: GamerDNA SXSW Presentation — and voting it up.  Comments are also very welcome and helpful, as they’ll help the panel committee understand why the panel is important.

This is also an opportunity to raise the profile of the people who make up the GamerDNA community–because we’ll be talking about our own members and what we’ve learned about games and gaming from YOU.  Be a part of shaping the way gamers are perceived by the industry!

Yeah, you heard me. I yawn at its giant early numbers. I am just not impressed. Let’s look at the facts:

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Darkfall Online is not even released yet and it has a huge hardcore following. Most of its draw comes from the promise that it hopes to be a truly massive universe completely centered on PvP. No release date has been given at this time, but that hasn’t stopped many of you from creating guilds and clamoring for your own custom theme! You have asked, and we have answered:

If you want to customize Darkfall, it has has slots for 4 images that can be replaced with your own, to randomly change the image in the top left corner. By default the theme has 4 different dragons in that position by default. You can also replace the 4 large background image as well… the only thing static are the gray boxes with boarders and tribal edges. So have fun with it! Leave any feedback in the comments!

A new guild theme theme for our group hosting system is now available for Dream of Mirror Online, nicknamed DOMO.What is DOMO you might ask? From their site:

Dream of Mirror Online features a fun and beneficial “personal relationships” system. Everyone, in some way, depends on others, and when you nurture those relationships, you’ll not only make great new friends, you’ll enjoy the benefits of having someone to back you up in any battle, and perhaps even some exclusive special abilities as well.

In Dream of Mirror Online, your characters are able to develop three types of close human relationships: Teacher and Student, Friends, and Lovers. Anyone can develop these relationships, but other relationships are predestined - depending on your birth date and your Chinese zodiac sign, you’ll be connected to certain players by the red string of fate. You may find yourselves to be relatives, rivals, or even a true love via these fated connections - and who knows what may happen after that? It’s all up to your initiative!

The theme comes in orange or blue, sun or moon and displays one of up to five DOMO figures at random. The randomizing images is a new feature and this is the first theme to take advantage of it. You can also customize it even further so that it works with other similarly styled clan/guilds. Enjoy!

The following slideshow is from the presentation that I gave at Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2008.  The title of my presentation was, “Megatrends in Video Gaming,” with the audacious subtitle of “Can Videogames end War?”  I presented evidence that we’ve gleaned from GamerDNA about the increasing social and global nature of games.  Will people be more prone to seek peaceful real-world solutions with the people they’re engaging in virtual competition with?  What do you think?

Some of the games used in the analysis include: Rock Band, Guitar Hero III, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto IV and Call of Duty IV.

The following are all the changes that were made for our latest build. It was a tough build. We added some new routing rules for various features which caused all sorts of problems last night. We were here until 4am tweaking things and are still catching them all… but progress is being made. In the meantime, you can explore a few things:

Profile Enhancements & Changes

1. Added ICQ as an AKA that you can specify in your gamerDNA panel.
2. A message was added to quiz section of the DNA panel temporarily to explain where the quizzes have moved to (in case people are looking for them). This will be removed later.
3. Added the ability to add a level to Guild Wars characters in your DNA Panel.
4. Fixed a bug where experience embellishments were being blocked in some cases.
5. Fixed a bug where users who were giving respect were not getting the proper fame. It has not been corrected to give fame in the correct manner.
6. Hover for WoW characters in the DNA Panel fixed for Safari users.
7. Previously, if you deleted an image there was no feedback that the delete happened. It now notifies properly.
8. Fixed an issue where the guild theme styles were conflicting with the DNA panel when adding a character.
9. New badges section added to the member profile page that holds all your dynamic quiz results sig images.

General Site Enhancements & Changes

1. New B2B site has been deployed, it isn’t live yet, but will be shortly, focusing on the GamerDNA Alliance and providing additional information about the program and members.
2. New quiz system has been launched! For more details check out the Quizzes 101 post.
3. Old quizzes were removed/altered to work with the new system. the MMO Personality test will be added back under the new system in the coming weeks.
4. New buttons and icons have been added to the forums, replacing the old GuildCafe style.
5. More themes added to the guild feature bar showcasing FPS themes.

Guild Hosting Enhancements & Changes

1. We removed the Guild Radar gadget from the guild directory so we can redevelop it with the new quiz system data to be more accurate and relevant. It will be making a return shortly.
2. We Added a new page option for guilds. If your users have Xbox Live gamertags, you can enable a sub-page to your guild that lists out a wall of GamerCards. Check it out by going to the “pages” tab and activating it! It looks like this (my test guild as an example):
3. Cleaned up some design in the Games page of the guild hosting management to better match the current site style.
4. Cleaned up some design on the guild hosting management screens for the pages configuration.
5. Special characters in character names now display correctly in on the guild rosters.
6. Fixed an issue where the cursor was not activating in the guild charter textarea. Users had to switch to the non-rich editor… however that has now been fixed.

That is it for now! We continue to crank on some tweaks from last night, so if you have problems hitting the site, it might be us.

We are launching a new quiz system today… we are still tweaking it and will be doing more announcements about it as we create some more integration into other parts of your profile, but for now you can take the new quizzes and get some new signatures for your results. The quizzes have some new components:

1. Quizzes are no longer in your DNA Panel… they are on the Quizzes page.
2. Every quiz you take, gives you a dynamic signature that is available in the badges section of your profile. Check mine out!
3. Every quiz you take contributes to your gamerDNA traits. As you take each quiz, the resolution of it gets better and better, and as we add more quizzes we hope to make it more and more accurate. Here is what your trait panel could look like. We will also be introducing a dynamic signature for the trait panel as well shortly.
4. There are numerous traits in the system, and as we add more quizzes to test other behaviors, we will add them. In your GamerDNA traits, we display the top six traits that you show the largest propensity towards. This is refelected as “More” or “Less” of that trait. So if you are more inclined to certain things, that trait is “+”. If you are less inclinded to certain things, the trait is “-”.
5. When you complete a quiz you also get players with similar results that match you, and you also get lists of games that potentially match you as well based on your results.
6. If you are not registered, and you take a quiz, but registering afterwards, your results are saved… so if you are an unregistered member, you can still give them a try! You do have to be registered to use the dynamic signatures.

So go take some quizzes! I hope everyone has fun with the new system. As I said, we will be ramping up adding quizzes as we go a long and hope to offer a dozen or so quizzes eventually that test across all sorts of genres and behaviors. As always, we are interested in feedback!

Last week some of the folks from gamerDNA went to August meeting for the Boston IGDA Chapter.  Everyone was very excited because Ralph Baer was speaking, the man who invented the home video game system and is responsible for the creation of the industry that we all love and enjoy.  Not only that, but Harmonix Music,the company who has created such great games as Guitar Hero 1 and 2 as well as Rock Band, sponsored the event with free food and drinks and we were told that they would bring some “games” to play on the projector screen.

The night started off with a great speech from Mr. Baer about the his work on creating the home video game system, many of them you may know of today.  Ralph is credited with creating the Magnavox Odyssey, the light gun, and the Simon.

Steve “Fatty Chubs” Sopp was able to get his original Odyssey (complete with the box!) signed by Ralph Baer (Seen below)

After Ralph finished his speech, Harmonix rolled out the yet to be released Rock band 2 and allowed everyone in the crowd to go up and play the game with the new instruments and new tracks.  Fatty Chubs and myself (Sam “QforQ” Houston) took the stage and rocked out to  “Kids in America”, with Fatty Chubs on guitar and QforQ on bass. Click here for a picture, taken by Jon Radoff.

Click here for a link to a short video shot of the gamerDNA guys playing Rock Band 2, shot by Harmonix’s own Rob Humphrey.

The Rock Band 2 instruments felt great with a lot of small but significant improvements that make the game experience better than the original Rock Band.  I’d say we’re definitely excited about Rock Band 2 which is set to release for the Xbox 360 next month.

That about wraps it up for today’s “gamerDNA Life” glimpse into the offices here at gamerDNA.  In the future you can count on more posts about what games we’re playing at the office and news about what gamerDNA is up to these days.  Stay tuned!

Today marks the first day of gamerDNA’s regular “spotlight” feature, where we shine the light on a member or group in the community and see what makes up their gamerDNA. This week, we have an interview with the leader of Fyrdraek, a World of Warcraft raiding guild.  They’ve put a lot of time into creating the guild and using gamerDNA’s event system to keep track of their raids, so it is my pleasure to introduce their leader, Elilane.

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Maybe it’s because this is a presidential election year. Maybe it’s because this is turning out to be a bit of a slow news year. But we here at GamerDNA have been perusing the data, and with all due respect to MTV’s Multiplayer blog and G4 and other gaming news sources, we’re not seeing any need for players to choose between the top titles in the music game category.

You might have seen news articles talking about a brewing showdown for the upcoming sequels to the raw awesomeness that are the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises. Conventional wisdom stated that the required accessories for these games were so expensive that consumers could only choose one set of toys. Early attempts at making you choose one (thaaaanks, Activision, really) didn’t pan out as planned, and the buzz is that the titles are going to compete on their merits.

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Hi all, just wanted to call attention to a new Guild/Clan theme that went live this week called “America’s Army”. Description from Zel, the author:

Inspired by the game America’s Army. Similar to our Clean Slate theme, this theme offers complete color customization. Just submit a different hex color code in the overall color field and watch as all background elements shift to the color of your choice. This theme also allows you to remove or replace the heading and outside background images with images you supply.

So if you have a FPS Clan or a Guild in a military themed title, check out the AA Theme… it might be right up your alley!

Here are the notes from our recent weekly build. A few things in here… but most of the work still goes towards quizzes next week!

Note: Anytime we do a release, it is best to hit CTRL-F5 in your browser to force all files to refresh.

Profile Enhancements

1. Your latest twitter message now appears in the right-column of your profile page if your twitter account is added to your AKAs.
2. The Last.fm music feed has been added to the right column of the profile page for users with their Last.fm account in their AKAs. In general we are just experimenting with these various non-gaming related network APIs… so the locations of these might change… but we have to keep the interns busy!
3. When clicking images off the pic-strips, you are now taken to a stand alone image page instead of a popup.
4. Fixed the DNA Panel to use the image thumbnail in the panel properly instead of the full size image simply scaled leading to better performance.
5. There is now an Images sub page in your profile that lists out all of the images, and allows you to link people directly to your image collection.

General Site Enhancements

1. We upgraded to Rails 2.1… which is pretty cool… you will see performance improvements in the site.
2. Added Socom, Socom 2, Socom 3, Socom Combined Assult, and Socom Confrontation to Tier 3 so they appear in the drop downs.
3. All moderate image requests now feed directly into our support form for better response.
4. Battlefield: Bad Company promoted to a tier 3 title with icon and info.
5. Everquest characters can now specify a level.
6. Added guild URL to the support form and also added user screen resolution to better help track down issues.

Guild Hosting Enhancements

1. New Fallen Sword Theme was added
2. The ability to preview a post before you submit it has been added to the Guild forums.
3. New DOMO Guild theme has been released!
4. Fixed an issue where logging out on a guild page would take you to some random test guild. It now takes you back to where ever you logged out.
5. Fixed an issue where IE7 users were having problems changing themes.
6. Fixed an issue where deleted guild forum posts were still showing in the “Most Recent Post” column and causing an error when clicked.
7. Fixed a bug where favorites couldn’t be turned on and off. It now behaves correctly.
8. Fixed a long standing bug with guild progress never going to 100% even when you invite members. It now works correctly.
9. Added ability to easily rename guilds from the support pages. So if you want your guild renamed it is easier for us to handle that.

Coming soon (same as last week)
These are bigger projects we are working towards that will see life in the coming weeks.

1. An entirely new and revamped quiz system that will help you discover your gamerDNA.
2. A new guild event management and notification system.
3. Enhancements to games so that we have more information and more games in the system for you all!
4. OpenID support

Be prepared (same as last week)
Here are a few changes we will be making in the coming weeks. We will be contacting you if you are affected by this.

1. Due to OpenID we need to fix about 8,000 user names that are using non-compliant characters in their names. These users will be asked to rename their accounts so that the openID system works correctly on their new names and profile locations.
2. The current blog system will be going away. We will allow people to migrate all content into the new Experiences model, complete with your comments. This will be optional if you do not wish to keep your content.

Feel free to leave any comments on the past, present, or future!

The worst thing about playing a real time strategy game is that you lose track of time. It is possible to sit in one posture for so long that you do not realize what you’re doing to yourself until you realize you are permanently crippled. Actually, the first indicator isn’t your mouse hand cramped into a death claw, or your dried out eyeballs, or even the rosy fingers of dawn creeping through the window at a point in time when you were thinking you should get some supper. It’s your numb, bloodless butt that has been planted in one spot for more hours than is strictly natural.

Clearly the solution is a softer seat. Like your couch. And it looks like in all the sound and fury over MMOs on the console and FPS on the computer, the real crossover is taking root. It may be too early to call it a movement, but we here at GamerDNA are going to stand up and call it a trend.

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You think we have quizzes? We have not yet begun to quiz!

You might not consider it on the surface, but quizzes are a huge part of what we are doing at gamerDNA… there is the auto-data capture side… where you can put in your XFire, Xbox Live, or WoW character and we auto-pull data and provide daily updates about your game play on your profile… the other side is building out behavior analysis to really define what you, as a gamer, find important when you game. The Bartle quiz scratches the surface of that for MMOs, but what about other genres? Other scenarios?

That is why we are investing the time in a new quiz system that is not just fun to take, but really tells you something about who you are as a gamer and what you find important. If you don’t know what your gamerDNA is, we will help you discover it!

Sneak peek of the new interface:

We are of course working on many other things in parrallel, but I wanted to share one of the big features right around the corner that will add a whole new dimension to who you are as a gamer… it will be complete with embeddable signature graphics you can take places and share with others, displaying your gamerDNA for all to see.

As you know, every week we do a build of the site… we put in some bug fixes and new features.

Note: Anytime we do a release, it is best to hit CTRL-F5 in your browser to force all files to refresh.

Here was what went in yesterday:

User Profiles
These are changes to pages specific to you.

1. Users can now delete any shoutbox entry… or click to delete all their entries.
2. The Xbox Live gamercard is now on your profile page if you have your Xbox tag in the AKA of your profile.
3. User registration and guild registration now check for uniqueness due to coming OpenID requirements. No member name can now conflict with any guild name.
4. Gametap.com added as an AKA on our site.
5. Images can now run in a stand alone page. We have also added pre-built links for HREF, IMG, and BBCODE on the image page to make it easier to share the image.
6. Fixed the DNA Panel to use the image thumbnail when viewing characters. This should speed up the character panel.

General Site
These are any changes made to wider parts of the site.

1. The IRC link that is called in the nav has been updated to support tabs that can easier allow you to use NickServ and other features.
2. Fixed an issue where the Warhammer page on the guild directory was having CSS troubles.
3. In cases where guilds had the same name in the same game on different servers, people were being take to the wrong guilds. We simplified the link to the profile page so they should now work in all cases.
4. Repaired an issue where fame history and activity were giving 500 errors due to a new method for generating page titles.
5. The gamerDNA panel should now properly fit into 1024×768 resolution and not obscure any buttons.
6. Fixed a few places where the guild template styles were conflicting with the gamerDNA panel styles causing strange display issues.
7. Implemented a standard method of doing character counting on text boxes… this is in places like shout box and game comments, etc.
8. Small tweak made to game page titles.
9. Tweaked some design in the guild hosting sign up page to use smaller text.
10. Fixed a bug where if you filtered the gamerDNA active strange on the home page the link on the avatar was pointing at the wrong location. It should now point at the correct location.
11. Fixed an issue with some 500 errors in the image gallery for certain users.

Coming soon
These are bigger projects we worked on that didn’t see deployment. So you know they are coming.

1. An entirely new and revamped quiz system that will help you discover your gamerDNA.
2. A new guild event management and notification system.
3. Enhancements to games so that we have more information and more games in the system for you all!
4. OpenID support

Be prepared
Here are a few changes we need to make shortly. We will be contacting you if you are affected by this.

1. Due to OpenID we need to fix about 8,000 user names that are using non-compliant characters in their names. These users will be asked to rename their accounts so that the openID system works correctly on their new names and profile locations.
2. The current blog system will be going away. We will allow people to migrate all content into the new Experiences model, complete with your comments. This will be optional if you do not wish to keep your content.

Feel free to leave any comments on the past, present, or future!

One of the most annoying things about working in MMOs is listening to armchair quarterbacks talk about subscriptions, play time, and what have you without a speck of data. “The sky is falling!” is one of the most common refrains of a player whose particular little red wagon isn’t being fixed fast enough. Do I sound jaded and bitter? Friend, I’ve been around so long that I remember when “everyone” was quitting Ultima Online after the carebear patch. Yet it’s still there, and doing better with more loyal subscribers than a number of other AAA titles I could mention but won’t.

So let’s take a look at some numbers for Age of Conan. Specifically, let’s use the data we’ve got to test two common hypotheses - one, that players who left WoW for AOC are going back to WoW, and two, that the patches are causing players to stop playing. (Please note that I said “stop playing,” not “quit.” I will not speculate on whether or not players are actually canceling subscriptions. I will simply note that in my time on the front lines during the first year of a new release, if I checked the billing records of twenty people claiming to have canceled, one of them would have actually done so… and half of those that did so resubscribed within the week.)

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We recently created a new #gamerdna channel for IRC. If you want to connect up and live chat with members of the company and community peeps, you can do it a few ways:

1. Go to irc.gamerdna.com. This will launch a default IRC channel viewer.
2. Use our Mibbet link. This launches a popular IRC viewer. You can also find this link in the FORUM drop down in the Gamerdna.com nav bar.
3. Download a plug-in for your favorite browser. Everyone at GamerDNA uses FireFox 3… so there is Chatzilla. Connect by using the command: /server irc.gamerdna.com
4. Grab some client software…mIRC is popular.

In general though, our information is:

Server: irc.gamerdna.com
Channel: #gamerdna

Come hang out though… we have had a good number of people chatting over the last few days and it has been great meeting you all.

Theo and TX Eegras worked together to put up a stat page of the chat as well! Thanks guys!

I had a few people ping me today, suggesting things they’d like to see in a future Data Driven post. But why should the people who have guessed my IM name be allowed to have all the fun? You can email me at sweathers AT gamerdna DOT com if you’re not a member, or you can get priority and send me a PM through the GamerDNA site.

Our data depends on you, by the way. If you think your favorite game is underrepresented, make sure it’s in your profile (or make sure you’ve added your Xfire data to your profile page) - and drag your friends in that game over to us to track their DNA