Recent posts by jimgreer on Kongregate

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate Arcade for Iphone/Ipod??

Bumping this thread – as others said a full Kongregate Arcade would violate Apple’s terms, but we now do have our first iOS game, complete with Kongregate badges. It’s /ESCAPE\ – check it out. Pretty addictive little one-button game that plays very well on iPhone/iPad/iPod.

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate stole my money!

Originally posted by Joshua031197:

I tried emailing them but it says kreds@kongregate.com does not exist. I spelt it correct and everything

It exists. I promise.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: New Homepage Split Test

Actually there’s a real bug here – we’ll fix.

Originally posted by Bilious:

Originally posted by Thebum06:

It’s not working, even with adblock (and all other addons) disabled.
http://i.imgur.com/yH2Mw.jpg

Rate more games. I only have a couple showing, (none today), and I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve only ever rated 20 games.

Topic: Kongregate / Sorry, Men of Kongregate...

Congrats, Mr and Mrs DuckBeard! Looking forward to collecting your firstborn (you did see that clause in your employment contracts right?)

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: New navigation and footer test and changes to developer payment history pages

Originally posted by kwinse:

can you please directly display the game’s name with the badge of the day under the achievements tab?

Yeah, that’s a good call.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: New navigation and footer test and changes to developer payment history pages

Originally posted by penuzi:

I still can´t use the new menu. I mouse over one link on the menu and the sub-tab open and close lots of times per second. To open the forum I need white the url on the browser…

Penuzi – sorry you’re having this problem. Can you tell me what browser version and operating system you are using?

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: New navigation and footer test and changes to developer payment history pages

Ok, thanks, I get it now. So it’s mostly an issue on the forum pages, or are there other places on the site where you do that?

Topic: Kongregate / So, what do you guys think about the new Kongregate layout?

If it says “My Profile”, you’re signed in.

If it says “Sign In”, you need to sign in.

I agree “Sign Out” is pretty buried though.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: New navigation and footer test and changes to developer payment history pages

> Why bother shrinking the header if you’re doubling the size of the footer?

So people can play a game without scrolling.

I really don’t understand the issue with a larger footer. You only scroll down to it if you need to see something in the footer, right? The rest of the time it’s not even in view.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: New navigation and footer test and changes to developer payment history pages

> What exactly was the point of this “upgrade” and do you think you have achieved it?

Emily posted our goals the night we released it:

1) to reduce the overall space taken up by the header, so that more of the game can fit into the screen
2) to make it easier to navigate — in the old version if you wanted to jump to something on the far right of any sub nav it took a lot of careful mousework to get over there, and we had a hard limit on how much we could put in there — now we can organize it and be much more flexible with what we put in there. Now your recommendations are in with games, badge of the day is showing under achievements, and all the forums are up available immediately.
3) move less accessed resource to the footer and increase organization there.

Reducing the overall space requires some compromises, so a main part of what we are testing is different versions of height. One variant keeps a slimmed-down version of what was in the old nav (points, avatar, etc), one variant has all of that down in the profile (but has new message notifications that pop up, don’t worry), and one variant is somewhere in between.

I know it can take some time getting used to new things but there’s a lot here to like, give it a chance for a few days. We don’t expect that we got everything in there that really needs to be in there the first time but with the flexibility of the new system we can adjust. So over the next week or so we’re going to be taking both your feedback and the usage patterns we see to iterate and improve on what you’re seeing.

As for whether we achieved it, we’re going to be looking at how people use the nav – the old one was pretty confusing for new users, and hard when you had to scroll way over… So time will tell. Please be patient with us!

Thanks,
Jim

Topic: Kongregate / New Game Downraters?

As it turns out, Diamond Hollow II was the victim of some serious and coordinated downrating (botted). We’ve got measures against this, but it looks like we missed it here. I’ve purged those ratings and the game is up over 4.2.

Fortunately it looks like Diamond Hollow II was affected far more than any other game. We’ll be doing some work to make sure this kind of botting is harder to do. An ongoing war against hackers and haters…

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: CR 2011.08.24

> I’d start rating lots of games if I didn’t get points for it, and I know I’m not the only one.

Huh? What’s wrong with getting points?

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: CR 2011.08.24

There’s not an explicit limit. In practice, it would be extremely rare that it would recommend a 2-star game.

I looked at your current recommendations and they are all pretty highly rated games… have you seen any low ones?

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: CR 2011.08.24

Originally posted by GameBuilder15:

Is this a bug? The recommended games on the game page can be below 3.5. :o

Not a bug! If your ratings show that you have a taste for a certain style of games, then it will recommend those to you even if a lot of people don’t like them.

Think of Netflix – if you love 50s noir movies it will recommend a lot of them, even though most people would rate them poorly.

We’re hoping that this feature will help games find their audience, and not make Kongregate so focused on the top 0.5% of all games…

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: CR 2011.08.24

> You can see your comments or leave the developer a message. Happy gaming!

I just fixed this, should be admin or developer, as appropriate in our next release.

Topic: Kongregate / Recommended for you?

This should be fixed in the next couple of weeks… sorry for the delay.

Topic: Kongregate / Forget about armorgames, Freeonlinegames is beating both us and Armorgames! WTF?

It just depends which measurement firm you look at – their numbers all kind of suck and there’s huge variation. The graph showing freeonlinegames.com ahead of both armor and Kong is Compete. Their graphs have never even moved in the same direction as our internal ones.

If you look at Alexa, both Kong and Armor are ahead of freeonlinegames:

Topic: Game Programming / Game Design forum?

Done. Now please go over there and get some discussion going!

Topic: Kongregate APIs / An API Forum?

Better docs are on the way – but it’s always nice to have a place to ask questions.

I made the game design forum, too.

Topic: Game Programming / Game Design forum?

Good idea! I’m making one now.

Topic: Kongregate APIs / New Kongregate APIs Forum

Hey Devs – We’ve decided it would be helpful to have a dedicated forum for help with Kongregate API integration. The current programming forum is great, but it is usually more about general Actionscript questions. Having this dedicated one will help us answer questions and get feedback about our APIs. This is the first step in an upcoming revamp of our developer documentation.

I’ve also renamed the Programming forum to Game Programming, to make the distinction more clear.

Topic: Kongregate / Recommended games is broken

We just fixed an issue that was causing recommendations to be totally terrible sometimes. Check now and see if they are better.

The issue that it sometimes says it recommends something based on a game you didn’t like is still broken, but that should be fixed soon.

Topic: Kongregate / Recommended games is broken

Originally posted by CowFriend:

I’m not really sure why the admins don’t just remove games that’s rated 2 stars or less completely out of the suggestion pool. I’m getting quite a lot of those 2-stars suggestion recently, too.

Yup, that should be fixed soon.

Topic: Kongregate / Recommendations broken?

There’s definitely an issue with recommendations that are based on games that you disliked. What’s happening is that sometimes the algorithm will make a recommendation based on the fact that you hated a game. But the UI doesn’t realize that, and so it assumes that it is always because you liked it.

We’re working on it.

Topic: Kongregate / Recommended For You!

Originally posted by hello5666:

Mines broken. Most of the recommended comes I didn’t rate. I need you to show 15+

Just rate them, and you’ll get new recommendations.