Topic: Kongregate / Cadbury egg promotion?

We had to make a few changes to it, so consider last night just a teaser ;) It’ll be back up at some point.

Topic: Off-topic / It's been a while. >_>

Originally posted by Jazzaboy:

Originally posted by MadJedi:

Welcome back. Aside from a multitude of updates, here’s what happened with the community: Ducklette isn’t a community manager anymore and became a marketing one instead. Trickyrodent is the new community manager now and Iamthecandyman became an administrator. The Off-Topic forums now have three new forum moderators too.

AC isn’t a community manager either, she’s working on mobile games I believe.

Nope! Well I was, I’m not now. Now I’m working on product with the web team.

also hi hokage :)

Topic: Kongregate / Official Kong Plus Thread

Originally posted by DannyDaNinja:

Question, when when our Kongplus runs out do we lose the charter medal and and do the profile skins dissapear?

Charter member medals are forever, profile skins are only there for as long as you’re a kong plus member.

Originally posted by SAl37:

We wanted to allow as much freedom as possible, but we also didn’t want to fall victim to the myspace effect.

Could you please explain what the “myspace effect” is. I don’t use social networks, so I would have no idea what it does.

So sometimes, when you give users the power, they turn lovely things into ugly things. Example:

Since other people can see your profile too, we just want to make sure that they’re all generally aesthetically pleasing (as well as appropriate) :)

Topic: Kongregate / Official Kong Plus Thread

Just wanted to jump in to address this:

@Z, I really appreciate that though. I think that the main thing about this I dislike(d) was that I feel like this could lead to normal users being at a disadvantage, but it’s reassuring to see that isn’t the case. I just don’t want the normal users to be put down in any way because of this, and it kinda feels like giving certain content (in this case, just the backgrounds, not too big a deal, but bigger stuff being limited to K+ users would be a downer) could count as putting down normal users in certain situations.

I promise we will not be spending our time developing loads new features only for Kong Plus users. Promise. You can shave my head if we do, and I have a really big, really oddly shaped head.

We just spend a really long time working on improving things for everyone (see: new nav, new homepage) before tackling this project and some of the work that went on to support Kong Plus has improved things (I believe) for everyone. Anyone can be invited into and participate in private chat. We wouldn’t have been able to make it so that game/room chats are on tabs next to each other so you can easily switch back and forth without this work. Also the unread chat notifier wouldn’t exist.

I totally understand the concern, but you’ve trusted us thus far so I’d ask you to try and trust us a little longer. I really do get your responses (and I appreciate you coming back and reading what we’ve posted with an open mind), but we are committed to ALL our users.

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

Originally posted by Bilious:

The recommended badges are based on game rating? Ah.

Don’t really want to beat a dead horse, but please, please, can you make the points earnt for rating games something that can be opted out of? First it just affect ratings, so my input towards other users experience. Then it affected the recommended games section, and now it’s affecting the recommended badges. With each similar update this becomes a bigger area, impacting more on personal experience of the site.

I’m confused :/ Why would you want to opt out of rating for points? Your recommended games/badges are purely based on your ratings, not those of anyone else.

Topic: Kongregate / New Homepage Discussion

Originally posted by uzzbuzz:

I never get badge recommendations :( What it is based on, the same as game recommendations? I still have some badges left, but they are all on newish games.

It’s based on your game ratings. You really don’t get any badge recommendations? :/ That’s wrong. Can you screenshot it for me please? You haven’t gone nuts with the not interested [X] by chance, have you?

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

To not ignore posts about latest news:

No, it’s probably not getting moved up :P It’s not super valuable to most people that hit the homepage, so it got pushed down. Sorry :(

edit:

“And keeping it more updated, perhaps with game releases you guys are excited about (Raze 2, maybe, being the second highest rated game on AG,) contests like the name that ugly thing on the kongregate section of the forums, developer interviews perhaps?, games that on active beta, allow MMO devs to buy a news article space thing like on the featured games reel, showing off some of the collabs, announcing new admins/changes in the admins who work directly with users, keeping the top games of the week/month updated like they used to down there, etc.”

That would take a lot of work in upkeep and, while I definitely agree we could do more with it, we should take the step of making “Latest News” more valuable before we take the step of making it more in your face. If/when it’s something that has a ton of value for everyone—we can reconsider where we display it

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

Originally posted by blackchips:

Thanks for that update, but I have a question : What’s the difference between API and badged games (in top rated games)? Some games with badges are considered as API and other not.

Game developers need to put our API in their game (it’s some code that talks to some code on our side) for us to be able to put badges on it. There are lots of games that have the API (if you can see high scores, it has the API integrated) that don’t have badges, but no games have badges that don’t have the API.

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

Originally posted by saybox:

I think the new layout for the homepage looks cleaner, but I don’t like the shift in focus back towards established high rated games. Kong’s last few updates were pushing the idea of getting players to try more than just the very top rated games, and this seems like a step back from that. Mostly I don’t believe games with badges need so much extra promotion, either from the player point of view or on Kong’s side of it.

We’re actually trying really hard to show users more, and more varied games than with the old homepage. We’ve totally taken away “top rated” for registered users, and have added the “top weekly” and “top monthly” to more obviously call out great new games, as well as adding more slots in hot new games and recommended games.

I see what you’re saying with regard to the recommended badges, but even there we’re basing it off of your ratings so you’re seeing content that is personalized to you and not just ones we think are swell. I also think this is getting more important as time goes on, we have oodles of badges now, I know I can’t keep up with all of them so this is helpful in surfacing badges I’ve missed that I’d enjoy earning.

Or, as an alternative, at least make the recommendation engine not recommend games that we’ve already earned badges for. That would eliminate a ton of them.

That’s actually how it should be working. Are you sure it’s not? I know there are tons of games that I’ve rated highly and thought I’d earned the badge in, but when I went to check, turns out I hadn’t. You can also just hover over the points icon and click the [X]. The recommended badges group will never show that to you again.

Not sure if this was posted elsewhere, but has the whole “Badge of the day >>> Gamestop PowerUp rewards” thing been eliminated?

Not eliminated at all, just taken out of the featured games section :) You can see the badge of the day info below the ad on the right, and there’s GameStop PowerUp rewards on the right and in the footer, if you’re in the US.

I’ve got some stupid question… How does the Kongregate know what badges are to recommend for me?

Magic!

(or we use an algorithm using your ratings and the games our recommendation engine thinks you’ll like. It’s all based on your game ratings though.)

So overall an absolutely awesome update… just fix the ‘Play Now’ button and things will be super epic =D.

We’ll be fixing that :)

Topic: Kongregate / New Homepage Discussion

Originally posted by UnknownGuardian:

Originally posted by emily_greer:

In truth we show we like ya by doing some last minute testing after the deploy to make sure things look good before we hit the big button. Of course there may still be bugs and your first reaction may be “ew!” anyway but not because we didn’t try.

So then, just curious, what is the point of taking the site down for 5 or so minutes? I assume its just files moving to the real servers or database processing occurring?

Updating the code. We just took awhile to test before actually making it visible to y’all :)

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

Originally posted by UnknownGuardian:

With new profiles as well? crosses fingers They are really in for a refreshing look.

Nope!

That’s my “OH GOD CAN WE PLEASE FIX THESE PLEAAAAAAAAAAAASE” part of Kong though, so hopefully we’ll get those fixed up soon :)

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

Originally posted by HappyAlcoholic:

Users level 5 or lower:

• See Kongregate tips on the homepage

There’s no way to make it so that we can all see that? :P
I think “Kongregate tips” would still be useful to people, regardless of their level.
Everything else seems pretty nice to me.

A page to house all the tips is in the works :) We’ll get one up soon.

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

Y U HAXXING, ZSHADOW??

Topic: Kongregate / New Homepage Discussion

Originally posted by BadgesFreak:

Oh Kong, you such a tease ;D

It’s how we show ya we like ya ;)

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

No one’s in the new homepage group yet, because we’re not done setting it up. I’m sure once we’re done, there will be screenshots galore! :)

Topic: Kongregate / New Homepage Discussion

It’s not actually live yet, this is just a teaser. Give us a few minutes :P

Topic: Kongregate / Cards glitch.

Originally posted by Zachary_Greene:

Seems fixed now…

Yeah, we reverted it back to just showing your cards. We’re still going to switch it over to “Zachary_Greene’s Items” and include the weekly challenge items, we’re just going to hopefully not cover your profile in Rumiko when we do it :P

Topic: Kongregate / Cards glitch.

Originally posted by Phoenix00017:

Noooooo, don’t change it! My profile page is so pretty now!

I’m telling your wife.

Topic: Kongregate / Cards glitch.

Rumiko’s our favorite and we want her to be your favorite too. :) :) :)

Seriously though…er…oops. Fixing it now.

Topic: Kongregate / New Kongregate Version: Two new split tests and a change to profiles

Originally posted by resterman:

Woah, the fastest admin forum post after an update I’ve ever seen. I have to admit that I love that…
And yeah, I don’t see any items section neither…

The item section actually has a bit of a delay before it’ll show up. We’re running some behind the scenes stuff to move over the items y’all have won in the past few weeks from the Friday challenge :) Once that’s done, you’ll see the switch from cards to items.

Topic: Technical Support / Skyrim medal obtained but kong points not awarded?

Thanks guys, sorting this out now.

Topic: Kongregate / *Mobile Contest Winners Announced*

I am very pleased to announce the winners of our summer mobile game contest! We got a ton of great entries, I had so much fun playing through them. A big huge thanks to everyone that participated and keep in mind that we now do a monthly contest for mobile games like we do for web games, with a top prize of $1000.

Grand Prize ($6000)

Cat God vs Sun King Mobile

2nd Place ($4000)

UpBot goes Up Mobile

3rd - 10th Place ($1,125)

in no particular order
Love Mobile
Racing Comrade Mobile
Dibbles: for the Greater Android Good
Aliens in the Box
Exorbis 2 Mobile
Orange Block Attack
Hue Runner Mobile
Reincarnation TEND Mobile

11th - 25th Place ($400)

in no particular order
Watermelon Bomb Mobile
Picma Squared Mobile
Reactance Mobile
Wood Puzzle: Levels Pack
Refraction Mobile
Castle Siege
Ninja Dogs Mobile
We are the Robots 2
Diggy Dig Mobile
Curving
Perpetual Blaze Mobile
Pipe it 2D
Popballoons Mobile
Gone to the Dogs Mobile
Infinite Tower RPG

Congratulations to all the winners and thanks so much for participating!

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate Letter Avatar Week

In! Thanks for the custom one, Z :)

Topic: Game Programming / Android Development...

Originally posted by mikebolt:

I believe the Kongregate arcade app accepts .swf files and not .air files. You can develop these games just like other flash games, only with mobile things in mind like screen size, technical limitations and varying input methods. You shouldn’t need to upgrade flash to do this. The .air solution is mostly for people who want to put games on the android market, as compiled packages.

Just wanted to confirm that this is correct :) We run .swfs within a browser for the app, so it’s the exact same coding as web Flash games, just making sure to not be too processor intensive and to be touch screen friendly.

Topic: Kongregate / Help us find games for mobile and we'll give you shiny things

It’s not that I don’t like the suggestions, there are just some that are already uploaded as mobile versions :P Sorry guys.

Okay, more suggestions I think will work!:

Mitoza
Icy Gifts
Vertical Drop Heroes
Run Elephant Run
Robot Wants XYZ
Shift
Liquid Measure
Breach

Thanks for the suggestions :)

edit: oh man, many posts between when I wrote this and hit send, I’ll go look at all those games now