Recent posts by emily_greer on Kongregate

Topic: Programming / Collab Petition!

The work is more about displaying authors and tracking the revenue correctly. It’s on the list, but there’s always been something we need to more urgently. But if the petition gets long enough, it will definitely help push this up the priorities list.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Winners Announced!

Yup, we were discussing how next time for something like this we’ll have to pick finalists and put them on the homepage to ensure they get enough traffic/ratings before judging. And have a much longer period for rating, too. But as I said there were some weird timing constraints due to Scion’s needs.

I’m pleased that a bunch of the games have had their ratings go up after being featured.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Game future

They are your property, you can do whatever you like. If you want them deleted you need to email support@kongregate.com as only admins have the delete button.

Topic: Kongregate / Question about ad revenue from games

We support Paypal and check, both. We used to support Moneybookers as well, which works in places Paypal doesn’t, like Russia, but they recently changed their policies in a way that prevents us from sending money, but we may be able to get it reinstated. Stay tuned.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Winners Announced!

Whoops, Greg put the start and end of the challenge as the same. Fixed now.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Thanks! (+Payment proof)

Draco, it’s like you have spycam in our office.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Cheating! Scion contest

Probably something along the lines of: weigh the votes of existing Kongregate players more heavily than new accounts, then have judges actually pick the winners out of the top 10 rated, which reduces both the impact of cheating and the incentive to cheat.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Thanks! (+Payment proof)

Well, thanks on the speed of payment goes to Alison who is very on top of this! I just sign what she puts in front of me. :D

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Thanks! (+Payment proof)

The other two opted for checks so it will be a while. I just signed them this afternoon.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Cheating! Scion contest

PinkComp, note that we have not accused anyone of cheating or disqualified any participant, because we can’t conclusively prove that there wasn’t an innocent explanation (as you’ve given) for a very suspicious pattern of account creation/voting, or that the developers themselves were involved.

However the results were clearly being distorted substantially, and we felt that throwing out the suspicious ratings (all new level 1 accounts, upvoting one game, downvoting multiple others with no other activity, registered in clusters, on just a few ips or email addresses) and letting the contest be judged on the remaining ratings was the fairest action, and the one most likely to bring the best games to the top.

so now it would look like either there is at least two cheaters, or one cheater and weird coincidences.

There were three substantial factions of upvoting/downvoting that were thrown out.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / What have you learned?

We learned that a contest where games are not on the homepage needs a longer judging period and more protections against fraud. We also learned that there’s a real talent pool that we could help get started, and perhaps more importantly, help each other. I’m pretty impressed with the number and quality of the entrants, and all the great advice and help in the forums.

I’ve learned that $250 isn’t worth the effort. There are bigger prizes out there.

We deliberately kept the prizes low so that experienced developers wouldn’t be tempted to submit games and crowd new developers out. We’ll probably do new contests that are for different levels of developers, some for those starting out like this, some for more experienced devs with higher prizing.

Topic: Kongregate / So Staff...

I love that there are 15 posts in this topic, and only 3 in the topic where I actually announced the winners.

Topic: Kongregate / So Staff...

I fail. I forgot that the announcements don’t accept textile. Fixed now.

Topic: Kongregate / Scion Shootorial Contest Winners Announced

We’re excited to announce the winners of the Scion Shootorial! contest.

1st Place and $250 to jimmy_raynor for river raid
2nd Place and $150 to dahnraelz for elastic
3rd Place and $150 to leandropug for g-virus

We were also extremely impressed by astro75’s gravity master but regretfully disqualified it from the contest rankings because not enough of the game was based on the Shootorials. However, Gravity Master will be featured along with the three winners on the homepage during the next week for a points challenge. A fifth game — Greg’s Pick — will also be featured (once Greg has picked it that is!)

Congratulations to the winners and all the entrants — we were blown away with the quality of your submissions, and are excited to see the games you make in the future.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Winners Announced!

So when you guys said “it could be a shooter, a racing game, a platformer, or something else entirely,” was that a lie?

No, it could be any type of game, but it did need to use a reasonable amount of the Shootorial code as a base. We corresponded with Astro75 to discuss how much of the code was on the Shootorial base. While some parts were, he already had this game in progress before we released the Shootorials. We thought that featuring his game but disqualifying him from the prize pool was a fair compromise; he’ll probably earn as much from that in ad revenue as the contest prizes.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Winners Announced!

Yes, we cleared out all the fraudulent voting before we determined the rankings.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Winners Announced!

Stickied, plus I’m posting in the main forums and as a news post.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Winners Announced!

Hi guys,

We’re excited to announce the winners of the Scion Shootorial! contest.

1st Place and $250 to jimmy_raynor for river raid
2nd Place and $150 to dahnraelz for elastic
3rd Place and $150 to leandropug for g-virus

We were also extremely impressed by astro75’s gravity master but regretfully disqualified it from the contest rankings because not enough of the game was based on the Shootorials. However, Gravity Master will be featured along with the three winners on the homepage during the next week for a points challenge. A fifth game — Greg’s Pick — will also be featured (once Greg has picked it that is!)

Congratulations to the winners and all the entrants — we were blown away with the quality of your submissions, and are excited to see the games you make in the future.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Cheating! Scion contest

Hey guys, we identified 300 accounts that were clearly fraudulent and we’ve cleaned out the ratings associated with those accounts. It had a pretty major effect on the rankings; unfortunately we can’t extend the voting because of commitments to Scion but all the top games did receive substantial number of legitimate ratings. I’m about to make an official winners post so that it’s not announced in a thread called “cheating”.

Topic: Programming / Revenue ERUGH!

So the process is that on the 1st we (and by we I mean Alison) do a check run and mail the checks for everybody from the previous month, then go through and pay everybody who selected paypal. Once everybody is paid then we record the payments on the site. So depending on timing on the first of the month you may have two months in the “On Hold” amount. And since a human is involved the time of day when you get paid will be during a workday, so not exactly at midnight on the first.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Cheating! Scion contest

We used the same time scale as we use for weekly/monthly contests, not expecting the absolutely flood of last day entries. We also didn’t worry too much about fraud because that hasn’t been much of a problem in those contests since anything that makes front page gets so many ratings that it’s virtually impossible to manipulate placements signficantly. So yes, we’ve learned a lot from running this contest.

My preliminary investigation shows that there has been widespread suspicious downvoting, and suspicious upvoting on some but not all games. We are working to identify the accounts involved and delete those ratings. The current rankings of games is not likely to hold up, and we may throw out one or more games out of the contest because of it.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Cheating! Scion contest

Well, Scion had specific timing needs that we wanted to live up to, but yes, not so great!

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Cheating! Scion contest

dahnraelz, we are interested, but the contest finished during the middle of a holiday weekend when most of us were traveling, and while I was here in San Francisco I was dealing with both having family in town and a break-in at the Kongregate offices, plus a tremendous wave of spam comments, etc. So cut us some slack, please.

Topic: Kongregate Labs / Cheating! Scion contest

Hey guys, we are doing an analysis to check if there has been any systematic vote fraud by an entrant. If we find any such patterns the perpetrators will be disqualified, those ratings discarded, and the winners reordered.

On a side note, I can tell you that the 38,000 game plays for G-Virus are completely legit, and are the result of a big Norwegian site (123spill.no) linking to the game.

Topic: Programming / Money

It didn’t disappear. Before we made the correction that I posted about in this thread you were above the minimum payout for October, now you’re not, but the amount just rolled into the balance, which is $73 and would normally be paid next month. However looking at your account the amount of activity on your game given the low rating is quite suspicious and we are now examining it for fraud.