Recent posts by greg on Kongregate

Topic: Kongregate / Reemus on the "Highest Rated Games"

Fact 1: the highest rating thing is just a program function that checks the 3 games with the highest rating.

Actually I do it manually, but I’ll take this as a compliment!

Topic: Kongregate / Regarding PAX cards

Who said your current job is cool?

It’s a lot cooler than I am. It works out pretty well in my favor that my job is the only thing you guys know me by.

Topic: Kongregate / Regarding PAX cards

I’m as shocked as anyone.

Topic: Kongregate / Regarding PAX cards

I am a horrible person, as I am just now sending out a batch of PAX cards that were requested a few months ago.

Here’s the problem: Several people requested autographs while Jim was on paternity leave. I figured I’d wait until he got back to deal with it, which somehow equated to waiting even with people who didn’t request autographs (my brain works in mysterious, lazy ways). By the time he got back, I was so disorganized that the requests had gotten buried in a pile of other paperwork, and I’m just now digging them out.

So basically if you requested an autograph, instead of sending you an autograph, I likely just did not send you anything at all. This is much like watching a puppy run over to lick your feet, but instead of scratching it behind the ear, opting rather to kick it across the room.

So here’s how it’s going to work. I’m currently sending out all the PAX cards that were requested, but no autographs (sorry). If you requested autographs a long time ago and you still like us for some weird reason, please email me at greg@kongregate.com to hassle me about it and I’ll address an envelope (only the people who already requested them — I’ll probably remember your name when I see it). But I promise that Kongregate employees are rather unremarkable human beings, and I very highly doubt that our scribbles will ever be worth anything on eBay. Honestly the fact that so many people even requested this really caught me off-guard.

If you would still like PAX cards, please see this thread. Yeah, we still have a ton. But for the love of God, you MUST include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

If you would like autographs, first, you’re crazy. But second, please send a SEPARATE envelope with a sheet of paper or something. Trying to sign PAX cards really doesn’t work very well.

Also, we’ve really enjoyed all the letters you guys sent in. I’m stockpiling them all so that I can reread them when I’m working as a data entry clerk in 30 years to remember that I used to have a job that was cool.

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate Haikus and Limericks

My soul is long gone,
Sent to graveyard by Hogger.
Release and run back?

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate Haikus and Limericks

PCs rule for games.
Screw it, who am I kidding…
All I play is WoW.

Topic: Kongregate / Who do you think should be an admin?

I actually ninja-fixed it. I’m like Batman, helping people from the shadows.

Topic: Kongregate / Help test possible Mud and Blood 2 impossible badge!

The comparisons to Zilch are somewhat valid, because Mud and Blood 2 admittedly does have a lot of luck involved. One of my problems with a Zilch impossible, though, was that it wouldn’t actually be difficult. I’m not sure if this same problem exists with Mud and Blood 2 if you were to follow a guide.

Hard Badge huge problem: … Unless you keep only 9 soldiers or less the whole game you’re not going to win the hard badge

This is my mistake; I looked at the large number of people who had submitted this stat and I assumed that it must have been sending as soon as wave 50 is reached, rather than at the end of the game. I’m still a bit perplexed at how people could be submitting a “0” for casualties if it’s only reported after you lose… I didn’t think it was very likely that people were surviving to wave 50, then losing to German troops crossing the line without inflicting any casualties. But now I’m starting to think that this must be the case, unless we have some hackers on our hands.

Obviously how the stat actually reports is a huge deal, and the ideal submission method would allow the player to train as many troops as they want as long as none of them die.

I’m going to email the developer about changing how this works. If he’s unable to do it, I will probably change the hard badge to either merely surviving 50 waves or surviving 60 waves (to compensate for the fact that casualties no longer matter). As it stands now, I do not believe that the hard badge is designed very well, and I’m itching to tweak it a bit, hopefully in a manner that’s fair to as many people as possible.

Victoria Cross ribbon: Issued anytime the commander has 10000 enemy waves survived before the 100th mission and less than 2500 men deployed.

Thanks for letting me know what the Victoria Cross award even is. I completely agree that this would be a poor task to use for a badge.

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate Haikus and Limericks

This API sucks.
But badge whores don’t understand.
I fear for my life.

Topic: Kongregate / The Monthly Contest of Reemus

Rating extends through a few days into December to allow ratings to settle a bit. The same thing is done with the weekly contests, and that’s why they’re not made official until Tuesdays.

Topic: Kongregate / Help test possible Mud and Blood 2 impossible badge!

All right, since I did not expect this thread to turn into a discussion about whether or not we should have an impossible badge at all (Mud and Blood 2 is one of my favorite games on the site, personally, and it seems to lend itself to an impossible badge pretty well), I’ll just go ahead and say that I probably won’t add one now. I won’t go as far as to say that I regret putting up the current ones, though! :-P

Topic: Kongregate / Help test possible Mud and Blood 2 impossible badge!

no impossible? yay!

I’ll add one if someone can help me test the stat.

Why this game? It’s… like a small child made it as his first flash game…

Most talented child ever.

Topic: Kongregate / Help test possible Mud and Blood 2 impossible badge!

Yes, when I started a game, a message that said ‘Games: 1’ appeared.

There’s a stat for tracking the total number of games you’ve played (not terribly useful for a badge), so that’s what that is.

Hehe, but anyway, sure, I’ll try to help. I’m only on… ermm… can’t remember what rank, but it’s both pretty high and probably nowhere near chief of staff :P

If you have general or victoria, that would be useful too.

Topic: Kongregate / Help test possible Mud and Blood 2 impossible badge!

That’s actually just the connection; I need the stats after the light turns green. When it actually sends, it WON’T disappear from chat the way those do. And it must follow the exact format that I mentioned above.

Info: Staff:1

None of the Max/null/(0) business.

For reference, the other stats are submitted after a game is completed.

Topic: Kongregate / Help test possible Mud and Blood 2 impossible badge!

Mud and Blood 2 will be tonight’s challenge, and I already have 3 badges planned out. The easy will be to collect a crate, the medium will be to score 100 kills in a single game, and the hard will be to survive wave 50 with fewer than 10 casualties (if you have issues with these, you have about 15 minutes to voice your concern!).

I’d like to do an impossible as well, possibly for achieving some kind of rank. The game submits a few stats, which you can see in the scoreboard. There’s “general,” “victoria,” and “staff.” They submit a “1” when the corresponding rank/medal is achieved.

Now, there’s no way I’m going to be able to personally get the Chief of Staff rank. In fact, I’m not sure if anyone has since the API was implemented. Or maybe it’s just not submitting. Who knows!

For those of you who have achieved these ranks, this is what I want you to do. Load up Mud and Blood 2 at this URL: http://www.kongregate.com/games/urbz/mud-and-bl…

There will be an “info” user sending messages in chat. What I want to see is a message like this:

Info: Staff:1

That means that the game is sending us a “1” for completing the staff criteria, which is what I’m thinking of making an impossible badge. But I need to know 3 things:

1) Does it submit correctly?
2) When does it submit?
3) If it has already been submitted, how can the player get it to submit again?

Any answer to these 3 questions for the stats of “general,” “victoria,” or “staff” (especially "staff") would be greatly appreciated. A screenshot of the stat actually submitting would also be great. Thanks!

Topic: Kongregate / Witches in Kongai!

I really dont get the need for big boobs. Just get a girlfriend with big boobs and cal it a night.

Easier said than done. :(

Topic: Kongregate / Moderators: Is it practical?

Should we focus more on spreading knowledge to the players, or getting more moderators to patrol the chat and ban the abusive users?

Not that this is an either/or scenario, but I don’t think getting knowledge to players will help much, since our behavior guidelines are basically common sense. People usually know when they’re doing something they’re not supposed to do. And even if they don’t, moderators are supposed to give them warnings and chances to correct their behavior.

Moderators aren’t really supposed to just patrol rooms and ban people either, but that’s a whole separate issue…

Topic: Kongregate / Random Rant: Stop rating games lower because they don't have badges yet, idiots -.-

Hey, at least these people help balance out those who downrate a game BECAUSE it has badges… I think the latter group is still in the majority.

Topic: Kongregate / Remove Doom Game.

Only the shareware demo version was converted; it’s not the same game that you’d buy on Xbox Live. So I don’t think that id Software would have a problem with it, but if we get a complaint from them, we’ll certainly comply and take it down.

Short of that, though, it’s unlikely that we will remove the game based on consideration for promoting other games made by other people instead. We might have to discuss this matter within the staff a bit on Monday, but if there’s no legal reason to deny the game promotion, and Mike is willing to add our API, I would personally be pretty excited about adding achievements to it.

I’m not sure whom exactly this post is directed at, but I think that the intended spirit of Kongregate is sometimes twisted to fit people’s opinions of what they want it to be. We love to promote independent developers whenever we can, but in the interest of fairness and user experience, we also like to promote games that people on the site enjoy playing (and thus rate accordingly).

Topic: Kongregate / Jumpcat

We don’t award old challenges, but I think a lot of people are confused by this, because we get a lot of requests for them. All of them are denied, and I believe we’re going to remove the functionality of requesting old challenges entirely once we get around to it.

Topic: Kongregate / If you were a Kongregate administrator...?

if you were sabotaging the site Jim and Emily would notice

Well, they haven’t yet!

Topic: Kongregate / If you were a Kongregate administrator...?

Subtlety, Alison. Subtlety.

Topic: Kongregate / Challenge?

That badge was a real pain in the ass.

At least I didn’t require you to conquer all the cities like the first one.

Topic: Kongregate / Challenge?

Sorry guys, no challenge till Monday. Kongregate has Thursday and Friday off.

Topic: Kongregate / New card art!

I have no idea. Something with booting up a computer? But like, on a robot with boobs?