Recent posts by greg on Kongregate

Topic: Kongregate / Broken badges

Thank you for making this thread. To respond to some of the individual games mentioned:

Caesary is gone and those badges will probably never be earnable again. :( Sorry!

DTD 1.5 goes down regularly; we’ve emailed the developer about it but haven’t gotten a response yet this time.

Platform Racing 2 directs people to the Carina server right in one of the badge descriptions, but I can add it to the others as well. Can anyone confirm that the Carina server is required for all 4 badges, or just a few?

Sonny is an old glitch that Krin is aware of but I guess hasn’t been able to fix. :(

Rotazion is such an old game that realistically it probably won’t be fixed, but the glitch is in people’s favor anyway.

Streamline is actually working as intended. You used to be able to right-click to become invincible and cheat.

I wasn’t aware of a few of the others; I’ll email the developers about them. To everyone else, please post any more that you’re aware of.

Topic: Kongregate / Question about "Hot New Games"

We know it’s kind of weird to do this, but Hot New Games is the only editorial part of the front page where we can put games that don’t have badges, so when we want to promote an older game it’s the only option.

Topic: Kongregate / Todays Badge of the Day = massive load of bs

Regarding the original post, this badge was definitely on the longer/more difficult end of what’s considered appropriate for badge of the day, and your criticism is noted.

Please don’t cheat, though.

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate: Y U NO SOPA PROTEST??

Originally posted by BobTheCoolGuy:

Originally posted by uzzbuzz:

For those that really need to use Wikipedia, just disable javascript. Problem, Wikipedia? ;P

Or just press escape before the annoying message pops up.

Wow, that actually worked. You have to be pretty fast on individual pages, though.

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate: Y U NO SOPA PROTEST??

If it’s any consolation, most staff members personally oppose SOPA, but Kongregate as a website is generally apolitical — much more so than Google, Wikipedia and especially Reddit.

Topic: Kongregate / Best of 2011 *Official Voting*

My vote goes to Tyrant.

Topic: Kongregate / Kongregate should blackout for a day in response to SOPA.

Originally posted by SicMirx:

I don’t get it. So trying to deny the passing of SOPA is like a justified barrier to deny the consequences of stealing?

Personally, I love the fact that there’s finally controversy over the shit tons of piracy that happens. I also happen to love Kong. So… I’ll stay on Kong during the “blackout” to show my support of SOPA.

This man does not speak for us. :-P

I don’t condone piracy, but Tom Fulp from Newgrounds has a great write-up about the problems with SOPA.

Topic: Kongregate / How Are Badges Chosen?

I don’t think The Ocean Around Me is even being considered, or at least I’ve never received a message about it.

Yesterday I tested the API and it worked perfectly, so thank you for doing a great job with that — I was actually planning to put up a badge tonight. Literally the only thing that’s keeping me from badging your game right now is coming up with a name. Really. Got any suggestions? Or a preferred 36×36 image?

Topic: Kongregate / Who even reads the conduct/rules?

If people read the rules, it would only make them more informed about what they can get away with.

Probably true, but it’s better than people reading the rules and feeling the reverse.

Topic: Kongregate / Who even reads the conduct/rules?

The conduct rules are written to be as commonsense as possible; I don’t think there’s anything too obscure in there. It’s very unlikely that you’ll get banned from the site just from a misunderstanding or lack of information — usually people are given warnings before being banned unless it’s something really obvious (eg, spamming porn links).

Topic: Tyrant / Post Active Raid Links Here

Fresh Enclave Flagship: http://www.kongregate.com/games/synapticon/tyrant?kv_joinraid=3

Put those daemons to use! Deck strategies here: http://warmetal.wikia.com/wiki/Enclave_Flagship_%28Raid%29

9:00 p.m. PST Update: 18/25 members, 40% health left, 18.5 hours left

Topic: Kongregate / Badge of the Day not on frontpage?

I took down the Badge of the Day feature for Epic War because it was broken, then I forgot about it until the next morning. Whoops.

Topic: Kongregate / [Archive] Badge of the Day (2011)

Sorry about the Epic War fiasco, guys. We’re looking into fixing it, but probably not in time for Badge of the Day. Just submit a missing achievement report today and we’ll be extra lenient and speedy about awarding them.

Topic: Kongregate / back yard monsters.. badged... wtf greg

I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree that Backyard Monsters is an idle game. I can definitely understand that point of view, but there are a few key elements that set it apart — you can be attacked by other players and NPCs (thus setting back your resources and making the badge take longer), so building up defenses and deciding where to place those defenses is important.

You can expedite the hard badge by building up an army and attacking other players and NPCs for resources. This at the very least requires some strategy, even if we’re not exactly talking Starcraft here. You can also earn the hard badge faster by planning out which upgrade path is most efficient (which carries a bit of risk, as it means putting fewer resources into defensive structures).

You can also work with other players to gift resources, speed up upgrades, and form alliances.

Again, I understand that there’s a lot of waiting around, but my point is that Backyard Monsters is undeniably a game, which is more than can be said of the pure-form idle genre.

Topic: Kongregate / back yard monsters.. badged... wtf greg

I understand that you spend a lot of time waiting around in Backyard Monsters, but let’s be fair here — calling it an idle game is a bit of a stretch. :-P

Topic: Kongregate / back yard monsters.. badged... wtf greg

Originally posted by JimmyCarlos:

Originally posted by SamsterSamster:

I shall very soon have the hard badge, but I didn’t recieve the medium badge when I beat the first tribe and now I can’t attack it again. Does anyone have any tips on what I should do now for the medium?

Is also concerned about this…

You can attack any tribe at any time. There’s always one available, and the medium badge just keeps getting easier and easier the longer you play, so don’t worry about missing any kind of window (that was a huge concern of mine when designing the badge).

It might become more difficult to destroy a tribe with a single attack, but that’s not what the badge requires. After you’ve played for long enough, you can get 25k resources pretty easily by just doing a bit of damage; you don’t even need to be successful.

Regarding the hard badge, yeah, it’s super long. There’s no denying that. There’s also no denying that we’re a business and we need to make money, but our goal wasn’t to make money off of speed-ups with the hard badge. If you do the math on how much it would cost to speed up production to make the hard badge earnable in a short amount of time (let’s say a week), it’s unreasonably high — revenue from speed-ups isn’t even very significant anyway, possibly because it’s just not considered viable for most people.

Our bigger goal here was actually to get people to just play the game and see how much the world opens up once you’ve gotten your map room to level 2. The game actually gets pretty interesting — you can build outposts, see a lot more bases, take over new territories, etc. We thought that a hard badge would be a great way to encourage players to get to that point. If you want to spend money along the way or after you reach that point, that’s great. But it was never our belief that we’d make any significant money off of speed-ups just by virtue of having a badge that takes a long time to earn.

It’s also worth noting that the amount of real-world play time for the hard badge is actually pretty short relative to games like Sacred Seasons and Dream World. The hard badge in Backyard Monsters might take 2 full months to earn, but that just means a few minutes a day. And, as always, the badge is 100% earnable (without even a lot of difficulty) if you don’t spend any money on the game at all. That’s a principle that we have no intention of deviating from.

Topic: Kongregate / No longer correct badge descriptions

Developers need to stop changing their games! If anyone can think of any more, list them here and I’ll take a look this week.

Topic: Kongregate / Is it possible for the BoTD to be e.g. a Caesary badge?

Originally posted by yourmomdad:

Gerg removed all MMO badges from the list of possible badges.

I should clarify that we might have MMO badges as BotD at some point, but only if they’re short/easy enough.

Topic: Kongregate / No Marathon or MMOG for 'Badge of the Day'

This is indeed already a goal. Feel free to blame me if one slips through the crack; I check for this manually.

Topic: Kongregate / is level 16 high?

I remember thinking that level 20 would be an appropriate level cap when the site was still new. I guess this was before badges, though…

Topic: Kongregate / Are we in the suck?

People will always have different opinions about whether games are good or bad, but it’s worth pointing out that just like the movie and console gaming industries, the Flash gaming industry can have uneven periods where sometimes a bunch of great games are released during the same week, while other times there can be a few consecutive weeks that are less competitive.

In general I wouldn’t agree that there’s an overall long-term decline, though. In fact I’d probably argue the opposite.

Topic: Kongregate / Should female staff protect underage players?

We actually did this for a few years, but we suspended the Kongregate child-rearing program when all the kids grew up and joined 4chan. I guess it turns out that we weren’t such great parents after all. :(

Topic: Kongregate / The New Challenge

It is undeniably a goal for Kongregate to make money. We are a wholly owned subsidiary of a publicly traded company. You can debate whether we’re being evil by providing a challenge task in a free game that provides a reward in another free game that has optional microtransactions, but I’d argue that this is pretty benevolent and win/win/win/win for everyone involved (the 4 parties being Kongregate, the developers of both games, and the players themselves). Unless you’re principally opposed to companies generating money, I’m not sure I understand the objection.

Did Rawismojo/and the admins of kongregate, REALLY just USE a game that littlegiantworld and his devs worked there ass off to create, to push players into playing another MMO?

If by “use” you mean “promote,” then yes, that’s what we did. So far we’ve never received a complaint from a developer for promoting their game, especially since it means they get more shared ad revenue. In fact, typically they greatly appreciate it — that’s why littlegiantworld worked hard not only to make a great game, but also worked hard to implement our statistics API so we could use site features to drive extra traffic to the game.

If you’re outraged on behalf of littlegiantworld, you might want to re-evaluate that stance.

Topic: Kongregate / Friday Challenges!

I should clarify that these are more “Friday evening on the West Coast” challenges. :-P

It should be up within the next few hours.

Topic: Kongregate / Friday Challenges!

Starting this week (holy crap, tomorrow!), we’re bringing back challenges on Kongregate!

But instead of offering Kongai cards, we’ll be giving away special prizes in various kreds games across the site. We might be able to squeeze in a Kongai card here and there just for old time’s sake, but who knows! Certainly not you, and possibly not us!

Just like before, the challenges will be featured in single-player games, typically around the same time these games receive badges. You’ll have one week to complete a special task, which will award a usable item in another multiplayer game on Kongregate.

Big thanks to Ducklette and rawismojo for working hard to make this happen, while I just made this forum post as an implication that I deserve all the credit.