Arrow Guessing Game!

As you may have seen from my previous post, we’re about to launch a new mini-game on the site. As you guessed it, it’s an ARROW GUESSING GAME!

Every day, you’ll be able to enter a contest (with credits) by guessing how many arrows will be hit tomorrow. Whoever is closest, will win! But, two things need to happen before we release the tool

1. UI: I’m looking for someone to mockup in photoshop, paint, gimp, whatever, a interface for the contest page! There needs to be space to submit a guess, and then another area for the current arrow count for today, as well as # of people who guessed, credits at stake, and how many people are still in the running for the prize! Please send submissions as a jpg or png (but save the originals)
2. A name! “Arrow Guessing Game” sounds kinda lame… so I’m taking suggestions for another name

How to submit your UI’s and Names: Send an email to [email protected] or [email protected] (You should be able to figure out which email is for which) with your submission. Multiple submissions are fine.

Check back tomorrow for the results!

-lightdarkness

LD needs test data!

EDIT: Thanks, check back later!

-LD

Header Updated

Just did some changes to the header. Cleared up unused space from the old ad layout.

If you’re having any problems, clearing your cache should fix them. If you’re not sure how, this will help you through it.

~Velocity

November’s Most Popular Songs

November has come and gone, and with our first full month back, I thought I’d let you know the ten most popular levels of November!

1. Excite Bike
2. -Y
3. Guitar vs Piano
4. Policy in the Sky
5. Power
6. Zelda Stormy
7. Death Piano
8. Snowflakes
9. 300 This Is Sparta EXTENDED Mix
10. Chaoz Fantasy

Surprised?  Let us know what you think in the comments, and tell us what your favorite level is!

-lightdarkness

Bluenote/Synth Songs

For the uninformed: The bluenote/synth songs are a number of older songs from the earliest days of the site, where the files were actually made basically in notepad with some frame timings on them. As a result, they’re pretty wildly offsync, and as they predate the period where notes were coloured based on their timing, are blue noteskinned throughout.

What happened is that the list of synth/bluenote songs was moved from their various genres into the “Support” genre, which previously held only the three songs obtainable by buying the artist’s album in the FFR Shop.

The Bluenote/Synth songs, being in Support, are no longer public, which is why you’ll have lost public AAAs/FCs and the total public song count is down. Since they’re in the Support Genre right now, and nobody happens to own the tokens (since they don’t exist) the songs aren’t available for play, which is why you can’t find them.

Anybody who is a veteran, or still has subscriber benefits can see their ranks on the “Token level rank” page. Your scores still exist, the songs still exist, and you haven’t lost any AAAs or FCs.

The Support Genre is going to be renamed to “Legacy” containing all of the old songs that weren’t created under the new noteskinning/syncing system.

The Legacy Genre -will- be a public genre. The songs will be available to everybody, and once that is done, the songs will re-appear in the normal levelranks page, and the profile bars will re-update with the old number of songs, and your old AAA/FC counts.

Nobody has lost songs, nobody has lost AAAs, nobody has lost FCs, we’re just being careful with the databases as we get these moved over, taking it slowly, making backups, to ensure that no data is lost.

-Devonin

Bots get out

We had some issues with our internal resolvers on the server that was causing emails not to work properly. This was fixed a few days ago by Synth, you might’ve noticed that challenges and profiles information is going out to your emails now.

Now that this is working I have set up new registrations to require email validation. This is mostly done so that the staff doesn’t have to waste their time banning people who have a big proxy list and are bored enough to keep registering new accounts. As such, when signing up a new account or registering an alt, make sure you provide a valid e-mail address.

Additionally, the registration page now uses a signup CAPTCHA, this was done because I have seen two spambots sign up and flood profile walls over the past month.

Regards,
aperson

Incoming credit changes

We’re changing the structure of credits since the current implementation strikes us as a bit silly. Currently, the cap has been raised from 40 to 60. We slightly changed the counting method so what the game reports and how many credits actually get added might be off-by-one until we update the flash.

In the future, we plan on changing the credit formula to credits / 75,000 and removing the credit cap altogether. This is just a heads up since you will be seeing the amount of credits you earn per song change in the future.

Also, for those of you that play on Velocity’s engine, it now records scores, credits, and replays. You will not be able to load any secret or token songs that you do not have access too, however, because of some new checks we put in place.

Stats update rewriting

aperson, Velocity, and Sprite- have just rewritten the code that updates your stats after a game is played. This change should be transparent if you are a legitimate player. We added a few new security checks and optimized the code flow taking it from 750 lines to 450.

If you have any issues with scores, tokens, or challenges after a song is played, please post in the comments.

In other news…
Velocity has been working on the ProChat code and has released version 2.8.0. This version includes toggle-able timestamps for messages and a stats window when you click on someone’s username in the room list.

Cheers,
-aperson

Someone set up us the bomb (ap I’m looking @ you)

Jonathan | Velocity: Tyler broke shit, others failed at fixing, wild synth appeared. Shit fixed, Vet Alive, MP updates coming.
Amy: The database housing FFR got into a wizard-of-oz like mess. It had to find its way to the wonderful wizard of oz to get its brain back. Along the way it met Synthlight, aperson and Sprite-. The end.
Amy: and yes… aperson is the cowardly lion.
Dom: tl;dr: verify yo backups
Dom: -FFR Staff

aperson’s Lesson of the day: If you’re going to restore from a backup make sure the backup itself isn’t corrupt.
That’s a tough lesson to learn. We lost our master VBulletin User table after aperson tried to roll back the user table to a backup he had just made that was corrupt.

The next morning, Synth got the user table from his backup that he used to bring the site back up in October. Lightdarkness patched in the new userids from our game statistics, and then Sprite and aperson went through and updated all of the table information to be coherent with the other tables. Fortunately, lots of the information was stored elsewhere. We were able to update the passwords that were changed during this period because VBulletin is nice enough to store every password ever used.

There were a few things we were not able to restore however. Custom Avatar information has become corrupted due to a mismatch in where the avatar is linking to for any users that changed their avatars since October 10. In the restore process, we have lost approximately 0.05% of the userbase on FFR. However, we will be glad to work with any of the affected accounts to restore them or transfer their stats to a new account. You may PM an admin for assistance if you have created a new account since the site came back online on October 10.

For some good news, we are rolling out veteran status. Initially, this will be set for users who have both 3 years since their join date and 3 billion grand total points. This limit is subject to opening up, but not becoming more restrictive. We will be changing the word ‘Subscriber’ to the word ‘Veteran’ over & over shortly, as well.

Also!
Expect some MP updates coming soon