This summer we held our first contest, the All Out Summer Contest. We did it to reward the community and try get the word out about Gamocracy by showing good stuff is happenning around here.

Winners were pretty happy about their prizes but it didn’t bring new people in. Actually, most contenders were doing their best to conceal that the contest even existed, which is pretty logical, it turns out… The more people wrote on Gamocracy, the less likely they were to win stuff.

So, despite what I wrote before here, we will stop awarding prizes for contributions, whether Opinions or Glinks. It doesn’t mean we won’t do it ever again, but just don’t take it for granted that this kind of contest will come back.

Also, we are right now thinking about how to improve gameplay mechanics so that contributing to Gamocracy gets more interesting in itself. Maybe when we’re done with those improvements, we’ll add a final touch that could be prizes, but don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.

That doesn’t mean we’ll stop awarding prizes to Gamocracy community members altogether. We’ll keep doing giveaways to reward those that help us spread the word about Gamocracy.

Our next prize will be Zowie Gear’s EC1 mouse, by the way.

Totally unrelated: We had a nasty bug for a couple days that prevented new players from regaining their PP’s and pwnz!. It should be fixed now. Sorry about that!

Hey everyone, I just got back from vacation.

While I was relaxing away from the web, Gamocracy kept going so here I am catching up!

Let’s start with the updates that were made. We wanted to be nicer to beginners! Noobs make the world go round, too, you know.

Publish Points help
Over the past few weeks we realized we needed to provide more PP’s for beginners. This is now done: they are still limited, just not as much.

Reviews help

Now available from level 6 (down from 7)

Pwnz! help

Now available from level 1 (down from 3).

That’s it for the tweaking of what we already have.

We’ve been thinking about what new mechanics to add next. Gamocracy could be so much more and our minds are almost set… but at the moment we are focused on polishing what we already have and getting more people to the site so the new stuff will have to wait a bit.

The rest of the catching up in the coming days…

Thank you everyone that’s been around, taking part and supporting us, wherever you are. On Monday we had a winner from Portugal, on Tuesday we interviewed a Finnish player and today it’s Estonia that’s featured.

A couple weeks ago, Anomaalia from Toila won in the All Out Summer Contest thanks to his Heroes of Newerth rating. He won dots packs, which are Japanese toys allowing to create pixel art irl.

I sent them way up north and… look at the pictures I got in the mail in return, a few days later:

Thank you very much Anomaalia, this is a really nice gift. They’re both great, that original G!

And those Tetris blocks on the forearm? For real, yo!

Here’s the man’s blog, it has more pictures.

Oh and it’s totally unrelated but we just saw we got featured by the French Agency for Video Games (kind of secret agents protecting video games). Nice!