October 07, 2008 vDream Index + Leaderboard

10:19am by Lijen (Site)

We have a couple exciting updates for you guys! For those of you that have logged on today, you probably noticed a couple changes. (1) Theres a bunch of little numbers all over the place and (2) theres a new little tab in the Track section! What’s this madness all about you ask? Well… we’d like to introduce to you the vDream Index (VDI) and the vDream Leaderboard.

vDream Index or VDI is a user rating that we generate based on a user’s record and activity on the site. It’s our version of a universal ladder ranking, the higher it is the better. Make sure you stay active, or your VDI will depreciate! Also, don’t be surprised if you see your VDI changing a bit in the near future, as we plan to tweak our internal VDI algorithm to make sure that it stays fair and balanced. VDIs get updated daily. My VDI is 648, whats yours?

The Leaderboard is just what you would expect. A listing of all of the top users on vDream and how you match up against them. You can see who’s atop the vDream community based on VDI, wins, losses, chicken outs, and fastest recorded 1/4 mile times. I know how I match up (see the following “biggest loser” screenshot), but where do you stand?

And a few other small updates for you guys. (1) We fixed the dreaded “notifications sent to yourself” bug in Facebook and (2) our servers haven’t crashed in 3 days!!!! My hair can now stay in my head and we can continue focusing on new feature releases for you guys!

Hope you guys like the updates, let us know what you think and if you’re running into any problems.

Edit from Cheechoo:

We will be monitoring cheaters starting today. If you have a “minion” account, which is a separate account that you use for easy wins on your main account, you could be caught and will not appear on the leaderboard. We will also be monitoring support more than usual today. So if you don’t see your standing on the leaderboard, don’t be afraid to send a support email. I’ve only marked a couple people for cheating already. Oh, and if you’ve been marked as a cheater, but decide to change your evil ways, send us a friendly support email, and we can throw you back on the leaderboard. =)

October 07, 2008 Weekly Awards!

06:01am by Cheechoo (Site)

Welcome to the weekly awards! Where users can receive extra dough the following ways: 1. Having the most activity (I don’t count cheaters, such as if you have dummy accounts); 2. Having the most losses out of anyone on vDream (it’s to lift your spirits); 3. Having one of the most unique cars on vDream. On to the rewards!

Most Active User: Stephen Buck. Despite Myspace really turning into a juggernaut for vDream, our facebook users are really showing our myspace users how it’s done, and still winning most Active User every week.

Most Losses: Ben. I’m proud to announce our first Myspace weekly winner! Unfortunately we delete ASCII characters from the database names, so that’s all he is to us. Just Ben. Either way, Ben, keep it up! This reward should help you get a faster car so you can start laying the hurt, instead if the other way around. =)

Car of the Week: Our loyal Beta Testers / Moderators literally just sent me this 30 minutes ago, and I loved it at first sight. Not only is his checkered-350Z super unique, his user name made me laugh hysterically. Dip Shizits. No joke. His facebook name is Dip Shizits. Well, congratulations, Dip Shizits, you have a very unique vDream. I love saying that. Dip Shizits. Hahaha.

An announcement. We’ve got something good coming tonight, so keep checking the blog.

Here is Dip Shizits’ vDream.

October 02, 2008 vDream on MySpace

01:24am by Lijen (Site)

We’re proud to officially announce the launch of vDream on MySpace! Facebook and MySpace users can now challenge each other, so start sending out those cross-network random challenges and represent your social network!

To all the MySpace users out there, welcome to the community. Please let us know if you are currently experiencing any issues with the app as we are still going through some rounds of fine-tuning.

September 30, 2008 Weekly Awards!

04:44am by Cheechoo (Site)

Surprisingly, despite last week’s horrendous amount of down time, we still had a pretty active bunch of users. Here are the rewards for this week:

Most Active User: Carl Smith with 323 Activity points. Remember that there are zero rewards now (monetary, and activity) for sending invitations (facebook’s fault), so these numbers are a lot higher than we expected.

Biggest Loser (most losses): Richard Baird, with 129 losses. This reward money will surely help you out!

Car of the week: Vijay Sarathy, with what I think is a cool Viper. And to the haters out there (and I know there will be haters): Don’t be jealous of America’s Viper!

September 26, 2008 Day from Hell

02:36am by Cheechoo (Site)

Hey guys. Today’s vDream down-time was so bad that we felt we had to offer you all an apology. This past week we’ve been trying to figure out why our server explodes over 10 times a day. These past couple of days have only netted us 15 cups of coffee, hours of conversation with random sysadmins, 5 emails to our server, 4 emails to a third party server monitoring service, Lijen pulling out some of his hair (kind of funny to watch), diarrhea from all the coffee (not funny), and NO RESULTS.

Please, bear with us, guys. We are trying our best to figure out what this problem is. It also kills us because it’s pushing our features to later dates, because instead of us trying to push out features, we end up sitting here trying to stop all server crashes.

We are at wit’s end. But we WILL fix this problem.

As I finished this post, I just heard Lijen scream out “OMFG it’s down AGAIN, WHHYYYYYY”. lol

September 25, 2008 Challenge Limit Has Been Increased

07:27am by Lijen (Site)

Due to recent events in the economy (I mean vDream’s economy, not that other “global” one) we here at the FED Bank of vDream have decided to make an emergency raise in the daily challenge limit from 15 to 20 to compensate for rewards being removed for invitations & referrals. I hope Ben Bernanke’s taking notes =)

September 23, 2008 The Honeymoon is Officially Over

07:41am by Lijen (Site)

So it looks like we didn’t do our homework and have inadvertently made our friends over at Facebook not so happy. By giving vDream dollars away for invitations, we were also violating the Facebook Platform Policy.

As of tonight, we made a couple of changes so that we don’t get taken down.
- We no longer reward folks for inviting their friends to join the fun. Don’t get us wrong, we still want folks to invite their friends to enjoy vDream but we just can’t give any money for it anymore.
- We are increasing the amount of money you get when you send and accept a challenge to $50 from $25. Get those engines started! ...vroooom…

To our friends over at Facebook, oops… our bad.

September 22, 2008 Winners! (weekly and poll)

04:27am by Cheechoo (Site)

Last week’s winners are: (drumroll)

Most Active: Robert Maybruch, with 403 activity points.

Biggest Loser: Nick Sopchak, with 129 losses. That’s even more than Lijen, who WANTS to lose! Hope the reward money will help you get a faster car. =)

Car of the week: Jason Gibson, with a seriously sweet looking tricked out GT3. That Canadian monster looks like it’s ready for some serious racing.

Also I’d like to announce the Poll Winner of last week, and one of the future vDream cars: Pontiac Solstice GXP has been added to our queue. Our moderators and beta testers have been helping us man the boards to see what people have been asking for the most, and we’ve put together another poll that will probably be launched later this week.

Happy vDreaming!

September 20, 2008 Domestic Pocket Rocket!

12:49am by Cheechoo (Site)

Enter the winner of the entry-level domestic poll! The immensely powerful Dodge SRT-4 is sure to spin those front wheels like crazy. Entry level cars beware, the SRT4 could have the most potential!