March 30, 2009 vDream 2.0 Preview: Trophies

09:23am by Lijen (Site)

Here is our last installment of the vDream 2.0 Preview, vDream Trophies. The concept of trophies is quite simple. As user’s progress through vDream and reach certain accomplishments they will be rewarded a trophy for their hard work and persistence. This is our way of giving you recognition for your vDream accomplishments!

Here is a list of all of the currently available trophies. There may be more to come in the future!

And here are some answers to common questions that you guys had from the last post, vDream 2.0 Preview: Racing Titles & Feature Unlocking. Thanks again for all the great feedback and ideas, keep ‘em coming!

Q. As long as there are Tier 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 cars for purchase, will there be a way to only challenge cars in your cars’ own tiers and drivers’ VDIs and above?
A. We are updating the Random Challenge algorithm so that it only chooses users in nearby levels. You will technically be able to challenge anyone you want, however. If this gets out of hand, we will put in more limitations.

Q. If for some reason your VDI decreases, will you be able to drop levels?
A. Nope. Once you level up you stay there. There is no such thing as leveling down.

Q. Since we start out a noob, can u still use a high tier car if u already own one?
A. Yes, you get to keep all cars, parts and vDollars that you currently own. Also, remember that you will level up extremely fast if you already have a high VDI.

vDream 2.0 will be released on Tue, March 31. We’re excited, we hope you are too!

March 26, 2009 vDream 2.0 Preview: Racing Titles & Feature Unlocking

08:07am by Lijen (Site)

Here’s the 2nd installment of our vDream 2.0 preview. As mentioned in the previous blog post, all users will have a racing title that represents their status and experience on vDream. When you reach certain VDI milestones, your racing title will upgrade and as this happens new cars, parts, and race types will be unlocked.

You can read more about the different titles in this teaser.

I’d also like to address some of the questions that we’ve been getting from our users.

Q. If we already have a high vdi, does that mean we will start off with a high “racing title”?
A. Yes. Well, technically you will start out at the lowest racing title and very quickly climb through all the titles. We did this so you can still see what the titles are.

Q. When you say unlock cars and parts, does that mean we can’t even see the cars/parts we can’t buy or will it just not allow us to buy?
A. You will be able to see them but won’t be able to buy them (see screenshot).

Q. What about the cars and all the stuff we already have? Do we get to keep those or do we have to earn them again?
A. You get to keep them!

Q. This is vDream, not Mobsters, Mafia Wars, Street Racing, etc. That is what I LOVED about this game! I hope it doesn’t turn into one of “those” games.
A. And it won’t! Our focus is and always will be enabling our users to build out their dream car collections. We’re looking at vDream 2.0 as a way to give our users status, create more unique cars, and offer more ways to earn vDollars. Yes, you will earn vDollars when you level up!

We also have one small policy update to announce. Due to the imbalance from leaderboard users getting flooded with challenges, we decided to remove VDI earnings for accepting challenges and instead double the VDI earned for sending challenges.

Stay tuned later this week for the next installment, vDream 2.0 Preview: Trophies!

March 24, 2009 vDream 2.0 Is Coming!

07:40am by Lijen (Site)

Hello vDreamers! We would like to proudly announce the upcoming release of a whole package of updates that we like to call vDream 2.0!

vDream 2.0 will be a huge change for all players, adding structure and depth to the existing vDream experience. Here’s a quick high level overview of what changes to expect.

1. Racing Titles
Begin your vDream journey as a “noob” and gradually race your way to become a “Formula 1 Racer”. As you climb in VDI, you will also level up and gain access to more cars, parts, and features.

2. Feature Unlocking
Alright, happy hour is officially over friends. Users will now have to unlock top notch cars, parts, and advanced race types by achieving specific Racing Titles before they can access them.

3. Trophies
Earn trophies by reaching certain milestones in the game. A couple examples are “Master Dragster” and “Mr. Baller”.

You might be asking, why vDream 2.0? The reason is simple, we want to reward our most loyal users! New features will now only be accessible to users who have earned their status on vDream. For those of you who are thinking… “Oh no, I was about to buy a thingymajigger, what if it becomes locked?”, do not fret. You’ll have until next week to purchase anything you’d like before we launch these changes.

We’ll make more updates throughout the week to give you a sneak peak at the specific features and to give you more details about what vDream 2.0 means for you. As usual, we’d love to hear your feedback!

March 20, 2009 Photoshop Competitions!

10:24pm by Lijen (Site)

I know for a fact that we have some user’s that know a thing or two about gradients, color swatches, layers, and other nerdy Photoshop tools. For all you creative vDreamers out there, this is your chance to show it all off!

We are running Photoshop competitions for each car in the vForum. For more details, simply go to the vForums, find the car you are interested in, and in “The Game” forum section there should be a thread called “Official vDream Photoshop Competition!”.

Post up your best Photoshopped version of the car, and on April 1st, the moderators will have selected from each category a car or two to be decided by the infamous Cheechoo who the winner is.

Why do this? Oh…I dunno…how about $50,000 vDollars? And the title of vDream’s official Photoshop King (or Queen)!!!

As with any forum posting, the only rules are that your image contains no pornographic, violent, or other offensive material. Other than that, photoCHOP to your heart’s desire!!!

March 19, 2009 A Japanese Exotic! And Weekly Awards!

08:27am by Cheechoo (Site)

Greetings fellow vDreamers! Now that the Legendary Refactor is done, it’s time to get back to the grind. First off I’m proud to announce the release of one of the winners from the Big Car poll: series one, about a month and a half ago, the Acura NSX! With the look of an exotic, but not the price tag of one, this Mid-Engine Rear-Drive sports car is sure to be a crowd favorite. The 1997 has the 3.2L as opposed to the 3.0L, but still the stylish oldschool look of the ‘91. It’s not the most powerful V6 in the world, but the car should hold its own on the track!

On to the weekly awards!

Most Active User: Travis Lombard, with 557 activity points. I bet you got a whole lot of VDI this week!

Most Losses: Andrew Wright, with 246 losses. Sweet! I’d tell you this 5 grand will help you along your way to a more expensive car, but you already own an expensive one!

Car of the Week: Sven Negrassus, one of our leaderboarders, with an awesome rendition of a beach party car! He’s got the balloons, the surf rack, the old school beetle, and he’s even on Pacific Beach! Better bring your wetsuit, Sven, the water is cold out here.

March 18, 2009 Legendary Refactor done: vForum!

11:21am by Cheechoo (Site)

Legendary Refactor is complete! Bear with us as we are dealing with an entirely new system. If all goes well within this next week, we will dedicate more servers to speed up the site. This is our live test run with the new refactored code.

The most important aspect of the release was the release of a BRAND NEW FORUM! Check the top navigation of the vDream app, and it will bring you to an entire new area to play around in! We will be closing the facebook discussion boards and moving all site discussion within the app, so as to preserve the sanity of our moderators. Please don’t hesitate to discuss anything you desire, so long as it remains in its proper forum!

Go talk on the vForum!

March 14, 2009 vDream Cars Coming up

10:59pm by Cheechoo (Site)

Hey guys. Unfortunately I can’t send out an announcement through vDream (it was pulled to try and see what the performance issues were, and won’t be active until the Legendary Refactor goes live).

But I wanted to let our loyal users know that we are still pushing forward on vDream cars, even though the entire site is getting refactored.

Some of the big winners from the “Big car poll” were as follows:

1. Shelby Cobra – we decided to push this to a later date, until we get the “special cars” system built – this will be our first “special car”
2. Acura NSX – this car is currently in production and is slated to go live in a few days.
3. Nissan 240sx – S13 Fastback. This car won by a SLIM, SLIM margin, by only 40 votes. Maybe you S14 Kouki lovers can lobby for your car later. =) The S13 won’t be out for a couple of weeks though, so be patient!!!
4. An Oldschool Dodge Charger. We’ll build it.

March 13, 2009 Teaser, Twitter, and Legendary Refactor!

09:00pm by Lijen (Site)

Hello vDreamers!

I just wanted to write a quick post to give you an update on what were working (slaving) on.

Legendary Refactor
Due to recent and ongoing performance issues, we have embarked on the unsurmountable task that we are calling the “Legendary Refactor” (any How I Met Your Mother fans out there?). Basically, we are re-writing a large portion of the code base and reorganizing our servers so that the site will be easier to monitor, maintain, and develop on in the future. We’re planning on releasing this next week, so if you run into any weird behavior on the site this is probably why. I’ll make another announcement when the release is out.

Teaser
I know we promised a new feature a couple weeks ago. Rest assured that we already have a couple big releases that are finished and waiting to be released once we clear up the performance issue. Just to get you a little excited though, I posted a couple teasers. Enjoy!

If you can’t get enough of vDream and are interested in hearing more of our random day to day musings, follow us on Twitter! You’ll get the inside scoop on new site developments and maybe a small leak from time to time.

March 06, 2009 got performance?

07:00pm by Lijen (Site)

Hey guys,

We know that vDream has been a tad slow (mild understatement) during peak hours these past couple of days. The one thing with trying to push out a bunch of features at once is that its hard to see what the performance implications may be until we get tens of thousands of users on the site.

Rest assured, we are 100% focused on fixing this issue right now. Hang tight!

And thanks for being patient!