In the past few days we’ve been experiencing some technical problems when trying to retrieve PlayStation Network Trophy data to update member’s profiles. These problems are due to changes from Sony, and we are unable to fix the issue until Sony makes a change on their end.

We are reaching out to Sony in hopes of fixing this issue, so that we can turn on the PSN Trophy tracking that many in our community enjoy. Until then, our Trophy Tracking will not work.

Sorry for the inconvenience, we’re hoping to fix this issue ASAP!

Thanks,
Sam “QforQ” Houston
GamerDNA Community Manager

We’re giving away a $25 Amazon Gift Card to the winner of contest we’re running right now on GamerDNA.com.

All you have to do to enter is make a game post or activity that lists the Top 5 games that were most influential to your gamerDNA. Make this post and link it to us on the designated game post (linked below), or send it to us on Twitter, and do all this by 5pm EST Friday October 9th – and you could win!

For the complete rules and information, please check out our contest page on GamerDNA!

On October 6th we will be making some changes to how Nudges work on gamerDNA.  Please continue to read on, as we describe what Nudges are, what changes were made and why we did them.

Nudges…what are nudges?

A Nudge is a way of letting your gamerDNA followers know about cool stuff on gamerDNA. This “stuff” could be any sort of content on gamerDNA, whether it be a Game Post, Game Activity, or Screenshot that you added to gamerDNA (or someone else added), or even a Status Update or Video on gamerDNA. You can Nudge someone by clicking the “Nudge” button on the page for that piece of content, or you can Nudge other members when you’re adding content to your gamerDNA. Every time a Nudge is sent, a member receives an email from gamerDNA

Here is an old screenshot of how you would Nudge other members when adding a Game Post or Game Activity to gamerDNA.

Nudges were built into gamerDNA when we originally had a Friending Model, meaning that you requested a member’s friendship on GamerDNA and they had to approve this connection. Due to the nature of Friending, the connection between the two members is much more personal, and therefore gives you some more permission to do things like contact one another when you do cool stuff on the website.

Now that gamerDNA has a Following Model, meaning I can follow you without you approving that follow or even following me back, we need to change how Nudging works. We also have new systems that suggest Followers to new members, along with features like your Member Homepage and the Spotlight section, both of which help your content be discovered by the gamerDNA community. Due to all of this, the purpose of a Nudge has changed and we need to change how the feature works to reflect all the recent changes to gamerDNA.

So..what is changing?

Until the upcoming patch (coming this evening, October 5th 2009), a member could Nudge everyone that is following them on gamerDNA.  This could range from one person, all the way up to 500+ people all receiving Nudge notifications in their Alert Box on their Member Home, and all of those 500 people receiving emails about this Nudged content.  Many new members of gamerDNA don’t know why they’re receiving all these emails, and the problem can become much bigger when a member is receiving multiple emails a day from the people they are following.  This is obviously a problem.

With the newest patch to gamerDNA, we now have made a limit on the total number of Nudges that you can send out at one time.  Now, instead of being able to Nudge an unlimited number of people, you can only Nudge up to 50 gamerDNA members at one time.  The “select all” button has now been changed to “Select first 50″, meaning that it will select the first 50 people in your following list.  This list is ordered by the number of Nudges each person has received from you, so that when you select the first 50, it will select the 50 people that you have Nudged the most.

This is a screenshot of the new nudging interface:

Why did you do this?

We have several reasons:

Nudging needs to be a bit more personal in nature, instead of an easy way to mass email all of your followers on gamerDNA.  Our goal for this feature is that a member would use it to notify their followers of something truly special, something that doesn’t happen all the time, or something that is so awesome that it has to be seen.  To date, Nudging has turned into more of a mass spam button, which doesn’t make a Nudge as significant or special, and diminishes the value of the feature for both members involved.

When we launched all the new features on gamerDNA on September 2nd, most of the features were focused on making content discovery and having conversations, as easy as possible.  Your Member Homepage has the gamerCURRENT, which streams in everything that your followers are doing on gamerDNA, and the Spotlight feature will surface interesting content from the gamerDNA community every day.  Both of these features help your followers keep up with what you’re doing and talking about, and both of them work without a single Nudge being sent out.

This isn’t the last and final “fix” for Nudging, or the intended purpose of Nudging.  It’s also not a fix or replacement for how the gamerDNA Community has been using the Nudge system to date, and the conversations that we’ve had internally at the gamerDNA Office have brought up various ideas for better solutions for keeping your followers up to date with things that you think they should check out.

If you have any feedback on this change, we ask that you let us know by using our Feedback Page or by posting below in the comments.  We know that not everyone will be happy with this change, but we ask that you be patient with us as we figure out the best solution, and please give us your feedback so that we can know what your concerns are with regards to Nudging and content discovery.

From the entire GamerDNA Team – We thank you!

-Sam “QforQ” Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

Today I’m going to start a new gamerDNA blog article series called “Community Connection”.  The goal of these posts will be to surface cool stuff from the community by pointing out various games and game pages that are active right now, surfacing some great Game Posts/Screenshots/activities and conversations, or even some gamerDNA member spotlights.

Most recently the new-hotness in terms of game releases have been a handful of games: Batman: Arkham Asylum, The Beatles: Rock Band, Halo 3: ODST, and the newest MMORPG on the block, Aion.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

To start with Batman: Arkham Asylum, I’ve definitely got to point out Vice_Destroyer.  He’s been playing the game almost every day since release, and most recently unlocked  all achievements in the game, giving him the full 1,000 gamerscore points possible.  Hats off to that!

One of our more active PS3 community members has been MartB64, who has unlocked 54% of the trophies for the game.  He gave Batman: Arkham Asylum a Five Star rating, saying “Wow, I was totally blown away by the depth of this game. It’s the best game so far this year! I can’t say enough good things about it”.

The Beatles: Rock Band

The Beatles: Rock Band has been getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason.  The game brings together the biggest band of all-time, with one of the biggest video game paradigm changes of all time (Music Gaming).  The result is something pretty special, and the community at gamerDNA has responded to it very well.

MrVista360 has been working his way through the achievements on the Xbox 360 version of the game, unlocking 15 in total so far, even playing the guitar on lefty mode specifically to unlock an achievement.

Halo 3: ODST

Halo 3: ODST is the newest addition to the Halo universe…and while we’re only a couple days into the game being available for play, results look promising.  The game has shot up to the #2 most play game spot on GamerDNA (2nd only to Halo 3), and the community is buzzing about it!

Tothcjt gave the game 5 stars, saying in his review: “This is a totally different game then Halo3. You can imply stealth to get around with The Rookie and then stealth around building to not fight hunters or other big enemies. Firefight mode is great and addicting, if it had matchmaking it would be a lot better but I guess playing with friends can be more fun.” Check his review out to see the interesting discussion that followed!

Aion

Aion is an MMO that is coming over to the  West from Korea, where the game has been out for a year and has already been quite successful.  NCSoft has made a very high polished/quality MMO with Aion, and many gamers are playing away this week as they try to level up as fast as possible in this PVP oriented MMO.

One of the more interesting things about the Aion community at gamerDNA is their love of sharing screenshots from the game.  This could be a reflection of the high quality graphics in the game, which result in some fantastic looking scenes. To date we have over 400 screenshots of Aion from our Community – a number that is growing daily!

KornCob has been very active in Aion, sharing many screenshots with the GamerDNA community.  One of my favorites is KornCob’s screenshot of the Sanctum, a beautiful looking castle that the Elyos race get to see in the game.

One of the top players of Aion on GamerDNA is LotusTheFallen, who has been playing the game while also sharing screenshots and game posts with the GamerDNA community. Check out their profile to see some great shots of the game, as well as to keep up with the ongoing story of LotusTheFallen’s journey in Aion!

That wraps it up for this GamerDNA Community Connection – If you have any feedback or thoughts on this post, or ideas for future Community Connection topics, please post them in the comments below!

See you in game!

Sam “QforQ” Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

Last week we asked for your questions for the 2nd Edition of the GamerDNA Townhall, and you guys came through big time!  We took all of your questions and answered them in the Townhall that we filmed on Tuesday.  We broke up the Townhall into 10 minute sections, with each video having a theme of questions.

Below are all the videos/segments:

Segment #1 – All about the new content/comment systems

Segment #2 – Questions related to the new gamerDNA Profiles

Segment #3 – Questions about features that we have mentioned/discussed in the past

Segment #4 – Questions and Requests for new Features

Segment #5 – Townhall Wrap Up, with questions about new features, community, and gamerDNA as a business

We appreciate and are thankful for all the questions submitted by the community. We look forward to doing more of these in the future, and we encourage you to stay tuned to our blog for more updates from gamerDNA!

Thanks,

Sam “QforQ” Houston

gamerDNA Community Manager

GamerDNA supports the PlayStation Network in some interesting ways…with some obvious and others not so obvious.  This blog article will give you all the details on gamerDNA’s support of PSN and how you can set it up on your profile in a few quick steps!

Of course to enjoy all this nifty PSN tracking you have to have a gamerDNA account.  Are you on GamerDNA?  Make sure you sign up today, it’s super easy!

1. Connect your gamerDNA profile with your PlayStation Network ID

The first step to all of this is connecting your GamerDNA profile with your PSN account, so that gamerDNA can automatically track your trophies every day.  Head on over to your Gaming Networks page for your account and activate your PlayStation Network ID with gamerDNA!

For more details on setting up your gamerDNA and PlayStation Network ID (or Xbox Live, Steam and Xfire), please check out our in-depth article on our blog.

2.   Earn a Trophy last night?  GamerDNA automatically picks that up!

GamerDNA automatically tracks your game-play by checking your PSN account every day for new updates.  For PSN in particular, we only track when you have earned a trophy in a game (For more info, check out our FAQ).  When you earn some new trophies, gamerDNA will update your profile with a new Game Activity which includes the number of Trophies attained, as well as the names and icons of the trophies that were earned in the gaming session.

3. GamerDNA automatically adds your PlayStation games to your profile

When you create an account on gamerDNA and go through our Jumpstart Wizard, gamerDNA will automatically pull all the games that you have earned trophies in, and then adds those games to your profile.  After that, gamerDNA tracks your profile every day to see if you have gained new trophies.  If you have earned a trophy in a game that isn’t in your gamerDNA, the game will be automatically added to your profile.

4. GamerDNA updates your Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and Tumblr when you unlock a Trophy

GamerDNA can automatically update your social network accounts with your latest PlayStation Network activity every day.  Head on over to your Broadcast settings to set everything up in just a few seconds!

Please check out our How-To guide on our blog for more information on connecting gamerDNA to your Facebook or Twitter.

That covers our PlayStation Network integration – If you ever have any questions or feedback, please contact us through our Feedback page.

See you on GamerDNA!

-Sam “QforQ” Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

Hi Everyone!

Now that we have the big launch under our belts, we will be back to more rapid and periodic updates to the product. Here is a full list of the changes this week:

• Added individual trophy detection and display for PS3 users. Now when you play PS3 games and you get a trophy, it will actually display the name of the trophy and a description of it. You still have to make sure your trophies are synced up to your account by going to the trophy section on your Ps3 dashboard.

  

• Added a new profile background called Shooter #1
• Added sub navigation to the profile button in the upper-right navigation.
• Increased the loading performance of the member home page by putting the expansion of all gamerCURRENT items behind a loading process. We had issues where really large discussions (300+ comments) were slowing down the intial loading of a member’s home page as well as the NOW page.
• Cleaned up the game data on a variety of titles.
• Fixed an issue in the quiz counts that was reading the incorrect number.
• Made additional performance enhancements to the games gadget on member home.
• Fixed a bug that was preventing you from unsubscribing to various conversations, so that members would still receive alerts.
• Fixed a bug in the content display that was causing long text strings to not break correctly.
• Fixed a bug where If you exclude a specific type of alert (say, nudges) from a specific user you would miss alerts from other people.
• Worked on some issues with trophy counting for PSN.
• Users can now delete their status. There is a delete link on the display page.

  

• Add some buttons to make posts/gameplay/media when you view your own personal game page.
• Fixed some out-of-date links on the game pages.
• Fixed the layout of all the static pages on the site to use thenew templates.
• Xternal Vids and Xternal Images are now visible in the game activity RSS feeds.
• Added paging to the follower and following modal popups.

Thanks for your support through this site transition. We are excited by all the great usage and participation and are looking forward to our next few releases.

We will be broadcasting live the 2nd edition of GamerDNA Townhall tomorrow, Tuesday Sept 15th at 3pm EST.  Last week we asked for your questions, and in this Townhall we plan to address as many as we can for the video.

We will also be recording the video, so if you can’t watch it live – Don’t worry!  We will have video up later in the week for everyone to watch, so if you miss the live broadcast just make sure you stay tuned to our blog for updates on when the video is up for viewing.

To watch the live stream, please click “Continue Reading” below, or go to our uStream page. See you tomorrow at 3pm EST!  (To see what time it is at the GamerDNA offices right now, please check out the Boston page at TimeAndDate.com)

Cautionary Disclaimer: We plan to stream the show live in its entirety, but if for some reason our internet drops and the video broadcast stops – there isn’t much we can do.  We *will* have a recording up to watch afterward, though.

Join us in the chatroom below!

This past July we did a video called “GamerDNA Townhall”, which was a platform for the community to ask questions, and ChangeAgent and I would answer them. (Here is the first Townhall, for reference)

So to kick things off for the 2nd Townhall, we need something very obvious: Your Questions!

These can be questions or feedback on GamerDNA, features that you would like to see, asking us how we do things at GamerDNA, or some of the features that will come down the road. Basically anything you want to ask the gamerDNA staff, please ask it!

We need these questions to be posted on this page by 3pm EST (Noon PST) on Monday, Sept 14th, 2009. That is this coming Monday.

We will answer as many questions as possible, so please post your questions in the comments below, or on our GamerDNA Post!

-Sam “QforQ” Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

Revised: 9/10/09

Following up our post: “How To: GamerDNA on Twitter and Facebook“, we would like to give a run down on how you can use GamerDNA to automatically keep track of all your gaming on Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam and Xfire.  Not only that, but once you enter in all your information from your gaming networks, you can automatically have your gaming updates sent out to Twitter and Facebook!  It really is a beautiful thing.

Are you on GamerDNA?  Make sure you sign up today, it’s super easy!

The process of plugging in your gaming accounts to GamerDNA is quite simple and can be done with just a handful of clicks of the mouse.  Here’s the walkthrough:

1. Head on over to Manage your GamerDNA

In the top navigation for GamerDNA we have some quick profile options in the far right hand side.  There you will see your Home, Profile, and Manage icons.  If you mouse-over the Manage icon you get a variety of quick options, or you can just click on the Manage icon to go to your GamerDNA management page.

2. Add your AKA’s!

The GamerDNA Management page is basically the hub of your gamerDNA…this is the place that you can go to edit everything about your GamerDNA profile and experience.  Every setting that you would need to change or addition that you would want to make to your profile, can all be made from this page.

At GamerDNA we call the names that you have on your gaming networks your “AKAs”, or your Also Known As names.  To add them to your profile, scroll down to the “Your Settings and Preferences” section of the page,  and click on the “Gaming Network Preferences” link.

Now all you have to do is add your gaming names from the different networks that you game on.  GamerDNA currently integrates automatically with Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Steam and Xfire – so once you add those names, we can automatically update your profile and let all your friends know what you’re playing.  To complete the process of adding a name to your gamerDNA, make sure you click the “Activate” button for the appropriate network that you’re trying to connect to your gamerDNA.

After you’ve added your Xbox Live, PlayStation, Steam, and/or Xfire names – Give GamerDNA a day or two to start picking up all your information and run it through our system.  After that 24-48 hours setup time, we start pulling your gaming information every day and update your profile. This means you can let all your friends know what games you’re playing, what achievements you got, and what days you played – without even updating your profile!

With PlayStation Network we currently only support the display of PSN Trophies, and based on that information we can see what games you have played.  This means gamerDNA can only know that you played a game if you attained a trophy within it.  For more information on this topic, please see our FAQ.

You can add other network names to your profile so that other gamers can see them, and we even have privacy settings so that you can make sure you’re comfortable with who does or doesn’t see your gamer names.  To change what Network IDs (AKAs) show up on your profile on the Bio page, go to the AKA section of “Manage Your GamerDNA”.

When you’re all setup, make sure you head on over and Edit your Broadcast Settings so that all your friends can see what games you are playing these days.  GamerDNA is the best way to automatically update Facebook and Twitter with all your latest Xbox Live, PlayStation Networ, Steam, and Xfire gaming!

If you have any questions on how anything works, please let us know on our Get Satisfaction page.  We’re here to help!

Have fun!

Sam “QforQ” Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager