Temporary pricing while they remain exclusive to the December 25 present unlocks =)
Also worth noting that account management is successfully letting you choose which flair to use now. Sorry about that, I didn't push out an additional change that was made to our form for it to allow it to save correctly.
Cosmetics still needs a huge overhaul in account management. I don't like that you have to guess what stuff is going to look like.
We had presents available for 38 hours which I feel was enough time for people to come and get them. We had the notice here that said they'd be available come December 25, posted about their availability in a frontpage article, and made sure there were timers so people knew how long they were up for.
FWIW, you did unlock them. Several hundreds of snowflakes, 2 avatar borders, and a couple of new forum titles. You should have received a corner popup on the site when you clicked each of the presents telling you what you received :D
The gifts aren't going to be present exclusive though - they will get added to the shop in exchange for snowflakes after a brief exclusivity period. The real gift is that they don't cost an arm and a leg to unlock them :D
I do wonder if Iksar will head on over there finally. In my mind, I always assumed he'd move over to SD since he felt like that "core" part of Hearthstone that isn't around anymore.
It isn't that I'd like to see him leave Hearthstone, he's one of the more communicative people on the team which is nice to have, I just think he's potentially being held back by Blizzard.
I'm going to add a Snowflake leaderboard for total collected, which was surprisingly absent initially (derp), but no plan for individual totals (if people want this, let us know and we can definitely find a place to put it). Currently, you can check your site achievements to see snowflake counts when you hit certain milestones.
I'll answer your first bit - I usually reserve my own hint giving until later on :D
For Magic Card clues, visiting any card that has the same name will work. I won't say that will always be true though because I do want to leave it open for us to make clues that would force you to go to a particular card with art from a specific artist or perhaps a card from a certain set.
I can definitely confirm though that this round any card with the same name will trigger the clues.
I can't make any promises about throwing things at people in other events, I want them to feel unique, but that uniqueness with all of the events we do on the site and having special stuff available for each one is definitely going to happen. Activities that can bring the community together and have some fun are very important to me.
I've already got a large list of stuff I want to see for next year's winter event, we'll see how much of it actually makes it into that one and what else might get repurposed into other events next year.
Stuff is rolling out slowly today for the holiday event.
If you want any of the headers, don't worry, you can safely spend your snowflakes. Unlike the Oozefest event, I'm expecting people to obtain at least a couple of thousand snowflakes during the event which will run until February 1.
Once everything is live for sure, there will be a news article detailing everything.
There is zero chance we'll ever let anyone see who is upvoting and downvoting content. In my experience, it just leads to harassment when people go after those that downvoted them. It creates a toxic atmosphere, especially when you downvote someone trolling and that troll now knows who "got their jimmies rustled" so they can go after them. Preventing that scenario from even happening is A+ in my book.
Upvoting yourself is an odd one, I will agree. The reason behind it though, which I know I've mentioned in the past somewhere but since we have a fresh thread on it let me repeat it, is because it gives us more flexibility. If you go through the deck database, not many people upvote their own decks. I'm willing to wager if a person doesn't upvote their own deck initially, there is a higher chance it isn't a deck worth looking at. Maybe someone is using the site to catalog decks they like. It's sort of a power-user feature so people that know it exists and are writing good deck content can make use of it to get themselves higher in the initial rankings.
Now, upvoting your own comments just comes from the silliness that is us using the same voting system for everything on the site. It might be a bit strange, but honestly, we'd just be starting everyone at +1 anyway without it so its another opportunity for people to signal boost themselves if they think they wrote something worth seeing.
Ultimately though, the points don't matter much and its just something fun. It's super easy feedback to give since it is low effort and if people really need to upvote themselves, I'm okay with it =D
I mean is there a possible realm where we move away from the current internet meta of "liking/upvoting/reacting" to everything? Can we possibly go back to a "good ole days" era where there were no likes/upvotes on comments. People make comments, and people respond. If people don't like the comment, they can reply and say "you are wrong and here's why". If people troll, we just use the report button to report the people who troll.
The problem inherent with "liking/voting/etc" systems is that it panders to , frankly speaking, the Facebook type of crowd that can't be bothered to respond to a picture of a family member, so they just like it instead.
Maybe if the downvoting is the problem, we just get rid of "liking or disliking" comments altogether. After all, comments are opinions: sometimes they are wrong, sometimes they are right, but they are opinions. And people are allowed to make their opinions heard if they so wish, correct? As someone mentioned earlier, there was a problem with someone or some people mass downvoting news thread comments. And they most likely didn't contribute to the thread themselves. If we removed the ability to like/dislike a comment, wouldn't that solve the issue? It would force the people who don't want to contribute, and instead just want to downvote people they disagree with to actually formulate an opposing opinion and write it down...
And if the mass downvoters/trolls/whatever they are get pushed away by a new environment that doesn't have like/dislike buttons, then that's better overall for the community anyhow isn't it?
Just a thought.
I don't disagree! I miss the old school parts of the net :D
With that said, the voting is so much better to engage more members of the community and therefore keeping more people around. Sometimes just having conversations isn't enough and doesn't feel as rewarding. Look at achievements on the site - they don't really matter much but people love to complete them and it creates more attachment since you get to work towards something.
Gamification is a big deal online now. Keeping people around and building healthy communities with it is so important.
Applications are still being worked through. There were quite a few of them, more than I had expected to see, so with the extra load from that and all the content we've been working towards for the big game announcements this week, it has been a slower than expected process.
Everyone who sent in an application will receive a response.
Looks like the package didn't have the associated reward, oops!
Going to run a query to get this fixed for everyone. Sorry about that!
That's been fixed :D
Always happy to take credit for Avalon's work. As long as I don't have to eat a shoe!
If you get targeted hard by people, you can accumulate quite a few snowflakes
The issue with notifications for currency being under the nav will be fixed this morning.
Temporary pricing while they remain exclusive to the December 25 present unlocks =)
Also worth noting that account management is successfully letting you choose which flair to use now. Sorry about that, I didn't push out an additional change that was made to our form for it to allow it to save correctly.
Cosmetics still needs a huge overhaul in account management. I don't like that you have to guess what stuff is going to look like.
We're introducing a new cosmetic today called Pins! This is the first part of how pins will be used on the site.
New Features
Pins!
We had presents available for 38 hours which I feel was enough time for people to come and get them. We had the notice here that said they'd be available come December 25, posted about their availability in a frontpage article, and made sure there were timers so people knew how long they were up for.
FWIW, you did unlock them. Several hundreds of snowflakes, 2 avatar borders, and a couple of new forum titles. You should have received a corner popup on the site when you clicked each of the presents telling you what you received :D
The gifts aren't going to be present exclusive though - they will get added to the shop in exchange for snowflakes after a brief exclusivity period. The real gift is that they don't cost an arm and a leg to unlock them :D
Honestly, it is a limitation to how our system works for the tasks and was hoping no one would point it out :P
I do wonder if Iksar will head on over there finally. In my mind, I always assumed he'd move over to SD since he felt like that "core" part of Hearthstone that isn't around anymore.
It isn't that I'd like to see him leave Hearthstone, he's one of the more communicative people on the team which is nice to have, I just think he's potentially being held back by Blizzard.
At the moment, the text for Mythgard cards isn't in our database, so yes, definitely something wrong. Huge oversight and we'll have it corrected TBD.
I'm going to add a Snowflake leaderboard for total collected, which was surprisingly absent initially (derp), but no plan for individual totals (if people want this, let us know and we can definitely find a place to put it). Currently, you can check your site achievements to see snowflake counts when you hit certain milestones.
I'll answer your first bit - I usually reserve my own hint giving until later on :D
For Magic Card clues, visiting any card that has the same name will work. I won't say that will always be true though because I do want to leave it open for us to make clues that would force you to go to a particular card with art from a specific artist or perhaps a card from a certain set.
I can definitely confirm though that this round any card with the same name will trigger the clues.
I can't make any promises about throwing things at people in other events, I want them to feel unique, but that uniqueness with all of the events we do on the site and having special stuff available for each one is definitely going to happen. Activities that can bring the community together and have some fun are very important to me.
I've already got a large list of stuff I want to see for next year's winter event, we'll see how much of it actually makes it into that one and what else might get repurposed into other events next year.
We haven't covered every announcement they've put out. In retrospective, we should have.
Stuff is rolling out slowly today for the holiday event.
If you want any of the headers, don't worry, you can safely spend your snowflakes. Unlike the Oozefest event, I'm expecting people to obtain at least a couple of thousand snowflakes during the event which will run until February 1.
Once everything is live for sure, there will be a news article detailing everything.
You will be able to disable card styles in a future update!
We did the worst-case scenario so you can only be happier with your actual outcome :D
We also don't take into account buying the pass and getting an XP boost.
I don't disagree! I miss the old school parts of the net :D
With that said, the voting is so much better to engage more members of the community and therefore keeping more people around. Sometimes just having conversations isn't enough and doesn't feel as rewarding. Look at achievements on the site - they don't really matter much but people love to complete them and it creates more attachment since you get to work towards something.
Gamification is a big deal online now. Keeping people around and building healthy communities with it is so important.
Applications are still being worked through. There were quite a few of them, more than I had expected to see, so with the extra load from that and all the content we've been working towards for the big game announcements this week, it has been a slower than expected process.
Everyone who sent in an application will receive a response.