Hi Nitromians,
It's been a while since we spoke about the accounts, so today I thought that we’d take a little peak at the progress made so far.
Registration
Upon launch, there will be multiple methods open to you from which you will be able to create a Nitrome account.
You will either be able create a Nitrome account from the registration page, or you will be able register with an existing Facebook account.
The second option will be great fun for people that want to enjoy that social network experience, like letting people know about the games you are playing or bragging about scores or new badges you've earned, we'll talk about badges a little bit later.
If you decide that you want to connect your Facebook account to your Nitrome account after registration, the option will be there for you to do that (there is also a shiny badge for connecting your Facebook account to a Nitrome account).
When accounts launch, we will be looking out for any bugs that we were unaware of during the development phase and ironing them out. The reason this is not as feasible in the development process is due to the high traffic / load that we would need the accounts system to experience and the different user scenarios that occur. There are many linear methods that can aid us in stress testing and unit testing the accounts, but we all know that nothing can emulate that human behaviour quite like you can! So you could say that, technically, accounts will be in beta when we launch them and the Nitrome community will be the account stress testers!
We have carried out some preliminary testing to make sure that any issues that can be found at this early stage are dealt with and the system will be monitored after launch to seek out any hiccups that may arise from then onwards.
Let’s talk about the badges, what are they exactly?
Badges are cool new unlockables which will be introduced alongside accounts at launch. You can earn badges by performing actions that are not necessarily linked to the games themselves. This could be things you do around the site, like commenting, private messaging, unlocking new avatars, reporting abuse etc. We thought we would keep them separate from any game specific achievements that will be introduced after accounts launch and things are all running along smoothly.
Upon launch, we will have included a light content moderation system which will try and help us keep the site as clean as possible. The moderation system may need the help of a few good Nitromians to start with, and by this we mean reporting any bad behaviour. Remember, this is going to be a community and we want you all to take pride in it and be apart of it. You will also be able to earn the reporting badges if a user you've reported is dealt with by an admin.
A typical scenario.
Let’s say that a rogue user decides to spam in the comments of a game or blog post to achieve badges quickly, what can you do about it?
Well, if you are one of the people that report them, you will be rewarded with a report badge for your community support effort and we will remove the badges from the offending user, possibly even removing their account if they persist. So in essence, you get something - the community gets something and everyone’s happy.
Features to expect at launch
- Facebook account integration
- Badges
- Notifications
- Commenting
- Reporting
- Friending
- Private Messaging
- Personal 'hearted games'
- Avatars
- Unlockable Avatars
Features to come after initial launch
Things we will be working towards, once the accounts are considered stable, are game saves and achievements.
Game saving is something we know you all want and we know why it’s so sought after. We’ve had plenty of emails that come through regarding saved games being lost from computers.
There are two main reasons for this:
- Local Shared Object (LSO) files size limits
- Some browsers mark the LSO content to be deleted along with your browser history.
This is something that a cloud saving system could help us fix for you all so it is on our road map.
Game saves and achievements will be coming after launch as they need to be fitted into every game that will support them. This means actively going through our games catalogue to retrofit them with this new functionality.
Profile Page Screenshot: Click Here!
We are getting very close to launching accounts now. We hope you are all as excited as we are!
