I was struggling to find something to blog about since it's about time for a new one from me. I had almost given up and was going to resort to a crash course on some of the advanced options for mod and game teams (It's coming in my next blog so I can have an even more in-depth look at some of them) when Scott gave us our two big new toys; high quality video and the new levels system.
High quality video is exactly as the name suggests. The video is now encoded with the frankly awesome H.264 codec instead of the somewhat ageing H.263, making for videos with sharper lines, better colour and all-round niceness. All conversion and switching between the new and old formats is handled entirely by our team of server monkeys, but there is still a little bit of fine tuning going on so if you spot any video glitches just let us know and we'll prod the settings so everything is excellent.
It's not quite HD yet, but it's something we're looking at for future expansion. Stay tuned.
Next up are our excellent replacement for Karma, something we've been promising to improve for a long time. After the combined efforts of several staff members couldn't find a decent set of equations for calculating karma without unfairly penalising some or rewarding others, we replaced it with a much more gaming-oriented and decidedly more fun system - levels.
Instead of a boring number telling you how good or bad some arbitrary maths somewhere thinks you are, your level is an indicator of your 'usefully-activeness', a phrase I've never heard before and should probably never use again. Instead of trying to base it around how many people say they like or dislike what you did - comment voting was a huge part of the old karma system - your levels are based on how much you do around the site that is then used by someone else.
Writing a tutorial is good and earns you activity, but if it's viewed by 5,000 people then you get even more activity from it. On the flip side, if your tutorial is so poor that it's not authed (or worse still deleted) by the staff then you're likely to get very little activity, or even have some removed. Activity points go towards increasing your levels from 1 to 70, each of which has a specific gaming/modding related rank name.
Don't get too excited about your level, it doesn't change anything around the site although in future we may choose to only let people above a certain level take part in things like feature betas or vote in contests. All in all it's just a bit of fun.
