I wrote up a Planbeast newsletter, with the idea that it'll be a monthly thing. A copy got put into the ol' email for everyone whose "Mailing List" checkbox on their accounts pref page was checked (at least as of a couple of days ago).
You can also read this first issue on planbeast.com, in beautiful full-color HTML. Enjoy!
I'm pleased to announce a new, important feature: you can now mark any event as repeating. Several users have requested this feature, and if it works it should keep Planbeast's calendar nice and active into the future, so I'm pretty excited about it.
Repeating events carry their users and their attached comments over from one iteration to the next. So, for example, all the discussion that happens in a weekly event's comments section remains in place, allowing for ongoing conversation among its players. Furthermore, when you join a repeating event as a guest, you'll continue to stay there for further repetitions until you leave.
To set an existing event as repeating, go to the page of an event that you're hosting, click edit this event's settings, and then select the desired frequency from this This event repeats pull-down menu. Naturally, this menu also appears as you set up a brand new event. Please give it a try, and let me know what you think!
I've started to add some Xbox Indie Game titles to the Planbeast catalog:
One of my main motivations in building Planbeast was my desire help promote all the multiplayer games that just don't have the critical mass of players to support a culture of online play. Getting to this point by themselves is especially hard for Indie Games, whose developers shoulder the entire burden of promotion.
Do you have any other Indie favorites that we should add?
The last few days saw the addition of two new features, both requested independently by several people.
Event history: When Planbeast events slide into the past, they stay in our database, but unless you happened to have their URL bookmarked they become basically nonexistent to their participants. This is an especial bummer if there was conversation attached to those events' comments sections.
Now, every user who was a host or guest of an event at the time of its passing can easily continue to find those events. Your history page shows a neat little list of all the events in your past, as well as the most recent comment posted to each one. You can click through to re-access the original event page and all discussion attached to it.
You can find your history page linked from the front page, as well as your account page.
Buddy-list sharing: One of the known weaknesses of Planbeast is the difficulty in seeing who-all is here, so when three people in one day asked for a basic friends-of-friends feature, I jumped on it.
If you check the "Allow other users to see your buddy list" checkbox found on your buddy-list-management page, then a link appears on your profile page that will allow other users to see your list. Likewise, you can view the buddy list of anyone else who has turned on this feature for themselves.
So that nobody is unpleasantly surprised, I've set that feature to off for all existing users; you'll have to go turn it on for yourself, if you want to share your list with other users.
I've been scratching my head about why the database seems to be missing so many titles that were published in 2009. Since newer games tend to get much more online play, this discovery has been a little embarrassing.
I have finally discovered the culprit: Planbeast's source for getting new game data, 360voice.com, at some point last year changed the numeric IDs of their game database, as part of the process of merging their data with their new parent company, GamerDNA. Since Planbeast's database uses 360voice's game IDs in order to figure out which games are new and which it already knows about, this led to Planbeast getting confused, and effectively ignoring a lot of new titles.
I certainly don't blame GamerDNA for consolidating their own DB, and recognize the responsibility is wholly mine. This is simply the sort of thing that can happen when you leave a project with external dependencies alone for several months, as I did with Planbeast. There's little for me to do about it other than clean up the mess, and I sincerely appreciate all the help y'all are giving me with pointing out games that ought to be in our database. I add them as fast as I can, when you do, so please keep them coming!
After a year or so of letting it sit around undisturbed, I've started to more actively promote Planbeast. I began with this post on GeezerGamers.com, a web-based community for grown-up video gamers, many of whom love online play.
The Geezers have so far been invaluable not just in making some nice suggestions about the site, but calling out its flaws as well. For one thing, our registration system wasn't allowing recognizing addresses with two-letter TLDs (such as .uk or .ca) as valid. Just as alarming, the magic elves who populate our database with new titles had somehow managed to overlook both Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands, two of the most popular Xbox Live games right now. I patched these errors as fast as I could, and extend my gratitude to those who report them to me. Please keep the bug reports coming!
New members, especially those who frequent web forums, should check out Planbeast Cards. Paste these little code snippets into your forum signatures will let everyone else on the web know what online games you like, and when you're next scheduled to play an online XBL game. (Yes, I should make that page more obvious to this site's users somehow...)
One one user's request, I have also created a game entry for Halo 2, even though it's technically not an Xbox 360 game. Microsoft has announced that it's pulling the plug on XBL support for original Xbox title (including Halo 2) in April, and Planbeast can help you get your last licks in before the servers go dark.
Happy planning!
Just added a new feature to every game page: you can now opt to receive an email whenever anyone creates a new public event of that game.
Take Schizoid's page, for example. If you dig that game enough to want to know when someone else creates a public event, check the checkbox labeled "Email me when anyone creates a public Schizoid event", which you can find underneath the "Stay notified of upcoming events" header (if you're logged in, that is). Every game page has a checkbox like that.
In some ways this feature is redundant with the RSS feeds already attached to each and every game, but I'm operating under the hypothesis that signing up for emailed announcements is, for many people, a friendlier (read: less nerdy) way to stay informed about things like this.
Follow Planbeast on Twitter! Every time someone schedules a public Xbox Live event, it shows up as a tweet, with a link to the event's page here on planbeast.com. We hope that it's a fun way to keep track of what people are playing, and an easy route to jump into games that interest you!
We'll also use it make short posts on other stuff of interest around the Planbeast-o-sphere. See you there...!
I am in the process of sprinkling pretty little RSS icons around the site, attached to pages and page-sections that have their own feeds. The ability to subscribe to notifications about upcoming game events is one of Planbeast's key features, and I've been concerned that it just hasn't been obvious enough.
Got ideas for other kinds of feeds we should support? Let us know...
