Pandamonium

Following the common for everyone else and not common for us routine let's review the 2010 as it was.

Without a doubt we can mark passing year as a preparation to the true product Renaissance. Building a great product is like building a good looking fancy and yet usable house. You need to get a beautiful concept and lay down the groundwork, only then any magic is possible.

We had lots of fun, ups & downs and even tears along the way, but it all was for good. 

Here are few things that we've done during the year: 

— Found a development partner — Railsware who does all the engineering & design heavy-lifting up until now
— Opened up the product as a private beta for the first time
— Spread the Headquarters from New York to sunny San Francisco

Beautiful photos by Siebe Warmoeskerken

— Rebranded/renamed from GameSetCash to Playhem (that was a loooooong month right there)
— Moved from the closed and almost intimate private to a full tiered beta
— Got mentions in major gaming outlets such as

• ESPN
• IGN [1], [2]
• Kotaku
• Ripten and many more

— Introduced points and awesome prizes that gamers can get for them (iPads, iPod, Sony Move, Kinect and more). Many prizes was claimed from that time
— Redesigned, re-engineered and re-cut our head to head challenges and tournaments around 500 times. Got a completely kick-ass tournaments system out in the autumn
— Filled up a throne for the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) with an Charles Bellfield and added four more high caliber advisors to the US team — Steve Kane, George Miller, Julian Green, and Richard Kunzer
— Started this product blog
— Got into tons of great meetings with many great and powerful companies. Expect to see the results in the 2011.

In numbers:
— Got about 12,000 likes/fans on the Facebook
— Visitors are up to 10K uniques a month (as of December) and growing
— More than 2000 tournaments played
— More than 4000 head to head challenges done
— Site activity peaking at the 65 users playing at the same time

However all of this was for nothing if we would not got the most amazing and talented team together spread across all the globe, from the San Francisco (US) to the Kiev (Ukraine) and even to the Siberia! These are super fun bunch to work with every day. The team is ready to bring some key innovations to the gaming & social space.

And of course, where we would be without our community? Thanks to everyone who helped make the product what it is now, we heard lots of feedback, proposals and suggestions this year. Thanks to all who play on Playhem and enjoy the fun. 

Next year is going to bring by far more adventures! 
Stay tuned and Happy New Year! We will see you in the 2011. Let's Playhem! 

We've just pushed the most recent patch. Please welcome 1.2.7.0.

Now you will be able to set the mood message. Some of players was already using display names on the dashboard as a utility for that. We are disabling the ability to change your username on Thursday of this week. Please remove 'Challenge me' or anything else that belongs in a mood message, and make your username unique so others can easily identify you as our community grows.

Simple simple:

1. Click on the mood message window and enter the message

2. Hit the arrow at the end of the field or just push Enter and new mood will appear near you on the dashboard and inside profile

Marvelous illustration above by Bobby Chiu

Following numerous requests of our users we've finally made the general chat. All people currently on the site are going to join this chat automatically, imagine the possibilities! Also it's going to be available on all pages except the profile and cashier. 

Here are few examples of how you can use it:

• Meet with other players and trash talk them to pieces :)
• Tournaments organization. We had the chat inside the tourneys before, but site-wide general chat is going to be more helpful
• Speak with Playhem team

Important. Some things to remember:

• General chat is a place to communicate with each other, please be nice to other people
• Any kind of offensive behavior will result in point deduction for your account and a possible consideration for ban

Enjoy and have fun!

We've pushed the site with some new updates:

Features

• Email verification setup guide (200 points reward included)
• 5 games bonus now only works for automatically verified games

Fixes

• IE8 performance is greatly improved
• Max entry fee for the tournaments is officially back on 250 

How 200 points bonus works? 

Basically we're rewarding you with 200 points for each game setup on each console. You can potentially earn 2000 points by setting up all the games on both consoles :)

This is the first mini-article in the feature spotlight series. Let us know what do you think of it.

Issue: Users who have both PS3 and Xbox 360 were not able to set automatic verification for both consoles at the same time.

Notice: Please keep your verification email private.

The original verification email looked like: username+random_number@playhem.com, for example: even60@playhem.com

Two additional emails were added (an example shown):

• even60-ps3@playhem.com
• even60-xbox360@playhem.com

If you already have your original verification email set up on one of your consoles (PS3 or Xbox 360), you do not have to change it. You will only have to enter the new verification email address in the console which is not already set up.

Enjoy.

A great illustration below (by Corrado Ficarelli) depicts how feature usually appears on the production where you can experience and use it for the first time. Yes! Occasionally that's indeed look like that.

PS: As you may already figured the crying bunny is the feature or release. And the big orcish guy is the team delivering it.