So the DeadGod design has been changed a bit, as you may have noticed. That big bar beneath the title area will display recent posts, popular articles, or popular threads depending on what you mouse over.

The logo has also been changed to be slightly less offensive ;)

So, thoughts? Ideas? Like it? Hate it?

o Now only two items will be shown in your inventory.

This includes both the postbits area below player's avatars and their full user page. Which two items are displayed are up to you--they will be the top two items listed on your inventory page. You can access your inventory page as follows:

[ DSG Items ] -> [ View Inventory ]

Re-arrange your inventory by dragging the items around.

o All purchasable items now have a set cost of 5 credits.

o All purchasable items now have a stock of 1,000,000.

o Only people who have registered for the current cycle will be affected by events.

o Signing up to play a DSG cycle will grant you 150 credits. Playing each day will grant you an additional 10 credits.

This is in addition to the 1000/500/100 rewards everyone gets at the end of the cycle. This means that no matter what you will gain credits by playing DSG.

This opens up the game to people who don't necessarily want to play to win, but just want to interfere with other players :)

o The play method has been changed significantly. The new system works as follows:

Each cycle will open with a "registration" period that lasts 48 hours. This gives everyone a break and ample time to sign up for the new cycle. To register, visit http://www.deadgod.net/dsg

After the registration period is over, a single staging day will happen. When you are satisfied with your selection of items, visit http://www.deadgod.net/dsg to say you're ready for the next event to happen.

Every four hours a script will run to check if all players who registered are ready. If all players are ready and at least 16 hours have passed since the last event the next event will run. Players have 48 hours to signify they are ready, otherwise the event will run regardless. All registered players will receive a reminder email every 4 hours after the initial 16 hours have passed if they have not said they're ready.

At this point you can change your items around again. Once satisfied, you must visit http://www.deadgod.net/dsg and verify you're ready for the next event cycle.

This is much simpler than it sounds. Just visit http://www.deadgod.net/dsg after buying your items and you will be guided through the process.

That's it. Good luck!

You may notice some new features to the forums =)
Here's a brief list:
* Thread tagging
* Search cloud / tag cloud
* Thread prefixes
* Reciprocal friendships between users
* Public visitor messaging on profile pages with 'conversation' feature
* User picture galleries with user comment facility
* User-created social groups with invite only and moderated membership options
* Extended member profile pages
* Customizable member profile pages with admin-controlled styling abilities
* Inline editing of custom user profile fields
* Lightbox viewer for attached images
* Viewable and comparable history maintained for post edits
* User change history
* Social bookmarking integration

The DeadGod Rewards system is finally up and running. You can access it via the link below:

http://www.deadgod.net/rewards

Basically, 50,000 credits can be redeemed for a $25 Amex gift cheque.

50k credits seems like a large number, however we plan on adding more ways of gaining credits in the future. The most notable of these is the DeadGod Survival Game (DSG)--the reward for being the first to solve the riddle is 50,000 credits. In addition, DSG will pay out a weekly bonus to all players.

In addition to DSG you can earn credits by posting (based on word count), writing a post good enough to deserve front page status (1000 credit bonus) and winning jackpots in the Arcade.

FAQ:

Q: Wait, you're bribing us now?
A: No, we're rewarding you. You don't need to redeem your credits after all.

DeadGod.net is a serious project for us, complete with a budget. Server collocation costs, software licensing, domain fees, gaming servers, etc. have always been a part of this. In order to grow the community and increase member activity we've decided to re-focus part of our budget on advertising and rewards.

Q: Can I redeem a lesser amount of credits for a lesser reward?
A: No. Redemptions can be only be claimed 50,000 credits at a time.

Week 1: Animal Kingdom

Don't be afraid to enter! If your new try anyways, we don't bite. Mostly.

Objective:
I will post 2 pictures that you will edit in a caption or speech bubble with Photoshop or Paint(this isn't an art contest, doesn't have to be pretty.) Try to keep the slurs of any specific category of people down.

Rules:
-Time Limit: Feburary 8th 2008 - March 8th 2008
-Entry Limit: None but try to keep it from 1-2
-As I said do not to put hate or malice into your entry, it will be discarded.

Judging:
Will be judged on originality, creativity, and of course humor.

Winners:
First: 5000 Credits
Second: 2500 Credits
Third: 1000 Credits

And now for the pictures!

or


Good luck!

Note: This is officially sponsored by DeadGod, however all coordination is being handled by DeathCharms.

Holy crap the title says it all huh?

OPINIONS? (Not you Ratha)

To see the skinning capability compare this to the comic page.

You may notice item inventories, item links and "DSG" references on the forums over the next couple of days. We're very close to releasing the DeadGod Survival Game and need these parts of the system to be active in order to complete it's work.

It's important you do not buy any items yet. We will be wiping the database periodically, and any items you buy will be removed. Your credits, however, will not be returned.

Due to popular demand the Arcade has been re-instated!

http://forums.deadgod.net/arcade.php

This is the first project which will make use of your credits (it costs credits to play). While you can buy an Arcade pass for 10,000 credits to play as much as you like, it might be better to just pay for each game instead--you're not eligible for the jackpot if you use the pass and gain the high score.

Every time someone plays the game their fee is added to the jackpot for that game. Should you achieve the high score you will receive the jackpot as a reward.

Although there's only a handful of games now many more will be added in the near future.

The second project that will make use of credits is currently in the design phase. No hints about this one yet, but it will be original ;)

You may have noticed that we installed a credits system last night. This system gives you credits when you are active on the forums. You have nothing to spend these credits on yet--that's phase two. Phase two shouldn't take too long to implement though ;) It should be pretty fun.

We're also bringing back the arcade, hopefully some time today or tomorrow.

Phase three will blow you away, but that's at least a month out. It'll be sweet, though. For now enjoy the credits and (soon) arcade.

http://www.DeadGod.net/Catch

I have altered the Ombeve map for the Catch region of space.

This is mainly for alliance members, but I figured I might as well post it on the forums, I spent a long time on it =)


P.S. The naming in the upper-right is a bit confusing, I'll explain:
A long time ago DranoK and I used to play EVE Online together.. We both quit after a couple months.
About 2 years later I got back into the game and I reactivated our existing, dormant accounts.
DranoK had no interest in continuing playing, so I took over his character.
Unfortunately there's no way to rename characters. So, to the eve communities I am Drano Kay.

Something to be aware of while downloading anime/movies/whatever:

http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/650

In other news, Singularity is built and running, I've just been bogged down with other things to finish writing it. Hopefully part 4 will be up tomorrow.

So I did something new this year =)

If anyone else has extensive Photoshop experience and would like to make some themes for deadgod let me know and I'll send you the template file for making them and explain how my process works. It is extremely easy for anyone with basic to moderate photoshop experience.

They do not need to be holiday themed, though if you want to we currently have no other holiday themes and so if you make one it'll likly be used during that holiday (Christmas anyone?)
If they are not holiday themed and they are appropriately awesome they will make it into the daily rotation of themes (currently have about 8).

Let me know if you're interested!

And now, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Enjoy

Currently in beta, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. Test away--be sure to change the last field (X-Axis) to various options other than +healing to generate some pretty interesting graphs.

As always, report any bugs and/or feedback!

http://www.deadgod.net/healcalc

DeadGod is now hosted at www.SoftLayer.com

This is why there was a significant downtime, we were performing a cutover to the new server.

It is a significant hardware upgrade.

If there are any problems with the website, please use the Contact Us form to inform us about it.

We've created new postbit icons (those category images next to forum posts and on the blog system) to be a bit nicer. The jagged non-anti-aliased text of the old ones was really getting under my skin :/

If you're still seeing the old icons you probably need to hold down shift and hit reload page. This will update your cached versions of the images with the new ones.

Let us know if you like the new icons or have any suggestions :) I'm really digging this new content management system LiQUiD_X has created for us.

As Helki discovered we recently changed the anime blog so anyone could post to it. This is a problem since any post here ends up being displayed on the anime site.

I've locked this down for now, however will re-open the creation of new threads soon after working out a solution using postbits. In the mean time you can still reply to existing threads, just not create new ones.