MyGameMug is now seeking developers to help us grow the site and introduce all those features that you all have been looking for! We are primarily looking for a senior developer with LAMP expertise (PHP) and a UI/UX developer in the Bay Area (or willing to relocate) and who also enjoys online gaming immensely.

You can view the available opportunities at http://www.mygamemug.com/jobs.php

If you know anyone who may fit the bill, please let us know. Additionally, if you think you or someone you know may be able to help us in other ways, drop us an email as we would love to hear from you!

One of the many requests we have been getting is for forums support. For those of you who have explored the group part of our site, you may have realized we do provide free forums for all groups. For the general community however, we have created something that works differently and much more efficiently than a forum for discussing games.

Many of you have noticed that on every game's page there is a section for discussion. We are giving these sections much more exposure now with the news feed - you will be seeing ongoing discussions of games that you have added to your profile (to keep it personal) and be able to keep track of those discussions as well. It is our hope that this will surpass forums in ease of use and usefulness.

We highly recommend you all to use these discussion systems as much as possible and please let us know any feedback on how to improve it in the future!

I would like to thank everyone who responded to the survey that we sent out - we are still getting some replies and it has been extremely helpful in determining MyGameMug's next steps. Remember to send us feedback whenever you have a question or concern!

In response to one of the more popular requests, we have quickly revised the review system to allow for reviews to be saved before publishing to the site. This allows you to work on it without letting others see it, and publishing it when it's done for all to read.

We encourage all of you to test out this new feature - and please let us know your thoughts on it as well! I think it will promote much better written reviews as well as solve many of the issues that users have been facing in the past with the review system.

We have a lot of features that were requested on our list in the upcoming weeks. Look forward to those and a few new surprises as well!

Thanks!

While we are working hard to bring new and exciting features to MyGameMug, we would like to ask our users to give us their input as well! We have set up a survey and it will directly impact how we develop MyGameMug in the future.

Please spend a few minutes and answer 5 important questions that will help shape the future of MyGameMug:

Link to survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=oT7TI64saUJDrQw0ID_2blSg_3d_3d

If you provide your username, we will credit you 100 Bonus MugPoints!

Thanks!

Many of you will have noticed that we have upgraded how our news feed is displayed. We have noticed that entries were getting cluttered and sometimes moves too fast or too slow. We now allow you to view only news, reviews, media, and official MyGameMug feeds instead of all of them bunched up at the same time. We have many other upgrades planned down the line for the news feed so stay tuned!

As always, please let us know your thoughts and suggestions with this new news feed display!

So the big question - what can you do with MugPoints?

Our first step -> trophies. As our first step to reward those who contribute to our site, we will be offering trophies for users to augment their profiles with. In this blog post, I will outline how it works, what are future plans are with it, and some thoughts thrown in here and there.

The first type of trophy is the achievement trophy. These trophies will be automatically given to you when you attain certain prerequisites with the current ways to get MugPoints. These include inviting 5 friends, or writing 5 quality (+5 rating) reviews, etc. The higher end achievement trophies will be the most prestigious.

The second type of trophy is the award trophy. These trophies will be given out during certain official MyGameMug events and promotions periodically and will usually be limited and a one time thing. No MugPoints are required for these, but may require participation or skill in a given game :)

The third type will be implemented in the very near future, and will involve spending your MugPoints to attain these.

Speaking of spending MugPoints for trophies - there has been talk of more valuable rewards to spend MugPoints on - and this may be a very real possibility in the future!

The MugPoint page for every user has been upgraded as well and will reflect the current state of the MugPoint system. In addition, in your edit profile page (http://www.mygamemug.com/editprof.php), you may set a default trophy to display next to your username in your profile and other various parts of the site.

If you would like to invite your friends and gain credit, we do realize that email is sometimes troublesome. To solve this, we have added a referral system as well to invite your friends with links. This can be found here: http://www.mygamemug.com/sendinvite.php

We would love for everyone to test this system extensively - we will be upgrading it very frequently and upgrading other parts of the site to support the system. In addition, our illustrator, Simon, is working hard to bring the best trophies possible to display on your profile!

As a thank you for all our existing users for your support, everyone will receive 100 MugPoints bonus to kick off our new system! Thank you all!

For those wondering about our ambiguous MugPoint system, I bring good news! Our weekend project had us taking a break from the games section and completely revamping the MugPoint system to make it actually useful to augment existing features!

The MugPoints are now MyGameMug's exclusive and only virtual currency - and this is how it's going to work:

1. If you invite a friend, and they register for MyGameMug, you gain 10 MugPoints. This ultimately serves two purposes - to create incentive for the more lazy members to invite their friends and more importantly, ensure that people who sign up will have at least one friend they know. YOU MUST USE OUR INVITE PAGE TO RECEIVE CREDIT! Linky:
http://www.mygamemug.com/sendinvite.php

2. If you write a review, you will earn 10 Mugpoints. However, to ensure that people write quality reviews, we encourage peer rating and commenting. If your review achieves a positive rating, you will receive 5 MugPoints for every rating point above 0. If your review's rating falls below 0, you will lose 5 MugPoints and if it falls below -5, you will lose all 10 MugPoints earned.

3. As an incentive to get more people to submit their opinions about reviews, we will be giving out 1 MugPoint for every review that a user rates (up or down). Authors love feedback and criticism (not to mention MugPoints!) so please give your opinion to every review that you read!

You may view how many MugPoints you have and where you received them from by clicking on the MugPoints link under your profile pic in your profile page. We will be adding more ways to gain MugPoints in the future with the various features around MyGameMug.

You may be wondering now, what can one do with MugPoints? What's the point of collecting them?

The answer will become apparent in the coming days - for those of you who haven't invited friends or written reviews, I highly encourage you to do so now as there may be a special bonus for you in the near future!

Hi all,

As many of you may have noticed, our match filtering page has been drastically improved!

http://www.mygamemug.com/match.php

We have greatly improve the algorithm -- to make it more accurate and faster. Try it out!

We are now also enforcing a new rule on the matches. There must be at least 1 platform and 1 game shared in order for a match to show up. So, if you have no matches, please add some games to your game library!

Ray

As many of you have noticed, we introduced a new platform to MyGameMug called 'web' that includes all games that are played solely on a browser. This means no downloadable client or buying a DVD/CD at the store.

While browser games are still in its early stages, there are a lot of casual and non-casual browser-only games out there that require a significant amount of social interaction. With advancements in Flash and javascript, new technologies such as Flex, and old technologies such as Shockwave, we are seeing an emergence of web-only games that we feel need MyGameMug's service as much as traditional games.

Your enjoyment of playing Pictionary, Scrabble, or Monopoly online with others is as much dependent on the players you play with than let's say...World of Warcraft. While one may take 5 minutes to play and the other 5 hours, social interaction still plays a significant part to both and thus one bad egg can certainly ruin the experience in both cases.

I encourage all our members to try out some of these games we are adding, and let us know your thoughts on this new step and how we can better improve it for you guys. If you have any recommendations for these types of games as well, let us know and we can add them to the site!

This week we have decided to tackle two issues - first is to start an initiative to get more users to come participate in our events and second to further improve our game system. The following are a list of the large changes in no particular order:

- Gaming index, news, search, pages, and reviews are all open to the public. This means you do not have to login to view these pages - but you must to participate.

- Event pages are now open to the public. When you create an event, you can now send the link to it to your friends and community members so they can register and RSVP for it.

- Front page of site has a new banner explaining the main features of the site (games, events, and matching). These buttons can actually be clicked on now and will take you to the corresponding newly public pages.

- The inbox link has been moved down to the personal menu bar, replaced with the event section.

- You can now share your reviews!! Sites like Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc. are available for you to share your reviews on. Please use this!

- Event system improved
1. You can "Maybe" attend an event now and switch up and down from Attending to Maybe Attending to let the organizer have a better feel of who can attend.
2. Organizers may now send email reminders to those in the event to let them know about an upcoming event they have signed up for.

- As you may have noticed, we are actively looking for people to help promote and organize site events for popular games. If you think you are a fit let us know!