Oh, RPI Chat, how you entertain us so!

One thing I must say that has been extremely entertaining and exciting for us to do has been reading the Public Chat in our RPI game.

While there have been solicitations for dates ("A/S/L"),

downright mercenary espionage,

B* H* from BARH, RAHPs, Stackwyck, and Colonie Apartments: Selling red team secrets: Payment negotiable (01:49AM)

random pictures of rocket-propelled chainsaws and sniper crow bars,

and complete trash talk about the military strategies of other teams, none has bothered us much until this comment:

Z* H* from Cary and Crockett Halls: GXC is on the internet. Internet is serious business. Through the transitive property GXC is also serious business. (01:22AM)

We must contest this entirely. While the writer may speak some truth...



We must argue that:

GXC is the the farthest from serious business as you can get. GXC is fun. GXC is a game. GXC is meant to foster pride in your affinity group and healthy competition against others.

You know what is serious business? Kristen Zaik.

Haha - nice one, RPI.

Metric Mayhem

So things are doing pretty well at RPI. Depending on who you ask, we have:

- 25% of all on-campus residents
- 13% of all undergraduates
- 25% of everyone assigned to a team
- 600 players
- ?% of all @rpi.edu email addresses

Not too bad for four days after launch. However, we've been struggling over how to frame our data. All of the statistics above are correct, to varying extents. Teams only include people in on-campus dorms. However, off-campus residents, professors, grad students and alumni are allowed to join. But not many of them do -- everything from the map to the teams to the core players on each team are very undergraduate campus-focused.

So how do we grade ourselves?

I'll be discussing this tomorrow with people who have a much deeper understanding of this stuff than I do. With any luck, we'll come to some sort of conclusion on the best way to display our usership data.

Ugh. Why can't we be one of those sites that can just spew crap about uniques and page views?

Our time per sesh is niiice, though. It's not facebook-ish, but it is YouTube-ish.

Mailer Daemon is Our Friend

So we were getting a lot of MAILER DAEMON errors to our server, like the following:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at *censored*.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses: *censored*@hotmail.com.edu
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

Sorry, I couldn't find any host named hotmail.com.edu. (#5.1.2)

Full well knowing that Microsoft hadn't founded a University named after its famous web mail program, we immediately knew that hotmail.com.edu was not a real email address (We're just that good.)

We quickly suspected that must be a good reason for these fishy registrations. Without going into the details of the exploit, let's just say we've taken care of it.

"Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor."
- Joseph Addison

Remember folks - in war, there are no "fake" soldiers. Play fair and fight with dignity. Read the Code of the Samurai if you have to.

Soviet Propaganda, anyone?

So we recently created some sweet Soviet-style GXC propaganda for the Ivy League Championship and RPI games. These posters are being spread around Ivy campuses, being sent out en masse in student emails, and generally indoctrinating people into the GXC dominion. ;-)

They were fun to create, as you can see. If you want to download one, just click on it above.

Speaking of GXC propaganda, one of the coolest physical extrapolations of GoCrossCampus games is user-generated propaganda to lead teams on to glory. In fact, to bring this all together, we're launching a YouTube- and Flickr-enabled landing site to stream GXC-related videos, photos, and flyers created by our users. So you'll be able to upload all your propaganda online, tag it "gocrosscampus," and it will instantly appear on GXC for everyone to watch, comment on, and be inspired by. Hot? Hot. Anyway, we'll let you know once it's up.

Cheers,

-MOB

Day Zero, and Overeager Yalies

Say hi to world, GoCrossCampus.

Launch day has gone smoothly so far. The only hiccup has been the lack of email filtering allowing some overeager Ivy League kids into RPI's party. That will be fixed shortly. As for now, Thou Shalt Not Join Games In Which Thou Not Belong, Or Thine Ass Shalt Be Deleted.

While I would love to say that our first registrant was someone at RPI, Yale's infamous spam king accessed our site a few days before launch, signed up, and started playing a test game. We love you, G!

More to come soon.