We hope you like the new look of the site!  We worked our developers to point they almost took off on one of the fishing boats next to our office.  There a few things you should notice and hopefully enjoy.

1.  It's faster.  We significantly improved the performance of the site.  A little optimazation, some upgrades to Rails, and a whole lots of code improvements. 

2.  Improved navigation.  We realized the old site made it dificult to find some useful features.  It also was going outgrow all the applications we intend to launch.  Hopefully you'll be able to find what you need faster. 

3. Flags and maps.  It's a minor touch, but one that we thought ended up being pretty nice.  There is something about seeing your country's flag next to your name on the leaderboard that inspires.  Brasil is currently dominating.

4. New language forums.  We added language specific subforums to accomodate our non-English speaking players.  This is just the start.  We will be localizing the entire community site for several languages.  Don't ask me for a date just yet. 

5. Community newspaper.  Be sure to regularly check out the community homepage - or community newspaper.  This page will growing and we are inviting players to submit their work to be posted here.

Oh and yes, don't forget to buy some Stars and support GONG!  Your support matters and will help keep the development team from trying to escape on the fishing boats.

Patch notes for GONG! version 1.6.5.250

1. New map added – “Baja Beach.”
2. We made some changes to the Grandfather's Journal (found in the practice area).
3. There were some changes to various text files to correct errors and grammar.
4. There was an AI player that was missing. It should have a name now.
5. We fixed a training message error. When clicking "Return to Lobby" it produced a “training complete” message, even though training had NOT been completed.           
6. We took our some items deemed “bad” by the ERSB. We hope to have a retail offering so we had to listen to them. (^:
7. There was an icon changed. The icon that covers white star box had to be adjusted.
8. Made some changes for UI consistency. 
9. Date formula change - YY/MM/DD change to MM/DD/YY 
10. Users can now report abuse in the chat box.
11. We implemented some parental controls for parents of players under the age of 13.

We hope you like the changes and bug fixes.  Our dev team is workign really hard to keep them coming. 

Some of you may have seen this video already.  There are some camera angles and I dig how it follows the ball.  Let me know if you see any players you recognize in tehre.  It was submitted by one our top players.    Can you guess which one?

To celebrate our new website's look and feel, we’re offering you the chance to design a GONG! wallpaper which we will make available right here on the GONG! website for other users to use. 

Use the screenshots, video and artwork posted on www.gongonline.com to make a wallpaper for us to share. 

To enter please e-mail your wallpaper design in PNG (.png) or JPEG (.jpg) format to contests@gongonline.com with your name, city, and email address so we can give you all the glory if you win and of course ship the prize to the lucky winners.

We’ll choose 5 winners that will each receive a $25 Amazon.com Gift Card. 

 


Entries must be received by July 31st 2008, 23:59:59 PST and we’ll publish the winning entries right here on the GONG! website.

Have some fun creating interesting wallpapers!