February 27, 2009 More Challenges Anyone?

07:13am by Lijen (Site)

Hello vDreamers! We’ve got a few more policy updates that we’re excited to announce.

More Challenges – We have updated the way that the quota for daily challenges is calculated. Now you can send 15 challenges + 5 extra challenges every 4 hours. For all you insomniacs out there, that means you can max out to 45 challenges every day if you log back in every 4 hours!

Updates to VDI calculations – We’re continuously updating some of the VDI reward values. I’m not going to tell you what the specific updates are, that’s for you to figure out yourself.

Update reward for sent challenges – When a challenge you send is accepted, you will now receive $100 vDollars (up from $50). Cha-ching!

Gas required for endurance – We increased the gas required to compete in an endurance challenge. This policy is meant to bring some more balance and strategy when deciding on the different race types.

February 26, 2009 Facebook Application Tab is Back!

09:34am by Lijen (Site)

We’ve got a little treat for you Facebook folk. The application tab is back and better than ever! Show off your vDream garage to all your Facebook friends by adding the vDream application tab.

February 25, 2009 First Limited Donate-only Parking Spot, and Weekly Awards!

07:13am by Cheechoo (Site)

Greetings vDreamers! Today we released the first Donation-only parking spot in the history of vDream. We are a San Francisco-based team, so what better way to celebrate, than a beautiful shot from Ocean Beach looking at one of the seven wonders of the modern world – the Golden Gate Bridge!

The Charon parking spot didn’t sell out as fast as we thought it was going to, so we figured the demand wasn’t as high for an easily available parking spot. Please think of all paypal transactions on vDream as what they are – Donations! The money is going straight to Joyent, who provide us with their great servers, and to our outsourced team of artists. vDream officially consists of four employees, two of which work for free, and the remaining two who haven’t received a paycheck since November. Donations are very much appreciated, and they go straight to ensuring the life of vDream, and making sure we can continue to release cars, features, and to support the website.

We just wanted to make sure you guys didn’t think the money for parking spots and collectibles wasn’t going to prime ribs.

Either way, here are this week’s awards!

Every week, we recognize the most active user, the user with the most losses, and a user with a unique car, with 5000 vDollars and mention in the blog and announcements!

Most Active: Andrew James, with 496 – one of our longtime users! Great job with the VDI Andrew!

Most Losses: Anthony Manton, with 198 losses. Great job Anthony, you’ve earned the reward!

Car of the Week: Andrew James, our first dual-winner, with a nice looking black-topped yellow-bottomed S197 Mustang! Keep up the good work, Andrew, your loyalty is recognized!

February 24, 2009 Update: All Purpose Challenges

08:33am by Lijen (Site)

We here at vDream have decided to open up the flood gates and allow our users to send out 20 all purpose challenges everyday.

What this means is that, instead of having a max for each challenge type (1/4 Mile, Track, Endurance), you have a max of 20 daily challenges that you can send in whatever fashion you choose. For example, users with more friends might want to send out more endurance challenges and users with high power-to-weight ratios might want to stick to sending more 1/4 mile drag race challenges.

As usual, please let us know what you think about the policy shift and if you are having any problems with the updated system.

February 23, 2009 One Month Away! Who Else is Excited?

10:08am by Cheechoo (Cars)

I can’t contain my excitement! I saw this little video today on Youtube, with the young gun Sebastian Vettel narrating the new FIA rules for the ‘09 F1 season. Pretty neat little video if you ask me, even if you aren’t that into F1. KERS seems immensely cool – almost like the “turbo” or “nitrous” buttons in those old school video games.

Even with Honda out, I’m still excited to see the new changes in the cars, and to see the young kids Vettel and Nakajima in action! And OF COURSE BRUNO SENNA, if he gets a shot…

Sorry to those who aren’t interested in F1, but if you call yourself an auto enthusiast, go turn on the tele or read up some F1 news!

BTW, what’s with all the Sebastien/Sebastians in Formula 1 these days? There’s three of them now!

February 20, 2009 EVO!!! Weekly Awards, and the Law

01:16am by Cheechoo (Site)

vDream Racing is proud to announce the release of the latest car: Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 9! A true competitor to the Subaru Impreza WRX STi, the Evo has a huge following, and I’m sure many people (including me) are excited to see it on vDream!

Weekly awards: every week you can win awards for Most Active, Most Losses, and Car of the Week, and win a clean 5000 vDollars for winning! Here are this week’s winners:

Most Active: Bryan Camble, with 460 activity points. Keep up the good work Bryan!

Most Losses: Fiona Wignall, with 245 losses. Keep the faith Fiona, you’re representing the vLadies by succeeding in vDream!

Car of the Week: Nick Froehlich, with a very tasteful (and very neon) Lamborghini Murcielago. Lookin’ great, Nick!

Now on to the administrative matters. We have noticed a lot of minion accounts on vDream recently. Minion accounts are accounts that are created for the sole purpose of losing against your main account. If I create an account, and use it to challenge my main account every day, this is considered cheating. If you are doing this, don’t be surprised if you are no longer on the leaderboard. The vDream Police Force has been notified, and they are working around the clock to keep a watchful eye on everyone. If you have been stricken from the leaderboard, you can either keep cheating and remain off of the leaderboard, or you can have your account reset to zero, and start over. Please use common sense, people! Cheating is never good, especially when you’re going up against people who play the game fairly. Let this be the warning to those with minion accounts – stop using them immediately!

February 13, 2009 Happy Valentine's Day from vDream!

11:52pm by Cheechoo (Site)

We here at vDream would like to wish everyone a Happy Valentine’s Day! Spend some time with your significant others, eat some chocolate, and kill some roses!

We have released a few unique parts into the system, and I’ve used them to make a neat Valentine’s Day Mini Cooper! Hopefully some of the ladies out there start rolling around in one of these bad boys!

Also, have you noticed that we’ve changed the VDI system? It’s more linear now, instead of super-dynamic like before. Everyone’s VDI should start growing faster now, and VDI is updated on the fly.

February 12, 2009 Weekly Awards, and Poll Winner!

06:05am by Cheechoo (Site)

Hello vDreamers! First I’m proud to announce the winner of the most recent open car poll – the Mitsubishi Evo IX! The car will be released within a week! The Evo got a boat load of requests, ranging from the Evo VI all the way to the X, but we calculated the most requests were for the IX.

On to the poll winners!

Most Active: Bryan Camble, with 454 activity points. Bryan just started playing in January – it’s great to see new users heading up the most active category!

Most Losses: Sven Negrassus, with 350. Sven is our resident statistician. He is one of our dedicated users who takes the time to dissect the vDream system and figure out the ins and outs. You should pay him to share all the insider info he knows!

Car of the Week: Joel Wolski, with a great looking Chameleon Elise! Keep up the great work guys!

February 10, 2009 Updates Galore

08:03am by Lijen (Site)

Hello vDreamers! We’ve just launched a small set of user interface upgrades to make your lives, not to mention the lives of our servers, a bit easier. Let us know if you run into any bug outs or weird behavior.

First User Experience. This is for users that newly install vDream (sorry old timers). We have created a new user wizard to help guide the newbs in buying their first car and learning about the challenge system.

Show off your vDream garage in your profile! Instead of only display the car that a user is driving and listing it’s installed parts, we decided it might be a little cooler to see a user’s entire garage and the stats for each car.

Part Shed Optimizations. We did a little reorg on the Part Shed page. It should load a little faster and be much more server friendly.

Fixed inaccurate reward messaging. The bug that was displaying incorrect reward values from challenge wins has been fixed. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then slap your left knee with your right hand and dance in a circle (did anyone actually do that?)

Happy vDreaming! Oh, and were planning on launching a major new feature in the upcoming weeks. I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you what it’s not. It’s not a rat sitting on a cat sitting on a dog, although that would be pretty neat.