Hey all, With two Plus+ enabled games rocking the App Store Sales Chat, Plus+ is the best Social Gaming Add-On a developer could add to their game. An amazing amount of polish, great catalog, and push notifications. I wanted to get a thread going and see what upcoming features you'd like to see with the Plus+ network. I hope they actively update Plus+, and maybe if we get a big thread going on suggestions, Allen/MJ may just spread the word to the rest of the team! Here's a few things I'd like to see: Global Plus+ Score Leaderboard Whose Online and what their playing Direct Messaging/Email Landscape Support Require Plus Logo on App OR do away with it completely Contests! Feel free to add anything you guys can think of, I'll add it to the list.
Landscape support. Offline scoring/achievement caching, automatically submitted next time I'm online.
Full Plus+ Points Leaderboard Offline Mode Friends Status/Messaging Basically just rip off every great idea Microsoft came up with for Xbox Live.
i'll add some thoughts here....... -who's online and what they are playing (assuming its a plus+ game) -- agreed -def should support landscape -- agreed -offline mode -- agreed -require the plus+ logo on all apps supporting plus+ -- agreed i actually think it looks really cool -it already does status updates well sorta...... -contests -- thinking about this will update with my thoughts in a later post in landscape mode i would like to see some coverflow usage especially for the news/social media campaigns items would rather see some rich thumbnail images then just text tittles and be able to go from coverflow to list by just rotating the iphone as far as messaging i would go with something more like twitter asynchronous messaging within the plus+ network rather then a ton of public IM chat rooms or one on one IM private messaging i would just go with something like twitter and facilitate a centralized conversation thread for announcements, private messages, ect all on one thread party functionality should scale from in game parties like they are with eliminate private matches and other games yet to take advantage of it to beyond games where a gamer playing eliminate could join a plus+ generic party of friends playing rolando (for example) and interact with friends across games should be a combination of chat via voice and IM text chat while your in the party also since there is the distinction between friends and followers i really have a feeling this is the direction they are going with messaging more twitter like rather then a collection of real time chat rooms or rather then PMs or email/inbox like and if they are going with a more twitter like experience that is a REALLY smart move on their part what do you guys think?
Good idea, I definitely have a few suggestions A dedicated Plus+ application that is always up-to-date, and includes an expanded and more detailed feature set Instant Message / Mail Landscape support (I don't care, but others seem to want) Better and less obtrusive icon identification (Maybe just the '+') Delayed challenges (a list of all unanswered challenges, rather than a "respond immediately or it's gone forever") Detailed profile information Detailed leaderboards and rankings Save game uploading and management in every game
The ability to have any picture for public pic most recent games on profile card when you go to the friend screen and if they're online or not. [without having to click into the person's profile](like a small picture of the game's icon and/or small pictures of the most recent achievements. Descriptions for EVERY ACHIEVEMENT! (for achievement whores like me
i have also been asking or requesting "groups" but im trying to figure out how that would work with a twitter like communication platform because above all else it should be asynchronous and revolve around a centralized activity feed/channel/thread but i really would love to have groups and a twitter like experience on the plus+ network so im going to attempt to design flow here using the twitter lists as a starting point here goes................. 1) users can organize their plus+ friends list into groups or lists and name them for organizational purposes 2) they can also publish the group or just leave it private 3) when a user publishes a group every person in the group (even if they are not a friend) gets notified that they are a part of the group but only friends and followers of the group creator will automatically start receiving group content in their channel and by group content i mean messages posted with the @groupname from the creator and/or users in the group who have synced to the group but members who havent synced and are just recipients they will only receive content from users where there is a connection meaning they have to be friends or a follower of one of the users 4) a member of the public group those who did not create the group -- can do 2 things: 1) they can opt out of the group and not receive content posted to the group via @groupname or 2)sync the group and this will automatically follow members of the group who haven't been followed and allow the user who didn't create the group to sync the group to their account where they can either leave the name the creator used as is or rename it to whatever they want and once synced they can then begin to use @groupname to post content to the group there thats a good flow or at least a good start......any gaps i didn't think of? also even though i would love for it to be "like" twitter i would prefer there to be a few distinctions..... here they are: @username will be a direct message and doesn't get published in your public thread which will be pushed to all of your friends and followers, it only gets published to the @username users you designated in the message and if you add multiple @usernames in a single message all of those users will get the message as is. i think that would be better for a gaming social network and if you want to reply or dis someone publicly just post a message with the name of the person you want to reply/dis in public without the @ symbol in front of their name and that will do the trick no need to publicly publish each and every message, and this will of course make filtering much easier as a user could then filter between public messages or direct messages private groups can still be used to send a message to multiple people without having to type them all out, just use the @groupname and each person you added to the group will get the message without the @groupname in it the recipients or friend the user added to the group will get the message that will have their @username in it the username would be their username of course instead of the private name of the group that the sender hasn't made public so for instance i make a group and name it "punks" i send this message "@punks you up for a challenge?" and the recipient in this case lets say his username is "bob" well bob will get a message that looks like this "@bob you up for a challenge?" public groups are different from private groups private groups are just like email lists or mass texts it allows the sender to send a single message to multiple people without having to type out each and everyone of their names each time but a public group is very much a group in essence like say for instance skip made the 53battalion group public he would send out a message "@53battalion meet up tonight lets take on the 11battalion at full force" everyone he added to the group (assuming of course they are a friend or follower) would get that message as is and if they synced the group they will be able to use the same @groupname to be like "@53battalion hell yeah im in" and everyone in the group would get that reply but if a user synced the group then changed the name to say @progroup when they send the message it will show up with whatever name the users in the group have it synced as so if skip still has it with @53battalion and i synced it to @progroup and sent the message "@progroup" count me in too" it would show up to skip as "@53battalion count me in too" with that name not @progroup. the main difference between the private groups and the public groups is that the private groups are very much like mass texts that come across as private messages to each of the recipients individually without knowing who else it was sent to, but the public groups are very much public broadcasts but only to the members in the group and it doesn't show up to everyone who is either your friend or following you. make sense? the public groups will help users send public messages to relevant recipients rather then to everyone that is their friend or follower that could care less where as the private groups are just mass direct messages to each recipient i think this design is better for a gaming social network then just completely copying twitter as is, because it will keep the threads relevant and easier to manage even if you go on say an add spree and add a ton of people who you dont even know yea at first your thread will be overflowing with content and seem quite ridiculous but one need only to tap the @ filter and all of a sudden the thread will become an optimized stream of relevant communication as all of the public announcements will disappear and only direct messages and public group announcements will be listed in the thread and if your in a ton of groups there may even be a on/off button turn it off group announcements they will disappear and you can focus on replying to all of your direct messages, turn it on and you can check out all of the group activity and instantly be able to get involved in the community hell there may even be a filter specifically for public groups where you can filter the thread to just group announcements and if Ngmoco is feeling creative there may even be a nice search feature similar to how it works in gmail as if twitter hasn't proven it yet but activity feeds trumps all -- im, email everything it is the most efficient communication platform to date and optimize it slightly for use in a gaming social network then you will have an awesome leg up in the race to become the defacto layer offered to developers but even so dont forget about IM all together as it will be a perfect fit for parties especially if there is also a voice chat functionality to go along with it but thats temporary and role specific as both IM and chats should be want a powerful messaging platform then design something like twitter not mail not forum real time asynchronous activity feeds is where its at if you want to chat "chat" then invite your friends to a party if not then create some messages and be done with it. and all of this functionality could be implemented with just one extra tab at the bottom in plus+ call it "socialize" or something this would be where you go to not only read your thread but also compose and post announcements/status updates, direct messages and public group announcements then on the friends tab just add the functionality to create groups and name them and publish them or leave them private done done and DONE!! you can thank me later
public groups will of course be an opt in experience if you start getting aggrivated by group add requests or rather notifications that one of your followers added you to a group you can set your plus+ profile to private and no longer worry about random ppl adding you to random public groups only your friends will be able to do that
also keep in mind that such functionality will of course diminish (slightly) the need to leverage third party networks to issue challenges (you will of course still have friend finders tho) and of course you could still have that functionality to issue challenges on third party networks built into the game as a dev but........ imo a robust communication platform is WAY more valuable then the marketing potential of leveraging third party networks (twitter/facebook) besides who wants a bunch of irrelevant challenges clogging up their twitter channel or Facebook newsfeed when they dont even own an iphone or the game thereof im sure plenty of your friends dont? and i personally would get pissed if one of my friends would keep spamming me with challenges or app requests that are completely irrelevant to me......with no way to filter these out which is why i think plus+ needs a robust communication platform so the community of users who do own an iphone and who obviously have the game and are very much willing to engage in social relationships with other users who also have the game so that a robust communication platform will allow these two strangers to challenge each other thus each user will gain more value from the social layer of the game as a customer rather then leveraging third party networks which is basically enabling users (or depending on them) to spam your product for you to their friends of course i dont have access to the analytics nor have i had a chance to look at the analytics from anyone really (i dont think anyone has made that data public yet) so i have no clue just how efficient these third party challenges (twitter/facebook) are for driving sales but going with my gut instinct i doubt its enough to be all like "no we cant provide a robust communication platform on our network because that would decrease our sales potential as users would no longer spam our product to their friends" but then again i haven't looked at the data so for all intents and purposes consider my above statements completely speculative.........
heres my thoughts on contests....... while it makes sense from a marketing perspective to leverage the plus+ network as a media distribution platform and the value of doing such could be astronomical to the partners involved but the content as of late is nothing more then marketing 101 press releases and that content is going no where fast, its stagnant its idle chat, unless of course the game is highly anticipated and uber hyped and even so i the user have no power in sharing that content via digg, facebook or retweeting it within the in game app itself even tho i may or may not have already integrated a couple of those accounts already but bottom line i want to see some more compelling content a true engaging social media campaign with the features to share it on third party networks as is (digg, twitter,facebook) and heres the MOST important feature "join" the event and be notified when the event is about to take place and not only that be able to invite my friends to "join" the events as well or even integrate with the calendar app and add it to my iphone calendar... i mean look at XBL for example they have sm camps such as gaming with the devs, ladies night, ect and while those are more innovative then marketing 101 press releases they are still very shallow but they do get one thing right and thats a call to action in an event thats taking place that should be fun and compelling to participate down the road in the future i also want to see video content, or podcasts at least attempt to build rich media properties around this plus+ network media distribution model or get another network such as IGN, gametrailers, MTV or G4 or whatever its called to join in and help out i want to see content that was truly inspired by the community or is interesting and creative and consumable in short bursts, reach out to the users at the top of the leader boards interview them keep a look out for groups and communities and threads that rise up around the game reach out to them too, hey while your at it reach out to TA and STP also get some dev diaries going i mean the skies the limit here it just needs to be creative rich compelling and engaging.... and how does contents fit into this? well contests via the media distribution platform in the home/news section is another potential type of content that could be harness and if used effectively it will pay off big time idk how you guys run this and i dont claim to be an expert in sm marketing or marketing in gernal or BA so idk if you guys run this in house or you leave the responsibility up to the partners to compose and submit content for publishing, whatever it is you def need to throw some more interns at it and really digg deep and come up with some compelling content cuz....... im going to be completely honest here that content in the home/news section is nothing but ambient noise to me that has not caught my attention or compelled me to view it at all.....yet
I didn't think of about the challenges, they definitely need to sort that out. It's so annoying to get a challenge when I am unable to play it, then never be able to come back to it.
