Trapper Markelz

...we are working on that! ;)

Yeah we knew from the start that rewards wouldn't be available to non-US folks. That is just how these things work.

For any contest, prizes have to be fulfilled locally. It wouldn't make sense to get a gift certificate to a store that isn't in your country right? So just adding ONE country greatly complicates the prizing. And with the smaller markets it doesn't make sense for companies to fund fulfillment agencies and separate prizes in every country where there are xbox gamers... so for simplicity they do the largest market which is the US.

So it isn't that no one wants to include international audiences... they simply can't afford to put the infrastructure in place to support all that. Believe me... if they could they would. No one likes excluding people... but it just comes down to what is realistic.

I hope that clears up a little bit for people why international markets are often excluded from this stuff. But that doesn't mean international gamers can't compete for bragging rights! Once you win a challenge you will always have the challenge graph of your conquest to link back to!

But you create your own challenge and invite the people you want... so if all of your friends have lives... and can't put up 2,000 points a day, that is who you should compete against. You control your challenge.

Contest rigging is prevented in a few ways.

1. You have to have a gold account when you start or join a challenge... that prevents people from using lots of free accounts.

2. Since you create, invite or join challenges, you control who you compete against. If their game data looks fishy, don't compete with them in that challenge... or if you are the creator, boot them out. You control the challenge.

3. There are open challenges with no constraints. Prizing challenges (once they launch on Wed) will have requirements... the bigger the prize the more people you have to have in the challenge and the longer the duration... you can't just compete for 3 days against 3 people to get an HD DVD player :)

You can always email mail@360voice.com with questions... check out our dev blog... or the forums. This challenge feature is a long term feature of our community. We plan to support and improve it continuously.

I see you registered for a full membership. You should get your activation email quickly. Check your spam filter. If you need me to activate you, let me know.

Also if you have suggestions for what is confusing and how we can clear it up, 360voice is build on user suggestions... nothing is fixed... so just send an email or post in the suggestions forum. Cheers!

Sorry if everyone feels it is "vague and gay"... it is an integrated feature of our community... And think about it... you get to create your own challenge with your own friends and compete against each other to win prizes... it isn't some random race for 2000 points for a T-shirt... It is what you make it.

Explore a little more, I think you will find it can be pretty fun.

Fatty Chubs and I (ChangeAgent) are really just trying to make something that will be fun for the community (Gamerscore challenges). The prizes are just icing on the cake...

Through the beta almost 500 people have participated in challenges racking up almost 500k in gamerscore in just a few weeks. It adds another dimension to your game play...

This is a long term thing... it will be a part of 360voice whether old spice is sponsoring it or not. So I urge you to give it another look. Cheers all.

Dr. Cox, just want to drop a little note that if you register for a forum account, 360voice will track your Halo 2 playing. It was a new feature we rolled out in May. You have to have a forum account though because it is a data-intensive process to track back-compat games, so we didn't want everyone having it on by default if they aren't going to use it.

As for beating X3F in the award, I think we got lucky and flew under the radar... I can't imagine we will get as lucky next year. ;)

Hey thanks for the link. You can see the old web interface here:

http://www.360voice.com/blogject.asp

We are planning a web render of the feed though.. coming soon!