Happy 9th Birthday GGn!

Birthday Presents!

As a celebration of the wonderful time we've had this past year and in anticipation of future events yet to come, we have some goodies for everyone! You may have noticed the gift box in this post. Clicking it will award you with a 9th Birthday Gift, containing a **** and ****, as well as two different buffs from a subset of special birthday items. The items offer one-time use only buffs for Upload/Download, Forum Posts, IRC Lines, Gold, and Requests. We hope you get some good use out of them.

AdventureClub

To celebrate our birthday, we'd also like to announce a fun new mini-game, where you get to battle various monsters in IRC: #AdventureClub. In this text-based RPG with an attack system similiar to Pokemon, you defeat monsters from different realms in order to increase your experience and to customize your character further. You can also buy or find different attacks and items, and craft more powerful attacks to defeat even the most powerful of monsters.

In order to start playing, you need to be at least Pro Gamer, with a minimum of level 3 attack (250GBs upload), level 3 defense (250GBs download), and level 3 accuracy (100 snatched torrents). If those conditions are met, you can purchase and use #AdventureClub Access from the shop. After that, you can purchase attacks and use them to have them permanently added to your character. Learned attacks and skills can then be equipped and unequipped, to a maximum of four being active at the same time. After that, hop into #AdventureClub in IRC to give those monsters a whack!

You can read a more in-depth explanation of the system in the AdventureClub Intro wiki article, explaining additional concepts such as attributes, backpacks, and status effects. The mode is still new, and so we're looking to expand it with even more exciting features in the future!

Seedtime FL Tokens

Starting up in GGn can be daunting and it's often not easy to build up a healthy ratio to download the games you want. We've implemented a new system that should make it easier to work towards a sustainable seeding base by awarding freeleech tokens based on seedtime. This measure is specifically geared towards new users and users with a small seeding base, but everyone will be able to profit from it. By rewarding longterm seeding, it should have a positive effect on retainability and tracker health in general.

There are two milestones to be met in this system: a seeding time of 3 months and a seeding time of 8 months.

Once 5 torrents have been seeded for 3 month, a freeleech token will be awarded. Every time that number is doubled, there will be an additional token awarded. So for 10 torrents, there would be 2, for 20 torrents there would be 3 tokens, etc. There will also be a second token once these torrents are seeded for 8 months, again providing an additional token each time the amount of torrents is doubled. However, only torrents where at least 1GB of data was downloaded will qualify to reward FL tokens.

Users can view their own progress on the overwiew page that is linked in everyone's profile next to their FL tokens.

This system will be fully turned on at Mar 17th 2019.

Mephisto Removed From Recognized P2P List

We're trying to ensure that everyone gets the highest quality game releases possible. One of the ways we stay comitted to that goal is our List of Recognized P2P Groups, who are privileged by some uploading rules. These groups have demonstrated in the past that they can offer value beyond simple homerips, be it smaller size, additional content, or a large and reliable output of working releases that can be cross-seeded to various other places.

However, we've recently investigated the releases of one such group: Mephisto. These releases generally do not offer any additional content over other uploads, being often simple repacks of already uploaded scene releases with no additional advantage. Further, we've noticed that they quite often contain incorrect language information in their NFO's or release name, either by omitting some or even listing languages that they don't contain. As such, many of their uploads are currently incorrectly labeled and we cannot confirm that any of their releases in the future would contain the languages their NFO would promise. This is clearly not up to the standards of other P2P groups.

Due to that and their restrained popularity, we've taken the decision to remove Mephisto from the list of recgonized P2P groups. Effective immediately, all their uploads will be treated as home rips.

Of course, the contents of these repacks may still be uploaded, but they will no longer enjoy the protection of their former P2P status, and will now have to adhere to all homerip rules (i.e. no split archives nor custom installers).

Finally, we'd like to give a small reminder that we changed the way the Accuracy (Snatched) achievement is calculated two weeks ago, now requiring at least 30 days seedtime.

With all that said, I hope you'll be able to join us in celebrating our 9th birthday. A toast to another wonderful year towards our 10 year anniversary!

GGn Staff