Yep you read that right, and I am talking about a retail game, not an arcade one! So what’s the story here?

Well, like any good site, its the community that drives the site. The staff can sit here all day long writing news posts, slaving away at the laborious job of playing games to write a review and sorting though user submissions for a contest. I can sit around all day long tweaking the back end, modding the forums, changing bits and pieces around, incrementing css hex codes one at a time till its ‘just right’, and finding new an exciting ways to add features you all love. The thing of it is though, without the community, its all for naught.

You guys are why we do this, and you guys are who we want to see involved just as much as us. To that end, we launched the forums last week. We want our community to have a place to come together, outside of just the comment system. Because of this, we need to foster this community. Some of you may have noticed an “experience” system on our forums. Its a rather convoluted system involving math, spacial relativity, and quantum physics that takes in the amount of posting you do, the threads you create, how often they are read, who reads them, who replies to them, and what people rate you and them as, and tons more. Its not a popularity contest on who has the most read posts, its not on who makes the most postings, and its not about who replies to the most threads. It’s all that and more. It takes a fairly accurate accounting of your entire interaction with the forums, and the community, and their reaction so said interaction, and quantifies it with a number of “points” and in turn a level and some other bits and bobs we have not yet implemented.

Starting today, July first, and running though midnight of the last day of the month, July 31st, I will be watching those numbers. The user with the highest number of points, will be receiving an as of yet un-determined game for the 360. Rest assured, it will be a popular one worth the trouble! (Heck you might even get to pick it out yourself!)

It could be said that we are “bribing” people to post, and I guess it looks that way, the thing of it is, its like a snow ball, you get it rolling, and it will take off on its own and grow, just someone needs to make a fist full of snow and hurl it down the hill to get things rolling! So hop on the forums, start chatting, stir up some intense debate, share your thoughts on the new launch of my favorite game of the summer, Bad Company, and let your voice be heard!