Hey folks,
The weather outside is frightful, and the warm glow of your computer screens is delightful. If you've got no other place to go, let it go, let it go, and come play in the snow!
To celebrate the wintry holiday season, we're introducing this year our first annual Winterfest Event! All of your favorite Marble Blast Multiplayer levels have received a wintry makeover, featuring:
- 6 Brand New In-Game Achievements and 35 new Website Achievements
- A new Title and Suffix system
- Snowball Game Mode
- Loads of new scenery objects and obstacles
- Multiplayer UI Recolors to match the Winter Season
- Brand new Chilly and Frozen scores to beat
- Hidden Snow-globe objects
- ...and much, much more!
In addition, for a limited time, the website will feature daily achievements between December 1st and December 31st, so be sure you log in to the website and visit your User Profile via the Profile Button every day and claim your rewards! Perhaps there will be an extra special gift waiting for you under the tree on December 25th?
The Winterfest Event will be live beginning on December 1st, and be available until the 11th of January, 2015 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time. In addition, the fabled PlatinumQuest Multiplayer Levels will be unlocked for the public to play between the 1st of December and the 4th of January, 2015, inclusive.
In addition to the exciting content we've prepared for you, we will also be upgrading our servers late this December. We will be launching a brand new dedicated server for our leaderboards and website and several new dedicated servers for the leaderboards system. One server will be located in London, UK, as a testing server for several days. We openly invite you to provide us with feedback so we may improve our dedicated server process.
If all goes well with the dedicated server testing, the remaining dedicated servers will be launched. In total, we expect to have 7 dedicated servers by the end of January, 2015:
- Tsuf 1 - California, USA
- Tsuf 2 - California, USA
- Thistle - Vermont, USA
- Beginners Only (Provisional Users only, < 20 games played) - Vermont, USA
- Cuties Only (Established Users with 1650+ rating only) - Vermont, USA
- London 1 (TBA) - London, UK
- London 2 (TBA) - London, UK
We would like to thank the following community members for making this Winterfest event possible:
- Aayrl - Usability Testing, Quality Assurance, Winterfest Ideas, Winter Textures, Level Design, Web Programming
- RDs.Empire - Jaw-dropping scenery and dts shapes for Winterfest
- Whirligig - Physics Programming related to Wintry Hats
- Buzzmusic - Phenomenal Winter-themed Music
- HiGuy - Lead Programmer, Level Design, Web Programming
- Jeff - Physics Programming, Assistant Programmer
- IsraeliRD - Lead Designer, Winterfest Ideas, Level Design, Usability Testing
As always, we greatly appreciate donations to help us keep the website and leaderboard services running as optimally and efficiently as possible. We are currently paying the expenses for our website and dedicated servers out-of-pocket. Any donations provided by community members will only be used to pay for the website and dedicated services. You may donate via PayPal through your User Profile by clicking on the Profile button (once logged in to the website) on the top right side of your browser. From here, click on the Donate button, located on the right side of the screen. Please be aware that donations of $1, while greatly appreciated, will still have a premium taken off the top by PayPal (whom takes 33 cents as part of their fees).
Happy Holidays, and enjoy the wintry levels!
~Aayrl
Marble Blast Community Manager