

The splash page that drove up conversion by 300% - yosho
http://ravn.com/beta/splash

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yosho
Hi, I'm one of the creators of the landing page. We thought traditional beta
signup pages were boring (ie. Launchrock style) so we added a "Ravn Hunt" game
to our landing page. Our landing page was pretty traditional beforehand, but
after the game, user conversion went up as people became more engaged, and
kept playing for the invite code.

It also helps that we invite the top 10 users who achieve the highest score
everyday so that people have a goal to reach to get the invite. And of course,
the Facebook share button helps with spreading the word.

\---edit---

Here's a pic of our old landing page <http://i.imgur.com/ZhURi.png>

It was pretty straight forward, full size image in the background with a
simple Request Invitation button in the middle. Hope that helps.

~~~
rhizome
You could just have the game ask to enter your email address if you want to
save your scores.

~~~
stevenou
you're totally right... feel really stupid that we didn't do it that way in
the first place!

~~~
rhizome
Nah, don't feel stupid. I've just been thinking about stuff like this, where
basically you can let people get going anonymously, because in some instances
people are going to want to save something. it just may turn out that scores
on your game is one of them, so just like entering in one's initials in the
arcade, you can ask for email.

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civilian
My coworkers are wondering why you're encouraging potential users to shoot
your mascot/namesake, but my coworkers are nitpickers. That was fun!

If you do: $('div.ducks').mousedown(); in the developer console it's pretty
hilarious.

~~~
mentat
All the high scores are based on this now, except for one person who probably
modified the JS for the scoring system.

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ttrtwrtwrtwr
I just added a made up email just to see your game. Does that really help you?

~~~
angryasian
same just wanted to try the game.

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blake8086
What was it before? How did you test the change? What can anyone learn from
this?

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jonursenbach
My thoughts as well. Without any context, this is pointless.

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kyledr
I had top score until someone got a score of 100001158 (mine being 3385. You
may need to take extra measures to ensure the scores are valid and from the
game.

~~~
yosho
Lol, if you're able to hack the score, please send your resume to
hiring@ravn.com

~~~
seanalltogether
It looks like a post request with an authenticity token that never changes
during the session, so you can just post a new request with the same
authenticity_token and invite_id, but with any value for new_score :)

~~~
stevenou
you're right. honestly we didn't try at all to make it difficult to hack.
figured that no matter what we did, anyone with decent skills should be able
to hack it. after all you can see all the source code! (like jerry said in
another comment, we're not a gaming company after all - it was just a fun
little experiment) - excites me that it piqued people's interest enough to go
poke around in the source code though! :)

~~~
citricsquid
The best way to prevent any sort of manipulation is a combination of two
things: have a "maximum conceivable score" _and_ regulate the scoring server
side. Every time a "round" ends (ducks on the screen) send the data to the
server, compare the score relative to the previous score and if it's
ridiculous (eg: the max score they could get is 500 and it's 10,000) you dump
the session for being fake.

The obvious flaw with this is people who just work out what your maximums are
and then get the 100% score, but it discourages the ridiculous scores.

edit: one of your people said this below, disregard :-)

~~~
gridspy
Also need to rate limit this, so you don't have someone playing an infinite
number of rounds over 5 minutes.

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psykotic
I'm running on a 12-core machine with a high-end GPU on the latest version of
Chrome and the parallax scrolling is _still_ hitching. Just sayin'. :)

~~~
oniTony
any number of cores more than 1 is only relevant for parallel code (or
multiple concurrent apps). Which, for this page, is probably not the case.

~~~
psykotic
> (or multiple concurrent apps)

I'm a programmer. I always have dozens of apps running. The point was, it's
silly that you can't smoothly translate a few images at a mere 30 Hz with
plenty of CPU power to spare.

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jastanton
you should obfuscate that js ;)

~~~
humj
haha good job stanton. obfuscate probably would have added 30 seconds to the
time it would take to hack it. If we really wanted to make it more robust, we
would have added a validation to the score, a validation ensuring that time
had passed between duck clicks, (looks like you didnt click ducks at all in
your case), a minimal time to beat the game, a validation that ensures you
didn't exceed the maximum possible score, and whatever other means to make it
more annoying to hack, but even then... and in the end, we're not a gaming
company and this was just a fun lil exercise we threw together to test a
concept. Good job though haha, we knew if we posted in tech, this would
probably happen :)

