Valentine's Day Special
Tuesday, February 7. 2012

Receive a limited edition "Ruby Valentine Ring" item with every purchase of 100 or more points through February 15.

posted by James :: Comments (4)

PokerRPG Charity #2
Sunday, January 29. 2012

The last charity was a huge success and we are ready to do another. Most of the same charities are back on the list, but the United Way has been replaced by Unicef as a potential donation target. Remember that when the goal is reached, a "winner" will be chosen at random in a raffle style drawing, and that person gets to choose which charity from the list receives the $250 donation.

posted by James :: Comments (5)

Monthly Chips Ranking
Thursday, January 19. 2012

There is a new category on the ranks page: Monthly Chips. This ranking is ordered by how many chips you have earned during the current month.

posted by James :: Comments (8)

Interested in being a moderator?
Friday, January 13. 2012

If you are interested in being a moderator for PokerRPG, please click on the link below to add your name to the list (it will be added automatically just by clicking the link). Please only click the link if you are actually interested. This doesn't necessarily mean any new moderators will be added right now, but I'd like to get a running list of interested people.

Click Here to Add Your Name

posted by James :: Comments (13)

Credit Card Payments
Wednesday, January 4. 2012

If you've tried to buy points with a credit card in the past you might have noticed some issues. The company I've been using to process credit cards is a very large company, but their service up-time is extremely spotty, which causes a lot of transactions to fail for no reason (which is very frustrating when you have to type out that long credit card number again). So, I've finally decided to switch to a new company, who are extremely reliable, and offer improved security. Now, not a single bit of your data ever touches the PokerRPG server. No credit card info has ever been stored, but with the old company it had to temporarily pass through the PokerRPG server to be verified.

posted by James :: Comments (3)

Improved Market Analysis Feature
Tuesday, December 27. 2011

The Market Analysis upgrade feature has been improved to now show the first 5 market results for the item that you look up (in addition to the 7-90 day price history already available).

posted by James :: Comments (2)

Holiday Hunt 2011
Sunday, December 18. 2011

I'd like to personally thank all of your for your support of PokerRPG and this amazing community that we have all built together, and I hope all of you have a wonderful holiday season. In order to help celebrate, we have another Holiday Hunt this year, which will run through December 31 at 11:59pm.

There are 8 new festive items available, with 6 being found randomly around the site and in the poker credit store. The 7th item will be available for a limited time as an exclusive, and the 8th can be had with each point purchase of 100+ points.



posted by James :: Comments (9)

3 New Achievements
Tuesday, December 13. 2011

Three new achievements are now available to be attained: Play for 7 Consecutive Days, Play for 30 Consecutive Days and Play for 90 Consecutive Days. This is only starting to be recorded today, so these achievements are starting fresh for everyone.

posted by James :: Comments (9)

Facebook Login Update
Tuesday, December 13. 2011

If you use Facebook to login, I've now updated the code to comply with their new version, which includes SSL security while processing the login. This should prevent any problems going forward with logging in through this method. The Facebook invite widget on the Referrals page has also been updated and should be working again. If you have trouble logging in with Facebook now, please open a support ticket.

posted by James :: Comments (1)

Cyber Monday Sale
Monday, November 28. 2011

You didn't think the shopping madness was just limited to Walmart and Amazon did you? PokerRPG is joining in on the discounts this year with our very own Cyber Monday sale. Through Wednesday, November 30, receive 5 Pro Donator Days free with every purchase of 100 or more points (the days will get added onto your total if you already have some days).

posted by James :: Comments (1)

Banners & Store Verification
Wednesday, November 16. 2011

There was an issue on some browsers that caused banner ads to layer over the verification window at the shops, sometimes making it difficult to click the blue circle. This issue has now been fixed and tested to work on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. If you still see a similar issue, please open a support ticket.

posted by James :: Comments (4)

PokerRPG Charity
Monday, November 7. 2011

Thank you to everyone who supported the last PokerRPG Charity donation drive! We reached our goal in record time and donated $250 to the World Wildlife Foundation (as chosen by the raffle winner, Spartaan), helping to preserve the wildlife of this beautiful planet that all of us call home. A new donation drive will start in the near future, so be on the lookout for that! A screenshot of the donation confirmation page has been added to the charity page.

posted by James :: Comments (9)

Trick-or-Treat 2011
Tuesday, October 25. 2011

Watch out ghosts and ghouls, trick-or-treat is back! We've got 9 awesome limited edition items that wil be available through November 7. Receive a Witch Cauldron item with each 100+ point purchase. 7 other items can be found randomly around the site or at the Poker Credits Store.



posted by James :: Comments (5)

Prizes and PayPal
Wednesday, October 19. 2011

This post pains me to write, and trust me when I say I've been doing everything I can over the last several days to avoid writing it. In the interest of transparency, I'm going to lay it all out so that everyone is clear on what is happening.

On Saturday night, without any prior warning, I received an e-mail from PayPal stating that they had permanently closed the GoldFire Studios PayPal account, locking all funds inside and blocking payments to and from the account on all games and sites associated with my game studio. The e-mail gave no explanation as to why this was happening, and the customer support on the phone told me they couldn't tell me and that I wasn't allowed to be transferred to anyone else (say what...?).

Luckily, I met some people from PayPal at the Game Developer Conference last week and was able to get ahold of one of them on Sunday afternoon. This person was able to connect me to the department that handles all of this and I finally got the explanation that the account had been locked because PokerRPG represents an "illegal gambling violation" (in PayPal's own words). PokerRPG is in no way a gambling site, which was the whole premise of the game all those years ago when I started it. So, I've been trying to explain this to their compliance department all week, but they refuse to budge.

The sad thing is that PayPal holds so much power that I'm left with two options. I can either shut down PokerRPG (because without accepting PayPal, I can no longer cover costs, and I'll be out of cash to run the game by year's end), or I can remove the prizes from the game. Neither is favorable obviously, but there's no way I'm going to let PayPal cause PokerRPG to die, so I'm having to make the extremely difficult decision to remove prizes from the game in order to get back in the good graces of PayPal.

The prizes for October will still be awarded, but the auction will end at 11:59AM this Saturday (October 22). You can bid on the prizes by clicking here. Be assured that I will also come up with more frequent contests for prizes that don't involve the poker aspect of the game (so as to stay within the laws as PayPal sees them).

Again, I'm very sorry about the short notice on this, my hand has been forced at this point. If PayPal hadn't sprung this on me out of nowhere this whole process would have been a lot more smooth. I hope all of you understand the decision that had to be made and can continue to enjoy the game. I look forward to making great improvements to the game over the coming weeks and months, and I hope to see all of you continuing to enjoy them as well.

posted by James :: Comments (57)

Item Thursdays Bug & Update
Saturday, October 15. 2011

A bug that caused items to sometimes not get refunded when an Item Thursdays MT didn't fill has been fixed.

Also, sorry about the lack of updates lately. This isn't because I haven't been working on anything (check out my blog to see what I've been doing/learning), but most of it has been in the background and in preparation for big updates down the line. I also had the opportunity a few weeks back to spend a week in California going to various events and delivering a keynote speech to high school students about entrepreneurship. It was an honor to be invited to speak at those events, and I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to help out others as I was helped when I was that age. Anyway, I just wanted to say that updates are on the way, and I'm not ignoring the game, I'm just having to learn a lot of new things to take it to the next level (and unfortunately, this takes time).

posted by James :: Comments (5)