H2H Cup Jan-Jun 2012 Final Results!!!!

After nearly 5 months of competition, this edition of the H2H Cup has finally ended! ExplodingPonyToast and wasted made it an exciting competition throughout, but in the end, the final wasn't even close--ExplodingPonyToast typed more than 3 times as many keys as wasted to take the title of H2H Cup Champion for January-June 2012! Here is the final H2H Cup bracket:

And unfortunately, this looks like it might be the last post on Kongpulse for quite some time. It's sad to see, as someone who has been a fan of the blog for well over two years, and an editor for the past six months. But all good things have to end some time. Anyway, give a big congratulations to ExplodingPonyToast, and good luck in all your future WhatPulse endeavors! Even without the blog, I'm sure that the over 500(!) members of the Kongregate WhatPulse team will continue to prove that we deserve to be a Top 10 team.

http://i.imgur.com/YLeJf.png

H2H Restarting 3/17/2012

As Team Manager, I would like to take over the responsibility of H2H, since Jaume and Selly seem to have disappeared into the ether.

Battles will restart/restart on Saturday, March 17th at midnight (00:00) CDT/EST.
All users who were enrolled in H2H will be automatically re-enrolled.
Users will start with 0 points. Same point structure as before applies.
I will be monitoring the Kongregate Team @ WhatPulse thread, so if you wish to join the H2H battles, let me know. :)

Suggestions to spice things up are welcome. Please provide feedback here or in the Kongregate Team Forum Topic

-Inquisitor911

SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION BECAUSE SELLY IS A SELL-OUT

Like Reddit? Reading this page? Then go here!: http://redd.it/ojaiy

WHATPULSE + REDDIT: WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Ultimate explanation of the Head to Head battles

Due to the previous Head to Head battles explanation by tetrismaster becoming somewhat obsolete, I've felt obligated to create a new explanation.

What are the Head to Head battles?The Head to Head battles, also known as H2H or Head to Head, are a WhatPulse-based competition organised by Kongpulse. The H2H goes for 25 week-long rounds from either January to June or July to December. Each round consists of groups of "battles" between users separated into two divisions. Each battle consists of two users typing as many keys as they can in a week in order to win this battle.

DivisionsThe divisions of the Head to Head battles are the Primera Division and the Segunda Division. Each division tends to have around 20 users. The Primera Division could be described as being much more of a competitive division with a couple of users who type over 1,000,000 keys per week; whereas the Segunda Division is a more relaxed division. Even though there are only two divisions nowdadays as of 2011, if some season we get around 45 sign-ups, we might create a third division; likewise, if we have around 64 or 72 sign-ups we might create a fourth division.

Time of start and end of roundsEach round lasts seven days and goes from the first Saturday at 7:30 am UTC (2:30 am EST; 5:30 pm AEST) to the second Saturday at 7:30 am also.

Points system and tablesThe winner of each division is determined by the number of points they have won by the end of the season. For every match won, a user gets three points; for every match drawn, a user gets one point; for every match lost, a user gets zero points. A win is defined as defeating the opponent they're against that round, i.e., having typed more keys than the opponent. Draws tend to not occur often, as they involve both users typing the same amount of keys; all of the draws so far have been of two users not having pulsed that week.

To make things clearer, every round in the H2H posts at the bottom we have two tables of both divisions. Below is an example of a table, the table used in Round 21 of the July–December Segunda Division.



In the table, "Pos" means "position", "Pld" means "played" (number of matches played), "W" means "wins", "D" means "draws", "L" means "losses", "KF" means "keys for" (keys typed by the user throughout the season), "KA" means "keys against" (keys typed against the user throughout the season), "Dif" means "difference" (difference in ranked in comparison to the previous round) and "Pts" means "points".

Restrictions on teams of usersThe Head to Head battles are open to not only users from the Kongregate team, but from any WhatPulse team. Whether you're from Bronypulse, Kongregate or any other team, you will be allowed to be in the H2H and that will not be a burden to your participation.

The only actual rule of the H2HThe only real rule of the Head to Head battles is that pulses will be cut short if not pulsed within the week round. If a pulse lasts over a week the pulse keys will be calculated in a different way: the keys of the first pulse within the week will be divided by the number of days the pulse lasted and this will be multiplied by the number of days or hours of this pulse that were within the duration of the round. This method is used because of the unfairness of counting the entire amount of keys—usually greater than they'd habitually be if the pulse last a week. This does not necessarily mean that we disencourage pulses that last over a week or that you are required to pulse at least once a week, but it is meant to not give unfair wins and advantages to users typing less often than once a week.

Here is an example of the aforementioned if this rule was not used:

Battle 1500:
Jaume vs Sellyme.
Jaume typed 6,666,666 keys and Sellyme typed 7,000,000 keys.

Start and end of pulses: Jaume: 15 March to 22 March; Selly: 2 March to 22 March. Amount of keys in pulses: Jaume: 3 pulses of 2,222,222 each; Selly: 1 pulse of 7,000,000 keys.

As Selly's pulse began much before Jaume's, this is not fair to Jaume as he pulsed his pulse legitimately within one week, the round's duration. In order to prevent this problem, the battle between the two would end in the following way:

Battle 1500:
Jaume vs Sellyme.
Jaume typed 6,666,666 keys and Sellyme typed 2,450,000 keys.

Selly ended up getting 2,450,000 keys the following way: 7,000,000 (keys pulsed) divided by 20 days (number of days the pulses lasted) multiplied by 7 days (the number of those keys within the round) equalling 2,450,000 keys thus making Selly lose against Jaume.

What to do if you want to join during the seasonThere's not too much we can do about that as it would cause the disruption of the league system. Instead, Jaume would add you to his H2H Excel spreadsheet and you will be notified during the next sign-ups of the H2H. If many users are awaiting for the arrival of the new season who're not in any league, we might create a little unofficial league between users who've not signed up. An example of the latter is the end of the January–June 2011 season in which we ended up having a league composed of aaaaaa123456789, hilaryam89, MicroGamer15, Mysterymason, RoSi_xD, SilentSand and Yotoovimestari.

Any other queries?If you have any other questions please don't hesitate to ask us in the thread, via email, via WhatPulse message or via Kongregate message.

Are Jaume and I the only ones who actually update?

(For some reason "author:Inq (2)" isn't showing up)

Everyone: Feel free to bitch at us to update something you want to see.

Historic archiving of Kong team statistics (Day 1)

I'm gonna try to do this sometime around 11pm every single day to provide you guys with a nifty archive.

Link.

Yes, I'm aware it's ugly and unformatted. Don't worry, I'm saving the all as full .html files and WILL eventually update them all to look nice (likely with dedicated web-hosting). However, at the moment I have 13KB/s internet speeds and a large majority of that is going to downloading the new Everfree Radio show:

But yeah, have a look, and I'll post these daily now! Yay for lazy updating :D

Welcome to our newest editor, racefan12!

Yes, he really impressed us that damn much. We now have 5 permanent writers (Myself, Jaume, Mysterymason, racfan12, and Inquisitor), and we are aiming to start bringing you daily updates, starting sometime likely late next week.

So I hope everyone makes racefan12 feel welcome, and I can't wait to see what he can do!

2 years!

Wow, even though I've only been a writer for 3 months now, about 1/8th of the total blog existence, I have seen it grow and grow, gaining new members through the thread on Kongregate or just word of mouth. I have seen completely new members join the IRC chat, shy at first, fitting in like a reg after a few weeks. I smile every time I see a new eager face ready to type away, for the team. Like Selly said, this team would be nothing if it weren't for the typers at the bottom of the leaderboard, typing only a few million, but helping the team more than they could possibly know. A hundred people with a few million keys equals a few hundred million keys, is another way to put it.

So, to wrap up this small post, thank you loyal members of Kongpulse, for not stopping doing what you do best. And thank you Selly, for creating Kongpulse, bringing people, typists, together, to tap away in their own little corner of the world, rising the team high into the sky, and giving writers endless statistics to process, but they do it with a smile on their faces.

Happy 2nd birthday, Kongpulse!

Today, just a few hours ago, Kongpulse turned two years old! I'm amazed that this blog has survived this long from just a small silly thing I started when I was 13, and I'm proud to have seen so many people enthusiastically subscribing to it, to have had more than 20 people ask to be a blog writer in the past two years, for the WhatPulse thread to have now reached nearly 11 THOUSAND posts, and the thing that has astounded me the most, for the team to be on 2 billion keys.

When this blog was started two years ago, the team had under 300,000,000 keys, only 97 members, and were ranked somewhere in the 180s. Since then we have grown to 480 people, 2,000,000,000 keys, and 15th place on the main team, another 1,000,000,000 keys and 137 users on the secondary team (now in 40th place), then ANOTHER 300,000,000 keys and 56 users on the Ninja Chat team. All of this, and we are still growing hugely. How hugely? Well, in the past year the only team to have typed more than us is the Dutch Power Cows. We've typed 85,000,000 keys more in the last 12 months than LueLinks, a team with 7 times as many people.

I remember looking at the top 25 and thinking "4 million keys? I'll never get on there :(". Now it's 16 million keys. We've upped the ante slightly. Not only this, but damn near everyone is active. Looking through the first four pages, 95% of you have pulsed this year. Now, even in 2009, just 16 months after the team's creation, at least half of the team hadn't pulsed in the previous year.

Perhaps more astoundingly, only two of the current top 25 were in the team when I joined (three if you count myself). Everyone else has, in less than two years, joined the team and typed their way up to a point where they are on the team's front page for everyone to see. But not only this, there's also hundreds of people at the 5 million key mark, or 2 million keys. These people have their stats buried 9 pages down. But do they care? No, they've just kept on typing, not worrying about the front page. And without them this team would be nothing. Having 3 users with over 50,000,000 keys means jack shit if there's no-one else.

The community support has been great. The three Kongregate teams combined have over 150 moderators and 3 admins, something that I never envisioned happening when I started this humble blog. The H2H is technically sponsored by Ducklette herself, and Hokage4354 (Kongregator of the Year 2009 and 2010 and owner of Kongregate Collective Guides), and while we probably don't mention that enough–or at all–it's still incredible to me to have achieved such recognition.

I'd just like to say thanks to every single one of you. Yes, you. Even if you're not on this team, by simply viewing this blog and racking up pageviews you are helping. Every time I look at the stats for this blog and realise that something I just decided to do on a whim as a child has become something that hundreds of people enjoy. Words can not describe my joy when H2H results are posted and I see a huge 200 view spike. Or when we come up with some new obscure statistic for you to enjoy and people post in the forum thread about how entertaining they thought it was. You have all made us what we are today, and for that I am eternally grateful.

THANK YOU.

This is a test of Blogger's break feature, and as an excuse to spam pictures.

News update: Departures and Arrivals.

Okay, I could write an essay about this first part, but that's really not necessary. Long story short, Jaume is leaving Kongpulse. And when I say "leaving", I mean he's left. This is due to some personal issues in his life I'm not at liberty to divulge, so, sorry to leave you hanging, but I'm sure he'd prefer to tell people himself if he wanted to.

Hopefully he'll come back eventually, but for now we'll just have to deal with it.

On a less sombre note, we have a few new writers. We've already introduced Mysterymason and SlateFx as temporary stand-in writers, but today Mysterymason has graduated to a full writer and will be taking over H2H. This unfortunately means H2H may be delayed by up to an hour from normal times, but the normal results will still stand. Fortunately, due to time-zones, this will not affect most of you, but to those it does, we're sorry. We'll try to streamline the process to fix this problem.

On a stats note, we shall be starting the new Head to Head clicks (Under the rebranded name "H3H", no, we have no idea what it means either) this Tuesday! Please notify Sellyme either in the thread or via PM, even if you've already signed up previously, we want to double-check everything.

H3H will run on a vastly different process to what H2H currently does. It will be a mostly experimental thing until Christmas, and will be all on all. This means there are no battles, but instead, a high score table. We believe that this will allow for a wide array of statistics that you haven't seen before, and will provide a change of scenery for those accustomed to the current H2H system.

Kongpulse has suffered a pretty major setback with Jaume's abrupt departure, but this is NOT going to slow us down or stop us. Hell, I know the other writers will kill me for this, but I'm planning on us updating 5 times a week from now on. Enjoy!

Does Kongpulse confuse or scare you?

Well, then we have something to make that better! Check out the wiki on everything Kongpulse! It's quite small now, but this is what we plan to include in it.

• Every H2H participant ever.
• Every member of the team with over 10,000,000 keys.
• Every single class of blog update, with links to each blog update of it chronologically.
• On each users page, a table with every single one of their H2H results.
• A history of Kongpulse.
• Explanations of any event that may be coming up.
• Detailed blog post schedules.
• Desu.

So go on! Have a look, see if you like it :D

Congratulations to Hippy, Slate and Mysterymason!

Congratulations to Hippy [aka Hippyman27 (K/WP)]! Hippy is now the Kongregate team's new team manager. He'll be managing the team and kicking any users in case they misbehave or act very much against the views of Kongregate.

Congratulations to Slate [aka Slater9731/SlateFx (K/WP)] and Mystery [aka Mysterymason (K/WP)], who are Kongpulse's new writers! Welcome to the blog! :O Hope you enjoy writing and stuff. If you ever have any doubts as for what article/blog entry you could write if you're bored, contact me or Selly!

Kongpulse: Notice anything different?

On a more meta note, I've been making some aesthetic changes to Kongpulse in the last few days. You may have noticed that the blog is much wider now (By 120 pixels). Because Google's blog designer is shit, I've had to edit the HTML, the body is now 1100 pixels wide (instead of 1000) and the sidebar is 260 pixels (instead of 220). If you have a screen smaller than 1368 pixels in width, I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and am working on a low-resolution version of the blog. This improvement means that our images will actually fit in the post body! Yay!

I also got rid of the default ugly "B" favicon, and replaced it with the Kongregate favicon (Not exactly though, I resized it slightly to distinguish it from Kong's). If any graphics designers out there (Or even someone with a copy of MSPaint, it's a 10x10 pixel image, not that difficult to make) want to design a better logo for us, it'd be much appreciated!

I've also updated and fixed some of the widgets on the side of the blog, removed the annoying whosamong.us pop-up, and generally improved the HTML behind the blog so it should run much faster now. Hope you enjoy!

Use a Mobile Device?

Well there's good news! Kongpulse now supports all mobile devices without bugs in the sidebar, with our new mobile template! If you want to preview it on your computer, check here.

Here's a few preview shots as well, because redundancy kicks ass!

Adf.ly

Get paid to share your links!

Kongpulse is proud to announce that we have incorporated Adf.ly into the website! For those of you not familiar with adf.ly, it is similar to bit.ly, except it shows the viewers simple .jpg ads while redirecting. Okay, sure, that seems like a dick move, but it's only 5 seconds before it moves on, and every second is the equivalent of a tenth of a cent. Now, Kongpulse gets around 1500 page views a month, and has 100 links a page, with roughly 1.8 link clicks per page view. Using simple maths, that's almost $15 a month purely from a few seconds a day.

Again, this may seem like me being a greedy bastard, but for the last few months I have had almost no time to update, and Jaume has had to do the majority of the work. A minimum 25% of profits will be going directly to him as rewards for the efforts he's been putting in for the blog, and for you, the readers, the other 75% will be split between getting some actual coding done to set up automated stats, so there'll be detailed information for every user; every day, incentive for me to work on the website we never got around to hosting, and (possibly) a fully dedicated server and .com address. That's right, thanks to a few seconds a day, you may sometime soon see kongpulse.com up and running!

To those who detest ads and run Ad-block+, I plead for you to add exceptions to adf.ly/* and kongpulse.blogspot.com/*, as none of the ads on either website are beyond .html and .jpg, so there's no annoying flash ads or auto-play movies. A simple 15kb and 5 seconds of your time will help Kongpulse go from a relatively popular blog to a fully functional and consistently updated webpage!

If you feel like you absolutely despise all kinds of ads, you have every right to run ad-block, but remember, every ad you block, a puppy dies.

Oh, and if this turns out well, there will be Kong merchandise prize drawings for Kongpulse members, so there's something in it for you as well. Keep your eyes open for any events that may be coming up soon!

Epic banner is Epic

Slater, you are a god.

Useless Update

It has been a while since we had a different blog update, maybe too long...

This isn't a good juicy update, this is just a quick one to tell you how we are doing in the leaderboards.

Team Kongregate is now ranked 22nd with nearly 1,434,000,000 keys. That means we are only 66 million away from the next milestone of one and a half billion keys. good work team. :D

We also have 402 members who have joined and pulsed. That means the average keys per kong users is just over 3 and a half million 

The last useless fact of the day is: It takes the grand total of 71 of our bottom pulsers to equal Mr. Bean's last pulse.

Quick Update

This is just a quick update to let anyone who reads the blog and doesn't know, Team Kongregate is in the top 25. (We have been for a bit, but we never actually announced it.)
You can see us on the first page here (we are the ones in 23rd)