Archive for January, 2018

January 12, 2018

Weekly Buzz 01/12/18

Hello Collectors,

Another week has come and gone. We’ve just finished A Frosty Afternoon yesterday, which brings our active set count to one. Luckily for you all, we should see two new sets appear very, very soon. This week’s blog post is a little shorter than normal, but don’t worry. We’ll have plenty to cover next week. 😉

Behind the Curtain

We are putting finishing touches on update 2.2.2. We’re really excited to push out this update and hope you are too! More information about the update will be provided upon launch.

The hosts of the London event would like us to mention that signups for the Friday night event will close on Tuesday, January 16th. If you are interested in attending that event, please make sure you let Cceasar or Stulimont know, as space for the Friday night is limited.

Should you have any questions, please let us know by emailing Support@WallaBeeGame.com


Recent Item Highlights

CARROTS! Well, it finally happened. Carrots were found, snowmen were created, and mistakes were made. Hopefully your encounter with carrots was positive!

Dogsled Ride

Ookpik and Arnaq gear up the dogsled to explore the frozen tundra.

Carrot

Wow, I’m hungry! Maybe just a small bite?

Snowman

I did it! The snowman is finished, but it feels like it’s missing something…


Player Unique Spotlight

With more and more Player Uniques coming out, we want to spend a respectable amount of time learning more about them. This week’s Player Unique Spotlight highlighted Yorkshire Rose. You can read more about this unique here.

Yorkshire Rose

 


This Week In WallaBee History

January 8th, 2015: The Auction House began with Old Lady releasing on this day. Since that release, the Old Lady has been seen in at least one other set. Do you remember which one?

January 10th, 2016: The original WallaBee team was putting together The Men Of WallaBee 2014, and began a poll in the forums to see which character should be featured as February’s calendar item. Of course, we all know who the winner was.


Room For Growth

We have compiled a list of issues that we are currently working on. If you find something that doesn’t fit into this list, please reach out to us and let us know.

  • Battery drains like crazy – We are currently testing an internal build of the app that handles the store differently. We hope that this change will drastically save battery when using the app like normal. This internal build has reduced battery consumption when not using the store, as it halts animations from processing until the store is brought back into focus. However, this is causing some strange loading with items, which sometimes appears as the wrong item in the store. This can be confusing during a drop, and we are looking into it.
  • Forum Notifications/Count are missing – Coming in a future update.
  • Performing an action that triggers a pop up sometimes ‘freezes,’ which needs a hard close to fix – There is a new version of React Native available which should have this fixed. We will be updating to the newer version of React in the near future to test whether the fix works. More information to come.
  • Market Items sometimes not available – This deals with a very rare situation where an item is removed from the market, but the listing is not updated. We are researching what’s causing this.
  • General slowness – Because the app runs completely off of an API, connection to WiFi or data is extremely important. If your coverage dips, your connection will also dip. This doesn’t explain every situation, but needs to be addressed. We are currently working on speeding the app up in various areas. You will notice that the forums perform MUCH faster than before. Our goal is to cut the slow, and speed it up, bro.
  • Store Item and Icon don’t match – This is a known issue with how the phone holds store information. At the moment, there is a chance that the previous item image will linger, even though the item has updated to the next one in line (viewable by the honeycomb price and set icon). We’re investigating a fix for this.
  • Store purchases hang up for a long time – we are investigating this. We’re so sorry for those effected by this issue… which should be everyone. Whoops.
  • Random Crashes (especially on older devices) – We have discovered that the ram needed for the app fluctuates way more than it should, sometimes peaking over 1gb, which can cause older devices to crash. We are investigating what is causing this, so that we can enhance app performance.

Community Content

This is a section of the blog where we will highlight any funny images or videos from the community. These may appear through links in the forums, on Facebook, guides on YouTube, or other sites.

As a friendly joke from a group of players, I was hand-delivered carrots to the office this week. If players are willing to bring joke gifts by the office to get new items, we should create a set about puppies. P.S. I like corgis. 🙂

If you think someone’s content (or your own) is worthy of being highlighted, you can suggest by emailing support or tagging it with #WallaCommunity.

Any additional questions, comments, concerns? Email: support@wallabeegame.com

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January 9, 2018

Unique Spotlight – Yorkshire Rose

Yorkshire – God’s Own County

Owner: dlp85

How To Get: Players can acquire through any upgrade.

Meaning: The reason I wanted this is because as I’m from Yorkshire I wanted something to symbolize this and I wanted something that all players would recognize and the Rose is perfect for that.

Which number unique is this for you? This is my first unique

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January 8, 2018

WallaBash 2 & MHQ Bash 5 Dates!

Hello Collectors!

Back in 2014, Munzee held their inaugural MHQ Bash. It’s hard to believe that this will be their 5th year, but they’re ready to make this one the best they’ve ever had! WallaBee will be once again joining in the festivities this year with WallaBash 2. If you missed out on our first WallaBash, you’ll definitely want to make plans on attending this year. While we can’t share all of the details yet, we can tell you the dates.

MHQ Bash 5 will be held Friday, October 26th through Sunday, October 28th, 2018! We currently have 5 events (Friday Night, Saturday Morning, WallaBash, Saturday Evening, and Sunday Morning) on the Munzee Calendar, and we will be updating you with more information as soon as we can share it.

We hope to see you in McKinney in October!

Forage on!

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January 5, 2018

Weekly Buzz 01/05/2018

Hello Collectors,

We made it to 2018! Since no one died from Christmas Crisis, we’re pushing forward into the new year with new sets, new types of items, and new updates. This is going to be a very exciting year!

Behind the Curtain

It’s January 5th, and everyone wants to know about two things: Carrots and Calendars. Where are they? While we’re not quite ready for either to come out, we can give you a head’s up about one of them. This year’s calendar set is going to focus on This Day In History. Dust off those AP History books, because we’re taking a look at some notable events throughout the year. Who said WallaBee couldn’t be educational…

Twenty more Benson items have gone out to monuments around the world, bringing the total of Bensons to thirty-five. We apologize for Benson’s delay, he seems to have a mind of his own. He will be traveling much more this year, so keep an eye out for him at a monument or sculpture near you!

WallaBee HQ enjoyed a relaxing holiday week out of the office, but we’re ready to get going on the new year! We released information about this year’s theme, Breaking Barriers, on the 1st of the year. If you didn’t catch that blog post, you can find it here. The Weekly Buzz was our first step toward breaking one of our barriers, which deals with how we update y’all with what’s going on in the app and behind the scenes. As we continue into 2018, we want to add more content to the blog, as well as our social media pages. We know it’s important for the community to stay engaged, and reaching out to new players through these mediums is part of the solution.

We are just about ready to release update 2.2.2 to the public. This update brings some exciting new features, like a visual timeout indicator on the places tab, checkmarks on location items if you have them saved, and the ability to save a new type of item. Stay tuned through the week as we give more frequent updates about these shiny new features.

Forums. Oh, forums… how you have been such a great (and terrible) aspect of WallaBee. We know you miss how players once flocked to you. We do as well. We’re working on a way to alert them to unread message, so don’t worry – they will return to you once again. We promise.

Another pool fill-up is coming soon! Keep an eye on the mixerpool browser on ItemBrowser.com for the next wave of items.

Should you have any questions, please let us know by emailing Support@WallaBeeGame.com


Recent Item Highlights

As everyone’s fingers recover from December’s many items, we’ve had two new items in 2018 to highlight. Both of these items come from the third BeeKeeper co-directed set: Arctic Antics. If you enjoy the playful design of this set, drop a line to QueenofDNile and tell her what you think!

Meeting

Ookpik and Arnaq get together to have a day of fun.

Blanket Toss

They begin their day at the festival in the village. Celebrating the Nalukataq is always great fun.


Player Unique Spotlight

With more and more Player Uniques coming out, we want to spend a respectable amount of time learning more about them. This week’s Player Unique Spotlight highlighted The Kiwi Chocolate Fish. You can read more about this unique here.

The Kiwi Chocolate Fish

 


This Week In WallaBee History

January 1st, 2015:  Midnight Kiss and Happy New Year 2015 both released on the 1st of the year, ending the New Year’s Eve Party with a bang!

January 1st, 2016: The January Beast item was released to kick off The Beasts of WallaBee 2016. This item has yet to get a name upgrade to something better than the month it released in, and we ain’t lion. -rim shot-

January 7th, 2014: Mr. January released, beginning the very first WallaBee Calendar set: The Men Of WallaBee 2014.


Room For Growth

We have compiled a list of issues that we are currently working on. If you find something that doesn’t fit into this list, please reach out to us and let us know.

  • Battery drains like crazy – We are currently testing an internal build of the app that handles the store differently. We hope that this change will drastically save battery when using the app like normal. This internal build has reduced battery consumption when not using the store, as it halts animations from processing until the store is brought back into focus. However, this is causing some strange loading with items, which sometimes appears as the wrong item in the store. This can be confusing during a drop, and we are looking into it.
  • Forum Notifications/Count are missing – Coming in a future update.
  • Performing an action that triggers a pop up sometimes ‘freezes,’ which needs a hard close to fix – There is a new version of React Native available which should have this fixed. We will be updating to the newer version of React in the near future to test whether the fix works. More information to come.
  • Market Items sometimes not available – This deals with a very rare situation where an item is removed from the market, but the listing is not updated. We are researching what’s causing this.
  • General slowness – Because the app runs completely off of an API, connection to WiFi or data is extremely important. If your coverage dips, your connection will also dip. This doesn’t explain every situation, but needs to be addressed. We are currently working on speeding the app up in various areas. You will notice that the forums perform MUCH faster than before. Our goal is to cut the slow, and speed it up, bro.
  • Store Item and Icon don’t match – This is a known issue with how the phone holds store information. At the moment, there is a chance that the previous item image will linger, even though the item has updated to the next one in line (viewable by the honeycomb price and set icon). We’re investigating a fix for this.
  • Store purchases hang up for a long time – we are investigating this. We’re so sorry for those effected by this issue… which should be everyone. Whoops.

Community Content

This is a section of the blog where we will highlight any funny images or videos from the community. These may appear through links in the forums, on Facebook, guides on YouTube, or other sites.

This week’s highlight is the shocking rediscovery of Blue Egg #11. It sat in the mixerpool for a while before coming out yesterday, and we couldn’t be more thrilled! Congratulations on pulling it out of the mixerpool, Julie! Hold onto that one for a long time. It’s quite valuable, as you’re well aware.

 

If you think someone’s content (or your own) is worthy of being highlighted, you can suggest by emailing support or tagging it with #WallaCommunity.

Any additional questions, comments, concerns? Email: support@wallabeegame.com

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January 2, 2018

Unique Spotlight – The Kiwi Chocolate Fish

We make a living by what we get We make a life by what we give — WC —

Owner: greyhoundjane

How To Get: The fish is now available to any new members to the Kiva Team who make a cash loan, or I am happy to trade him for a personal Unique I am missing. I will also consider trading for a DD of a saved set item I am missing.

Meaning: In New Zealand we have type of lolly/ sweet/candy, called a chocolate fish. It’s basically a fish shaped marshmallow, covered in chocolate. This treat is often given to kids as a reward for doing something well (give that kid a fish for a job well done). A chocolate fish isn’t the prettiest thing, so I decided pick my favourite fish a Betta for the image. I initially created this item to give to active members of the WallaBee “ Kiva “team. Kiva is a micro loan charity, which provides small loans to people. You can read more about Kiva on their website. Each team member got one as a “job well done“ for supporting such a great cause. The quote on my Unique also reflects this… We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give. – Sir Winston Churchill

Which number unique is this for you? This is my 3rd Unique. 1st was The 40mph Couch Potato and the 2nd was The Traveller.

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January 1, 2018

2017 In Review and 2018 Theme Announcement

2017’s theme was ‘Everyone, Everywhere.’ We began implementing this right away, with our 2017 calendar set: it’s a small worldwide celebration 2017. This set highlighted holidays around the world, both big and small, serious and comical. We also released Legacy Pt. 2, which highlighted some of our favorite Player Uniques from the community. We continued our theme by celebrating our 5th birthday in February. The Birthday Baking set allowed players all over the world to create cupcakes in honor of our big day. We also had two major events in Orlando and London, where players from around the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia visited one another with fun scavenger hunts, lots of laughs, and maybe a few butterbeers to boot. March took our collectors into the heart of The Waztecs‘ culture, where we found many Giant Heads, made of stone. Strangely enough, they resembled members of the WallaBee Staff.

We tried our luck at humor in April, releasing a set of WallaBee-inspired memes. Despite our best efforts at appealing to internet culture, none of them took off. Oh well. We also launched Another Night In The Forest, which continued where the first set left off. The item ‘It’s A QR Code!‘ ended the set with a nod to Munzee, allowing a nice bridge between apps and communities in July. After rewriting the app from scratch, we launched Version 2 on May 1st. This set the course for the rest of the year, allowing both iOS and Android users access to the wonderful world of WallaBee. We threw back to the London event with a BeeKeeper co-directed set in June, highlighting some of the memorable moments during The Hunt. We also cleaned up our act with Two Bits, which helped introduce a new sub-category for Service locations.

The community cooled off with a water war in August, with Team Pink taking on Team Blue in WWH2O. Which team did you root for? Keeping with a Summer theme, we explored the California desert in Joshua Tree, the second BeeKeeper co-directed set of the year. Version 2 Achievements launched in September, and who could forget MHQ Bash (featuring WallaBash)? Those in attendance were able to meet Andrew Cameron in person, get his autograph, and view a specially made video of him drawing Pouch of Plenty. We also released WallaBee Passports, which pay homage to some of WallaBee’s roots.

October rolled around the corner with the release of web-messaging and everyone’s favorite addition to the game – Lock Box. We also began Budgets Wonders, where players around the world helped Benson navigate certain special landmarks. Munzee Inc also merged with Freeze Tag Inc, creating an even larger library of mobile games. Our joined forces should be interesting come 2018. On Halloween day, something strange happened in Wallaville – there were signs of an Invasion. Unfortunately, this story doesn’t finish until next year. In an effort to help the community feel more connected to what’s going on behind the scenes, we began the Weekly Buzz blog posts in November. These have been a great source of information for our players. A new WallaBee Artist was announced in December, leading up to Christmas Crisis – a set no one will soon forget.

We would like to thank our community of collectors for a great year. We appreciate your love and support as we continue our efforts to give you the best mobile collecting game on the market. We have compiled some fun statistics to share with y’all. We hope that you enjoy them.

Stay tuned for 2018, as we begin our new focus: Breaking Barriers. Barriers can hold us back, mark limitations, or even provide a certain level of comfort to those inside its walls. By recognizing and addressing these barriers, we can grow past the status quo and improve the game for all users. Our goal through this is to update the tutorial process, redefine competition, and enhance gameplay for all users.

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