UPDATES

January 15, 2016

Announcing the 2016 Munzee Theme…

2014: Expect The Unexpected.

For players who were around in 2014, you’ve certainly heard these words in one form or another. President Rob Vardeman chanted this mantra at many meetings, events and podcasts in Munzee’s third year of business. We were striving to keep things fresh, surprise our players and grow as a company. Often this also meant surprising the MHQ staff with quick turnaround on projects and unexpected campaigns.

2015: New Year. New Perspective.

In 2015 we aimed to flip everything on it’s side and approach our game in new ways. From retiring the MVM to transferring to hybrids apps in the long-awaited 3.0 release, we changed the way we looked at the company. 2015 saw the creation of Zee, Eventzee, Runzee and the acquisition of Wallabee- all different ways of playing mobile games.Not to mention the continued success of the Munzee Marketplace and the creation of Green Pin Produce. It was a year of big changes, but admittedly there were some growing pains.

At the end of 2015 we as a staff thought hard about the successes and missteps of our four years in business. We analyzed what worked, what didn’t, and what we would have to do in 2016 to continue the success of our brand. No matter our expectations, no matter which way we looked at it, the success of Munzee all came down to one thing: You, our community.

2016: Growing Innovative Communities Rooted In Fun.

More than a theme, 2016’s mantra is a combination of a goal, a mission and a vision. It’s time for us to get back to our roots, which is our strong and devoted community of players. Although our community spans the globe and grows every day, we want to ensure that our relationship and our communication is maintained with players of all Munzee Inc. games. Of course there will always be branches that break and sometimes the weather may rustle a few leaves, but like the mighty oak tree, we will continue to grow as long as we maintain strong roots.

As all branches of our company grow our communities grow as well. Because without the roots of our community we cannot grow, innovate and evolve as a business. Thank you on behalf of all Team MHQ- we’re excited for what 2016 has to bring.

January 6, 2016

New Website Features!

We’ve added a few new features to the website map to help your Munzee adventures!

Plan For Group
Do you like to cap as a group but have a hard time finding areas where you all haven’t capped yet? Check out the new “Plan For Group” feature on the website map. Together with the “Exclude Captured Munzees” filter, you’ll only see munzees that all of you can cap!

Addtional “Route” Features
When using the “Route” feature on the website map, you can change the mode of travel. Your options now include: driving, walking, bicycling, and transit!

January 4, 2016

To All of Our Players

We would like to discuss the issues that have occurred over the past few days.

On Christmas Day, our hosting provider, Linode, came under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack from unknown assailants. This attack was aimed at their hosting facilities around the world, including Atlanta, Georgia, where Munzee Inc’s servers are hosted. This attacked lasted 10 days, the worst of which were this weekend. They finally came to a stop yesterday when Linode was able to mitigate them. Though there was intermitant uptime, our services, including apps, websites, and stores, were down the majority of the weekend. There was little (read:nothing) our team could do but wait for Linode to restore service. We tried to keep our communities up to date as best we could, but our fate was in the hands of Linode at that point.

Though the down time was the result of a cyber attack, we realize that it is not fair or acceptable to you to not be able to play. We are currently researching changes to ensure that downtimes like those that occured never happen again. These changes include, but are not limited to, hosting servers at multiple data centers, hosting servers with multiple companies, or changing hosting providers. When we decide what the best action to take is, we will inform you before these changes take place and keep you up to date on the progress.

As for gameplay that was missed the past few days:

Capture and Deploy Streaks will not be affected. January 1st, 2nd, and 3rd are now “Black Out Dates” in our databases. This means that when Capture and Deploy Streaks are calculated, these days will be skipped (i.e. if December 31st was Day 10 of your capture or deploy streak, January 4th will be Day 11). If you have any question regarding the number of days in your streak, check the badge on the app or website.
Any points or badges that were earned during the Black Out Dates WILL still count.
Clan Wars will begin on January 6th. Some of the requirements and rewards have been updated, so please check the blog post to see what’s changed.

We’ve altered some of our plans for this month, so please take note of the following events:

MunzPak Double Point Weekend
- The Double Point Weekend will take place January 15th-17th and will include the following:
  - MunzPak Subscribers from December 2015,
  - MunzPak Subscribers from January 1st-January 14th, 2016 (If you didn’t subscribe in December, you still have a chance to subscribe.),
  - AND ALL CURRENT Premium Members.
- These users will receive an email next week with more information as we finalize the plans and check them 10 times. 😉
Double Point Weekend for Everyone
- A Double Point Weekend for EVERY Munzee player will take place January 29th-31st. We will post more information about that weekend on the blog as we get closer.

We again apologize for these issues and can’t thank you enough for your support through them. There’s a lot going on this month, so stay tuned and check the blog and our social media regularly to make sure you’re up to date.

Once again, thank you, and Grow the Map!

December 17, 2015

Make Us A Munzee Competition Finalists!

The Munzee team was overwhelmed with the response to the “Make Us A Munzee” competition! We had over 600 entries, and it was tough to narrow them down to five finalists. Below are the descriptions of the finalists and a link to vote for your favorite. Voting will close on Wednesday, December 30th at 17:00 MHQ time. The winner will be contacted shortly following then to make their idea become reality! Also, please remember that details of these Munzees is subject to change, but the overall idea will remain intact. The text below is what was submitted by the player. Team Munzee will work with the winner to determine exact logistics after it is chosen.

Finalists

The Joker (Rubik80) – “A physical munzee that rewards the capper with 100 points or penalises them with minus 50 points. Limited to one per premium member per membership, like a Premium Munzee. The trick is when they lose the 50 points, they go to the munzee owner.”
The Pioneer (d-n) – “Can be only deployed in areas with no other munzees in certain radius (for example 1/2 mile). Cap on points residual into 50. Advantages -Support for starting the game in areas with no munzees.”
The Prankster (Rosemark) – “This will be a virtual Munzee. It will have 5 location Pins on the Map, but only 1 will be real. To deploy The owner will pick a location and deploy just like a regular Virtual, and the computer will create 4 more locations on the map within a 1 mile radius of the deployed location. Only one of these pins will be the real location of the Munzee. When a player attempts to cap the Munzee, they will not know which pin is real. If they pick the wrong one it will tell them “No Joy” and they will have to go to one of the 4 other locations until they find the correct one. Once they find the real one, they will receive the points earned, and a Badge for successfully capturing a Prankster Munzee. The scoring should reduce for each miss. Perhaps 50 points if they get it right the 1st time, 40 if 2nd, 30 if 3rd , 20 if 4th and 10 if last. Cap on points to owner could be like 10. Each time the Prankster is captured, a new correct location is randomly selected by the computer, so the correct pin is different each time capped.”
The Wormhole (kulbago) – “This Munzee will randomly tunnel to another munzee that is over 100 miles from its deployed location. Upon capturing this munzee, you get points just as though you were at the location at the other end f the wormhole. Once captured it will re-tunnel to another randomly selected munzee somewhere else in the world. Each wormhole munzee can only be captured once per day per player. (ie. you can’t stand there and keep capturing Munzees that are far away) If you wanted to make it more interesting you could make different “size” wormhole munzees. Small would tunnel to 100 miles away, medium say 250 miles, and large would have to find a munzee more than 500 miles away to connect to.”
The Rock-Paper-Scissors (2dld26) – “On deploy, the deployer picks it to be Rock, Paper or Scissors. The icon shows RPS so as not to identify what it is. When capture, the capturer has to choose Rock, Paper or Scissors. If they beat the deployer, then capturer gets 20 points and the deployer gets 10 points. If the capturer loses, then the capturer gets 10 points and the deployer gets 20 points. If they choose the same, then they each get 15 points. Potential badges: -Badges for winning 1, 25, 50 matches (bronze, silver, gold) -Badge for winning once against all three types: rock, paper and scissors Clarification: rock beats scissors beats paper beats rock.”

Ready to vote? Go here!

December 15, 2015

Christmas Parties Are In Full Swing!

We’re halfway through the month of December, and the Munzee Christmas Parties are in full swing! Rob, Matt, Louise, Daniel Hammock, and Daniel Fischer have all attended events already this month! Matt will also be attending the Metro Vancouver Post Holiday Cap’ing event on December 27th, and he’s excited!

In less than two weeks, 1140 players have capped the Father Christmas special, and we have another 17 events happening worldwide in the next 7 days! We can’t wait to see the outcome of them! Also, if you haven’t checked it out yet, the Dodgy Jumper gallery is live! We’re adding more images as we get them, so check it out!

These events have given us some crazy capture numbers, too! Matt stopped by the office around 3PM MHQ time on Saturday, and there were over 103,000 captures! We want to thank everyone who has hosted and/or attended an event for growing the game!

October 22, 2015

The Future Is Now!

Well October 21st has come and gone. Still no self lacing shoes (yet!), no flying cars, and the Cubs won’t be winning the world series… But, we did have hover boards! For one gleaming day, hover boards were a reality in the Munzee world, and you guys went out and got them! During the 48 hours in which it was October 21st throughout the world, players captured 87,116 hover board icons!

We’d also like to take this opportunity to recognize Rob Steer and the Back to the Future Day event he hosted in Shepparton, Australia. The badge for capturing the hover board icons was a variation on the badge our designers created for his event.

To everyone who participated in Back to the Future Day events over the past few days, thank you! We hope you all enjoyed the special. We’ve got more exciting things coming!

September 28, 2015

MHQ Bash 2015 Update

With less than two weeks until MHQ Bash, we’ve got some updates and new information!

Friday night’s event at TUPPs Brewery is open to all ages, but you must have an ID to enter if you are over 18 even if you aren’t going to be drinking.
Sunday’s brunch will be held at Celebration Park in Allen, Texas. We will be grilling hotdogs and hamburgers and offering Munzee Segway Tours (see below for more information).
We’ve partnered with McKinney Segway Tours to offer Munzee tours by Segway during the weekend. A total of 24 tours will be offered Friday-Sunday. For more information and for tickets, head to our Eventbrite page.
Can you imagine a purple dinosaur? There happens to be one that used to have a show on TV. If you didn’t know, he was created in Dallas, and his show was filmed at multiple locations in the DFW area, one of which was Allen. To commemorate this, we’ve created a small and limited edition *garden in his image in Allen just a few miles away from Celebration Park. All pins in this garden are sold out at this time. Stay tuned for future sales.

If you haven’t purchased your tickets for MHQ Bash yet, there’s still time! Online registration closes on October 7th at 5pm MHQ time, and you will be able to purchase tickets at the door. Don’t miss out!

Clan requirements will be released at 5pm MHQ time today. Here is a sneak peek…family jewels will be very important.

September 21, 2015

Munzee 3.0.2 Update

First off, we’d like to thank everyone for their patience regarding Munzee 3.0 functionality with iOS. We want to provide the best experience possible while playing Munzee, and we’ve been working diligently to do so.

At 9am CST, we pushed Munzee 3.0.2 to the App Store and Google Play Store. This update includes:

Improved iOS 7.X support
Improved iOS 9 support
Layout fixes
Several bug fixes

Again, we want to thank everyone for their support. We will continue working to build upon and improve Munzee to make it the best we can. Grow the map!

August 17, 2015

Virtual Emerald Garden Locations

The official list of new Virtual Emerald Gardens is here. Along with the launch of these new gardens, we have also increased the capture radius of all Virtual Emeralds. You only need to be within 1500 feet (500 meters) of the virtual emerald in order to capture it. This will allow for all pins to be hand capped and not require blast capture. If you’d like to see all of the official gardens in one location you can visit www.munzee.com/gardens. Each garden has a virtual exclusion zone built in to protect the integrity of the design, however physical munzees are still able to be deployed in the area.

July 16, 2015

Goodbye Mystery, Hello Mini!

We love all of our different types of Munzees, but sometimes, you just have to let go and make changes. In that spirit, we say out with the old and in with the new! It’s time for the mystery sticker to retire. Welcome the new and improved mini mystery sticker!

Each sticker is a generic code to be used/shared by the purchaser. On deploy, the owner receives 25 points. Each capture will yield 10 cap on points for the owner while the player who captures will receive a mystery number of points from 5-50 in multiples of 5. The icon remains the same as the original mystery, and only the points and the size of the sticker have changed. Mystery fields will now include mini mystery stickers as well.

(Note: Rob wanted to help out the media team and designed an image for the event.)