It’s been a while since we’ve announced a new feature here on the site, but as we await Tad Kubler’s final decision on who will win this year’s Figment Album Cover Design Contest, we thought it was high time we announced not only a few new features, but also a whole new concept.  What’s that you say?  Well, remember our discussions about moving to virtual goods?  The time has come…gone is the Figment Lucre Store and rising from it’s ashes…behold the Figment Gear Store!

The Figment Gear Store will feature everything your fake band needs to gear up for the studio and the road.  Whether it’s a ZT Lunchbox Amp, a V-Shaped Guitar or some wheels-of-steel, the Gear Store has it all.

You’ll notice that we’re teaming with GBase.com on the store.  GBase.com is the definitive online source for used, vintage, and new musical instruments and equipment for musicians, collectors, enthusiasts and gear junkies!  If you want to stock up on real instruments to match your virtual ones, GBase.com has you covered.

So, how does it all work?  Well it’s simple, let’s start on your dashboard page where you’ll notice that every band now has another link underneath that says “Buy Gear”.  Just above that link is a list of any gear your band owns.  Of course, right now it says “This band doesn’t own any gear!”  So let’s buy some.  Click on the “Buy Gear” link and it will take you to the Figment Gear Store.  You should see a whole selection of musical equipment ready for purchase, that is unless you don’t have enough lucre to buy any.  If you don’t, there won’t be anything in the store, and depending on how much you do have, you’ll only be shown those pieces of equipment you can afford.  To buy a piece of equipment simply click on the button to the right of the piece of equipment you desire.  That button will have the price in Lucre listed on it.  When you click the button the lucre will automatically be deducted from your account and you’ll see this message at the top of the page.

You can also check the bottom of the page to remind yourself what gear your band already owns.  Any new purchases will immediately be displayed in this area as well.

Once you’ve loaded up on equipment you can either click on your band’s name under the Gear Store header to visit your band page or the dashboard link at the top of the page to return to your dashboard.   On your dashboard page you’ll be able to see the equipment that you bought listed to the right of your band, and on your band page you’ll see the equipment appear under the section titled “Band Gear”.

You’ll notice that we made a few changes to the layout of the band pages as well based on the feedback you’ve provided.  We’ve concentrated the primary info on your band – your Fans, Bio, Gear and Albums/EPs  - down the main right-hand column of the page with sections clearly marked with identifying headers.  From now on your band’s fans will be listed at the top of the page.  In the header you can see the total number of fans your band has and 13 randomly selected fan icons.

If you click on the link below the fan icons you will be able to see all of your band’s fans in the order in which they became fans of your band.

Under the fans section, you’ll see corresponding sections for the Band’s Bio, Gear and Albums/EPs in that order.

For those of you who asked for Band News archive, your requests have been answered.  The left hand column of the page now features, in addition to your band image and shout box, a new “Official Band News” section.

Click on one of the news stories or on the “View all news items” link and you’ll be taken to your band’s news archive that contains every news story you’ve ever published about them.

Another improvement that you requested was to have album descriptions allow more text.  Well, we’re happy to announce that we’ve increased the character limit on album descriptions from 500 characters to 2000 characters.  That should give you plenty of room to say thanks to all of us here at Figment!

We’re very excited about the launch of the Figment Gear Store, the new band page layout and the addition of the Official Band News archive, so we hope you are too!  The Gear Store is just the first step in our plans to improve the Figment virtual economy and better enhance the overall Figment game experience.   We are looking forward to rolling out more features related to it in the future, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, please refrain from creating any equipment, equipment companies, etc. using Figment band pages.  If you do we will ban them and ask you to delete them.  We are looking into the best way to handle the creation and sales of custom and “endorsed” equipment by Figment players going forward, but until we announce those features please do not create any equipment related figments.

Thanks for all of your feedback over the past year, as you can see it does factor into our plans for the site.  We hope you enjoy the Gear Store and new band page features.  Now go gear up!

Merry Christmas!!!  We hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday!  As a little present Larry and I decided to give you something you’ve had on your list for a while now – more room to talk up your bands!  That’s right, we’ve increased the band bio box from 5,000 characters to 10,000 characters, the shout boxes from 140 to the aptly numbered 420, and your band news from 500 to 1,000.  So enjoy the holidays and “write” us a ton of band thank you notes!

For those of you who haven’t already noticed, we made a change to your dashboard page that you’ll see the next time you log in to Figment.  Gone is the old Fan Interaction List, and in it’s place are two new lists – “What’s Happening With Your Bands” and the “Last Five Things Your Friends Did”.

We made this change in response to your requests to have a better way to track the interaction with only your bands.  As you know the old Fan Interaction list showed not only activity with your bands, but also the activity of any player whose band you had become a fan of on Figment.  Due to the large amount of activity on the site this often pushed activity with your bands down the list and it was hard for you to know who or how someone had interacted with a band you created.  Thus the new “What’s Happening With My Bands” list.  The title says it all.

The new “Last Five Things Your Friends Did” list will provide you with information on the activity of those players whose band’s you have become a fan of, but on a more immediate basis.  After all if you want to find out more about what bands they’re buying/listening to you can always visit their profile page where a list of the last 10 things they’ve done on the site is displayed.

We think these two lists will better help you track the progress of your own bands while still providing you with some insight on what your favorite bands are up to on Figment.  We hope you like the change and look forward to any feedback you have on it.

When we started polling people for feedback using our UserVoice feedback tab a few months back, one of the improvements that was suggested and got a lot of positive feedback was the ability to enlarge album covers so that you could see them better.  Well thanks to Larry, we just pushed that feature live today!  So find your favorite album, click on the album cover and voila it’s larger!  Cuz everyone know’s bigger is better!

Let us know what you think and while you’re at it enlarge these classics!

The Bleatles “Abbey Fold”

Fustercluck “Hey, Lady!  Ya Dropped Your Kid”

Eccentric Arcade “Machines Again”

Fait Accompli “Malevolence”

Zandergriff Miggs & The Parliament of Owls “Seizure Salad”

Crimson Eye “Warmonger” (where you can finally see the guy in the tank)

The Administration “Disinfotainment”

Pastor of Muppets “Havin’ Fun with Pastor of Muppets”

Notice a change on our home page?  We’ve been planning to update our charts for some time and based on the feedback you’ve provided it was something you valued as well.  Well, we just updated the charts by getting rid of the Top Albums Chart and replacing it with the Hot Albums Chart which shows the albums with the most sales and listens in the last 30 days.  This way you’ll be looking at new albums that are rising up the charts as well as albums that have legs and continue to sell well.  So take a look and let us know what you think.   Larry worked really hard on this new chart, so take a moment and leave a comment or click on the User Voice feedback tab on the site to register your thoughts – we’d love to hear them.

Did your read our latest newsletter?  If you did, you know that we were set  to launch a new feature on Figment real soon.  Well, soon…is now!  We just launched our new Figment Merch Store! If you’ve ever wanted to take your fake band to the next level, now you can by creating a custom tour shirt for them!

A big part of the fun of creating a fake band is being able to share your band with friends and strangers alike.  What’s one of the best ways to do this?  Merch baby Merch!  There’s nothing better than wearing a t-shirt with your fake band on it and having a complete stranger stop you to ask where you saw the band.  Now that’s bringing your band to life!

It’s that ability to make your fake band come alive that led us to create a store where you could create custom apparel and do it on a one-off basis.  To do this we teamed with Spreadshirt to create our new Figment Merch Store where you can create a custom tour shirt for any of the bands or albums you’ve created.  Spreadshirt’s Designer let’s you personalize over 100 different articles of clothing with images (either the ones we have permanently added to our store or whatever design you’d like to upload) and/or text to create your band merch!

For those band’s who we think create images that a lot of people will be interested in wearing we’ll be awarding a special merch icon and lucre reward in return for placing their design in the shop.  We’ve already awarded this honor to Darkling, The Bleatles and a few other bands.  So be on the lookout for those bands that win this special award!

In order to create the best shirt possible  we suggest you read Spreadshirt’s info on how to best use their Designer.  Once you have, we hope you’ll take the time to create some merch for your band!

We can’t wait to see people walking down the street wearing your band’s merch – so make it work!

Now that Christmas is over Santa may be done checking his list, but you shouldn’t be done checking your’s!  What am I talking about?  The Fan Interaction list on your Figment dashboard page.

You may have noticed the list when it first popped up on your dashboard page late last year.  The early version contained a list of only those fans who interacted with band’s you created, but just before year’s end we updated the list to include any fan interaction that occurred with a band you are a fan of as well.  As a result of that change you can now see ALL of the activity that occurs with your favorite bands including your own.

The list may go through one more change before long, as we’re contemplating breaking the list into two separate lists with tabs that allow you to access both.

We’d love to hear what you think of the list so leave us a comment and let us know your thoughts.

You may have noticed a few changes to your Figment band and album pages.  From this point forward if want to become a fan of a band you can simply click on the “Become a Fan” button under the band’s picture on their band page.

In addition, we’ve removed the old “Add As A Favorite” link in the upper right hand corner of all the band pages and replaced it with the social bookmarking Add This “share” button that allows you to bookmark a page on any number of sites like del.icio.us, Digg!, MySpace, Facebook, etc.  We’ve also added the AddThis ”share” button to all of the album pages. 

 So if you see a band you like, click the “Become A Fan” button and you’ll be alerted via email any time they release an album.  Then help spread the word by “sharing” that band with your friends through a bookmark on your MySpace, Facebook or any other social networking site profile page.  Not only will your favorite bands appreciate it, but they’ll likely return the favor!

Hey, just wanted to let you know that we just released a new feature on Figment.  From now on you’ll know who is a fan of your band and who bought their albums because you’ll be able to see them!  That’s right, we’ve added profile picture thumbnails for every fan you have to your band’s page.

We’ve done the same on the album page where you can see what fans added your band’s album to their collection.  You can check them both out in the left hand column underneath your band/album picture. 

No more anonymous admirers, from now on you’ll be able to get acquainted with your users with a simple glance at your band or album pages, and if you want to get to know them better you can click on their picture to view their profile.

This is the first step in our plan to create more interaction between our users and the fans of their fake bands.  Keep a look out for more features as they will be coming on-line within a few weeks.

In the meantime, go spruce up your profile page and let us see your pearly whites!

Wanted to let you know that we just recently added a new feature to Figment.  You can now publish news about your fake band right from your dashboard page. 

Just click on the Publish News link and write up your band’s press release. When you’re ready to spread the news just click on the Publish button!

And voila your news is published right to your band’s page!

So what are you waiting for? Build that buzz!!!!