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Meta-PR

I have been hating on PR lately, but what sort of PR do you use to snow people who believe their own PR? The Arnell Group figured it out. I could leave the commentary to Bruce Webster, but I, like Language Log before me, feel the need to highlight. They have covered the text (“Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.”) well, so let me outline the visual explanations.

  • Page 3 explains how the new Pepsi logo was developed by sending DNA into the future and then backtracking a bit.
  • Page 5 relates the logo to 5000-year-old Hindu traditions and the Mona Lisa.
  • There are nine pages of loops that have a tenuous relationship to anything in the world, but claim proprietary geometry to Pepsi, so don’t you go using circles and ovals.
  • Page 21 claims a relationship to the Earth’s core, its magnetic field, and … no, that’s completely incoherent.
  • Two pages of molested happy faces follow. Show me on the Pepsi can where the bad man touched you.
  • Page 26 shows how a sufficient quantity of Pepsi (3) will create a relativistic gravitational pull, sucking the shopper through the wall of the aisle and into a spherical Pepsi aisle. This may relate to page 24, which shows how 2D figures can transform into 3D figures. Mario simply failed to move correctly.
  • It concludes with the creation of the universe, in which units of distance are equal to units of velocity. There is an exponentially expanding 8 light year Pepsi universe.

: Zubon

Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 5: More Cleanup

I did a few quest chains from Echad Dunann. Yeah, not too exciting, but there are a bunch of quests and someone asked about Day 5.

I mostly spent time crafting, on my main and alts. There is a lot to pick up in Eregion, and I am finding myself with stacks of (processed) ancient iron, ancient silver, and black ash for my alts. None of them are using those materials yet, but it will be waiting when they get there. My real bottleneck is silver for my jeweler, which seems to be more expensive on the AH than ancient silver. I may finish mastering a tier by polishing gems.

Oh, and Ethic found me for the COW static group. Once I de-mule my Loremaster, I will join that party.

: Zubon

We Are Loved

I was not aware that Kill Ten Rats appeared in a couple of developer podcasts recently. Granted, Kingdom of Loathing developer podcasts, but I like the game, and it is probably more popular than any MMO you have made. For most of you, at any rate; if you have a link to the right under “MMORPGs,” okay, most of those out-sell Kingdom of Loathing. Not all.

Anyway, 120 Minutes with Jick and Mr. Skullhead on January 29 and February 5 continued discussion from the The Price is Right post and Ultimatum follow-up. Which means this has now spilled into three KTR posts and two KOL podcasts. For your convenience, xSmootx made this video mocking everyone involved. Huggles! He then connects it to professional wrestling.

For reference, the “scathing criticism” was why I get burned out on KoL periodically. We exchanged a couple of e-mails. I may not have mentioned then that I binge heavily when I play KoL, like MMO player heavily, two hardcore characters while speed ascending on another. I am not entirely healthy, but I have a dancing badger pet, so life is good.

: Zubon

Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 4: Cleanup

Nope, not in the Mines yet. I have been working the two northern quest hubs in Eregion, and I finished Volume 1.

I have one quest left in Gwingris, maybe more if it is a chain. There is also the tea daily; the last quest is where the leaves spawn, so I may go back for it. The Gwingris quests are pretty typical Volume 1 stuff, for all the reasons I discussed on days one and two.

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 4: Cleanup

Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 3: At the Gates

The new stuff picks up south of Echad Eregion. This will be a happier post. You may have noticed that the last two posts showed severe underwhelmedness, which is like a word. Seeing new things is whelming, which actually is a word, even if none of the definitions are quite what I am looking for. Maybe I should have gone with “neat” or “novel.” Oh well, too late now. The previous posts had two points. One is to chronicle: humans tend to remember the extreme events and think of them as typical, forgetting conflicting evidence or whether they really were happy/sad for most of the moments. Going through those moments provides point two, which I will let Yeebo explain:

I’m not really sure what Turbine was thinking with the lead in to the mines. You show up at the north end of a new zone, and it’s not even remotely obvious that the best thing to do is run ahead. I guess they figured everyone would see Moria on the map and head straight there (that’s what I did).

In southern Eregion, the landscape changes. The scrub plain looks a bit like the Lone Lands, adding large furrows of dried-up rivers. The ruin architecture also feels different, although I do not study ruins enough to speak intelligently there. It is not like walking into one of WoW’s zones with an entirely different color palette, but it was striking enough for me to notice as a very non-visual person. Around Mirobel is where it really kicked in: enemies above level 50, a new monster type, legendary items, and all that jazz. Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 3: At the Gates

Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 2: Travel Agent of the Realm

Volume 1, Book 15 is horrible. Absolutely terrible. I am still not even close to Moria itself.

Taking Andrew’s advice, I started toward The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume 2: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ epic quest. The best way to approach this, I thought, would be finishing The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume 1: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. Volume 1 has 15 Books, of which I had completed 14, so I looked up where to start 15 (Elrond) and headed out. Book 15 is another epic travel quest. I spent more than two hours getting through the first ten chapters. Almost all of this time was spent traveling back and forth between two points.

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 2: Travel Agent of the Realm

Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 1: Same Thing, Bigger Numbers

I bought the expansion pack. So far, no real changes except in the numbers.

The level cap is higher, and it is neat to see experience on my level 50. My characters have new deeds, which will alter their numbers after I do certain things 100-1000 times. The deeds combine to other things that alter my numbers. All the defense numbers were moved to a different scale, which may have been meant to hide the nerf to all defenses; if you already blocked, parried, and evaded most attacks, you could not get much higher without breaking the game, so now you can earn your way back to where you were (at level 60).

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 1: Same Thing, Bigger Numbers

Migrant Developers

There is a lot of buzz in forums and the blogosphere about the recent layoffs from Mythic (and later THQ).  The extremes can be found at Broken Toys (sympathetic view from the inside) and Tobold’s MMORPG Blog (harsh view from the outside).  What I want to comment on comes from the statement from Mark Jacobs (top boss of Mythic) concerning the layoffs at Mythic after the launch of Warhammer Online.

With respect to customer service, quality assurance and play testing, prior to the launch of WAR, we hired additional people to deal with the rush of demand associated with an MMO launch and to insure the best possible experience for our players.

This seems to be commonplace with the development of MMO’s these days.  Age of Conan had to have layoffs from their pre-launch bloat as well.  Is the MMO development culture now one filled with migrant developers?

Continue reading Migrant Developers