Update: Friday, November 29, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-30

Shameless plug - Ever wanted to know which the best bands from you hometown are? P2 will answer your query! - Do you suffer from memory loss, and need a fast way to know exactly how you interacted with someone recently?The answer is now out there! - Have you always wished you had cute headphones and other symbols in your repertoire? We have solved that too! - Often feel the need to dump a whole lot of items at once, when littering a park? Go right ahead - it’s easier than ever! - And, you, business owner! Did you ever wish you could repair all your locales with one magical click of a button?Now you can! Our head scientist estimates that for the average popmundian, the below changes alone reduce the average number of clicks per gaming session with 10.000. On that bombshell, we wish you all a good weekend!  For those of you unsure about the contents of this message, these are the major changes made this week, in a more comprehensive style. - The City page has been given some new content. - There is an easier way to reach recent interactions with a character. - The repertiore page has been reworked. - More options been added to items, where you can now drop many in one go instead of one by one. - A "repair all locales" function has been added to Companies. Disclaimer: The product has no proven effect on baldness.

Update: Monday, November 26, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-26

It's all about looks The main chunk of functionality is now in place, and so, we are (finally) able to sink our teeth into the interface as such, and start making the new version a nicer place to be. You will start seeing changes fairly soon, and they will happen gradually along with the remaining functionality being finished. Some things have already started popping up, such as "pay all" for bills and a slightly reworked City page for example. It won't reach its final look right in one magic wave, but step by step, so keep checking in. We hope you'll like the changes!

Developer News   2012-11-23

Houston, we have a winner! Or several, actually, in the Avatar Contest. Thanks everybody who participated! So, who won? Head on over to the forum to find out:Message:2112393.500

Update: Thursday, November 22, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-22

HO HO HO and Snowballs Until the end of 2012 we're adding some extra value to our most popular products in the shop. This means more VIP and credits for your money... and SNOWBALLS! Snowballs are unique items that will raise your Christmas spirit when thrown back and forth between players. The snowballs are given to the oldest character on your account and a single snowball can be thrown five times before it vanishes. Please head over to the shop for more information.

Update: Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-21

Not at all quiet on the western front So, we've finally come to the end of cleaning up the mess caused by the money issue that was introduced in the beginning of November. As far as we're concerned, the matter is now closed, but we will do another sweep later on to double check a few things, just to make sure we didn't miss anything. Besides the extra work load caused by this, we haven't been totally unproductive. In fact, far from it. Below is a short recap of the bigger things we've done lately, for those of you who haven't figured it out yourself: We've begun work on competitions in V2, primarily used for the festival right now. Information on competitions is now available in the new version. But you're only allowed to use the new booking interface for the festival qualifiers. We're currently working on completing the new company license system so we can start selling them in the new version next week. We've recently added the possibility to give away shares, throw away shares, move locales between companies you own and control, as well as abandoning companies completely. We've made sure that you can use items on other items, which is needed when you want to create shots of medicine. We've implemented the base foundation of recipes, and you should be able to both see your recipes and use them. Have a nice day y'all!

Update: Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-20

Say "keeeys" Today saw the start of phase 2 in the quest to rid the world of keys. As of now, access codes will work in V1 as well. You can only create these access codes in V2 though. We've removed the ability to create new keys, but the old ones will continue to work until the 10th of December. Therefore, make sure to add your friends and family to your access code lists. And, oh, you can still change your locks. A lot more stuff (most of it fun) has been released into the world as well the last couple of days. Stay tuned for more info on that!

Update: Thursday, November 15, 2012

Sorry for Late Update but I was on a mini-vacation..  :)

Developer News   2012-11-15

Important Information Regarding Competitions Over the years we've tweaked the way competitions work a couple of times but we still feel competitions aren't really what they should be in the game. Therefore we've decided that the way competitions work will be redone in the new version of Popmundo. Early next year we'll take the old version of Popmundo offline. When this happens club owners will no longer be able to manage competitions they have arranged in the old version.  Therefore, to prevent everyone from investing time in competitions they won't be able to see through to the end, we're going to remove the possibility for artists to book shows in competitions on the 10th of December this year. This should give everybody enough time sort out whatever competitions they have planned right now. We realise a lot of you will miss the old fashioned competitions in the game. We will too. But things aren't always as bad as they seem. Stay tuned for more information as we continue to develop the new version of Popmundo.

Update: Monday, November 12, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-12

Avatar Makers Assemble! Once you start you can’t stop they say, and that goes for contests too. We’re in the mood for more! This time it’s not about music though, it’s about yourselves. The challenge is pretty straight-forward: create the best avatar! It can be funny, stylish, cool, following a theme or whatever you think of. The only must is that you create it using the avatar maker. To compete, take a screen shot or save the generated image, upload it somewhere, and submit it in thread Message:2112393.1 before 12 CET on Friday 23rd November. We’ll then take one of those friday afternoons to pick the winner. Or maybe several winners! There are two simple rules: you can only use the avatar maker (no external editors), and you may only submit one avatar per puppet master account. The jury will consist of us three developers, plus whoever else happens to be at the office that afternoon. The winner, or winners, will be awarded a choice of 3 months VIP or 1000 credits!

Developer News   2012-11-12

Scheduled downtime on Wednesday We need to stop the game on Wednesday morning, in order to install some updates to the operating system. This will occur around 10.30 CET, and we expect it to take about an hour. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Update: Wednesday, 07 November, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-07

Festival Booking Addendum Attention all Festival contenders! There's one more piece of information for you, which may save you from unneccessary grinding of teeth. In previous years, there has been set slots, with one show per timeslot. This thime though, there are parallell stages so room for more than one artist in each timeslot. Also: you can only book it through the new version (the Festival Pages are found under the Social menu). Happy booking!

Update: Wednesday, 07 November, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-07

Festival Doors Opening! After a week of tumbling around in money, we are finally able to turn focus back to the world of music. It is time to open the Popmundo Festival X - the biggest, baddest competition we have! So, are your songs rehearsed, instruments tuned, and your stage show designed to show off your coolest moves? No?? Don't worry, there is plenty of time yet before it is time to get up there and play, the competition itself doesn’t start until 16th of January. The bookings however, they open really soon - tomorrow to be precise!   Just like in earlier Festivals, there will be a show level requirement in order to be able to book during the first couple of days. This booking requirement is then gradually lowered and finally removed entirely. There are also a couple of other rules for taking part in the festival, so go read about it on the Popmundo Festival Page - where you should find all the info you need on levels, rules and how booking your own show will work.

Update: Friday, November 02, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-02

Mo money, mo problems. Part I It's been a few interesting and frustrating days here at the Popmundo office. We know that a lot of you are frustrated by the turn of events these days as well. Especially by the seemingly slow response by us developers to act upon certain injustices in the game created by the whole situation. We understand that you might not agree upon the actions we've taken. However, we've tried to explain it all in the form of a little Q and A. It's so big, it'll occupy two community news posts! Is the bug that caused this situation fixed? Yes. We've also made sure that if we're struck by the same type of database problem in the future, we'll be better equipped to deal with it. Why not restore a database backup? Restoring a database of the size and complexity of ours take a long time, and must be performed with the game offline. Although the complexity of the problems caused by the latest "crash" was the greatest we've ever had to deal with in Popmundo history, the data governing the core game was only corrupted slightly. That is why we decided to let the game world keep spinning instead of shutting the whole thing down for a long time, which would have created a whole other set of problems in addition to the ones were already facing. What did you actually do, and why did you take so long doing it? During the downtime on Wednesday we took care of the problem which caused the crash. Then we made sure the core game was brought up to speed as soon as possible. This was all done the same day the problem was discovered. After that we've mainly focused on tracking down the people who actively abused the system to gain unfair advantages somehow while the game was malfunctioning. Where it is possible we're currently in the process of removing money, skill levels, and attributes that these people gave themselves. Everyone we've dealt with so far have received some form of appropriate punishment suitable for whatever they did.

Developer News   2012-11-02

Mo money, mo problems. Part II If you haven't read part I (above) yet, do so first. Otherwise, continue below: Why don't you hunt down ALL persons who've gained money out of this? Following the money trail of every person takes an absurd amount of time, especially when people are trying to hide their tracks by moving money back and forth. Money is also not the key to the success in this game, which is why some players will get away with their abuse this time. But we'll make sure to deal with the biggest abusers. You should get to the bottom with this! We've already removed truck loads of counterfeit money. And we'll continue to do so for a while. However, tracking down every little cent would be counter productive and halt the development of the new version too long. There are things that benefit the players more than making sure every little shoplifter gets caught and slapped on the wrists. What's next? We're still dealing with bug reports in order of core game priority and others are waiting to be closed together with others of the same type we're currently dealing with. That is why some of you haven't seen your reports properly answered yet. We'll continue to clean this mess up next week while we slowly get back to business as usual with festival bookings and the usual things. Thanks for being understanding. An extra special big thank you to those few players who've taken the high road in the past few days and actually helped limit the effects of the crash instead of abusing it for their own greedy desires. Hope you all have a great weekend!

Update: Thursday, 01 November, 2012

Developer News   2012-11-01

Money for nothing, and chicks for free? One of the worst downsides of yesterday's database issues was that some people found ways to make money out of nothing. On top of this, people have been using this money to purchase valuable items from other, unsuspecting players. This clearly is in violation with our rules regarding cheating and abusing loop holes. Please continue reading below. We've already taken action against some of the players who used the temporary loop holes. The problem is that in some cases, we simply cannot trace the abusive transactions, which means that there will - no matter what we do - be a lot of counterfeit money in the game. We are going to have to look at individual cases, and take action on the based on suspicion rather than hard evidence. As said though, we wont be able to catch all culprits. We strongly suggest that all of you law abiding citizens should be a little suspicious on offers from people you know not to have had much money in the past. We also suggest that you hold on to your most precious items. We'd appreciate any form of anonymous tips. Submit them as secret bug reports. Those who have abused the system in any way, and now regret it, are free to do the same. In fact, it's better, since we will punish and possibly ban players who are later found guilty of this scam. Thanks for listening, and for understanding.