Hey, everyone,

I wanted to apologize for the slowdown yesterday.  We had asked our host to look into something for us, and we failed to communicate as clearly as we intended about when we wanted that to be looked into.

That being said, please plan on PMOG getting a massage on 24 Aug 2008 around 4PM GMT (early morning in the United States and Canada).

This downtime may take up to 4 hours.

Thanks again for your patience, and we appreciate you Passively Playing with us!

Yours,
Joe Wagner
@burdenday
PMOG Player Support Liaison

A player by the name of olympian has began soliciting suggestions for events for the first PMOG Olympics!

Which Association will you represent?

Check out this thread in the forums to submit your own event, or for the latest news.

So far, there have been a number of suggestions for events including chava’s “Portal Racing”, where players race to get through a string of 25 portals, and davidsev’s Speed Mine Clearing where players compete to clear 50 mines from their profiles as fast as they can.

PMOG Tycoon Zous has already donated 5,000 datapoints to the Olympic pot, so submit your event ideas and keep up to date with this exciting community event.

As always, if you would like your community event to be highlighted on this blog, e-mail community at pmog dot com!

Hello, PMOGers!

Between 10pm-12am PDT, 11 Aug 2008, there may be up to a period of downtime while we perform maintenance on one of our databases.  This downtime may last for up to three hours.  During this time all PMOG services and functions will be offline.

If you encounter any difficulties after this maintenance period, please e-mail help at pmog dot com.

Thanks,
Joe Wagner
(@burdenday)
PMOG Player Support Liaison

The Tubenauts are back after a week hiatus to bring you Episode 6: Two Shoats, One Crate! Your hosts lehall, tonedef, pixielo, and ethdem discuss benefactoring, toolbar version .420, Zous’s PRisk and have an interview with GameLayer’s very own Marc Adams, Senior Programmer for PMOG.

Tune in to hear all about the latest PMOGeon happenings, along with a sneak preview of some things to come in version .5!

You can also always subscribe to the show via iTunes or leave a note on the official forum thread.

If you have any other PMOG Community happenings you’d like to have featured on the PMOG News Blog, e-mail them in to community at pmog dot com.

Zous, PMOG Tycoon, proprietor of Zous’s PMOG Lottery and co-producer of the Tubenauts has decided to take PMOG to the next level with yet another venture. In the coming weeks, PRisk (PMOG Risk) will be taking the Passive World by storm.

Which association will rule the Passive World?

What is PRisk? Good question! From Zous himself, “PRisk is a modified game of Risk. There will be six Teams, each representing one of the Associations. Play will occur following standard Risk Rules (with some Passive variation).” More can be read on the forums in this thread, if you’d like to get involved or learn more about PRisk.

So far, the teams have been selected and the board is pending its official set up.

Zous stresses, “I want people to know that everyone can play, even if they’re not on the Team. Everyone’s actions will help out their team of choice, even if they’re not on that team in particular.”

PRisk will take the actions of each Association in order to act as Battles between the Teams.  The more a Team stays true to their Association, the better the Team does in their Battle, and the more likely they’ll beat out the other Teams.  In the end, one Association will take over the World!

If you’re a little confused, or you want to learn more about Risk in general, you can take Starryice’s mission “Risk - The Ultimate Quest for Domination”, which should help out.

If you know of another player or happening that you’d like to have featured here on the PMOG News Blog, please e-mail community at pmog dot com.

We’re learning to never say never. Despite our previous post, which stated our next release would be Firefox 3 only, we have worked hard the past week to leave those remaining Firefox 2 users with one final build of the PMOG toolbar — Version .420.

This release should make your PMOG experience more secure. Additionally, there are a number of bug fixes, including restoring functionality to the toolbar messaging system and ending the conflict with multiple overlays breaking one another.

This upgrade is highly recommended for all PMOG users and from the reviews we’ve received from those helping us test, a very solid release.

A special thanks to salmontickler for volunteering and putting in a number of hours testing this with us!

Greetings, PMOGeons,

PMOG will be undergoing some deep tissue massages in the early morning hours (US time) of 28 Jul - 30 Jul 2008.  These interruptions will last anywhere between 2 and 4 hours.

This downtime will help to ensure PMOG continues to improve its stability.  Prior to the past week, PMOG had been running strong, and we hope to return to that model performance.

If you live in the UK or Europe this will more likely affect you, and for that we apologize.

Thanks again for giving us the opportunity to improve upon playing the web.

Any extended outages will be noted on this blog.

Yours,
Joe Wagner
PMOG Player Support Liaison
(@burdenday)

Hello, Passive-ists,

I apologize first and foremost for the lack of updates.  As of 26 Jul 2008, 12:00 PDT, we are experiencing more unscheduled downtime.

There was a database failure earlier this morning, and we’ve been working on migration ever since.  The process continually gets close to completing, only to again fail.  We are doing everything possible to get PMOG back up and running for your playing pleasure this weekend.  However, it may take this afternoon for the server to complete this process.

We acknowledge our uptime has been a little less than ideal lately, and strive to provide a more stable gaming environment for you in the future.  Know that many of our staff are putting in countless hours of overtime, daily, to make PMOG great.

Thank you again for your patience, and for playing PMOG.

Yours,
Joe Wagner
PMOG Player Support Liaison
(@burdenday)

As of 15:00 PDT, 25 Jul 2008, we are currently undergoing some unscheduled maintanance to our servers.

We hope to be back up and running soon, and anticipate this downtime lasting no more than one hour.

We will keep you updated here and apologize for the lack of notice.

We just released PMOG version .419 and it’s awesome. Soon, PMOG .5 will be released, and you will only be able to play PMOG on Firefox 3 (or Flock 2).

For PMOG .5, we move crates and mines and portals and missions into XUL overlays.  XUL overlays? Basically, PMOG events will be more of a part of the browser window, where we can make more rich interaction.  Currently PMOG events are a part of a page you’re looking at.  For example here is a PMOG portal on top of the US Postal Service Web page:

Good luck on that insurance claim on your package - thank you Mrbubbles!

That PMOG portal is a part of the HTML of that web page. We pasted in a bit of PMOG at the end of the file that makes the Postal Service web page appear. All the links and datapoints and allies and rivals of PMOG are little HTML packages injected into the pages you’ve been browsing with our extension.

So HTML injections were an exciting way to bring you plenty of PMOG through Firefox for the first part of this year. For the rest of this year, we’re looking forward to some hottt new tech.

Firefox 3 was just released in June 2008. It manages memory better. It loads pages faster. And it has expanded tools for extension developers to make cool stuff in the browser. Maybe even cooler than canvascape though that is still pretty cool.

Taking advantage of the eXULent display powers of Firefox 3 (or FF3 here) requires a PMOG rewrite. We can devise an extension that supports both FF2 and FF3 players at once, where the same types of PMOG events happen. But for the size of a company we are, and the scale of the things we are eager to build, we can’t write two PMOGs at once. There can be only one.

Marc Adams

The best thing: this shift from FF2 to FF3 will actually help us build fun faster. I asked Marc Adams, our Senior Developer why he was excited to ditch support for Firefox 2, he replied: “FF3 allows us to prototype new ideas quickly both visually and from a data perspective. What required extensive coding in FF2 is reduced significantly in FF3.”

Here at PMOG we live a lot of our lives online; we’re honored that you folks invite us to play with you throughout the day. We expect this upcoming .5 release will give you more reliable, more flexible, more p mog.  So if you haven’t already, see if you can give FF3 a try. Hopefully it will works for your playful life online.