unforum

[Almijisti]

I'm surprised that no one here went to the con.

Anyway, what's up with the Nereid Communications stuff? It's listed as OOG, but there seems to be something going on there that's pretty sophisticated for a game jack.

[stacey]

It's listed as OOG with a question mark, meaning it's not 100% certain either way. If Nereid were in-game, it would make more sense for the Triton Enterprises site to have a matching press release about three of its employees being dead. However, one has not been posted so far.

Since there is not a match, it seems more likely that the person running the Nereid site isn't the same person as the one running the other sites. This would make it a very sophisticated gamejack indeed. The site required programming experience to make, though no expensive over-the-counter tools have been used as with the main Haas sites.

If it is a gamejack, this has interesting implications. The product the ARG advertised is a "roleplaying game" where the player community will have "involvement in improving and expanding the game." An excellent gamejack that doesn't contradict the gaming manual might grow to be considered part of the historical canon by the players and/or MSL itself.

A friend of mine went to Wizard World. He said they had graphics displayed on monitors and a couple of guys in devil/angel alien costumes but not much else. The people at the booth seemed cordial enough, but the discussion was limited since they had no product to sell as of yet.

[Gupfee]

You're getting your terminology mixed up.

A "gamejack" is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate, to draw attention away from a genuine ARG with a fake site for the purpose of disrupting or taking over the game.

What we have with Nereid I believe is a grassroots game--an attempt to pick up the ball where Mind Storm Labs dropped it, and continue the story they started with the Ethan Haas sites. This is more like fan fiction, and is meant to expand the game and contribute, instead of disrupt. Not that they could disrupt a game that was halted dead in its tracks, but I hope you get the meaning.

[stacey]

No, you're quite right. I think there were a lot of people who wanted more "closure" than they got on August 1st. It makes sense to me that somebody would take it upon themselves to make it happen. Grassroots is probably a better term for it if that's the case.

[Nighthawk]

Like I stated in a post on the AO site: the Triton Enterprises website broke the "fourth wall" by directly linking to the Alpha Omega website. The effectively took themselves "out of game" and in to the real world that is the AO site.

I wasn't expecting them to update that site no matter what happened. Same goes for the Mezin blog and the main EHWR site. It had to basically start over.

I consider NerComm either "fan fiction" (if its not official) or a sort of reboot (if it is official), but there's no confirmation either way.

[Almijisti]

Crap; NerComm looks interesting, but it's got all the encryption and code whatzits that I don't have the time or patience for. I guess I'll sit on the sidelines and see what others come up with. It's a pretty interesting development, nonetheless.

As for the "breaking the 4th wall" issue, the whole AO thing still seems a bit odd; retailers and distributors still have never heard anything about it. I assume this means it would be sold online only through their website, but that cuts potential sales drastically and it means the company would assume a fair amount of risk that would normally be absorbed by the retailers (which is most of the reason why retail sales of anything even exists). It's all very odd, but then this whole thing has been a series of incredible coincidences (timing of the ARG with 1-18-08 teaser release; alleged Paramount claim of copyright infringement; use of ethan haas name, etc.) and even weirder execution by the PMs.

I still haven't even figured out what the mystery code was. I assume it's not Divinus and it's not 54312 since the former is a place in the AO game and the other was used in the EHWR ARG. Did anyone ever get that?

[stacey]

It's not clear to me what's up with the "code" business either. It's only likely to become clear after the Alpha Omega online store opens.

[RA]

The AO official game site has been offline for almost a day now for maintenance (an AO logo and message displayed the site was down). Just recently, it appears there is an authentication log in window that asks for your login and password. Not quite sure if that's just part of the site maintenance or not.

[Bruce]

AO Site

[RAWH]

Re: AO Site

[Nighthawk]

I come from a world where being down for 30 minutes means you're out of business.

Being down for a full day, especially for a fledgling company trying to drum up interest, is unimaginable.

They don't have test servers, no deployment strategy, no redundancy, no load tests... Their network operations people (or person, I'm guessing) is a train wreck.

I wish them the best of luck in being successful, but this is not the way to do it.

[waitress#2]

Hopefully they get the site back up by the time GenCon Indy starts. I think it starts tomorrow and I know that they got some new members from Wizard World.

[kolixela]

Mind Storm is at con, the store is going online, the site is being updated, that would likely be why they were off for a while. Necromm is a gamejack but a well designed one, it's also unauthorised..

for sake of those who have this thread subscribed ill post the message I posted in the mindstorm message.


Well Day 1 of Gencon is concluded and I have a fair number of answers related to the whole ethan haas alpha omega thing.

1: This was not designed to be an ARG, the creators hadn't encountered the term previously, it was simply a way to get people who would be interested in a little digging to have a fun way to find some information about the game in a non unique game.

2: 8-1-07: Wow.. well that's the big thing here eh? From what I gather the whole issue was completely unintentional, the site upload was being handled externally, there were a few issues with that and they are as unhappy about how the day went as the rest of us are.

For the Future: well.. the crew was awesome, I met Van (i'll not reveal his secret identity for reasons ill explain later) and got a little more info...

We missed several things, several pages have had changes that were not found that contain more information, there are several more sites that have not been uncovered; I don't have the information on those sites for good reason however they did let me know that the forumers here have missed something.. There are sites not spoken of on unfiction (yes, they are watching us here ) that are "community related" that are "used commonly" that have not been found and reported that include more information. I assume they are referncing something relating to My Space or Live Journal etc. (no time to check till after con) We have missed updates to previously found pages.

the divinus page; they are aware of the fact we have the site address, as to if the page will be posted it's currently "maybe"

ethan's journals; there are more of them, THE WATERMARK WORD IS NOT A CLUE, it was apparantly part of the paper on which the journal pages were written that doesn't show to the naked eye, it's an unintentional red herring (verified by ethan himself - the journal writer that is) I did comment about more of the pages being released and it did seem to meet with a positive comment so I'd keep a close look.

Internal delays have caused some issues within the game that cascaded into causing problems within the Alt reality story, there are 3 minds behind this game they are making the game, setting up the con stuff, testing the game, designing histories and doing all of the work for the Alt reality story so understandably an issue in one area can cause issues in another.

The 2 cons seem to have taken up a lot of their time lately, after speaking for about 2 hours there's want from the company to continue to get players involved in the AO universe and Van said that we can expect a continuation of the story in one form or the other (there was talk of written media of several forms that all sound great) we may see a continuation on the ARG aspects of ethan and we may not, perhaps they may find some way to subsidise adding a Puppetmaster to the pay roll, we know that perplexcity did it with the cards to play the game, perhaps we may see clues leading to journal pages available via private mailorder (journal leads to online, online clues lead to new pages where you can purchase a journal packet with another page or two, a little background on some aspect of the game, etc) If so we might expect to see some cooler rare swag randomly in those packs or even some cool exclusive reward for those clever enough to help Van and possibly find out what is happening at Triton's now abandoned facility, there's a lot of cool possibilities.

Either way I'd say to give it a week or so while they get all done with Gencon stuff before looking around all that hardcore, it's not likely Van will get a chance to seek access with the Mezin in force now.

..Bix: Those at Mind Storm seemed awed by your abilities

Oh ya, and you were wrong! it's a 20% discount in the store

I know ^_^ I bought the first AO sourcebook; the store will go active soon, PDF version, hardback version, AO shirts and hats, Ethan haas was right shirts, even Triton Enterprises Golf Shirts (LOL read the description)
Expect store access online this weekend and several updates to the AO site in the coming weeks.

Combat demos start at the con tomorrow, I'm gonna check it out and see what it's like!

[sabaki12]

awesome cool update, kolixela...

I am extremely jealous since I am in Indy burbs yet won't be able to make it downtown.

AO store seems to be online now...

Did Van/they happen to mention anything connected to Nereid Communications? If that site is a gamejack (or a non-game-jack?!?!), it seems better planned out than the original. Would love to see something ARG-like fleshing out the "pre-history" of the AO universe...

[kolixela]

nerid is a game jack being done by a forumer, I am not revealing who it is because there's no reason to. I spoke with "Van" (Who actually told me he was van while talking with him) and "Ethan" (Who didn't say he was Ethan but did say that he wrote the journals, it is not Tom BTW tho the writing is similar) I specifically asked about Nerid (necromm.net) to see if they would say anything useful; they told me who made it (at least they told me who contacted them about taking over right around the time the site went online) and verified the site is completely Out of game.