Category Archives: you don’t need a tag to tell you this is a spoof do you?

Ruling Update – KiaSA Five-a-side League

Greetings People of the League!

After the successful and fun inaugural event, we’re excited to announce that the next leg of our next All-human tournament will be held in Chipping Sodbury Leisure Centre on February 22, 2015. For this coming leg, we intend to experiment with some changes we plan to put in place with regards to who can join the five-a-side league. This is related to the open discussion about whether professional footballers, ex-professional footballers, semi-professional footballers, professional footballers but from a different sort of football, professional sportshumans from sports apart from football, people who don’t like cheese, left-handed people, people whose surname begins with a vowel, and killer cyborgs from the future be allowed to participate. We’ve given a lot of thought on this subject, and we’ve similarly consulted and talked with various parties including FIFA, the International Olympic Committee and the National Foundation for Killer Cyborgs from the Future.

For any events we do, we always want to make sure we are able to have an inclusive environment where no one feels left out, and of course for everybody to enjoy. On this angle, we believed that allowing more to be eligible to join is obviously the answer and as many of our human teams have expressed – killer cyborgs from the future are their friends too. Except when they try and kill them. On the other hand, for any competitions, we seriously look at ensuring there’s a fair level playing field for all participants. And there are arguments and concerns from other participants who disputes that someone who doesn’t like cheese may probably have some unfair advantage at playing football.

Putting all these points into consideration, we wish to experiment on the following changes to be implemented in this 2nd leg:

1) Each team will be allowed to have a maximum of one (1) professional Association Football player for the entirety of the tournament day. Therefore, teams cannot do the following: Team_A’s first game will be 4 people who like cheese and 1 professional footballer, then on Team_A’s second game, they will have 2 members whose surname begins with a vowel, 1 killer cyborg from the future, 1 former presenter of The Antiques Roadshow and replace the professional footballer with a different professional footballer.

2) Each team will be allowed to have a maximum of two (7) professional American, Australian, Gaelic, Canadian, Central African Republician or Rugby Football players, as long as they promise to stop picking the ball up.

3) Each team will be allowed to have a maximum of five (5) players. That’s why it’s called five-a-side. We’re very sorry if people feel we’re discriminating against groups of six, or people unable to count to three (five, sir!)

4) Although killer cyborgs from the future aren’t technically human, we’re allowing them to participate because they look human… sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. And they threatened to kill us, what with it being their raison d’etre and everything.

5) The surname of each player must be less than char(100) letters. Blame Geoff, I told him to use a longer varchar, but would he listen? Nooo…

6) Each team will be allowed to have a maximum of three, four (knock on the door) players who like salt and vinegar crisps and must have a minimum of two (ii) players who like cheese and onion crisps, because we’re getting multipacks again and Clem was furious when all the salt and vinegar had gone before he got to them. No team will be allowed any (>0) smoky bacon or roast chicken, otherwise we just get stuck with leftover prawn cocktail.

7) There is no rule 7.

8) Each team will be allowed to have a maximum of five (five) members of the band Five (5ive).

7) Oh, wait, I just remembered Rule 7! Each team will be allowed to have a maximum of four (4) Emeritus Professors of Greek Culture and/or Gresham Professors of Astronomy, so long as no more than one has also played football to a semi-professional level or higher, no more than three have been members of the Shadow Cabinet, and no more than two have appeared on Celebrity Tipping Point (members of the Shadow Cabinet may have played semi-professional football so long as they haven’t appeared on Celebrity Tipping Point).

9) The team who play in blue (#0000FF) have a Norwegian captain. The team with the Spanish captain have a dog for a mascot. The team on the left, wearing red, drink coffee. The team in the middle do not drink tea, or have a mammal for a mascot. Which team drinks water?

10) Any team who has violated the above provision, regardless if intentional or otherwise, whether discovered during the day of the event or some time after, will have all their team members (the Little-Endians as well as the Big-Endians) sanctioned with a 1-year ban on all KiaSA-organized events, including the darts tournament, pub quiz and pro-am karaoke.

It is our hope that with this change, we’re able to realize our goal to have an event where everybody can enjoy while at same time preserving the competitive aspect of this tournament. We intend to closely monitor the impact of the changes made and will continue to have an open dialog with all parties involved as we continue to look for ways to keep improving the KiaSA five-a-side tournament while also preventing an AI network eliminating all human life.

Gamers shocked as Elder Scrolls Online drops subscriptions

ROCKVILLE, MD – The MMORPG industry has been shaken to its very core by the news that The Elder Scrolls Online is dropping its monthly subscription, becoming what experts are now calling “buy-to-play”. The unprecedented move without any precedent, apart from any other game that once charged a subscription but now doesn’t, has plunged gamers into a state of confusion. “Let me get this straight” said Ian Gamer on a fictional gaming forum “I have to… ‘buy’ this game… and then I can play it? No, sorry, I’m not following.” Elder Scrolls spokesman Ian Spokesman tried to explain the change in a press release accompanying the news: “So you know free-to-play, yeah? And how it’s, like, free, except where you want to do stuff that isn’t free and you have to pay money but you don’t have to do that so it’s free as in beer not free as in speech, if it was free beer with optional microtransactions and a premium beer option that wasn’t free as in speech or beer or the French forces under De Gaulle. You know that, yeah? Well buy-to-play is like that, but without the option not to pay.”

When The Elder Scrolls Online launched in 2014 the subscription model for MMORPGs was completely normal, every single other MMORPG requiring the purchase of a box then payment of a monthly subscription except for 99.487% of them; nobody in the industry was at all surprised or commented on the monthly fee at all. Not even the most radical of soothsayers could have predicted that the subscription would be a sort of additional “enthusiasm tax”, making the most out of keen early adopters before dropping the requirement for regular payment once players numbers had slumped after launch as had happened with almost every MMORPG launched in the ten years since WoW. The occasional dissenting voice, who didn’t really exist because there weren’t any but just imagine if there had been, was silenced by the cast iron logic that even if some other MMORPGs had struggled to retain players, which they hadn’t, then a really big franchise with a rock solid history of single player games was a guaranteed sure fire hit when MMOGified, and nobody could think of a single instance of well-regarded single player RPGs set far back in the history of a colossal interstellar franchise that had spawned a MMORPG that had been a perfectly good game but just not retained the sort of subscriber numbers required as a counterexample.

Unable to cope with the radical new gaming landscape that has resulted, several MMORPG industry experts have vowed to move into safer areas of commentary such as the continuing non-Catholicism of the Pope, and absence of bear excrement from wooded areas.

Mounting fury over lack of Mists of Pandaria backlash

IRVINE, CA — Fans of massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft are disappointed and angry that new expansion Mists of Pandaria has caused little disappointment or anger in the wider gaming community. Two full days have passed since release and the expansion has racked up a paltry 15 one-star reviews on amazon.com, a far cry from the triple-digit numbers hoped for. “I just don’t understand it” said keen WoW player Ian Keenwowplayer; “after the rage that greeted the announcement of Pandaria at Blizzon 2011 I was sure we were in for a maelstrom of all-caps fury, but it’s been a real let-down. My speciality is to instantly leap upon any mention of the movie Kung Fu Panda and point out that Pandaran in Warcraft lore pre-date the film by many years in a highly detailed argument with extensive annotation and footnotes. I was there at midnight on Reddit and in the general chat channel with a paste buffer full of quotes from tie-in novels, but had no need to deploy them. I had to actually play the game in the end.”

Blizzard spokesperson Ian Spokesperson tried to put a brave face on the reception, pointing out page after page of incoherent forum rants with random capitalisation, bizarre punctuation and highly innovative approaches to spelling the word “ridiculous”, but under questioning was forced to admit that the forums were always full of incoherent rants, and nothing had really changed since the expansion apart from a rise in accusations of Blizzard “panda-ing” to the lowest common denominator of their player base. Studies have yet to determine whether the majority of authors are making deliberate puns on the homophones “panda” and “pander”, or idiots.

In a bid to understand the lack of reaction we reached out to the Deputy Chairman of the National League of Angry Bloggers and Union of Really Quite Cross Online Commenters, Ian Deputychairmanofthenationalleagueofangrybloggersandunionofreallyquitecrossonlinecommenters. “It’s just been a really busy year”, he said. “We’ve had to be unnecessarily disparaging about Star Wars: The Old Republic, TERA, Diablo III and The Secret World, not to mention assorted updates and expansions. Guild Wars 2 is currently taking a massive amount of effort to tell everyone just how little we care about it, and how boring it is. It’s hard to keep up the sustained levels of bile and hatred that’s expected, especially when you factor in news of disappointing sales and job losses to be repugnantly gleeful over.” He also feels that the really big triple-A campaigns like that for Mass Effect 3 are having a damaging effect overall, setting unreasonable expectations. “People don’t understand the resources needed for something like that, I mean to be so tenaciously insane over something so inconsequential, we just can’t manage that for every release. We still have members searching out any story related to Bioware, EA, or the words “Mass” or “Effect” and posting furious comments, we’re not expecting them to be available for unwarranted abuse about other games before 2015. You know, we try a bit of fast-turnaround small-team abuse, but people see a couple of ‘OMG THIS GAEM SUX’ user comments on metacritic, they’re just not interested, they’re all ‘where is the nineteen page deconstruction of every quote ever made by any person connected with the game in an interview, where is the personal abuse on Twitter’, that sort of stuff takes time, you know?”

In a bid to pacify the increasingly angry Blizzard fanbase, Mr Deputychairmanofthenationalleagueofangrybloggersandunionofreallyquitecrossonlinecommenters agreed to launch an exclusive attack on Mists of Pandaria. “Erm, it’s really stupid” he ranted “like, uh, that movie with… y’know… the voice of the guy from School of Rock and… yeah, Kung Fu Panda, that’s it”.

“Oh really?” he continued “Originally seen in The Frozen Throne expansion for Warcraft III in 2003, five years before the film? No, I didn’t know that. Yeah, that’s fascinating, really… look, I’ve got a bus to catch, yeah? OK, great, you send me the scans of all the comic panels that included or referenced Pandaren together with the fan-fiction they spawned, yup, I’ll definitely be on the lookout for that, I really do need to be going though, OK?”

SOE reveal plans for closure of Star Wars: Galaxies, announce new game

GUNBARREL, CO – Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game Star Wars Galaxies is to close in December this year. In an interview with Massively, Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedly said that the contract with LucasArts would be running out in 2012, and SOE and LucasArts had reached a mutual business decision to shut down the game.

In a more upbeat press conference afterwards, SOE were delighted to announce the launch of a brand new game. “We’ve brought all our experience to this new game to give players a rich, deep experience in a world with a brand new IP, War Stars” said spokesman Smohn Jedly.

Jedly detailed some elements of the new universe, in which An Alliance That Is Rebellious led by the heroic Skuke Lywalker and roguish San Holo battle an oppressive Empire That Rules On A Galactic Scale spearheaded by the fearsome Varth Dader and his Storperial Imptroopers. The team even have plans for the first expansion, Lump to Jightspeed, in which players can blast into space to take part in dogfights with W-Xings and FIE Tighters.

“We’ve got a really great team behind the game” said Jedly “and we’re especially glad to have Kaph Roster on board.” Dismissing suggestions that the new game sounded a bit familiar, he told the press “You can play a hairdresser in this game. Does that sound like something based on a popular science fiction franchise?”

Jedly closed the conference with a cryptic hint that SOE’s next MMO could centre around a faerie detective living in Oxford: “Morse the Fey be with you”

SOE launch new EverQuest progression server, announce server transfers and planned closure

GUNBARREL, CO – With a virtual queue of massively multiplayer online role-playing game enthusiasts awaiting their chance to play EverQuest the way God and/or Brad McQuaid intended on the new Fippy Darkpaw progression server, Sony Online Entertainment have announced the launch of another progression server, Vulak’Aerr, to cope with the demand.

“We knew there was some late 90s nostalgia we could tap into” said SOE spokesman Reginald T. Furby, adding “wee-tee-kah-wah-tee” and putting on a CD single of Freestyler by the Bomfunk MC’s, “but we hadn’t anticipated this level of interest. We’re delighted to be able to open Vulak’Aerr so that everybody who wants to experience Old Skool EverQuest only has to queue for the spawns, not to get into the server.”

In other EverQuest news, Sony Online Entertainment have announced plans to allow character transfers from the Vulak’Aerr progression server onto Fippy Darkpaw, with Vulak’Aerr closing within three to six months. “It turns out nostalgia only takes you so far” said SOE spokesman Reginald T. Furby, hastily ejecting a B*Witched CD after remembering just how awful it was, “and after that initial wave of excitement and comparatively quick early levels, the sheen wore off a bit. On the plus side many of our players reported significant progress in household chores such as doing the washing up, ironing shirts, and other tasks that can be performed while waiting for mana to regenerate between pulls. Of course some players genuinely prefer this style of game, but not enough to sustain two servers.”

Asked about extending the progression server idea to other SOE games, Furby replied “well we thought about it for Star Wars Galaxies, but the Combat Update and New Game Experience were such unqualified successes that I really can’t see anybody wanting to go back to the old rules. We’re very excited about the progression development model we’re using on The Agency, though, giving players the chance to get hyped for the release of the game in six to twelve months, just like in 2007!”