A new solution, a new secret
Holly Longdale: Carlos and Kyle basically said holy [she spells it out] S-H-I-T — [they laugh and she pauses, then just says it] pronounced “shit,” I believe — it works. The excitement just among us, we didn’t want to blow it.
My opinion — and the team as they talked about it saw the value and agreed — was that if we put it on beta, the surprise and the nostalgia is gone, because everyone sees it, and it’s like — oh, yeah, a thing.
Carlos Mora: We had a couple close calls. One player had taken their character back way back when and had logged their character out on the island when it was there originally. We’re talking years and years ago.
Longdale: No way.
Mora: We got it fixed and we got it working and just turned it off to where players couldn’t zone into it, so that way they wouldn’t see it.
Well, that one character was still logged out there. So they logged into it, and they posted on the forums: “Oh, look, look what I found, it’s there, it’s all working!”
Longdale: Screenshot, screenshot, screenshot.
Mora: I had to go on the forums and deliberately sidetrack the thread, talking about all these other things really quick, and I got a whole bunch of other people talking about other things.
Longdale: “That looks photoshopped.” [They laugh.]
Mora: They said something along the lines of, “No, no, this is the character I made in 2007.” I’m like, “2007! See, that’s back from then.”
People got where I was going and understood there was something fishy going on, but they couldn’t quite tell what it was.
Fooling their own gamers
GamesBeat: Did you end up apologizing to the player later?
Mora: I did. After it launched, they sent me a private message, and they were like, that was the coolest thread ever.
Kyle Vallée: You were like, hey, look over here! Shiny thing!
Longdale: Carlos brought up this historical thing, of a cat that was dying … was it pepper?
Mora: During beta there was a bug, there was this little house pet cat, and there was a bug if you fed it pepper too many times, it would go into the dead state and you couldn’t get it out. It started this whole online thing, this story where the player is like, I killed my cat because I fed it too much pepper.
They made these [forum] signatures that were RIP Patches the Cat. This person had that signature, so I’m like, “Oh, I remember Patches! Yeah! RIP! Oh, yeah!” to deviate it that way, and it did.
Vallée: It was a total derail.
Mora: Thirty people were all like, yeah, I remember Patches! And they started posting the threads and it completely derailed that way.
[We don’t have a screenshot of Patches’ death-by-pepper. So here’s a video of a cat cuddling with a Dr. Pepper.]
Longdale: Thank you, Patches!