Greetings Pmogeons! We’ve got some exciting new character art that I’d love to share with you. You should be seeing this on the website soon. The art was created by an artist named Colin Adams and it’s a more cartoon-like take on Steampunk. Here’s a preview of the Bedouin association:
PMOG Welcomes Flock 2 Users!
We here at GameLayers would like to extend a warm welcome to all Flock 2 users who may have just discovered PMOG, the game that lets you Play the Web! I am Joe “burdenday” Wagner, PMOG’s Player Support Liaison. I’m here to act as a conduit between you and any and all things PMOG.
As you’re getting started with PMOG, I’d like to provide a few tips to inculcate you into the passive world of online gaming:
Once again, welcome to PMOG! We’re so very glad you’re joining us on this journey through the web!
Yours,
Joe Wagner
PMOG Player Support Liaison
(@burdenday)
Need help? email help at pmog dot com!
Update: 0.5.121 is in the tubes, it fixes a few little problems that sprang up from this update.
You spoke, we listened. We at GameLayers would like to thank everyone who provided feedback regarding the recent visual changes to PMOG. With that feedback in mind, we’d like to introduce you to PMOG 0.5.12.
Datapoints have returned to the toolbar! Easily monitor your point earning as you surf. And, if you’d like to see your current progress towards your next level, the mini profile overlay will give you the lowdown on what you still still need to complete.
DP Return next to the new Shoppe icon
The Shoppe has set up shop in the PMOG toolbar! You can now buy up to 100 tools with just a few clicks, and PMOG does the math for you.
Puzzle Crates are now available for Benefactors level 15 and up! If you have laid that many crates, you now have an option to lock a crate with a question and answer of your choosing — a great way to make someone wrack their brains for your treasure! Check your user profile for a breakdown of your levels for each of the associations, and see Merci’s related post on the subject.
For more detailed information, including information on what bugs were fixed, what other improvements have been made and a further rundown of new features, you can delve into my patch notes post on the forums.
Oh, and keep that feedback coming. The forums are open 24/7, and so is our mailbox, feedback at pmog dot com.
Huzzah! We’ve been changing a lot about PMOG lately and releasing those changes to you, the players, rather than selfishly keeping them. This means that you can continue to give us feedback as you have been. Today I’m writing to tell you about some changes to the way levels and associations work that will be trickling into the daily play experience.
First, some rambling about design imperatives
I have been trying for months to think of a better system than our current association calculation. On one hand, I didn’t want make yet another MMO that punishes multi-classing; on the other hand, I neglected the years of game design research that examines the emotional and psychological tie between the player and their preferred type. So we have a radical and yet imperfect current system in which the player’s assocation is decided by their tool use and recalculated every 72 hours.
As it turns out, this is a less-than-satisfying way to game. Not only do you get progressively fewer tools the more you level up, but then once you’re entrenched in the war between Chaos and Order it’s notoriously hard to stay who you are. (Feel free to mine me for that one.)
What the blazes am I rambling on about, you ask? Fear not. I totally have a point.
Really, I do have a point
We have an interim solution to the issue of not being able to purchase tools in the Shoppe outside of your association. Now you’ll be able to purchase un-associated tools at a higher price than the tools of your associations. But the Future holds even more excitement!
A new way to level up
PMOG associations will now be calculated only by tool use and you’ll be able to level up separately in each association rather than having a meta-level that is nothing more than metaphorically significant. This means that you’ll be a Level 14 Pathmaker, a Level 10 Benefactor, a Level 9 Destroyer, and so forth.
But the best part of this change is that, in keeping with the experimentation we’re doing with the interface, we’re also prototyping new game features. Now you’ll be able to level up in each association separately and get access to new abilities as you do!
The first new tool: Puzzle Crates
The first new tool that we’re releasing should only be available to Level 15 Benefactors. It’s called “Puzzle Crates.” If you deploy a crate as usual and have this option available to you, you’ll be able to “lock this crate” using Question-and-Answer fields. For example, you can lock 10 DP in a crate and ask people to answer: What are shoats made of? If the answer “bacon” is correctly answered, then the player who came across your crate will be able to loot it. If the player does not have the answer, they can “dismiss” the puzzle crate and will not have a chance to unlock it again. 
Much more to come…
So the new association/leveling system is not yet fully realized, but in the spirit of Beta and developing in conjuction with our community we’ve decided to release Puzzle Crates and show you your new levels as part of the version .5.12 release. In the future expect new tools to be released using a similar schema.
As always, thanks so much for playing PMOG: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game.
If you are over level 5 in PMOG, you can now set a “Minimum Level” required for someone to take your Mission in PMOG.
Revenge has never been easier. In fact you can pre-emptively tag those nasty mine layers with some St. Nicks – now in version 0.5.11, the Play: Attack menu has gotten another option.
More PMOG Keyboard Shortcuts than ever. More pictures of other players appearing when you find their Missions. Tighter, more better looking PMOG overlays.
And, you can now leave mines, crates, portals, lightposts, anything on nearly any URL online. That’s right – you want to make a portal to a jpg? Or leave a mine on an MP3? How about some Flash? We’re down with that! Poke at your toolbar, wherever you are! Then use Summon or Invite someone to enjoy your PMOGGery 
Well met, Passive-ist,
As you’ve likely noticed, PMOG 0.5.1 is centered around the themes of “Play, Explore and Create” I recently sat down with Merci Victoria Grace, PMOG’s game designer, to ask some questions posed by you, the community, and some of our testers, about this fundamental change to the look, feel and use of the PMOG toolbar and some other recent changes.
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burdenday: The PMOG toolbar looks completely different, why the drastic change?
Merci Victoria Grace: PMOG is a casual MMO, but from our initial toolbar you wouldn’t know that. PMOG offers short, periodic sessions of play and while we do have a persistent world it’s not a world that you’re ever punished for leaving.
As a very young company, we began with what we know best: hardcore gaming. And we made a hardcore interface that’s effectively inscrutable to anyone who has never loaded up World of Warcraft. The cognitive dissonance from having a hardcore interface on a casual game experience is evident in our still-small (yet awesome) community. We know that there’s a demand for a game you can play on the web, about the web, but as first-time entrepreneurs we didn’t know initially how to approach product creation. The last year has been quite a lesson about creating a product for your intended audience and not yourself.
When I first began designing PMOG I looked at native web actions: What are we already doing online? People were already making content about websites on websites, people were already pranking each other through links (ever been sent unknowingly to goetse? then you know my inspiration for portals), and people were already sending each other e-cards and buying virtual gifts.
In the last version of the PMOG experience I’d distilled those behaviors into the tools we play with today. In the current version of PMOG, I’ve distilled those tools into their primary actions: “Play” “Explore” and “Create.”
We want millions of people to play PMOG; this new toolbar is our way of making it more simple to understand how to do that.
burdenday: Wow, thanks! Along these sames lines, I noticed there are two new features: “Jaunt” and “Summon.” What made these come about?
MVG: Jaunting is a really just a new way to use portals; it’s lot like stumbling on something. Instead of waiting for a portal to appear during your casual web browsing, pressing “Jaunt” will take the player to a highly-rated portal. That way the player gets to go to a new site, and can open the portal they find if they so choose. Merely jaunting doesn’t earn you any Seer classpoints, it’s still only opening the portal that does.
Also in this release if you have any queued missions, you’ll also be able to “Venture Forth,” which will immediately start you on a random queued mission.
burdenday: “Venture Forth” seems very useful; I never seem to get around to taking those queued missions. Merci, a portion of our community has mentioned the “Steampunk” aspect of PMOG seems to be less emphasized with this new toolbar. Will it make a resurgence? Or is PMOG getting a new theme?
MVG: As of yet, PMOG is not getting a new theme. I still think that Steampunk is an intersection of technology and romance that lends itself beautifully to play on the web. The new icons represent a move toward a more usable interface in general.
burdenday: And last but certainly not least, can we expect more features in the future?
MVG: Holy blueberries, Batman! There are going to be so many new features for PMOG you’ll have to mine our actual office to stop us. But… please don’t.
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Many thanks to Merci for taking the time to answer these questions. “Play, Explore and Create” represent a change to PMOG that might take a little getting used to, but will ultimately lead to Playing the Web in completely new more interactive and intuitive ways!
If you have any questions for a specific developer you’d like answered in an interview like this, email them to community at pmog dot com. Also, we welcome your feedback on the new interface and would love to hear your thoughts, just send them to feedback at pmog dot com, and I will get them to the appropriate party.
Thanks for playing PMOG and taking this wonderfully exciting journey through the Internet with us!
Yours,
Joe Wagner
PMOG Player Support Liaison
(@burdenday)
A completely redesigned PMOG emerged today on the public internets. What can you do with PMOG now? Play, Explore, Create
Play is for quick fun: leaving a mine to trick someone, or a gift for the next player sharing your web surfing trail.
Explore is where you can see new sides of the web. Click Jaunt to visit a random web site with a Portal on it. Venture Forth pulls from your list of Queued Missions and starts you on a web adventure.
Create is where you can build Lightposts and Missions, and Portals to connect two web sites.
Beyond play, create, explore, you can use new social functions built into PMOG:
There’s more new fun secreted away in this release:
Experiment with the new PMOG! Read Joe’s notes in the Forums. And, play, explore, create!
IndieCade, the independent games festival, has selected PMOG: The Passively Multiplayer Online Game as a finalist in the 2008 competition. Yay! We’re honored to be included in the festival.
As a result of PMOG’s inclusion, I’ll be speaking this weekend at E for All in Los Angeles, where Indiecade has a booth.
On Friday, October 3, I’ve agreed to speak to students from the Los Angeles Unified School District in the Education area. I’ve decided to talk mostly about getting seed funding to make online games, and why the internet p0wns the traditional game industry. I’ll be sure to post my slides after the talk and link to them here.
On Saturday in the IndieCade booth around 1pm I’ll be giving an artist’s talk about PMOG. Designing PMOG has been a challenge and a joy, so it’s something I love to talk about.
I hope to see some PMOG players there!
Big things are cooking at GameLayers HQ! In the meantime, we’re pushed another release today: version 0.5.02. It’s a smaller point release, and it offers some fabulous new message functionality:
click on the scroll icon to send a PMail message and notice that you can tab between the message form and the address line, then fill out an address and hit enter – fast and smooth in-game messaging!
Here are some of the other features and fixes in this release:
- The toolbar no longer redirects to ext.pmog.com, meaning fewer lost crates, portals and mines
- Windows Vista users with the Aero Interface enabled will now be able to see the background of the PMOG toolbar.
- The XUL overlays now appear in three separate columns, which should help some Linux users who are facing rendering issues*
Note: This means not all overlays will automatically show up in the far right corner of the browser; some will be more centered or left-centered.
Those notes come from Joe Wagner’s post on the PMOG news forum, where the upgrading conversation continues 
And, as ever, you can find the latest version of PMOG on addons.mozilla.org.