Community News from 2005

Community News from other years:
2010
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2008
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2006
2004

A crime wave is striking Popomundo, as the impoverished and disgruntled masses (“The Does”) take to desperate solutions to their situation. Read More»

Some places are worse hit than others - truly abysmal parks, to name one of the worst places, are to be avoided if you are a wealthy pop star with loads of money in your pockets and personal safety important to you. Obviously the Law obedience of the workers (which can be viewed in the City Details page) is important. The current crime danger for each locale is shown in it's “header” as a rating for Law & Order.

Skill dependent interactions are now shown with a different background color than interactions that are not depending on any skill. Read More»

More and more the outcome of your actions are becoming dependent of what skills you have. Therefore it might be a good idea to focus on the skills you consider valuable just for your character.

There is no official guideline showing which skills that are most useful. It's all up to you to decide!

Skill names are now clickable in your list of skills. Clicking them brings up details about the skill. You can always read the details of your own skills, and the details of public skills on other characters. Read More»

A note: Collecting skills that you don't bother to learn to a significant level is pointless. Skills are useless until you have some level of proficiency. In the future you might even forget skills that you have no proficiency in and do not use. Don't bite off more than you can chew.

From now on it is a lot less profitable to play covers on stage.

We are now adding an entirely new way of learning new skills: Find a Master or Mistress, become their apprentice and start trying to learn one of their skills. This can be a very time consuming process, but for some skills it will be the only way of learning them (and there will be much more such skills in the future). Read More»

The Skills chapter in the Help has been updated with full information about this.

Of course, some of you might ask how the Master will learn the skill in the first place. Well, there will be ways… ;)

From now on, some skills will be classified as “secret”, in addition to the existing classification of Public and Private. Secret skills are private skills that are entirely invisible to others than yourself. Theft is a typical secret skill. Read More»

In the future there may be special ways of detecting even secret skills, but currently there are none.

So, you will have Public skills, which are shown wil stars and so forth to everyone, and regular private skills which are shown by the name (but not the level of skill you have) just like today. And then there will be secret private skills, which are not shown at all to others than yourself.

Nasty, filthy, devilish little players have sabotaged other people's locales by taking all their jobs held by Does and quitting them. This is no longer possible since ALL players now must hold a job for at least ONE WEEK before they can quit.

As a special gift to our kind VIPs who help us pay the bills we're handing out an early Christmas Gift: THE BOOKING ASSISTANT! Read More»

This nifty little booking function will make your lives much easier.

Simply select the date, time, and city you wish to perform in and you'll get a list of clubs suitable for you. Each club comes listed with a Quality/State rating and its genre strength so it will be easy to select exactly where you want to perform.

Thanks again for your kind support.

IMPORTANT: This function won't give anyone an unfair advantage in the game. It simply makes scheduling tours a lot easier.

The charts now hold all Artist Rankings in the game. The chart returns a maximum of hundred hits, so if you don't see the artist you're looking for try selecting a specific region. The region an artist belongs to is determined by your Band Leader's city residency.

You can now link to your own CD-Covers. We're also going to update the layout/navigation on the whole artist page over the next couple of days so don't be alarmed when things start moving around.

There's a lot of pointless bickering going on in the forum these days. We suggest the guilty parties take a deep breath and make a conscious effort to act a bit nicer to their fellow Popomundians. The path you're going down now will only end in forum bans or even worse… pianos falling from the sky.

Today we have limited the tour buses booking function to stick to the new travel routes. This will make the scheduling of your tours more challenging since you can no longer move your buses all over the place. Read More»

There will soon be a map available where you can see the network of highways. When the political system breaks through it will be up to you players to develop this network further.

To make up for the increased difficulty with moving your buses we've made the travel times shorter. And for now you will not have to worry about getting stuck in the customs either.

Head down to the local highway, smile, and stick out your thumb. This is the new way of travelling in Popomundo. Read More»

Each city in the game now offers Travel Routes. These are highways which all land based travels must follow from now on.

If you wish to hitch a ride to another town simply move to the route you wish to take and wait there for a bus to drive by. Keep in mind that some of these routes are quite long and can lock up your character for a long time. So you're most likely best off if you only hitchhike short distances.

On Monday this coming week we'll also limit the tour buses booking function to stick to these new travel routes. This will make the scheduling of your tours more challenging since you can no longer move your buses all over the place. As it is now the network of highways is somewhat limited. When the political system has left Melvin's hands it will be up to the players to develop it further.

To make up for the increased difficulty with moving your buses we're making the travel times shorter. All of you who have already scheduled your bustravels will not be affected by the changes. But don't expect to pick up any hitchhikers if your bus isn't going down one of the existing routes.

NOTE: There won't be that many buses to hitch a ride with in the beginning when the existing bus travels don't follow the new highways. This will change with time as the new bus booking system forces players to use the existing routes.

The effect and the requirements for character interactions has been tweaked. Read More»

Now the outcome of certain interactions depends on the character's skills. More additions to this will be made during the next few days.

The calculations for Fame & Wear of songs have been tweaked so it's easier for a song to accumulate fame in the beginning of its life.

Connie Perkins would like to inform you that the new Fame & Wear system has been implemented! Read More»

The average player will not notice much of a difference. But those of you keeping a close eye on the development of your Fame & Wear on songs will see subtle changes to how your songs evolve over time.

The radio have somewhat of a lesser impact with the new system and in general it should be somewhat easier to gain song fame by performing live.

The big difference, and the reason why we've redone the system, is that wear will now start to decline with time. This will enable some really old songs to make their comeback eventually. Note that wear will never decline if the fame is higher.

Since the system is brand new it will take a while for it to settle in properly. After we've seen it running for a while we'll most likely tweak the speed of it once again to make it even better.

EDIT: Currently the system is set to completely drain a full bar of wear of an abandoned old song in roughly 14 Popomundo years. But you will be able to successfully recycle it before that time depending on what you do to its fame.

Then we take BERLIN! In addition Melvin Stjärnblom announces: “Ich bin ein Berliner”.

Earlier today our main database/server crashed completely… We've moved the whole game to a new server and recreated the database with a minimum of damage. Everything seems to be up and running ok and we'll sweep up the remaining damage like messed up shows etc on Monday.

6 People died as a result of this incident. We'll make sure they return to the living first thing monday morning.

Yet some more stuff added. Read More»

The last two days we've added both subwoofers and control systems to the list of stuff you can lug around with you on tour.

We've also tweaked the amount of watt some of the already existing items demanded. Some of you using translations of the game might experience some strangeness here due to inactive translators. This will be corrected in time. In your equipment list however the correct amount of watt will always be listed to the right.

In the detailed equipment list you can also see the state of your equipment. With time your equipment will deteriorate in quality and after a year or two on tour you might want to consider buying new stuff.

This pretty much concludes the Stage Equipment stuff for now. We'll add more in the future. When it comes to instruments these will still have to be lugged around by each character for now. To compensate for this we've made the drums and pianos a little lighter.

Merry Christmas!!! The moment you've been anxiously waiting for has finally arrived. How does it work and will it mark the beginning of the end for the smaller genres? Read More»

The strength of a club's genre now affect the amount of tickets you sell when booking shows.

Booking shows at places which don't represent your chosen genre isn't a complete disaster though. You're always entitled to at least half of the tickets that you would get at a club that matches your genre with a maxed out genre strength.

A club's genre strength can be either weak, normal, or strong. This doesn't mean that all strong clubs have the same strength. The scale spans a MUCH wider range than what is actually shown.

IMPORTANT: Club Genres will not affect the actual score of your performance. This means that regardless of where you strut your stuff you'll always get the score you deserve.

Will this mark the end of the smaller genres in the game? No. Some things will become more challenging, like finding good places to play at, that's true. But at the same time it will present some new opportunities for people as well. Let's not forget that playing in a smaller genre has its advantages as well…

The preliminary clubs for the Fourth Popomundo Festival have been selected by Mr. Monopoly. Read More»

Preliminaries will be held in the following cities and clubs throughout January 9-13. All entries must be at least on Popomundo Year old. The entry cost may not excede 1000 US$.

Melbourne: Moonlight Bar
Moscow: Glamorous Kinkyness
Nashville: Riders of the Apocalypse
Paris: Eldorado-paris
Toronto: Brady's Punk
Buenos Aires: Lunatic Café
Helsinki: Niphredil Pop
Stockholm: Bellman's Tavern

Your shows must now have at least three songs in them otherwise they will fail miserably. Detailed warnings of this exist on the performance pages.

The newbie system has now been tweaked a bit. Now ALL characters skills in Basic Manners is updated when finishing the last assignment. Read More»

This means that characters that has purchased the book Basic Manners earlier will be credited a skill level accordingly to the mother's mood. It also means that characters that already have five stars in the skill actually can LOWER their level. In other words, be nice to your mother and treat her with respect.

To help Newbies get into the game easier a special newbie guide has been added. This guide comes disguised as your mother… Each mother presents a list of assignments that guides the player through the basics of Popomundo. Read More»

You can either attempt to fulfill your mother's wishes or ignore her… Depending on how well you meet your mother's demands you will receive a cash award, an achievement icon, and the skill Basic Manners.

Characters who already was in the game when this feature was implemented also have the possibility to go through this guide and enjoy its awards. Just go to the City Hall and ask for help to find your Mother. Most Mothers will be found quite without a problem. Note however that old users have propbably already completed their newbie assignments. Thus their list of remaining assignment might seem kind of pointless.

From now on the stage equipment you bring with you on a show influences your performance's score. Read More»

Another interesting addition to this is the locale's power capacity and your equipment's power consumption. If the locale doesn't have enough juice to power your gear you won't get all the points you deserve.

Mayor Stjärnblom's lovely personal secretary has announced that the fourth Popomundo Festival is to take place in Barcelona on January 23-29. Preliminaries will be held in eight cities throughout January 9-13. Like always you're only allowed to play in a preliminary once.

Burdened by a guilty conscience in the light of recent events Mayor Melvin Stjärnblom is ready to implement public trials in the forum for high profile criminal cases. First case: The People vs. John Souchet.

We can now reveal that it was in fact the corrupt judges of the “Court of Melvin” which released David Smith as innocent of the charges against him. Read More»

Des Swink who arrested Mr.Smith a second time around in good faith unaware of the extent of Melvin's corrupt influences commented: “Melvin is Heavy Metal, David Smith is Muzak”.

This must come to an end. The population of Popomundo simply can't let Melvin Stjärnblom continue to pester them with his totalitarian ways! Who will lead the revolution? Will it be you?

In the light of recent events (two sheriffs in conflict with each other have been suspended awaiting further investigation), we wish to inform you that the sheriff office is due for upcoming changes. Read More»

The sheriffs are the in-game guardians of public order. However, the division between their in-game nature, and the fact that they are appointed by the devs, causes some problems with respect to the role of the sheriffs.

In the upcoming months, we will begn to reform the way order in the game is upheld. The sheriff office, as we know it, will be abolished, and replaced by a system of a Chief of Police in each city, with well defined powers (including appointing Policemen). The Chief of Police will not be appointed by the devs, but instead be appointed in-game by the leadership of the city.

The Police force will be acting entirely in-game and focus on in-game matters.

Of course, as everyone knows, there are other powers at work, called by some “The Inquisition”, by some “The Powers Of Good”. The exact nature of this group is not publicly known, but consensus among scholars is that no Universe, Popomundo included, can prevail and remain healthy without the presence of forces of good, who's only ambition is to protect the Universe from significant threats, and to maintain the balance of the Universe. These forces may have access to powers beyond normal understanding, but of course they are only used towards the aim of protecting the Universe.

From now on it's possible to overtake someone's ranking by challenging them. Read More»

On your artist's Ranking Page you'll now get the option to challenge the artist above you for their position. If you don't see this option that means your competition is completely out of your reach.

Simply click on the challenge link to see if you successfully take their place or not. If you're victorious you'll move up to their ranking and gain some upwards momentum in the charts. If you're unsuccessfull you'll loose your momentum gradually. And what's worse… you might even loose your rightfully gained ranking!

Play your cards right. Challenge artists that seem to be on their way down or is doing poorer than you is the key to success.

Due to some performance issues the Artist Journal is now separated from the members only section. There is a new link below the members only link that points right at it.

The payment system is now up and running again, as Paypal are now again notifying us when a transaction is complete. So the VIP shop is open again. No one lost anything - all bought VIP memberships were activated as soon as Paypal came back online.

For some bizarre reason Paypal has ceased to inform us of VIP payments. We've contacted them and hopefully we'll have this sorted out soon. In the meantime we'd recommend not paying for VIP untill the system is up and running again. Those of you who haven't gotten your VIPs don't have to worry though. Your payments haven't been lost, they're just stuck in limbo for awhile.

Skills are now divided into Public Skills and Personal Skills. Public skills are skills where your skill level is visible to all players. Personal skills are skills which skill levels are hidden from all but yourself.

We've tweaked the appearance of the character page to separate the VIP functions a bit and show both diary events and blog at the same time. To see someone's skills and what they're up to prioritywise you can now click on their Priorities & Skills just like you can on your own character. We've also made it possible to view how many stars other people have in their skills.

If your vehicle was towed to its destination after a break down you need to repair it yourself. Buy a repair kit at the car dealer and USE it when it's in your vehicle inventory to fix the problem.

If you have extra repair kits in the vehicle while travelling the driver will be able to fix it automatically though. So plan ahead!

A simple blogware has been added to the Character page. Feel free to use it in anyway you want. Read More»

Regardless if you want to use your blog as a personal diary or a way to communicate your political opinion this will be an easy way for you to tell everyone more about yourself. Please do! Only available for VIPs though.

Company presidents now have access to ALL competitions hosted at the clubs they own.

From now on you'll have to select your artist genre manually. The game will no longer automatically update it for you. Read More»

If you change your genre you will loose your current artist ranking and start from the bottom in the new genre.

There are no penalties famewise for changing your name or genre though.

All artists which didn't have a genre picked have now been defined as POP artists. If you're among these artists you might want to consider changing your genre to something more appropriate for you.

We've done these changes to improve on the new ranking system. In the new system we don't want artists to switch genres without the players knowing about it.

Fresh out of the pipe come tour buses and stage equipment. Read More»

From now on you might want to consider going down to your local car dealership and buying a tour bus.

The main purpose for your artist to own a tour bus is to transport all the new stage equipment which you can buy at your local Stage Equipment Store.

Although it's not a requirement to own a tour bus and a ton of stage equipment it's certainly something to recommend if you want to put on a good show. (The actual effect on shows will be implemented within a week or two so you'll all have more than enough time to gear up.)

All items bought in the Stage Equipment store is paid for by the artist and put directly into your tour bus.

The tricky part to all this is to make sure the bus arrives on time to all your gigs. Make sure to buy a couple of repair kits at the car dealer in case the vehicle breaks down during transport. If you don't have a repair kit you'll have to be towed to your destination… this can delay your transport severely.

How you doin'? That's the question. Are you a Heavy Metal Megastar or a Punk Rock Wannabe? To find out simply click on Artist Ranking in your Artist Menu. Read More»

For now this is simply a complete chart of ALL artists in the game based on fame, sales, shows etc.

In a couple of weeks we'll add a second piece to the Rankings Game… Stay tuned for some crazy stuff to drop out of the pipe.

Oh. The little number to the left of the list is your actual ranking. In other words: how many artists you have to beat up in the parking lot before you're number one.

Whenever you go on stage from now on you'll be Occupied. Being occupied means that you can't move anywhere else or be interrupted by travels and other things of lesser importance.

The game server partied a bit too hard this Friday evening and crashed around seven o'clock CET. It's now ten o'clock and we've managed to revive it. Everything seems to be back to normal but we'll do a full damage control tomorrow morning.

We've updated the system which calculates flight times and costs. Although the new system is more accurate than the old it's not supposed to be totally realistic. We had to make this change in order to pave way for some new stuff that's about to come out of the pipe.

This won't affect anyone who's already bought tickets.

It is now possible to place a personal ad in your local edition of It's Pop. The feature is located below “Submissions”. Read More»

If you're looking for a band member, a romance or just a friend this might be a nice way to get in touch with Popomundo people with similar interests.

Please note that submitters that don't follow the simples rules of conduct will be punished and that placing a personal ad costs $100.

From now on newbies will only have access to the newbie forum for the first 3-4 days of their Popomundo existence. Any forum that newbies have already joined before this change came into effect will still be accessible to them.

In a bold move to placate his critics, Mayor Melvin Stjärnblom today announced the concept of Citizens. Read More»

The Mayor told the reporters: - The whiners say that I care nothing about human rights. This proves them wrong. It also proves that there is no reason for me to resign. In fact, I am the best guarantee for peace, prosperity and individual freedom.

Everyone who has ever been a VIP will soon get an offer from the Popomundo Census Bureau of citizenship in any city of their choice. You do not have to be or maintain VIP status, but you must at least once have proven your identity by becoming VIP. If you stop being VIP you are still allowed to keep your citizen status, and in fact the status is hereditary, so if a child's primary parent is citizen, then the child will also receive the offer when he/she reaches 16 years of age.

According to the Popomundo historians, in ancient days, the citizens of each city used to assemble in the City Hall to decide on important matters and elect public officials such as the Mayor.

Fortunately, under Melvin's benign reign, such impractical customs as this “People's Assembly” are obsolete because everyone in Popomundo happily reap the benefits of the exceptional wisdom, generosity and competence of our enlightened ruler.

Change your language setting to find out! We just launched the Finnish translation of everyone's favorite internet pasttime. Once again we'd like to thank Gordon Baxter and Jonathan Milton for their great work with the Finnish language!

We're now launching the French translation of Popomundo and the city of Paris. Many thanks to the translator in charge: Houston Dean. Without his efforts this wouldn't have happened so soon.

According to the rules Does aren't supposed to work with anything requiring any special skills or attributes. Read More»

Crafty locale owners and CEOs have abused the possibility of promoting Does to work as sales persons. singers, and lawyers.

This sneaky little trick is no longer possible to do. From now on you can't promote a Doe at all. They simply refuse to work with anything other than what they signed up for.

Many thanks to the one honest/anonymous player who reported this and SHAME on the rest of you. And there were a lot of you! “Joined the dark side you have” as another little green fella would have said. :)

It's now possible to set your ambitions for how much blood, sweat, and tears you're going to put into your shows. It will affect both the outcome of your shows and your health so all you band leaders might want to check it out under Artist Preferences.

From now on you will be informed of events concerning your character even when you are logged in. Read More»

If you receive any messages, invitations or similar when you are logged in you will be notified of the event in the new section in the menu. Reminders of events that has occured when you are logged out will also appear here.

For those of you who are wondering the following info might be of interest. Read More»

It's OK for you and your friends to play from the same IP number or the same computer.

However, it's NOT OK to login to other people's accounts or babysit other characters when their “real owners” for some reason are unable to play.

You're only allowed to have ONE account in Popomundo. Accounts which more than one person use will be terminated. Players login onto more than one account run the risk of having all of the involved characters struck by ligthning.

It's that simple.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: Don't bother mailing us about your other family members that also play Popomundo. We NEVER pay any attention to these mails.

The Community News now have the possibility of being translated into the active languages of Popomundo. Read More»

All news will be published in english first directly when the developers feel they need to inform the community of important changes to the game. This means that the latest news will never be translated when it's hot off the presses…

The translators will then translate the news whenever they get a chance to.

From now on you can't store unlimited amounts of items in your apartment. The load capacity of the apartment depends on how many rooms it has. So if you have a lot of stuff you just have to get a bigger apartment.

There's always been a lot of different theories about what happens when your character passes away. Well here's something to erase some of the questionmarks. Read More»

When you're character joins it's ancestors on the other side you will, if your karma is good enough, get the opportunity to return as a new character in PPM. Your diseased character will not disappear from your list though. You will still be able to login with him or her (perhaps on Halloween?). In other words a nice exception to the rules about playing two characters.

It is now possible for locale managers (company president or locale CEO) to upgrade the building condition of a locale. Buildings will not start to decay until next Friday September 9th, and decay will be rather slow. You will hardly see any major effects on a building until a couple of Popo years from now, even if you do not improve it in the meantime, so do not panic. :)

We are implementing a new parameter for locales: The physical condition of it. Locales will decay over time, unless the manager spends some money on repairs now and then. Read More»

Locales with better than Great condition will gain quality easier than today (the default level), locales with below great condition will lose quality compared to the current formula. Locales that reach truly abysmal quality might in fact collapse (don't get trapped in such a place…). Locale managers will soon be able to invest in improvements of this value.

Over time, the condition will slowly decay, so locale owners will have to spend some money on this in the future. Decay will start next Friday. By then, the features for improving the state will be fully implemented.

To counter the wear on health from excessive touring and to balance the order of the universe we continue with the following updates. Read More»

Resting now has slightly increased effect. The best result will be achieved if resting at home, but a park or hotel will do fine as well. There's no point in resting if your health is above 80%.

Going to the gym now also gets you more points. This is the best place to be if you want to get your health up towards maximum. It costs money though. Like always you get extra points for actually hanging out in a gym when the updates take place.

Failing a show has always hurt your local fame for up to one Popomundo year afterwards. In addition to this longtime effect there's now also an IMMEDIATE dip in local fame when failing a show based on the popularity of the artist and the amount of tickets sold. The greater the artist the bigger the pain in other words.

The legal system has gotten harsher for you criminals out there. Whenever you're arrested for theft these days ALL items you're carrying of similar types to the ones you have stolen the last 3 Popomundo months will be confiscated by the prison guards. You will not get them back. (Melvin refuses to answer any questions regarding his legal system being corrupt or not. All he mentions is how nice the new striped prison overalls look.)

Below “preferences” in the Members Only section on your Artist page there's now a new feature where the band leader can choose how to handle invitations. The default value is set to “recieve invitations”.

Connie Perkins and the Popomundo Board of Health would like to inform you of the following changes to the game. Read More»

Performances Performances wear your health down in the same way mentioned in last weeks community news.

Your mood is affected differently depending on the show's outcome. If you've put on a better show than your recent ones you're going to become happier and the other way around. Beware of putting on a really horrible show after a couple of good ones since this could effectively ruin your mental health!

Jam Sessions From now on Jam Sessions wear your mood down in the game. This is a new addition and something which hasn't been done in the past.

IMPORTANT: Remember that you can always spend experience points to boost your mood and health if they get dangerously low. The effect of this has now been increased some to make it more worthwhile.

A general word of caution: This is a game. We are pleased to see that it is a game that many people get deeply involved in and emotionally affected by. However, it is still only a game and you and others play it for your own enjoyment. Let's hope the day never comes when people actually start taking the wonderful but admittedly silly things we do here too seriously. So please be gentle with your fellow Popomundians whenever you encounter them - in the forum or the chat or elsewhere.

Grudgingly, Melvin Stjärnblom, Mayor and Supreme Ruler of all cities in Popomundo, has yielded to public pressure. He has now agreed to open up the public books somewhat. You can now see a lot of new details about the cities of Popomundo on the new City Details page.

You can now pay money to your parents, children or siblings (no others). This feature is found under Assets & Loans.

We are very very pleased to announce the arrival of a brand new full-time developer for Popomundo. Mika Grenhall will join Jonas “Kermit” Holtenerberg at the core of the dev team, starting today. Read More»

During the summer, the dev situation has been rather strained as holidays and similar things have brought much of the development of new features to a temporary halt, as Frank (part-time dev) and Jonas have been alternating “on duty” to focus on just keeping up with bugs and urgent issues.

Now things are brightening up.

Mika and Jonas will form the full-time team. But please tread lightly on Mika, as he will need some time to get up to speed. Master Jonas will have to teach his new apprentice some tricks in the next couple of months. The art of mastering the Popo Universe is not learnt in a day! :)

Meanwhile, Frank Blomdahl continues as a part-time developer as before. There are others in the perifery of the Popomundo staff, but these three (or two and a half: Jonas & Mika + Frank) are the devs upon which the shoulders of Popomundo rests.

In addition to the devs, there are our volunteers, which are regular users who help us in their capacities as Translators, Sheriffs, Editor and Moderators without whom the world of Popo would not function. Thanks to all of you!

Minor changes to how travelling and performing on stage affects your character. And while we're at it we're also changing the ingredients of the Fancy Meal and the memory capacity of your fans. Read More»

From now on performances tend to wear your health down just like it did early on in the Popomundo development. Your mood is also subject to the hardships of being on stage but to a lesser degree. Although the effects can vary somewhat from time to time, you'll see that constantly performing is much harder on health than it is your mood.

The opposite is true of travelling, here it is your mood that will be affected the most. The damage in mood will be most visible for you happy people. People that are somewhat depressed already won't really care as much if they're trapped on a flight all day.

Like always it pays off a great deal to buy those expensive first class tickets on supersonic jets to make your world tour easier to handle.

Your health while travelling on the other hand will only suffer minor dents due to the putrid airconditioned air on flights. This means that it's only the length of the travels that affect your health. (After all, first class and second class both share the same crappy air.)

These changes will make it harder for artists to constantly put on top quality shows while touring frantically across the world. And to prevent people from simply boosting their moods up again by stuffing themselves full of Fancy Meals we're redone the code there so that the results are somewhat temporary kind of like alcohol but much less dramatic.

IMPORTANT: To balance out the equation some, and not make life too difficult for you, we're making your fans improve their memory a bit. This means that you won't have to tour as much and as rapidly to maintain your fame in the Popomundo universe. From now on you only have to tour the world ONCE per Popomundo year to stay on top of the touring game. This should make things a LOT easier for you as well as add some realism into the length of intervals between tours.

From now on only 50% of your band members must be present at a performance in order for it to be successfull. However, your performance score will be severely damaged by missing band members. Read More»

The amount of damage to the performance score is directly linked to the percentage of band members that are missing. For example: if ONE member of a THREE man band is missing your score will only be 66% of what it should have been.

If all members of the band leaves you'll get a whopping “TRULY ABYSMAL”.

We hope this will make life a bit easier for you big bands out there.

Since the local authorities where our servers are located could theoretically insist on us paying “royalties” for the MP3 links in Popomundo we've decided to remove them.

If you're as upset as we are about this feel free to visit WWW.STIM.SE and give them a piece of your mind. :)

We have closed two loopholes in ticket sales, that enabled some clever folks to sell out several shows in the same city on the same day. As the help section clearly states, you should keep shows in the same city several days apart, ideally at least a week apart.

Your supreme Mayor Melvin Stjärnblom has issued a decree about copyright violations, to clarify what applies. Read More»

The edict reads as follows:

1. If you have linked MP3 files that you do not have the right to (usually by linking real-world bands other than your own), you have three days from now to remove them. After that, Sheriffs are authorized to arrest you for Copyright Violation. Judges are recommended to give one week in the slammer for first time criminals on this crime, more for repeat offenders.

2. Other violations of the Popomundo Content Agreement, such as adding copyrighted lyrics, are classified as minor offences and you there have 20 days from now to remove it. The recommended penalty for first time offenders is one day in the slammer. Much more for repeat offenders.

3. Any illegal stuff uploaded from now on are immediately subject to arrest. The 3 days/20 days respite only applies to copyright crimes committed in the past.

To remove lyric from finished songs, use the new “Remove lyric” link that is available on the song page. You may remove, but not edit or add lyric to finished songs.

It can now be found at www.popomundo.com:7000 or through the usual link here in the community pages to the right.

Sheriffs have now been authorized to arrest people for the new crime of Copyright Violation. This is applicable when you violate real-world copyright by, for instance, linking/uploading MP3 files not owned by you or copyrighted song lyrics. Doing so is strictly forbidden and on top of the in-game punishment of ending up in prison, we might take other actions. No one wants to see the game having to shut down because of law suits from real-world copyright owners.

Since the Popomundo dawn of time the songs in your repertoire have always faded in quality once a week. From now on they will decrease in quality on a daily basis and in smaller increments. Read More»

This change will make the results from competitions fairer since someone going on stage just after the weekly fade would do so with a “damaged” repertoire without having gotten a chance to improve it by jamming.

It also makes the repertoire fade smoother and more predictable for those who doesn't keep track of the inner workings of the game.

A new section of the Community Pages has been added: The Internet Library. Read More»

Connie Perkins, Shane Moore, together with Crystal Inglis, dropped the idea in the forum a couple of days ago. They wanted to create a page where people could register their own independent sites related to Popomundo for the world to see.

Since we didn't want to let such a good idea go to waste we decided to incorporate it right into the community pages of the game itself, thus making it an official Popomundo Internet Library.

The library is empty right now. So all you HTML gurus out there with Popomundo sites in the making, go register them NOW!!!

How your relationships are calculated have now been tweaked some. Hopefully this will make your ties with friends and loved ones slightly easier to understand and maintain… as well as squashing a bug or two…

Melvin Stjärnblom's has finally released the carrier pigeons with the invitiations to the festival. Read More»

the festival will run through August first to August seventh. Here are the contestants in the order they will go on stage:

The Hotties
Rock Band
Florence Morley
English Fever
Phoenix Rising
Souless
MrHobb was here
Bad Charlotte
Willy The Wonker
Mudlicker
Alex Osbourne
Charlotte Big
Emily Williams
The Third Apocalypse
Chernobyl
Jessie Malone
Manny Magma
artistic french fries
Abu JahJah & The Burqa's
Aether
Off Service
The Frank Blomdahl Odyssey
Asgard Whores
The Lovebunnies
Feanor
stop
Flying Gonzo
FBCS
DSPL
Melting
Utopia
Unlikely
Deeftones
RootDiggers
DJ Killingspree
Skarred
Fake Plastic
The Knights who say Ni!
The Vanguard
Twilight Garden

Please look at the competitions page for more information.

Link MP3 files to your tracks for other players to listen to. A truly minor addition to the game which we nonetheless would like to announce here for everyone to see. Read More»

We've added this possibility for all you real life musicians out there who wish to let the world know about your music.

For the time being the link leads to a simple download of the music. In the future, if people make use of this opportunity, we hope to develop the function into something much cooler…

Like always, the creators of Popomundo don't wish to steal any creations from its players. Anything you link to here in the game will only be used by us withinin the confines of Popomundo and nowhere else. Yet, if you do not wish your valued MP3s fall into the hands of strangers DO NOT link to them here in the game.

From now on Security Checks on flights will mainly happen to convicted criminals. Only on rare occasions will they happen to law abiding citizens.

Security checks will delay the traveller between 2-5 hours.

Once a convicted criminal has been clean for more than two popomundo years he/she will no longer be considered a criminal by the travel authorities.

Due to the recent increase of finnish players in Popomundo we've decided to add the city of Helsinki to the game. Seeing as Finnish and Swedish are both official languages over there we figured it was ok even though we don't have a Finnish translation of the game in the works… Anyhow, we're pleased to see that the Finnish Lions have found their way here. Read More»

Like always it will take a while for the city to prosper. Especiall now with the the requirement for company owners to actually travel to cities where they want to open up locales in.

A note on Helsinki time: We are making some changes to the time system in the game. Untill this work has been completed Helsinki will be on Central European Time.

Expect a Helsinki forum and Finnish radio stations to be up within a day or two. As well as the little pink star in the Traveller's Guide. We can't forget about that one!

And if anyone is interested in helping out with creating a Finnish translation of the game please contact Johnny Signorini who's our Main Man in the language department. A word to the wise before contacting him though: translating the game is a big job and should not be taken lightly. It's not for the faint of heart.

Those of you who don't want to wander around all year with your halloween masks on can now look at this new addition to the Traveller's Guide.

What happens if you don't reach the minimum number of participants in a competition? Read about it in the updated competition rules.

A problem occured around 06.30 Central European Time as all relationships were suddenly wiped out by the fickle Gods. However, about 40 minutes later, all relationships were restored to the state they were in at 06.00 and things are now back to normal.

'Nuf said.

The game crashed a couple of hours ago, but we're now up to speed again. Even though we're pretty sure none of you got really hurt by this incident we'll obviously help you out if you feel differently.

After extensive research, Popomundo sociologists have found that the maximum number of relationships a popomundian can maintain without starting to suffer from stress and a disease called The Cocktail Party Syndrome, is fifty (50) relationships. Popomundians are hereby recommended to heed this warning from the expertise, or risk depression.

Life in Popomundo just got more glamourourous and rock'n'rollish. You can now choose what kind of hotels you stay in while on tour - and even decide to trash the hotel room as a real rock star. Read More»

The band leader can now set the Hotel Tour options for the band (or solo artist). Either you can stay in your homes, which is kinda lame (but cheap) or you can choose one of the “always stay in hotel” options, which add glamour (fame) to your band. Each band member can also set his or her own Hotel Behaviour - that is, whether you trash hotel rooms or not (and whether you pay for it afterwards or run from the bill).

Full descriptions about these new options are available in the Help section, chapters Artist Preferences and at the end of chapter Priorities.

Note the difference: Where you stay (what kind of hotel) is set by the band leader. How you behave is up to each band member.

Your knowledge of different genres will influence the outcome of your jam sessions. Read More»

Your band members genre knowledge will directly influence the how well you can rehearse playing a song. For example: If you're not skilled in Heavy Metal you'll suck at performing Heavy Metal style music.

Your repertoire won't be negatively affected by this change so any points you've already jammed for will still remain. Chances are they will fade with time though and the will be harder to maintain if you don't read up on the required skills. This makes for a soft introduction of this implementation.

So off to study your history books then. (Which incidentally we're considering renaming as soon as we come up with a better name.)

Note: Read up on Jam Sessions in the rules for more information.

Connie Perkins would like to remind everyone that Mr. Stjärnblom is about to start arresting people in a day or two who still have more than three homes.

The New Competition system is now online. Read More»

If you're interested in starting a competition of your own, please read the section about competitions carefully in the rules first.

This system will be used by the locales hosting the Popomundo Festival Preliminaries. If you're hosting one of the preliminaries see the Gorky Park topic for more information on how to proceed.

There's a hefty fee of 10000 US$ involved in registering a competition. This is to prevent a slew of phony competitions popping up without any real commitment behind them.

We found two previously unknown bugs today, and fixed them: * Hotel costs have not been dependent on what city you are in, as they should. Now you will pay depending on what the price levels are in the city. * Fame for the very greatest artists have not declined as steeply as they should. Having awesome fame, for example, is really extreme and will only be possible for short periods of time.

It has been brewing in the popomundo cauldron for a very long time but Melvin Stjärnblom has finally decided it's time for another festival. Read More»

The festival will take place in Gorky Park, Moscow in the beginning of August when Melvin will take a break from counting all his moneys which is making him severely depressed.

But before we are ready to start the festival we need a preliminary round of qualifications to see who is worthy of receiving an invitiation to the festival.

The preliminaries will be held in 8 clubs in the following cities: Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Toronto, London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Stockholm, & New York.

The top 5 contenders from each preliminary will be personally invited to the festival by Melvin's secretary!

The preliminaries will take place on July 18th - 24. The festival will take place on August 1 - 7.

In addition to the regular awards. Special Honorary Awards will be handed out to the best artist in each genre.

For the latest info on clubs and dates please see the Gorky Park Festival topic in the general forum.

You can now choose the attitude of Stealthy. This means that any other character has to be in the same locale as you in order to see which locale you are in, and to see some of the other information about you. Sneaky characters are also hidden from the list of characters in a locale, unless you are in that locale yourself.

We wish to congratulate Jodanna Blanksma, who gave birth to a healthy baby girl yesterday, the first newborn character after Brian Tai. Several others are expected in the next couple of weeks.

The beta testing of the competition system worked perfectly. Read More»

The Knights who says NI! took home the top spot, closely followed by Melting Tree and Unlikely. In addition to the money received they also received a well deserved boost in fame. The Knights fame in the U.S. jumped up to REVOLUTIONARY! Impressive.

This means that we'll finish off the system soon by polishing up the presentation a bit, add on ongoing status report, translate the page, and write proper rules for it.

Then it's time for a public release and some Gorky Park Popomundo festival action.

Many thanks to the few and the brave who risked their artist's careers by signing up for the test.

Well, Popomundo isn't exactly the type of game that you can literally win, but we have a top list that ranks the artists. The formula for that list has been rewritten. Read More»

The old formula for the Who Is Winning only cared about money, money, money (and on top of that a little about fame). The new formula now takes all the relavant stuff into consideration: Fame, current radio chart positions, your best recent performance, and record sales last Popomundo year.

Also, we are now beginning to archive this top 10 list, and will have a Super-list called “Winner” - whoever has ever been #1 will be listed there. Of course, currently it is only one band.

Finally, you will of course get achievements for being on the list. Sadly the new award symbols for this achievement are slightly delayed, sorry about that. They will show up in a couple of days.

Changes to how your fame is damaged when cancelling shows. Read More»

As we all know by now your fame is damaged in a city when you cancel a show there. This system has now been refined to damage your fame differently depending on how many tickets you've sold in advance.

If you've sold a couple of hundred tickets you can expect a decrease of around 10% in local fame. If on the other hand you've sold up to 10000 tickets expect to loose about half of your fame in that city.

Note that these dips in fame are temporary in nature and your fans will soon forget about your poor planning skills. Like always it's best to cancel a show rather than to have one fail miserably. Your fans won't forget about a failed performance that easily.

There's still a MINOR penalty for cancelling a show even if no tickets have been sold. However, this penalty is is so small that only larger bands have to worry about it.

Popomundo is expanding both in the geographic and linguistic departments. Read More»

Thanks to Olena Ragnlind the game is now playable in Russian. To celebrate this we've added Moscow to the Popomundo map. Rumour has it a statue will soon be erected in Olena's memory on the Red Square.

Melvin Stjärnblom who's not late to join the russian band wagon announced earlier today that the next festival therefore will take place in Gorky Park! The festival dates will be set shortly after the Slime Light Beta Bash competition.

From now on we're monitoring which type of music is played at clubs. Read More»

Look at the info at the top of a club page… you can now see which type of music is commonly played at the place. It will also show you if the music has a weak or strong hold on the club.

This is a first step towards a new part of the performance system where you will have to meet the audience's expectations in order to put a good show.

Hence, in order not to be caught off guard as we implement this new system fully you might want to start scheduling your future shows at clubs which cater to your style of music.

We estimate to go live with this new system in three weeks time. This will give most of you ample time to adjust your tours accordingly. If you've got a really long tour planned and you think this change will ruin it all… don't worry… the change will be subtle at first.

Full details how all this will work will be made available before the total implementation of these changes.

We are beginning to release a new feature today, with much more of that feature to come in the upcoming weeks: Achievements for characters. Starting today, you will see icons for your three most remarkable achievements on your character page. Read More»

This is a feature that will start off as kinda lame, we gotta admit, but will get better and better over time: There are a set of achievements that each character can accomplish. We currently only have implemented 15 such possible achievements, but much more than that will be added in the coming weeks (and beyond).

Also, the achievements are not retroactive: If you accomplished something before we started to register that particular type of achievement, you won't get it counted. And we just started, so now that we release it, it may be kinda annoying that old merits don't count, but it is inevitable. If the history archives are empty, they just are.

What kind of acheievements can show up there? Well, sort of anything we think of to implement, eventually, but from the start, it will mainly be music related stuff.

The three top achievements will be shown directly on your character page. A more complete list for each character will soon be implemented.

What determines which are the “top” acheievements? Well, achievements are rated simply after how common they are. The more unusual, the more prestigeous.

We have appointed Johnny Signorini to a new office as Language Coordinator. He will be coordinating all existing and forthcoming translations of Popomundo, together with the translators of each language. Read More»

Anyone wanting to translate the game into their own language should contact Johnny at:

languages@popomundo.com

IMPORTANT: Translating the game is quite a major commitment. It is also a volunteer assignment that we cannot pay you for. Only if you are REALLY interested in commiting to making the game available to your language should you even consider it.

Obviously requirements for language skills and reliability are also very high. Previous experience with similar things is of course much appreciated (although far from required). Since starting a translation project that ends up half-finished is a major waste of resources, we will need to be convinced of your willingness and ability to carry the project through from start to end.

Currently, we will only accept translation offers for “major” languages. This is because we need to prioritize and although the translator does most of the work, a translation also does involve quite a bit of work for us as well.

Today, there are finished translations to English, Swedish and Spanish. In addtition, translations are in the pipeline for Italian, Russian and German.

We're about to test the new competition system in the game by arranging a small showdown in New York. Read More»

After a long time of doing performance and security related updates to the game it's time once more to get some neat stuff into the core game itself.

One of the new features which we're now about to implement is a system which will allow club owners to arrange their own competitions and festivals. Club owners can create the customize the entry criteria for these competitions in order to make the competitions exciting. The different criteria that can be used will range from everything from fame, performances, genre, gender, age etc.

All entries will pay an admission fee which will serve as the accumulated prize pot from which the winners will get their cash awards.

Complete rules on how this new system works will be presented in the help section when the time comes.

As soon as we've tested it with a competition or two we're going to officially premiere the system with an official Popomundo Festival!

As of this moment you're only allowed to have up to three homes in Popomundo. Read More»

We've added this limitation to make players settle and not roam the world as easily as they do now. This will make it harder for the big artists to rule the universe and help define the different “geographic communities” of the game.

NOTE: People with more than three homes should get rid of the of the ones they don't want to keep as soon as possible. Failure to do so will force Melvin Stjärnblom to sort out the situation for you… a solution we don't really recommend.

If you quit your lease in a place you get all your stuff expressed to your character. Even if this means you'll be carrying waaaay to much stuff. You'll have to drop your extra stuff whenever you get to one of your homes you wish to keep.

In the future we might create more advanced rules in limiting the number of homes you can have in the game. But for that we need a more developed political system. Hence, this solution will have to do for now. Then again, this game isn't about having a boatload of homes and three should be enough for most of us…

To celebrate that Popomundo has been around for roughly fourteen months (who says you can only celebrate 12 months, huh!) we will lower the price of the 12 months V.I.P. subscription throughout June (starting already today). For a limited time you will only pay US$ 29 (normally $34) for a full year of access to all the juicy stuff. If you recently signed up, you can always use this offer to top your account up with 12 additional months on top of what you already have.

We have found and eliminated a nasty bug in the ticket pre-sales formula. The bug caused ticket price (high or low) to hardly have any effect at all on how many tickets were sold. This has now been fixed and lowering ticket price will boost ticket sales as intended, and setting a high price will hit sales as intended. This means that the temporary limit to ticket price has been removed.

We have added a new chapter, sorely missing hitherto, to the Help section. The new chapter describes the different attitude settings you can choose for your character, inlcuding the two new ones that were recently added - Chaste and Promiscuous.

Since the beginning of the year (2005), we have been storing old radio charts in our archives. These are now available from charts page for radio charts.

Company owners beware! Starting next Saturday (May 21 at 12 noon, European time), locales that are in debt will be taken care of on a weekly basis. If the locale has more than half the building price in debts (for instance, half of $50,000 = $25,000 for a Gym), the city will confiscate it and close its business.

With Popomundo facing a baby boom, condom manufacturers are struggling to recover from a plummeting market. In a bold move to stimulate demand, they will henceforth sell their products in packs of 6. Prices will naturally go up a bit on these “family packs”, as they somewhat inappropriately are being marketed. Other item manufacturers might follow this new trend in the future.

The Live Aid II badges have now been handed out to the participants. Congrats to OneWayTrip, Rookie and Kissing Slits for grabbing the top three spots. Mayor Melvin has matched the sum raised from all ticket sales and donated to the Jane & John Doe Foundation. The charities can from now on be seen on the charts page. Means of donating more cash to these charities will be made available shortly.

Many thanks to Mark Pedersen for arranging the Live Aid festival.

It is now possible for club owners to set the ticket price of concerts. This, along with a few more minor changes, marks the last step of a major redesign of the concert arrangement system that have taken place during the last few months, and we have now updated the Concerts section in the Help. Read More»

The club manager set a default ticket price, that all new concerts start at. Then they can lower (but not raise) the ticket price for each concert, after ticket sales for it has started. Basically this works very similar to how the ticket LIMITS are set (although ticket limits can only be raised, while ticket price can only be lowered). Obviously the lower the price, the more tickets sold.

Also, the optimium ticket price (the price at which ticket price multiplied with number of tickets it generates is the highest possible) has been raised somewhat, from $5.40 to $6. This generally means slightly more income than before for you, folks.

These changes marks the final step in the major rebuild of the concert arrangements system that have been taking place during the last couple of months. We have now also added a lengthy description to the Concerts chapter in the Help, which describes all the changes. Whilst we certainly will revisit and improve this system at some point in the future, we now shift our improvement focus to other areas of the game.

It is now possible to get children in Popomundo. If you paid attention at biology class, you know how it works… If you need a refresher course, check out the new Children section in the Help. From now on it is your responsibility to make sure you have a condom when you snuggle, or else unforeseen consequences might happen.

You can now play popomundo in spanish. Go to your user information and select spanish. Nine out of ten Inquisitors recommend having Spanish as your default language! Many thanks to Johnny Signorini & Tyler Larsen for their excellent work with the translation.

From now on you can only play covers of songs that have been released on albums. This will prevent artists from getting their work wasted by countless cover bands wearing their work to the ground prematurely.

Songs that haven't yet been released can only be added to the repertoire of the author's artist and only by the author in person.

We're shutting down Popomundo on the 27th of April for roughly an hour. The planned interuption will take place around 9 am CET. We need to move the database.

UPDATE: This has now been done and we're once again back online. Everything went smoothly.

We've added two new and rather minor features: The “chaste” attitude that prevents your lover from becoming too intimate with you, and the “stalker” feature (“Follow” link). Read More»

We've added two new and rather minor features. The first was added upon request: You can now set your attitude to “Chaste”. This means that you are firmly refuse against all sorts of snuggling, tickling and passinate kissing. The second one may seem a bit silly: You can now stalk another character by choosing the “Follow” link (right below the Interact) on that character's page. Whenever that other character moves about, you do too. However, as a stalker, you won't automatically get plane tickets bought so unless you buy a ticket too, traces may stop cold there. The target of the stalker may not necessarily notice that you are stalking them.

We've now added city forums to the game. To find which city forums you wish to join simply use the added forum finder on the bottom of the opening forum page.

The city forums will not only allow for you to debate regional issues more effectively but they will also be open for local languages other than english. While most city forums will be bilingual, some might even tolerate more languages. The Barcelona Forum for example will be open for english, spanish, and catalan.

The official language of the forum is still english and will remain the only accepted language in the general forums.

The new and improved jam sessions should be up and running fine now. Please disregard any diary entries you've gotten from messed up sessions this past 24 hours. The jam sessions that took place during this time were all butchered by Jonas's bugs. Read more about the new system here: Read More»

With the new jamming system we hope to have eliminated the previous jam bugs as well have made the system more sensitive to the number of band members present during the sessions. For a jam session to be a success half of the band members must be present. Although you get most points if ALL members are present. Diary entries tell all present members when the session starts and ends. All members get a diary entry if the session fails either at the start or at the end.

Earlier today we were struck by a major bug which wiped out the whole population of Popomundo. (This day will hence be referred to as Popogeddon from now on. We might even have a holiday in its memory.)

During this plague we lost five hours of game time. This might have caused some chaos in your lives with possible overlaps in schedulings and what not. There's not much we can do about that and for that we're truly sorry.

Currently the magazine is pretty much in english. We'd like for this to change. We're going to change the layout of the magazine a bit to make the local news more prominent and hopefully attract articles in different languages. Global news will still be in english but news in cities where other languages are spoken will not have to be. In order to make this a reality we need a couple of more magazine editors… Please volunteer in the General Popomundo Forum…

Short note to people with unwanted guests lingering in their homes. When you close the doors to your apartments these days, everyone in the place (except for you) will be thrown out into the nearest park.

We've just made the swedish version of Popomundo available to players. This will be somewhat of a short beta testing phase for the translation project. So a few things are not quite done yet. But all major things should be working fine. To switch languages simply go to your user information page.

Barcelona and Buenos Aires have just trickled out of the pipeline!

Even though the Spanish translation of Popomundo into Spanish is still some time away untill completion we've decided to launch these two cities now.

In honour of the spanish translators (Johnny Signorini & Tyler Larsen) who's done an excellent job Popomundo mayor Melvin has promised them special mention in the local parks of these two cities. Please pay them a visit when you travel to these cities for the first time. :)

Welcome to the new Popomundo Community Page.

This Community Page will hold information and news regarding both the game world of Popomundo and the development of Popomundo. This way you won't have to rely on the forum to keep yourself up to speed on the latest stuff.

The plan for this community page is actually to have it greet you the moment you enter Popomundo. But since the page is merely a news feed for the moment, and not very exciting to look at, we're keeping it here for the time being.

IF you're looking for the forum it's in the menu to the right!