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Breakfast Topic: Most embarrassing thing you've ever done in WoW?
After the clamor the other day, the WoW Insider virtual offices broke into quite a bit of punnery. You wouldn't believe the clam-itous amount of punishment we underwent. It was a clam-ity. Of course, this sparked off a discussion on what is funniest in WoW, which turned into the most embarrassing thing that was ever done, which we thought sounded like a good breakfast topic. For me, amusingly enough, my most embarrassing moment actually had to do with a clam. We were in UBRS (back when UBRS was still hard and let you run 15-man groups) and one of our warriors got bugged while looting. While it's fun to watch someone scoot around in the looting position, it's not too good when it's your main tank. At the time the only real way to get out of the glitch was to carry a clam with you, open it and close it without looting. Being the only female in the raid - and not even thinking about it first - I cheerfully offered to give our main tank the clam I carried with me since he was grumping about being stuck.
RRoGDC? Xbox 360 failure shows up at trade show
Microsoft's efforts to divert attention from the Xbox 360's reportedly high failure rates were were certainly not helped today by an infamous Red Ring of Death that showed up at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. An intrepid BBC reporter noted the common hardware failure on display at Microsoft's XNA area in the Moscone Center's North Hall.Perhaps this is why the whole XNA area was protected by a shroud as recently as yesterday. Then again, perhaps not. Regardless, the BBC is certainly correct in noting that "at the very least it's embarrassing for the company that its own stock of demo machines are still susceptible to the problem." Check out the full video of the "event" below.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in.]
Rock fans uninterested in Harrison's PS3 auction
Marketing is all about knowing your audience -- what they'll respond to and what will turn them off. Going by that metric, it seems Sony's Phil Harrison wasn't quite a marketing genius at a recent rock concert.Paul Rose, a.k.a Edge magazine's "Mr. Biffo," recounts on his blog the somewhat embarrassing tale of a Harrison-led PS3 charity auction in the middle of a Marillion festival in Holland. Harrison, who's apparently a friend of the British rock band, reportedly took over the auctioneering duties from the band's keyboardist, raising the bidding price from just above €100 to the €600 retail price as he did. What followed was a debacle that Rose calls "one of the most awful things I have ever witnessed." According to Rose, Harrison was only able to get one bid out of the awkwardly silent two-thousand-plus strong crowd. What's more, Harrison reportedly "became increasingly desperate as it grew clear that everyone just wanted him to go away, and nobody was going to indulge his tasteless attempt at publicity."It'd be easy to spin this as an example of the PS3's high price hurting it's saleability, but really it's just another example of marketing tone-deafness of Sony's part. These people were there to hear a rock concert, not to hear a marketing pitch from a Sony executive who wants them to throw down €600+ for a game system on an impulse. Sometimes, you just have to know when people don't want to be sold to.
