Tag Archives: April Fools

EVE Online offers the New Eden Recreational Feed for April Fools

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Yesterday was April Fools and, rather than taking the day off I went on a bit of a tear about AI.  I just couldn’t help myself.

But that didn’t mean the day didn’t carry on as usual.  There were lots of companies out there with the usual range of humorous offerings.  I did like Valheim’s play mode that let’s you be a trader, and World of Tanks had new decals that were good enough that they should just keep them, while World of Warcraft was out with the annual leaked patch notes, though it felt a little less cutting and a little more low effort than past years.

Massively OP has a list of what happened if you haven’t seen it already.

But right out the gate at Midnight UTC, which is only 4pm Pacific Time so I had to look twice before I remembered how far ahead they are, CCP was offering up the New Eden Recreational Feed for April Fools.

Are you ready for the NERF? Nobody ever is…

The copy from the email announcement read:

Next-Level Gaming Awaits

Exclusive Access to NERF & More

Exalted capsuleer,

For a limited time, immerse yourself in the New Eden Recreational Feed (NERF) experience with our complimentary trial access, available for the next 24 hours only.

This dynamic launcher overlay transforms your interface with a collection of EVE Universe apps, merging your adventure with an unparalleled digital entertainment experience. Step into the future of EVE Online.

The name was, of course, a play on NERF… CCP does love its backronyms like the CONCORD Rogue Analysis Beacon (CRAB), the Bosonic Field Generator (BFG), or the Gravitational Transportation Field Oscillator (GTFO)… and in the announcement it was pinned up as a new feature to be included with an Omega Pro Max subscription.

There was a bit of a hiccup in that the link in the post tried to open up your EVE Online launcher at one point, which it failed at if it wasn’t in the default location and I saw people mention that the whole thing would then kick off a process to try to install the launcher there and… well, old hands remember CCP deleting the boot.ini file back with the Trinity expansion, so not the first goof.

This didn’t work for me and I was installed in the default location

But if you were in the expected location or just opened the launcher on your own, there was the ad for it and the hot spot to activate it.

Lot of people online on April Fools morning…

Clicking on the little red grid icon up at the top right… that bit of red above “Tranquility” on the top edge of the window… even those who missed the email and the ad on the launcher seemed able to spot the new icon as red attracts the eye… allowed you to activate NERF.

Welcome to NERF… the jokes write themselves here

Activating NERF brought you to a grid of apps.

The Main NERF panel

Some of them were kind of neat.  Rebel Radio opened up a music player that had 59 classic EVE Online themes as well as the Permabanned catalog.

Rebel Radio plays the classics

This, of course, made old timers pine for the in-game jukebox that CCP pulled out of the game… way back when.  I don’t even remember, I just know that I used to use it and they took it away.  Like the in-game browser, it was probably too difficult to maintain.

I pressed PLAY and carried on exporing.

The Readnought brought up a series of posts from the EVE Capsuleer Chronicles site.

Tales of New Eden

ACN, the Amarr Certified News brought up a selection of videos from The Scope… though The Scope is registered as a Gallente corporation last I checked.  I guess it isn’t immersion breaking so long as it isn’t Minmatar.

ACN presets The Scope

Instalock, their run at Instagram, opened up a range of images from the EVE Online press kit that you could view and download.

Picture this

Following on around the app, the next few were links to web sites.

There is some clear messaging in a bit of that.

Finally, Outback AIR, that just gave users a “down under” view of things.

This joke never gets old, does it?

And so it goes.

The response… aside from issues with the launcher location… seemed to be pretty positive.  There was an immediate thread on r/eve asking if we could just keep this please, though it also brought up a longing in others for the old in-game jukebox.  Players never forget a feature you take away from them.  Remember that.

Also, no new subscription level please and thank you.  The standard has been set, the company can only raise the subscription price once every 19 years.  So we’re good until 2041, right?

All in all, a pretty solid April Fools outing.

Alas, it was just for a day.  When I got up this morning it was gone.

Some of it was, of course, just silly.  But the response felt like there were roots of a good idea in it all the same.  Maybe having some of those links in the launcher wouldn’t be a bad thing.  I would certainly like Rebel Radio back, if only because one of the remaining migration issues with my new PC is that iTunes stubbornly refused to recognize any of the settings I moved over so all my playlists and most of my music has to be manually added, including my EVE Online titles.

But if you want something else to explore, CCP has announced the beta for the new Play Science app.  Information here:

Addendum: CCP has indicated that you can access a few of the NERF features still from the launcher.  Posted to Twitter:

The NERF update – click to embiggen

Basically, if you use the find command (control F on Windows, command F on MacOS) you can get at some of the apps featured in NERF.

For me, I found something that said “Unlock features [3]” when I did that.

Unlock what?

Clicking on that gave me access direct to Rebel Radio, Readnought, and Isnstalock.

Three apps revealed

So at least I have some classic EVE Online and Permabanned music to hand now.

AI is the April Fools that Never Ends

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I was keeping myself busy being frustrated at the whole AI phenomena yesterday, so I decided to turn it into a post.  And what better day to write about AI than April 1st, the traditional day to celebrate hoaxes and outright fabrications.

Tell me how this makes you feel…

There is so much to be frustrated about when it comes to AI, it can be hard to sort it out.

I am not so concerned about them being plagiarism machines.  I mean, have you met humans before?  Originality is so rare in us that any bit we can spot in the endless repeats and call backs is immediately stolen, appropriated, or otherwise claimed and reused by all who can manage it.  Theft is practically our default state, so of course we automated it.

Neither am I all that concerned about how BAD AI is at the moment or how unlikely the whole “but if we just throw more data at it maybe THEN it will work” plan is to play out.  I grew up in Silicon Valley and have worked here my entire life.  “Fake it ’til you make it!” is our motto, and riding a bad idea down the drain, promising it will all work out as promised right up until they are hauling away the cubes and office chairs has been the modus operandi of start ups for more than 40 years.  So many bad ideas, so much poor execution, so many liars who knew the tech was nowhere close to what they promised given a pass to start again.  Welcome to the valley.

I do get miffed when things are presented as AIs when they are pretty much what one would call “software.”  I heard a tech pundit the other day lauding AI because his son had “downloaded an AI” that helps him track when exclusive tennis shoes sale drops are happening.  Look doofus, if you can download it to do a simple task then it either isn’t AI or the bar for what counts as AI is so low that AI simply means software now.

But when I dig down into it, I really have two major gripes with the current state of affairs with AI.

The first is how many pundits, people experienced with the ways of Silicon Valley, people who should be able to smell the bullshit from a mile off, people who have a history of calling things out, are just blandly accepting that AI is what the people selling AI say it is.

AI is not like that student in class or co-worker who is currently putting in just enough effort to get by, but who could be brilliant if only properly motivated.  There is no intelligence in AI, to the point that even some of the AI companies are backing off on that and putting forth the more literally correct “large language model” terminology when speaking of it.

AI is a probability machine.  It is literally the digital refinement of having an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters attempt to produce the works of Shakespeare.  AI doesn’t “know” or “understand” anything.

AI, putting an infinite number of monkeys out of work!

It is just faster monkeys with a filter that keeps complete gibberish from being produced by having a model that puts words in a specific order because it has a database full of examples to compare against.  AI doesn’t know what a matching subject and verb is, it only calculates that, mathematically speaking, certain nouns go with certain verb conjugations.

The actual output can be, and often is, absolute lies.

I have done a few attempts at testing AI to see if it could, in essence, regurgitate known facts, like the names of all of the EverQuest expansions.  I wasn’t asking for intelligence, I was asking if it could plagiarize a Wikipedia entry.  And the three I tried couldn’t do that.  They not only couldn’t do it, when they MADE UP expansions and I called them on it, they responded that they had been incorrect.

This is AI.  A chat bot that gives you the answers it mathematically believes you want to hear without validation of their correctness.  There is an old saying about not trusting somebody to tell you the weather or if the sun rose in the east, and it applies in spades to AI.  If the model somehow decides that the sun rises in the west and that it is warm and sunny despite the snowstorm currently raging, it will tell you that.

Meanwhile, every AI image that is kind of cool… the ones that get the right number of hands on people, the right number of fingers on hands, and little details like that… because, again, no intelligence here, just probability that in a scene like this a finger or arm in a particular place has a higher mathematical likelihood than not… and gets shared around is built on a huge pile of bad images that make no sense at all, that wouldn’t fool anybody into thinking an actual person did it.

And yes, my little probes into AI are hardly substantive.  I have been asking silly questions about niche or esoteric topics to a few freely available AI bots.  You could fix the more egregious issue, you could do something to validate facts, you could make it no worse than Wikipedia or PACER on some fronts.  But that would take up time better spent trying to get the monkeys to be faster as far as the AI enterprises are concerned.  Damn accuracy, go monkeys go!

A side part of this is the garbage feedback loop AI will be creating, where AI generated articles and comments that are simply making up things will then be used as fodder to feed the voracious appetite for data to train the language model, so that lies will end up cemented into the foundation of the model and somebody will ask for a list of EverQuest expansions and see The Threat of Faydwer included… or maybe they will ask for something important and get an equally bad answer, only they won’t be pursing trivia but making a business or legal decision based on that answer.

We’ve already seen it, and it will happen more and more as the false promises about how AI can replace people spreads far and wide.

Which brings me to the final point of frustration, which is just how hard Wall Street and the Venture Capitalist class have bet on AI.

Rich people HATE paying smart people a large salary to do something they cannot do themselves.  The tenets of capitalism only apply when it favors them.  The audacity of somebody being able to demand a large salary merely due to market scarcity is anathema.

Wall Street will only be happy when the divide is the ultra rich and the minimum wage worker, with as few people as possible in between, and AI feeds into this obscene fantasy.  Expertise must be automated and made a commodity at all cost.

They may not even hate the people they want to replace in any personal way.  But the biggest expense at every company is always the people, and all the more so in high tech, where most companies would cease to have any value at all if you removed the staff.

So AI is the panacea, the promised land for Wall Street, a way to replace people. They believe that only by reducing payroll can they can achieve their promise of infinitely increasing shareholder value.  It isn’t like the signs are not already out there.

When Fortune is saying it is too much, maybe stop and think?

The Gilded Age, for those needing to come up to speed, was the height of corporations and trusts that… the robber barons… that even their wealth couldn’t stem public outrage forever.

Wall Street demands eternal increases in shareholder value… the line must always go up… and the way forward is to cut staff and raise prices.  Layoffs and greedflation will work in the short term, though once again the inability to see obvious issues with the plan is astounding.  When we’re all minimum wage serfs will they start reducing the quality of our gruel?  How will we be able to afford shiny new iPhones to keep the economy going?  I am sure the company store that serves the company housing we’ll live in with have a finance plan for us.  It will be Ready Player One without the metaverse aspect to keep us all distracted and compliant.

And that reference loops back into why Wall Street is going so hard on AI; the last few get rich quick schemes, things like blockchain and the metaverse, both brazen attempts to be landlords on the net, collecting a tax on users without providing any value, have pretty much collapsed.  You can still find an occasional headline about them over at VentureBeat, which is the magic mirror of the VC soul… if they have souls… reflecting back exactly what they believe in at any given moment.  And they believe in AI because they don’t have another gimmick handy.  Their last success, cloud computing, itself another rent-seeking course at its root, has been normalized, but can no longer be depended on to make the line go up.

Maybe they’ll find another false prophet to chase, but the allure of AI… the ability to fire all those brains who got into college on merit rather than being a legacy or because daddy donated or through an expensive applications coach… is so strong and they want it to be true so badly that billions will go to stand up giant, environment destroying, resource devouring data centers so that they can eliminate a few analyst positions without any thought to the absurdity of it.

Do we even get to choose if AI is good or bad?

There is something that doesn’t come up a lot, the data center needs behind generating an incorrect list of EverQuest expansions.

Don’t misunderstand me.  I am not calling for a revolution here.  In the end I believe an economy based on capitalism delivers the most good.  But money accumulates at the top… trickle down economics was always a lie… and money distorts politics which means there is no political will to stop a small number of very rich people from min-maxing the economy in their favor so they can amass wealth beyond any human need many times over.  In my lifetime we’ve gone from the dominant business theme that if the company does a good job it will make a profit to the company’s only purpose being ongoing and ever increasing profit at any cost.

Anyway, that went kind of dark.  I was really on about AI, but couldn’t help getting into root causes, which always leads back to late stage capitalism excess.  But, as noted, I have spent a lifetime in Silicon Valley.  I have seen the VC machine up close, had no less than John Doerr walk in to our lab and demand we strip RAM modules from our test machines to put in his PowerBook (as it turned out, our PowerBooks only had the base RAM allocation as well), and have lived through many cycles of trying to meet a short term quarterly financial goal by hamstringing the company in a way that would harm it in the long term, because the long term doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that the line goes up today!

TL;DR – It would be nice if some pundits who actually know better would mention that the AI emperor has no clothes.

Also, part of this was triggered in my head by a thread over at BlueSky which goes into some of the foundations of what is being peddled right now, which started up around the New York City chat bot which, as you might expect, is making stuff up.  It boggles the mind.

Finally, all art included was, of course, AI generated.  I never said I wasn’t part of the problem.

Blizzard April Fools No More

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Over more than a decade I have dedicated the first of April to reporting on what Blizzard had gotten up to, and it was, at times, a pretty fun and amusing series of posts to write.

There were times when people at the company went all-in on some pretty funny ideas, which often stood out as much for their relative quality as anything.  If New Years is amateur hour for partying and St. Patrick’s Day is amateur hour for drinking, then April Fools can very much be amateur hour for humor.

But this year I am giving it a pass.  Blizzard hasn’t been down with the idea for years at this point.  I am sure we’ll get some secret release notes post to the WoW forums and maybe Googly Eyes in OverWatch, but that is about it. (Here are the patch notes, btw. So I have done my annual duty all the same I guess.)

Googly eyes at the hero select screen

So, instead of that I asked Google’s new text AI, Bard, to write me a history of April Fools jokes at Blizzard, and this is what it gave me:

 

April Fools’ Day is a day of pranks and jokes, and Blizzard Entertainment has a long history of getting in on the fun. Here is a look at some of the best April Fools jokes from Blizzard over the years:

In 2007, Blizzard announced that they were developing a new game called “StarCraft: Ghost” for the Nintendo Wii. The game was supposedly a first-person shooter starring Sarah Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades. However, the game was actually an April Fools joke, and it was never released.

In 2010, Blizzard announced that they were developing a new expansion for World of Warcraft called “Cataclysm”. The expansion was supposed to add a new continent called Azeroth, which would be destroyed by a cataclysmic event. However, the expansion was also an April Fools joke, and it was never released.

In 2012, Blizzard announced that they were developing a new game called “Diablo: Immortal”. The game was supposed to be a mobile game that would allow players to experience the Diablo universe on their smartphones. However, the game was also an April Fools joke, and it was never released.

In 2014, Blizzard announced that they were developing a new game called “Hearthstone: Heroes of WarCraft”. The game was supposed to be a digital collectible card game that would allow players to battle each other using cards based on the Warcraft universe. However, the game was actually an April Fools joke, and it was never released.

In 2016, Blizzard announced that they were developing a new game called “Overwatch: The Board Game”. The game was supposed to be a board game that would allow players to take on the roles of their favorite Overwatch characters and battle each other. However, the game was also an April Fools joke, and it was never released.

In 2018, Blizzard announced that they were developing a new game called “StarCraft: Remastered”. The game was supposed to be a remastered version of the original StarCraft game, with updated graphics and sound. However, the game was also an April Fools joke, and it was never released.

Blizzard has a long history of April Fools jokes, and they have always been able to keep their fans guessing. It will be interesting to see what they come up with next year

Now that actually made me laugh.  There were a couple in there I kind of wish were not jokes, but that is just me.

And if you are interested in past coverage, here are posts I wrote in previous years about April Fools.

From that list I think things pretty much peak by 2017 and it gets pretty quiet after that.

April Fools at Blizzard 2022 in the Shadow of Many Things

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I have been doing this post, or something like it, for 13 years running now, and almost every year there is something different in the mix.

This year finds Blizzard embroiled in a government investigation related to hostile workplace allegations which has led to a chunk of the company’s leadership leaving to “pursue other opportunities,” and which has tarnished the reputation of the company.  The company is also in danger of falling into the “what have you done for us lately” situation, since 2021’s big releases were Burning Crusade Classic, a remake from 2007, and Diablo II Resurrected, a remake from 2000.

Also, Microsoft is in the process of buying all of Activision Blizzard, so we’ll just ad that into the mix of things that have happened since last year’s post.  Certainly that is no April Fools joke, and seems to be in for some serious scrutiny.

So I fully expected things to be quiet again this year, as they were last year.  Blizzard is studious about not even posting real news on the first.

The first place I went was the World of Warcraft forums where I found that they were keeping up the annual tradition of the April Fools Patch Notes.

As usual they are made to look like a leak with “Highly Confidential” and “Do Not Forward!” at the top.  It has things about new raids, new dungeons, new professions, and a host of silly class changes, like that of the warrior:

Warrior

  • Warriors have grown tired of being so focused on warring all the time, so in this patch the class is getting a major redesign:
    • Intimidating Shout has been reworked and is now named Shout Shout: The warrior lets it all out, declaring all of the things they can do without. Come on, I’m talking to you.
    • Furious Slash is now Slash: The warrior transforms into a famous guitar player with long curly hair and a top hat.
    • Casting Slam now puts your name on the list at the coffee shop so you can get up on their little stage this evening and present your poetry.
    • Charge now debits other players’ accounts and provides them with tickets to come see you perform.
  • Producers’ note: Ummm I think we’ve invented the BARD here?

Other than that I have yet to spot anything on the April Fools front at Blizzard.  No doubt there are other things going on in the various games.  I suspect those playing Overwatch might have googly eyes again.  I’ll check back later just to see if there is anything new.  But the era of the big web site joke post seems to be over for now at Blizz.  That seems to have fallen off past 2016.

For those wishing a recap of past years, here is the list:

If you are looking for other April Fools updates from the MMO space, Massively OP has a post charting  out what other companies have been up to.  Also, all of their posts today have a cute animal videos embedded at the end.

April Fools at Blizzard 2021 is a Very Quiet Affair

It is once again the first of April, that day of fools, beloved by few, hated by some, and ignored by most. Its arrival means it is time for yet another peek over at Blizzard to see what they are up to.

So I got online and checked their various web sites and whatever they have up for news in the launcher, and there wasn’t much there to spot.

In fact, the only thing I saw was in the World of Warcraft forums.

Over on the Azeroth front there is the usual joke patch notes are up in the forums, an April Fools staple, featuring a proposed new raid, class changes, new professions, and more, all wrapped up in some pop culture references.

The most consistent Blizzard April Fools feature

Otherwise there was nothing else I could spot.  Blizzard has followed their usual plan of avoiding posting any news lest it be construed as an April Fools prank.  Even the start of the next Diablo III season is set for tomorrow.  I can’t even find the old April Fools archive page on their site now, though they did reorganize the whole thing, so it might still be in there somewhere.

Of course, it is early in the day still, so I’ll check back to see if anything else gets posted.  And, if I have missed anything, you can drop a note in the comments.

Addendum:

Not from Blizzard, but related, Carbot has a video announcing their Diablo II skin pack, a mock follow on to the real StarCraft Cartooned skin pack from two years back.

If that isn’t enough, you can still revel in some April Fools humor from Blizzard, with elaborate new features or whole new games, you will have to go back to previous years.

Past April Fools

Meanwhile, over in the world of EVE Online, they have an April Fools post up that rather twists the knife for a long requested feature; a gate from low sec to the Stain region.  Bittersweet that one is.

April Fools at Blizzard 2020 is Centered on Overwatch

This year it seems it was the Overwatch teams turn to embrace the day, or at least be the theme of the day.

Googly eyes at the hero select screen

It has become something of an annual tradition here to cover what Blizzard has been up to every April Fools.  There have been years where the company has put a lot of effort into various items for the day and there have been years where April Fools has barely been a thing at Blizzard.

This year seems like an outlier, with a different feel altogether.  In the past the level of effort has often correlated to highs and lows with the company itself.  Last year, for example, was not a great year for the company, so it wasn’t surprising that people had little time for this sort of thing.

But with the COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world, I was curious to see if there would be any mirth on the first at all.  Blizzard has been giving players benefits in light of the crisis, like an xp boost in WoW and unlocking all the heroes in Heroes of the Storm and co-op commanders in Star Craft II.  It would be completely understandable to give the whole April fools thing a pass.  But a little bit of humor in the right dose wouldn’t go amiss either.

And some of these ideas take a while to put together.  I am going to guess that the giant cat that Bhagpuss wrote about over in Guild Wars II wasn’t rolled up over the weekend but planned well in advance.

Which brings us to Overwatch and its googly eyes on heroes at the select screen, and in the play of the game clip at match end, which I mentioned above. (This came as a tip from Blueline Basher.  The screen shot is one from many in the forum.)

Following on that, over in the Heroes of the Storm forums there were April 1st PTR patch notes posted that included the addition of a new hero, Mercy.  I got that Mercy was an Overwatch hero, but I know so little about HotS that I couldn’t really tell if the patch notes were a joke or if somebody on the team unironically posted an update on April 1st.  And then I watched the video linked in the patch notes, which doesn’t really reveal itself until the very end.

 

The other Blizzard games, Diablo III, Hearthstone, StarCraft II, and World of Warcraft have all been quiet so far as April Fools is concerned.  No news items or fresh blue posts with an April 1 date.  It is still early in the day on the west coast, so maybe something else will pop up, in which case I will add it here, but for now that is all I have seen.

Update: We now have the annual WoW April Fools patch notes, in draft form, for patch 8.8.8.  Icluded in the notes:

  • High Dwarves
  • Kul-Tiran Worgen
  • Highmountain Goblins
  • New Essences
  • Class Updates
  • New WoW Classic Flavors

If you are jonsing for a Blizzard April Fools joke beyond those your best bet is to look at past efforts.  You can look at the posts I have done over the last decade:

If you want to go back further than that, there is the official Blizzard April Fool’s archive, though that stops at 2015, which is probably meaningful in some way.

In a way I am kind of happy they did something this year, if only to keep the long tradition alive.  They haven’t missed a year since 1999, even if some years have been rather sparse.

For other games you can check out the post over at Massively OP where they are trying to round up the MMO front.

Other April Fools items:

April Fools at Blizzard 2019 is Pretty Much No Fools

There have been points in the past where April Fools was a pretty big deal at Blizzard and each game would have a special joke, a silly new game or outrageous feature, on their respective sites.

Blizzard Outcasts from 2014

Things are no longer that funny around Blizzard these days I gather.

There are a variety of reasons likely for that, but they all add up to declining fortunes.  World of Warcraft, still huge, isn’t as huge as it once was.  Overwatch has seen a decline over the last year and reports are that Hearthstone is suffering from franchise fatigue.

As such, this year’s entries are pretty much non-existent, somehow managing to be a step down from even last year’s low turn out.  I have logged below what I found on the US sites, which I will update if new items show up.

Blizzard Overall

There is a translator up that will show you Blizzard sites in the Murloc language.

The Murloc language is, of course, Nerglish.  This was also part of the Hearthstone April Fools last year.

World of Warcraft

The annual April 1st patch notes are up, titled Patch 8.6.7 Build 5309, a nod to a bit of 80s pop culture.  Some traditions never die.  Still, it is a somewhat tepid listing this year, featuring entries such as:

  • Feral Druids can now be crowd-controlled by throwing a slice of cheese on their head.
  • Groups of 5 Feral Druids can come together to form one super-bot.
  • Due to noise complaints, Stonebark has been fitted with a shock collar.

But that is it.  The WoW site has no new entries for April 1.

Overwatch

Nothing

Hearthstone

Nothing

StarCraft

Nothing

Diablo III

Nothing

Diablo: Immortal

Already confirmed as not an April Fools joke at BlizzCon.

Heroes of the Storm

It is still there… but no April Fools joke.

Past Years

If this year’s lack of effort leaves you longing for bigger or better gags, you can always look back at past years:

I think it might be telling that the official Blizzard April Fool’s archive stops at 2015.

We may be at a point where we can declare April Fools no longer really a thing for Blizzard.

But if you’re dying for something on April Fools, I guess you can go play Minecraft 3D.  The over-the-top April Fools spirit has hit Mojang… though I am not sure that their impression of a 1994 version of Minecraft is all that different from what they have today.

April Fools at Blizzard 2018 is Mostly Just World of Warcraft

This year Blizzard April Fools appears to have fallen even further out of favor down in Irvine.  I was wondering if it showing up on Easter would change this or not.  I checked the main sites as well as the forums for each of the current Blizzard games and below is all I found.

I’ll check back again later and add anything else that might pop up during the day.  If I missed anything, leave a comment to let me know.

World of Warcraft

The micro event when all the micro events are active… also, appropriate for today

This year saw the announcement of a whole series of new “micro holidays” including:

  • We’re All Elves Now!
  • Future Timewalking Event
  • Looking for Queue

In addition there is the traditional patch notes.  This year they are listed as Preview World of Warcraft 8.0.41 Patch Notes and includes such gems as:

The drop rates of mounts from raids and dungeons have been adjusted to ensure that that one mount you’ve been farming for the past 3 years will drop immediately for the newest member of your guild.

And that was about it.

Overwatch

Nothing

Hearthstone

What appears to be a real post about a month-long event.

A Murloc language version of the game.

Heroes of the Storm

Nothing

StarCraft II

Nothing

StarCraft Remastered

Too busy celebrating its 20th Anniversary yesterday.  You can get SC themed items in other Blizz games this weekend.

Diablo III

Nothing

Past Years

If this effort leaves you jonesing for more, you can always look back at past years:

And so it goes.  I think it might be telling that the official Blizzard April Fool’s archive stops at 2015.

April Fools at Blizzard 2017 – Not Much to Talk About

Here we are again, another April Fools has rolled around and… Blizzard doesn’t seem in the mood.

There are a couple of items up for StarCraft II that have an April 1 date on them, so I assume they are humor.  There is the the Instability / Co-op Mutation announcement.

D4rK V0ic3? What does this picture even mean?

Then there is the Overlord Announcer customized announce package.  It speaks Zerg.

Overlord, with sound samples

It’s funny because you can’t understand anything in the sample sounds I guess.

And that was about it.

Over on the World of Warcraft site they are still focused on the Tomb of Sargeras 7.2 update and its ongoing hotfixes, all of which has turned into a bad joke in and of itself.

On the Diablo III site, season 10 opened (finally available on consoles!) and there something about the coming necromancer update announced back at BlizzCon, but nothing humorous.

The Hearthstone site is on about the upcoming Journey to Un’goro card pack.

Heroes of the Storm news is all about the 2.0 plan to fix the game and make it popular.  I am sure you can make a joke about that, but that likely wasn’t Blizzard’s intent.

And the most recent update about Overwatch involves a statue of Windowmaker for $150.  That they have to say, “Limit – 2 per customer” should be funny… or sad.  I can’t tell.

So not much of an April Fools from the team down in Irvine.  Digging around, it seems like there may have been some things done in-game for players, but the usual medium of outrageous new features and fake patch notes on the various sites seems to have fallen by the wayside.  I’ll have to check Blizzard’s April Fools archive next week to see if anything else was added for today.  But for now, that is all I have seen.  I’ll amend the page if something new comes up.

Addendum, thanks to the comments:

My own archive of past years:

April Fools at Blizzard – 2016

The day has come again.  April Fools is a thing down in Anaheim.

Past years fun, for those who want to catch up:

However, this year all the humor at Blizzard seems to be focused on the World of Warcraft side of things.  Heroes of the Storm is in the midst of a tournament, Hearthstone announced a new ranked play season, StarCraft II is pushing mission packs, Diablo III only mentions that Season 5 is ending soon, and Overwatch is focused on its upcoming launch.

I am sure some conspiracy theory can be thrown together that this indicates that somehow Blizzard may not be serious about WoW any more, at least relative to its other titles.  Or maybe the other jokes just haven’t been published as yet.  Anyway, we go with what we have to hand:

World of Warcraft

In Azeroth, there was the introduction of the Frostdoge Clan.

Such Faction! Very Expansion!

Such Faction! Very Expansion!

There was concern from flight masters around Azeroth as a new service called Flyt arrived.

Because we couldn't figure out anything with Uber

Because we couldn’t figure out anything with Uber

Then there was Azeroth TV, featuring shows like Void Storage Wars and Keeping Up with the Barovs.

As with real life, nobody can explain why we watch, we just do...

As with real life, nobody can explain why we watch, we just do…

This was on the WoW page, but is focused on the collectible card game front; the announcement of Hearthstone: The MMO in a video.

And no April Fools day would be complete without some release note fun, so here are the latest updates for the WoW Legion Alpha.

And that is all I have seen so far, though I am sure I missed something.  The forums are often a source as well.  I will update this post if I find anything new.

Meanwhile, what other games have something good for April Fools?

Some items of note:

  • Psychochild’s new venture is RetroVR