Attentive readers of my and shaolinda’s posts on this blog have probably noticed from time to time a mainly played animosity towards a certain character named Powdersnow. That animosity – but especially the show especially the Marx Brothers are giving – has its root in old stories and long forgotten battles. Unfortunately for the named Powdersnow, I have a horse’s memory. We can forgive but we will never forget. If you are interested why Powdersnow nowadays is known as Dodo Pow or want to know why Shaolinda is a Goddess with her own high-priests and followers (Frogodo, the latest crew member, always washes her feet when she enters the office), I suggest you browse to the Marx Brothers blog and read up. Twenty people devote time and energy to write the greatest fabrications, exaggerations and PS-related stories. This official blog will not be used to say anything bad about Surreal*, the “who the hell?” clan Powdersnow was presiding and still mentally leads. I want, briefly, to discuss clans in itself: their goal, purpose and reason of existence.

Clans are in my view institutional oddities. They were created long before Powersoccer embraced them – crew members luckily have plenty of moments of vision – officially as independent, unofficial gatherings of people. If you were to command or create a clan, you needed to create a blog, have four members and write “we exist” in a specific thread in the best place on earth: the powersoccer forum.
It was only in November last year when clans were created in Powersoccer itself. Clans were bands of brothers fighting for clan ranking points and the overall honour of their clan (one could state: “as Surreal hardly played clan cups, they hardly had an honour”). As clans became official and gained a purpose (to be the best, the loudest or the most solicited, the least active), they became a tool for creating a sense of belonging as well. You prided yourself on being in a specific clan and you prided yourself on your clan mates. You upheld their honour in one on one’s clan cups and got to know each other better through the secret clan fora. Or you could do none of those things at all and call yourself an active clan, Surreal as that may sound.

Powersoccer becomes – and this is the main point of this article (yes, I have a clue) – through its institutional oddities ‘familiar’. You start to know all the household names. You start to like their characteristics (or dislike them). After a while, you get used to in real life absurd sentences like “Marx Brothers Clan is one hell of a great bunch of guys. Boy, did they kick Surreals’ ass – sorry for the word – badly” and you start to feel at home. Powersoccer becomes a family, a nation even, where there is shared belonging. We all talk Powersoccerian by now. We all talk about clans, tokens, MAs, PSE and many more things. We all know ATG, Imperium, Colony of Slippermen, Marx Brothers, TVST (and a tiny minority also vaguely recalls something called Surreal – please don’t shoot me if I misspelled the name). As this is a game played by thousands and thousands of people, that is one great achievement.

* A big thanks to Bigdaddyat for retrieving the link to their clan page. It was a bit dusty but we cleaned it and post it here.

As most of the readers of this blog probably already know, I am a 100 % Forumite. I never enter a gameroom on this account. In fact, I even am not allowed to enter a gameroom according to my religion (of which I am obviously the High Priest – interested people can contact me in the game). If the gamerooms were to be scrapped, I wouldn’t leave my sleep over it. I can challenge everybody I want to challenge and I can play cups without really entering a gameroom.
The forum is my home and my love. I just love to browse through its many daily posts and reply to some threads I find interesting. I am always happily surprised to see that people take time to actually sit down and write a proper text of 200 + words. And I am even more “walking on clouds” as I see it happens more and more often! The forum of Powersoccer is booming. The number of daily threads and daily posts equally borrowed those Seven-League Boots I mentioned yesterday. I have seen a whole bunch of young, fresh and inspired people entering the forum and started to post. Earlier this week, Powdersnow – on request of the Forum admins of the game – decided to expand the forum section of some of the existing languages (Dutch, Turkish, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese) and to create a new forum for Romanians. The forum seems to be the newest place in town everybody seems to check out. Let’s hope it can develop into one of the bars you simply had to have your beer when you are in town.

Not only is the number of posts increasing, there has been a new trend discernible too. People actually start to understand the community-feeling and living up to it. In a previous blog post, I noticed that a strong forum creates a community and a sense of belonging. You don’t cheat on your peers, you don’t offend your brothers and sisters. This seems to be happening as we speak. The post of one person, timcahill7, led to an avalanche of replies by various persons. What did timcahill7 exactly say?

“Hey guys,

Today is the day I make a public apology. Today is the day that I say sorry for all my PS mistakes, bans and lies .
So lets start off. To all of PS, i am sorry for my mistakes that I have made. I am sorry for my bans and lies. From now on you will see a big change in me, i will not do this stuff.

There is one person I would like to make a big apology to. And that person is sipwell. There is one reason why I would like to apologize to him. And that reason is I’m sorry for sending in all those FA apps, the reason I am sorry about that is i am under age, I am 14, not 19. So i am sorry about that. Can you forgive me?

I am sorry to the rest of PS if I have done anything to you. I am sorry for every single bad thing I have done. There is going to be a new timcahill7 around today.
Thank you, and goodbye.

Tim”

At least 5 other “bad seeds” in this game apologized for past behaviour. Some offered their public apologies to users they offended, to people they lied to or for their overall bad behaviour. Isn’t that superb? Isn’t that proof that the Powersoccer community works? Ah, posts like that simply make my day. They make my functioning in Powersoccer - voluntarily apart from the Swedish meatballs sent over by Powdersnow every week - worthwile. Make the community work, the game blossom in order to secure the income of some friends over in Sweden and increase the quality of the game even more. It is a circle I gladly step in.

And to end with a message to all the people still unsure about what to do: “Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” (Ralph Emerson). Powersoccer is a society too. Don’t deceive it.

May-June are probably my least favourite months of the year. I seem to be strapped to my office desk from too early in the morning till too late in the evening, doing too much work in too little time. In the meantime, the sun is shining, people are enjoying a beer outside or go for an early dip in the still cold but refreshing North Sea. I have been feeling like Tantalus lately, whereas the writing a blog post is so imminently close but forever distant. The joy of blogging became a nightmare!

And yet there is so many to blog on. To stay within the sphere of myths and fairy tales, Powersoccer seems to have stolen some Seven-League Boots… the game has evolved rapidly into an extremely addictive, multi-levelled experience. I find myself – in the moments of “in between” chores – thinking about strategy, training on quick passing, counter attacking and curling the ball. It seems the crew over at Linköping has been watching the evolution in football from very close and has seen that the days of big men pushing everybody aside – “American football style soccer” – are over: it are the days of quick players who can dribble, pass, sprint and have a tactical mastermind. Messi, Iniesta, Fabregas, Hazard (to name a Belgian :p), Rooney even, those are the players of the future. Powersoccer is the game of the future as well. Quick passing, tactical mastermind: all are necessary to make career in this game.

This game has become fun in an almost autistic (no offence intended) way: you can withdraw in your own (mental) world, develop the ideal strategy and train to put it perfectly into practice. You basically need nobody else to have fun. Powersoccer has it all for the loners amongst us (even the ability to turn of your chat and refuse to interact with your real life opponent).

Yet, what pleases me more is to play the occasional game against other high level players and see how they cope with tactics and strategy. The philosophy of the Marx Brothers, the most important clan in PS (there Powdersnow, I said it on your home ground), is that we play to have fun and not to win. ‘You lose some, you draw some’, our clan motto, doesn’t mean that we like to lose or to draw, it means that whatever you do (win, draw, lose), you should above all have fun. With this new version, we have come a giant leap closer to the absolute ideal of the Marx Brothers. I have lost often in this new version and I have lost badly too. I am however stupefied about the tactical and strategic approach of most of my opponents. I have witnessed plain brilliant goals scored against me, through pass that cut my defence open and for which, if they happen in real life football, you would jump out of your chair and cheer about the magnificence of the attack. I have seen tackling that was so perfect you almost had tears in your eyes. In my opinion, there is nothing more beautiful than an opponent out of the blue tackling your attacker on his way to an almost certain goal. The frustration lasts for one nanosecond, the joy takes over from then onwards.

Powersoccer seems to have it all. And that’s why I hope this game will grow until it reaches the sky. Why? Because it deserves it.

PS. Am I back to blog? Who will tell?

So, this is sort of an official statement, regarding Power Racing. I know for a fact that Pow is getting the same news out on the site as well.

Here we go:

Power Soccer and ManagerZone are growing fast, and we’re working hard to develop them in the right direction, with the right focus and engagement. Our games are in many aspects community driven, and lately we’ve been more and more aware that we need to improve the relations with our users as well as the quality of our games to meet your expectations. It’s important that we remain true to our core values. This means we need to back things up a bit, refocus, reassess our already existing games and make them as stunning and enjoyable as we all want them to be. Before building, releasing, maintaining, supporting yet another game we want to make sure the ones we already have stand on a solid ground.

In order to achieve that, we’ve had to take a second look at our priorities. We have reached the conclusion to put Power Racing on hold and to move all our resources over to ManagerZone and Power Soccer. This does not mean we’re not going to develop Power Racing, it just means that we have other things to do first. Power Racing is still very much alive for us, and it is our every intention to release it when the time comes.

What will happen now? All our efforts will go towards developing our already existing games until they match the visions we have for them. Some brand new features that will bring the different elements of the games together, improving the gaming experience even more. Improvements that we hope will take Power Challenge as a company, and its games, to the next level.

Not the kind of news I’d like to post, but then again, it’s all about making the best decisions and games we possibly can. I guess good gamedevelopers sometimes have to be the bringer of bad news

See you out there.

/ Linda, still in the office