This MMO has been around since 2008 but still has a player base… who ran into unusual server-wide messages.

Wizard 101 was released in 2008 and is an MMO aimed mainly at young players. According to the announcement on Twitter, KingIsle’s game went on hiatus Friday evening in the US due to “an unexpected issue” that forced the servers to be “temporarily shut down”, and they will update us later on the developments and thank us for our patience. However, it is just the tip of the iceberg.

The messages the server(s) sent to the players sound pretty harsh. For example, “Bradley, come down to the office this instant – the CEO”, the male genitalia and testicles, but there was something like “The next world is my boss’s a__hole”. However, there was also a “This game is s__t” message, and this post summarizes the messages that point to the potential issues within KingIsle.

Essentially, it is about an employee’s relationship with management being poor. He complains about low pay and a poor working environment. Still, there are also innocuous trolling messages (for example, one comment from Breaking Bad character Walter White, but there is also one about players being paid in a currency that does not exist in the game). But it’s also not impossible that this is the studio’s way of drawing our attention to the MMO that has been around for a while, so it’s also not impossible that this is just an organized guerrilla marketing, as recently demonstrated by the temple mod for NieR: Automata, for example.

Maybe the “perpetrator” is the Bradley named in one of the messages, and it may be some freak-out on his part, but in any case, it’s pretty funny how the messages are combined with the Comic Sans font used in the game because it makes for a nice overall look. (And the message about the male reproductive organ in this font is hilarious…)

Source: PCGamer