it appears FooMojo/Rivet's Foo FaceBook app, Pet Tales, has fallen by the wayside, with the usual lack of warning or fanfare (thanks for the heads-up, dee - seems like most of the interesting stuff happens when we're looking the other way, lol) - more on this as we research the situation. feel free to chime in with info and opinions!
we'd like to establish whether this was Rivet's idea, or FaceBook's - the fact that recent changes in PT had long-time devotees up in arms is certainly no secret ... and Rivet has pretty much proven that they don't really "get" what makes a VA site desirable and therefore profitable, much less how site economies actually work. (anyone know whether app pays FaceBook to be there, or vice versa?) but then, it appears that they don't see their sites as Virtual Adoptables at all - they are "social gaming" sites. (oh, really? anybody here take on animated pets that require consistent responsible care just so they could socialize on our wonderful Forums?)
the $64,000 question is...are WE next?
(back from poop-scooping...) it looks bad, folks...Janasov is jumping ship, and has written letters of recommendation for most of his major staff - while publicly denying any problems or change (and where have we heard THIS before?), it looks very much like Rivet is about to "ooo, ooo, take the money and run". Wall Street article detailing this clickable HERE ...i do believe, good people, that we got trouble, right here in Rivet City - with a capital T and that rhymes with P, and that stands for Dirty Pool...
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What the Foo is going on here, take two... so, they canned the entire team dedicated to Pet Tales - it appears that the keep-the-right-hand-secret-from-the-left policy FooMojo/Rivet observes here on Foo is writ large at the corporate level - and the usual onsite reaction of shut 'em down and shut 'em up is fully in force.
will they EVER realise that this merely FUELS the speculation they are trying to suppress - rumors only die in the face of accurate information, censorship accompanied by smoke and mirrors only encourages them. if they don't want people seeking out their potential fate elsewhere on the 'Net, it would behoove them to be open about it themselves : public information WILL get accessed and passed around, instead of acting like a cat trying to cover up on linoleum, how much better for them to come forward voluntarily and tell us themselves...unless, of course, the rumors CANNOT be countered with facts...
quite a while ago, we publicly pleaded with Rivet to "prove us wrong - please !"...it's still up on our profile. how sad that no matter what else changes - site ops, staff, corporate name - the policy of keeping their (now paying) membership in the worrisome dark remains in force.
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Wednesday 2/8/12... just looked in on the WSJ blog linked above : SPegg wrote
"Why wasn’t the game given a chance as a pay to play game like foo pets"
we posted this in response :
"i don't think they could have flown that stunt on a FaceBook app - if nothing else there is just too much competition for player attention...plus they had just disillusioned (to put it graciously) a lot of their most devoted and biggest-spending players. Ed aside anyone here surprised by that?
thus far, the pattern has been for each site in the "You'veBeenBoned"/"FooMojo"/"Rivet Games" portfolio to provide a stairstep to the next - from GoPokey, to FooPets, to Pet Tales, (but at least this time they had the semi-grace not to force-feed their existing membership the new version, though it was for their own convenience and not out of consideration for their customers) to Puzzle Tales, which appears to be the new-version Quest series from Pet Tales flying solo...and each independent transition has been a step down, from stand-alone site to FB app to phone app.
where on earth are they going next? animated-pet doorbells? do they have ANY idea what makes a VA (for these are Virtual-Adoptable sites, whether they call them "social gaming" or not) work? this whole epic reminds me of Mel Brooks "The Producers" - and i doubt THESE backers will take it as kindly as did the ones in the movie..."
bottom line is, folks, the pattern here appears to be bridge-burning, from Go-Pokey forward - with FooPets the only dinosaur left standing. we may be just too big to kill...lord knows, they've tried hard enough.
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Thursday 2/9/12... there was some kind of bait-and-switch with site mechanics (see Comments below), don't know what it means, but anything that happens and does NOT negatively impact the site here is a source of encouragement as far as we're concerned.
have been thinking...and come to the conclusion that if FooPets was killable, it would have vanished once Pet Tales was up and running - as sacrificing the previous site on the altar of the next has been the pattern throughout, regardless of WHO was in charge. the big question - once again - is, who's on FOOst? who's the new boss?
strange as it may sound, our vote goes to DrRon - it IS his baby, it DID run acceptably well under his management (the truth, now - don't the issues we had with him look a lot more minor now that we had a taste of Big Jesse? bearing in mind that Mr. Janasov stepped in and started rocking the boat right around the time Beta/WS was implemented?) whatever his past history, Ron knows this site and its players, and is bright enough to know that charging more for less is NOT the way to make money - something Janasov and company never quite seemed to get.
About Me
- GOLD RUSH
- Tabby Road, New Furrsey, Foo S. A.
- i am a seven-year-old virtual Cream Persian FooCat (born on Little Christmas, 1/5/10), the mascot and spokesfurson for FooBA4U, the FooPets members' cooperative service site.
Posted to snacksthecat 2-6-2012 9pm
ReplyDeleteSince several former Rivet employees have tweeted that the company has been dissolved and all the employees let go and you seem to be the last standing Rivet employee I am wondering if by chance you would be willing to share with the paying customers what the plan is to keep Foo up and running. I mean for us adults that got fed the "everything is fine, we are working on issues" lines last week on pet tales - your little post of reassurance is a joke. Is the server going to run on autopilot? Is a new company forming? Am I going to sign on next week to no Foopets as well? I think we deserve a little more respect than what we are being handed.
LOL anonymous -- an excellent message to Snacks. Of course it will be ignored and deleted or replied to in their usual bright cheery point-avoiding fashion and deleted. I don't think that many of the adults still on the site are under any illusions about Rivet, apart perhaps from the poor ambassadors and one or two die-hard members who trust Rivet's word despite all the evidence.
ReplyDeleteSnacks' announcement shows how thick they think we are. "heavy transition"?? Well, a transition has to have a "from" and a "to". Since he won't say what either of those points are, it seems likely that they are from "a semi-functioning site" to "complete collapse"
If the site is to transition into something entirely different, then heaven help all the foo addicts. But, given that the Rivet employees are mostly out of work and looking for jobs, it seems unlikely that the transition is anything other than down the tubes.
And any interesting threads asking for information regarding the issue get quickly locked or, if too near the bone, deleted by the ambassadors. The last quote from Remsie on the subject, when told by BBK that on LinkedIn it was clear that the CEO had left, was "I have passed this along to Admin.
ReplyDeleteAnnouncements will be made at the proper time." After a moment she apparently realised that this was completely laughable, and added "we are doing all we can to keep members informed. I ,personally, do not think that posts like the last few can help in any way, emotionally". It was after BBK pointed out "What happened to Pettales and the way it was stopped without any advance warning didn’t help emotionally either. I think it’s only normal that players want to know where they stand." that the plug was pulled on the thread.
Looks like foo is close to going down, doesn't it. Let's all have a drink!
...what interests me is that BOTH sides of the fence are conspicuously NOT mentioning the elephant in the room, Janasov's imminent departure as CEO...
ReplyDeletesaw snack's item out of the gate...(explains why the joint site-member FooDitarod event we were speaking about got kicked to the curb, lol, probably has his paws full), and noted that the only "real" thing it mentions, the lagging, has been "in progress", at least on paper, for some time now.
i wouldn't take the lagging per se as symptomatic, ALL sites this size have some (Rivet more than most, lol, but there are some that are worse), and all are "working on it". the fact that that and a sickly grin were all Snacks was allowed to provide IS worrisome, though...not that they have even really given any hard info (and no, shorti, we don't need or want "every little thing" - but a glimpse of the Big Picture for us paying chumps would be both useful in putting out the fire and hardly a lot to ask if it's NOT frighteningly bad news...)
I am just afraid that all they are doing is trying to get the last dollars out of the players that they can. Or even, to not have to prorata people that are prepaid up. Google bought Picnik and is shutting it down, but refunded people's money and gave like a 3 month notice so that folks can prepare. I don't guess Foo would have the ethics or the consideration of its customers to act similiarly. They have never in the past, why would they now. What is so upsetting to me is that they KNOW their customer base IS now children (they ran off most of the adults) and they would still screw them anyway. Have you been to the Rivet's home page? rivetgames.com go see for yourself is very telling. Not only that THEY ARE HIRING! oh yeah so lets add that obviously nobody is keeping their homepage current. I guess you need staff to do that.
ReplyDeletetheir page hasn't been current since it was set up over a year ago...and they are under no legal obligation to refund any "unused" membership monies, that's well-covered in the TOS (and i'm sure they used the same boilerplate over on Pet Tales), so that wouldn't hold them back for a heartbeat.
ReplyDeletethe site lagging - which is common on nearly every site i'm aware of, they're all "working on it", and none of them seem to get very far - precedes this crisis and as far as i can tell is unrelated : but mentioning it in the same breath as "we'll be all right, folks" has given it more impetus to the valid concerns in the wake of the shutdown across the way.
the lack of concrete site-supplied info is (distressingly) normal - they don't tell each other, much less us, lol.
chances are they are indeed hiring, if the mention of a "new" game is legitimate, that too is their pattern - everything and everyone is pigeonholed and has no contact with or knowledge of other divisions. their unprofessionalism never fails to astound me - canning one team and hiring another rather than move over an established group with no doubt the same basic skills?
seems the paranoia level we experience here operates at the corporate level as well..."they know too much! stifle them!"
Customer service? Where is it? Counting today, it is 12 days for me with Rivets mess and still no answers. No one knows what is going on and that includes them.I have 9 support tickets waiting to be answered and some of them are from before this transition. A transition is an overhaul. Apparently there is no one at Rivet that knows what they are doing. It has gone through my mind as well; they are trying to get every last penny from us before they shut down.
ReplyDeleteI also found out that any support member (we only have 1) does not go into our forums to see for themselves what is going on with the site. They rely on the "a" and "A" and they cannot do anything. They have the audacity to tell us, "we are working on it" when they do not work on anything to fix what is wrong.
Why is Rivet hiding from the members? Heck, we know more than the Rivet team in itself. We know when something is not working properly but they take lite of it.
http://webdetail.org/www.foopets.com
ReplyDelete(1st post) which Rivet mess - here, or Pet Tales? as far as the "transition" goes, it appears to be more corporate than site : not so much that there is no one at Rivet who knows what they are doing, but that there is no one at Rivet, PERIOD...they aren't hiding, just no one there to answer.
ReplyDeletei must disagree, A's and a's here on Foo DO have powerz - mostly negative, granted, but A's particularly can get things done if they feel like it.
(2nd post) good site - and they apparently do systematic updates, which most similar databases don't...this interests me deeply -
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Location: http://www.foopets.com
Content-Length: 0
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:50:06 GMT
Connection: close
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Server: nginx/0.6.36
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2012 22:50:04 GMT
so SOMETHING fairly drastic just happened at about 1:45 PST (give or take) - but WHAT?
one of their sponsors is SoftBank? these guys?
ReplyDeleteOh LOL... They actually found someone to pour money down their drain? Awesome... Where did you see that?
ReplyDeleteBut surely that's the old fooMojo that was sponsored by softbank, "Investors include Softbank Capital, Softbank Corp. Japan, Mike Maples, Ron Conway and Baseline Ventures." So -- if they were sponsors back then, surely they would no longer support Rivet/fooMojo?
ReplyDeleteyep, they put bucks up once again to Rivet - and were unavailable for comment, see clickable to Wall Street Journal blog in main post (maybe they didn't bother to check on name changes? or possibly took Janasov at his word - snicker - or perhaps just needed a writeoff for tax purposes, the timing's about right)... and i found that hilarious graphic in someone's siggy over on Aywas and HAD to hijack it - the person involved, by the way, is out of Great Britain, so it's not just stateside that they are a joke.
ReplyDelete... and now at last Snacks Speaks. Surprise surprise, Rivet no longer owns foopets. Whoever now owns the game, they could not run it worse than Rivet did. Back onto the rollercoaster we go -- hold on tight!
ReplyDeleteWhich site/place did that happen on? I've checked the FB page, support, etc., but can't find anything.
Deleteoh, my...hm. with Janasov et al gone, though, the question may be "Who owns Rivet?"...or, "Is there such a thing as Rivet?" off to prowl...
ReplyDelete