The History of Funeratic (New)

Outscore

December 4, 2022: After months of thinking about it and discussing ideas with fellow players, Scott resolves his conundrum about how to run Celebrity Goo Game in the future. The pagoda scoring system has come to feel stagnant. Upgrading the "lucky cats" into a more complex and strategically rich system is the first impulse, but the game's declining roster of active players makes that seem inappropriate. Finally, Scott settles on a return to basics: Each goo is worth a point, each creation is worth a point, a winner will be declared monthly instead of quarterly, and a sub-system of bonus points will keep any one player from dominating. The reception is positive, and the system does feel like the right size for the game's period of decline, although it does lead to a two-player domination: Russ Wilhelm and Steve West take turns winning each round of the game in the months that follow.

Vacancy

January 13, 2023: For years, Scott has wanted to turn the classic rock masterpiece "Hotel California" by Eagles into a tournament in Rock Block, preferably one that stretches the game beyond the usual simple race to win more concerts. Scott imagines a kind of virtual escape room challenge, in which players must think laterally to escape from a fantastical hotel inspired by the song lyrics, but he cannot conceive of how to recreate that kind of experience in a virtual online game suited to Rock Block. He asks players for advice, and Steve West begins thinking of puzzles and other suggestions for individual rooms of the hotel, but Scott ultimately gives up on the idea, and in the end doesn't even host a summer 2023 tournament due to low participation levels. But Steve still loves some of the puzzle ideas, and with Scott's encouragement, he creates a long series of rebus puzzles based on artists in Rock Block, posting them semi-daily in Tragic Comedy for months and inviting players to name the artist that inspired each one. This unofficial game winds up being even more fun than a tournament would have been.

Deprecation

July 28, 2023: Scott has been slowly working through a detailed step-by-step upgrade of the site code to make Funeratic work smoothly in the latest major versions of PHP and MySQL, but suddenly he runs out of time: While he's out with friends for the night, his hosting company upgrades the server to the latest versions, breaking Funeratic code and taking the entire site offline with error messages. Scott stays up until the wee hours just getting the site online again, but it remains riddled with bugs for months as Scott slowly fixes one system after another, including the back-end error reporting system itself that lets him know what's wrong. To complicate the situation, the hosting company is in the middle of a migration across the country, and Funeratic goes down for hours several times due to server configuration issues that are unrelated to the site itself. The mess is enough to make Scott want to throw out his computer.