Chicago reporters

If you’ve ever been to a massive gathering of tech-savvy people — like say, a gaming convention — you know better than to rely on the internet for sending emails or tweeting consistently, let alone for gaming itself. That’s just one of the lessons being learned by Niantic and the thousands of people who paid for tickets to Pokemon Go Fest in Chicago this weekend. Multiple outlets are reporting that not only can many people inside the park not connect to play, but there have been huge lines outside the park as people still wait to get in. When Niantic CEO John Hanke took the stage to calm everyone, he was subsequently booed and heckled while issuing apologies. Ouch. Popular fansite The Silph Road reports that Niantic is offering refunds and chunks of currency, but that won’t help all people who flew in from out of state — or out of country — for an event that’s gone south. Massively OP POGO specialist Andrew Ross tells us that the event … [Read more...] about Pokemon Go Fest in Chicago is pretty much a trainwreck

Just a month ago now, Pokemon Go’s Chicago festival was completely wrecked by connection issues that rendered the game an unplayable trainwreck for thousands of attendees, who booed studio representatives who climbed on-stage live to apologize. A Niantic spokesperson at the time admitted the team was “pretty horrified” about how it all went down, which didn’t stop the company from collecting almost $6M in sales on just one day of the event. It didn’t stop disgruntled ticket-holders from bringing a class-action lawsuit against Niantic in Illinois, either. At the time, Massively OP’s POGO expert Andrew Ross argued that Niantic has repeatedly made amateur-hour mistakes in its handling of a globally massive IP over the last year — that Chicago was just one more. So it may surprise you to know that in spite of the fact that players around the world are not thrilled about the game’s new raid mechanics, the event that heralded those mechanics … [Read more...] about Pokemon Go’s Yokohama event was a huge improvement over the lawsuit-provoking trainwreck in Chicago

Do you know that slow loading pages are bad for search engine ranking? Page loading is an official search engine ranking factor, and if your pages are not loading within 3 seconds, you need to work on it right away. You need to take care of loading time on the desktop as well as mobile. Along with taking care of basic requirements such as good hosting company, cache integration & few others, Content Delivery Network (CDN) plays a great role in speeding up your WordPress site. In case you have missed it, Harsh has already written a great piece about what CDN is and why you should use it. If you are completely new to CDN, you should read that post first. Also, check out: Seven quick tips to speed up your Website load time Does Website load time matters for SEO? Learn how to improve 2 Awesome free site to check your blog loading time Got back? Great. Now that you know why you should use a CDN service let’s see which CDN service providers are the best options for WordPress. In … [Read more...] about 6 Best CDN Providers for WordPress in 2017

Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers is the go-to ad serving platform that major publishers gravitate to. With 30% of the market share, Doubleclick for publishers or DFP as it is known in common parlance is considered the best ad serving technology out there, be it for web, mobile, or video. Launched in 1996 as an independent, and then revolutionary,  ad serving agency for the web, DoubleClick Inc. was later purchased by Google and redressed as DFP. One of the major reasons why DFP remains the most used ad-serving technology is their ability to unleash innovative and vertical focused solutions, guides and knowledge throughout the year. Take  look at the innovation of DFP in 2014 and you’ll see why publishers, big and small, love DFP. So we decided that since we have already spoken quite a bit about DoubleClick for Publishers and its pros and cons, how about we take real world examples and success stories of major publishers who scaled their publications with … [Read more...] about 6 DoubleClick for Publishers Case Studies to Learn From

In all our many roundups at the turn of the year, we’ve never done one on the legal dramas that have affected the MMO genre. That changes today! Of note, there’s… the lockbox scuffle as various countries turn their watchful gaze on the industry and self-regulation collapses in a puddle of shrugs; the Crytek lawsuit against Star Citizen studio Cloud Imperium; the potential for dead online games to skirt DMCA laws; multiple Pokemon Go-inspired lawsuits and criminal trials; the end of the Warner Bros. and Tolkien estate lawsuit; the continuation of the Oculus/ZeniMax Media lawsuit; the cease-and-desist filed against Asheron’s Call emulators; and a whole ton of Blizzard lawsuits, including the capsizing of the Bossland cheaters following multiple Blizz victories. My favorite, however, is Andrew’s research into whether lockboxes legally constitute gambling – from last January. Enjoy! Call of Duty swatting incident leads to man’s death in Kansas … [Read more...] about A look back at the MMO industry’s law dramas of 2017