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Fable Forum Goers Fall For Huge Hoax
CheeseMonkey writes "If you've played Fable, you have probably seen the Bards in the game, and may have had them tell you to find a "better bard". That better bard was found on the Fable forums (reg. required). Or, so it seemed. He led on the gaming public for two solid days with a series of incredibly well crafted poems. Finally, he fessed up. I extensively blogged the whole ordeal, so you don't have to sift through all the rubbish."
Fable came out. Many were not pleased with the short main quest time after all the hype that had spewed forth from the mouth of Peter Molyneux (the lead game designer of Populous and Black & White, et al fame) over the past few years. Many wanted to believe there was more to do, and so some of us held out hope.
Fast-forward to a week after release. A new xbox.com Fable forum poster (i.e. The Better Bard) started a new thread entitled "For the loyal - a week after release" or something akin to that in which he purported himself to be "contracted" (but, of course, under an NDA) to give out hints on the xbox.com Fable forum pertaining to extra lands and goodies you could get if you could solve his iambic pentameter riddles.
Although there were doubters, many, many people had their interest piqued enough to dive in headfirst, so to speak, enthusiastically trying to figure out his riddles.
His poetry, while not Shakespeare, was written just well enough to be taken seriously for several days, in which the thread he started grew to over 200+ pages in size.
Flame wars ensued between the doubters and the believers, the likes of which haven't been seen since the hey-day of Derrick Smart. New web pages were born overnight with all of his posts listed...many were just hoping against hope that he was for real.
Of course, since you're reading this, you know it was a hoax. He eventually fessed up, and some applauded his efforts while others promised to heap a thousand curses upon his head and that of his offspring for time immortal.
There...now you have it.
Someone posted hundreds of messages to a forum for the recently-released Xbox game Fable. The messages were poetic (in the style of the "bards" within Fable), and were presented as riddles to unlock secrets within the game (a viral marketing ploy, like ilovebees.com is for Halo 2). Later, the person stopped writing poems and came out of character, claiming that he was a 50-year old with a PhD in English, and that he was supposed to stop after he received a certain number of posts flaming him. It turned out it was all an elaborate hoax, and nothing he wrote pertained to any real secrets within the game.
Reminds me of when Final Fantasy VII came out, and all the fanboys believed that there was a way to bring Aeris back... people came up with all sorts of button mashing combos, ridiculous quests to revive her, and the like....
now THIS hoax... well someone with obviously massive amounts of time (that probably would have been better spent playing this awesome game) writes what appears to be like 20 pages of poetry to convince everyone there's some fucking hidden bard?!?
please... get a life man!
Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths....
Worse than that, it's not even an MMO... it's just a single-player RPG.