Moron #22: The Designers of We Rule

In the event you are not a gamer on such platforms as the iPhone, iPod, or iPad, "NGMOCO :)" is a very familiar gaming company that puts out gaming apps for such i-devices. It was recently purchased by none other than Zynga, which is a gaming corporation known throughout Facebook and online gaming communities to carry viruses, malware, and the like.

From the very day Zynga's purchase of NGMOCO :) was made official (December 2, 2010), weird things started happening in their We Rule Quest game: in-app purchases that required very real cash instead of the "play money," the odd disappearances of comments calling their business practices into question, and more recently, buildings that have nothing to do with the game theme but greatly resemble Islamic expansionism.

Now, I'm not really interested in their crappy way of doing business, no matter how underhanded it is. "Buyer beware" isn't a mantra pulled out of someone's ass for the hell of it, and if you can't reasonably determine the pros and cons of a company and make an educated decision to stay away from the naughty ones, that's your problem.

What DOES concern me and should concern everyone is this new intrusion of Islam into a game that is supposed to be about Medieval Europe.

Okay, to be fair I should point out that they, also, recently introduced a Roman Coliseum and Greek God temples. What should be noted, however, is that these introductions came swiftly after Zynga's acquisition and very closely follows the practice of grooming the consumer to accept queer changes that make no sense at first but then seem quite fine after public relations representatives step in to sugar coat the discrepancies.

How do they do this? With planted comments by fake gamers who just "looooove" the new item and share images of the items in their cleverly constructed kingdoms. These comments target the lonely gamer, whose only justification for existing comes from the acceptance of other gamers. This gamer reads these reviews, sees the attention the reviewer suddenly receives (by other planted employees), then rushes to buy one of his own so he, too, has a pretty kingdom to share.

Before you know it, they throw in this ("Observatory" is what they call it and this is their description):

 

I was sent this story by someone who I will not name with screen shots of their own comments regarding the MOSQUE. Those comments that were made in several locations on the official Facebook We Rule page have strangely disappeared, as have the comments of a player arguing that it looked nothing like a mosque (removing the initial comment to cover your ass means, also, removing any reply referring to the now missing critical comment). 

Hmmm ... Well, here are just a few of the images of mosques I found in less than one minute surfing the net:

Sure, chief. Looks nothing at all like a mosque *coughbullshitcough*.

How about we take a look at some photos from around the world of REAL ancient observatories:

Yeah, that We Rule observatory looks just like an ancient observatory and nothing like a mosque. Color me embarrassed!

Let's take another look at how the ..."observatory" is described in the game, shall we?

"Chart the stars over your realm"

Now that we can clearly see it IS a mosque, one has to wonder why the company insists upon calling it an observatory, treating it like an observatory, and deleting any comments suggesting it is anything but an observatory.

Hey! Just for shits and giggles, let's see how big this "observatory" is. I mean, it can't be too large since astronomy was more of a tool and not worshiped back in the middle ages with grand exhibits, and not too many shrines were built to house ancient astrology.

(Screen shot of an actual kingdom found in We Rule.)

Holy crap, that's big!  It's almost as big as the Ruby Citadel, which is one of the largest "castle" units offered in the game. Why, it's even larger than the Roman Colosseum (round item found at bottom right), which people complained was too big at the time it came out (oddly enough, said people haven't breathed a word about the size of this ... "observatory." Then again, I'm remembering other comments criticizing it quickly disappearing.).  It is the largest structure in the game, coming very near to dwarfing the castle. 

If anyone still cannot see that this is a mosque, I urge you to kill yourself now for the good of our species' evolution. You're too damned stupid to breathe our air, much less carry on your genes!

I think what really gets me going about this is that it comes on the heels of the mega mosque being built at the feet of Ground Zero. It never ceases to amaze me how completely batshit stupid people can be when the facts are there before them.

Let's say you still can't see the forest for the trees and are still skipping through the cotton candy fields of your delusional mind. At the end of the debate, the questions remain: Why do any comments inquiring about it's resemblance to a mosque disappear? Why does it look more like a mosque than an actual ancient observatory? And why do they refuse to call it what it obviously is?