Author: Admin

Romance of the Three Kingdoms Hits Mobile: Pre-Register On iOS


Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a series of turn based RPGs that has been pushing out sequels since the first game hit the PC-88 way back in 1985 Japan, although western gamers may be more familiar with its spinoff series Dynasty Warriors. The next installment of this RPG is come to the west is titled Legend of Caocao and has already become one of the top 5 downloaded games in Korea and Taiwan.

Pre-Registration for Legend of Caocao is available on iOS in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia with the grand launch coming on February 22. Pre-registration is not going to be available for Android systems, however the game will be available on that platform as well.

For more information leading up to launch, check out the official Facebook page.

Valve Terminates Insel Games (Wild Buster) Over Fraudulent Reviews


Valve today announced the immediate termination of its dealings with Insel Games. According to the news post, Valve employees discovered that Insel was using accounts to post fake positive reviews for their titles.

It has been recently reported on Reddit that the publisher for this game, Insel Games Ltd., have been attempting to manipulate the user review score for their titles on Steam. We have investigated these claims, and have identified unacceptable behavior involving multiple Steam accounts controlled by the publisher of this game. The publisher appears to have used multiple Steam accounts to post positive reviews for their own games. This is a clear violation of our review policy and something we take very seriously.

For these reasons, we are ending our business relationship with Insel Games Ltd. and removing their games from our store. If you have previously purchased this game, it will remain accessible in your Steam library.

This affects all of Insel’s titles on Steam, including Wild Buster and Guardians of Ember, as well as The Onion Knights: Definitive Edition. The controversy sparked after an email emerged on Reddit allegedly from the CEO of Insel Games showing the company pressuring its employees to buy the game and leave fake positive reviews.

(Source: Steam)

Beta Perspective: RuneScape’s Mining/Smithing Beta


Mining & Smithing are widely regarded as extremely antiquated skills in RuneScape, as Jagex essentially filled out the skill without much future proofing. Both skills were released in 2001 and have received sporadic updates throughout the years to boost their usefulness, but it can hardly be argued that either skill has been left behind as the game has progressed. Requiring 85 mining (of the 99 skill cap) to mine Rune and 85-99 smithing to create its equipment made a lot more sense in 2001 when rune was the best armor in the game (which it still is for non-members) and rune was incredibly rare with two very slowly spawning nodes deep in the player-vs-player wilderness.

One thing that’s obvious about this planned update is that both skills are see a slowdown in production,

Mining appears to be going for predictability and ease of access. In current RuneScape, mining is essentially handled by dice roll, with every strike giving the chance to collect an ore based on your mining level, the level of the rock, and your quality of pickaxe. For most ores in the game, the rock depletes after one strike and you have to wait for it to refresh before it can be struck again.

Under the new system, instead of offering a chance with each strike, Jagex is going for predictability by introducing a timed slider which grants an ore once it fills up, its speed decided by your level, quality of pickaxe, and quality of ore. In addition, it looks like all of the ore will be moved over to a community, non-competitive style with ore nodes that do not deplete. While this does mean that it’ll be more possible to mine while not paying full attention, you’ll still want to check in every so often and click the ore to restore your stamina bar, which will slow down gathering as it depletes.

Smithing on the other hand appears to be going for slower production but more returns per creation, so you won’t be pumping out hundreds of swords per hour but the experience you receive per sword will be better than the system that currently exists. Right now smithing is a simple operation of clicking on an anvil with the ore in your inventory, selecting what you want to create, and pressing a button. The new system appears to be promoting creating less items by putting more emphasis on re-smithing what you’ve already created. Items can be upgraded six times up to “decorated,” at which the item can no longer be equipped but can be traded in for a lump sum of experience. According to Jagex staff’s in-game comments, upgrading is intended to be the fast, expensive method of training with leveling by creating items from scratch being the slow, cheap method.

Smithing anvils will be situated next to forges, and now you have to keep your metal heated in order to work it into shape (for realism). This translates into a heat meter that depletes as your creation meter progresses, meaning you’ll occasionally need to stop and reheat the metal before continuing. Right now this process is incredibly slow, but there are planned changes to make your heat last longer as you level up. Coal has also been replaced with a new luminite ore as an ingredient to smith adamant and rune armor, and the existing equipment has been condensed down to level 50 with new ores/armor filling in the remaining levels.

Finally, there is an idea of convenience that has been sorely missing from mining and smithing since its inception. Since both skills are built around the idea of mass production, a lot of the time is currently spent running with limited inventory (28 spaces plus some limited options for holding coal) running to and from the bank. With this rework, players will be given an ore bag which can drastically increase the amount of time you spend mining before having to go bank. The numbers will most likely change before launch, however during the beta I could fit about 200 tin ore (level 1) and 100 living ore (top level) into the bag. On the smithing side, you’ll be able to fill a universal hopper with ore and bars that can be accessed from any anvil, removing the need to go to and from the bank with a sack full of ore.

Looking at some of Jagex’s available design documents, the company is taking into account all of the potential issues that this rework will create, including possible threats toward the value of existing, non-craftable equipment.

I’m looking forward to how this new system will shake up a system that has more or less stayed the same for the last seventeen years.

Chaturday: The Jack Thompson Reboot


This Chaturday I want to talk about Jack Thompson, because as we all know Hollywood and that means endless reboots and sequels of franchises, the kind we wish would have gone away after the last sequel flubbed in theaters.

The Jack Thompson reboot comes nearly ten years after the film franchise ended what was an otherwise spectacular and gripping series finale. Thompson, perennial anti-gaming lawyer of the series, played an opportunistic attorney and from 1997 to 2007 made himself into the anti-hero of sorts, chasing digital ambulances and wasting no time in taking advantage of murders to forward his zealous campaign against the evils of violent games. We got to see Thompson’s trademark “bad cop, incompetent cop” routine as he took all roads necessary to get results, from harassing defendants to intimidating witnesses, quoting non-existent studies and generally making false statements. We enjoyed Thompson’s antics because, much like Wacky Racer’s Dick Dastardly, at the end of the day he was destined for failure. The modern day Al Bundy.

And in 2007 we learned that the Jack Thompson series would come to a close with a gripping series finale in which Thompson was brought before the Florida Bar and disbarred for his various activities over the series, from making false statements to disparaging lawyers, and even that short mid-season spinoff where Thompson was practicing law outside of Florida. We were left with Thompson sitting on his motorcycle, driving off into the sunset with one parting message. “I’ll be back.”

Granted I could be mistaking the Jack Thompson show with something that happened in real life.

The season premiere has been covered by Rolling Stone, Jack Thompson has officially returned to prime-time television and this season is starting off with Thompson returning to offer his assistance in a school shooting in Marshall County, Kentucky in which a fifteen year old shot and killed two students, injuring 21 others. The shooter, it’s discovered, may have been a violence-addled video game addict and only one man is up for the job.

Thompson (the character, not the actor) is still trying to get back on his feet after we saw him ride off ten years ago. Without his license and with his credibility still in shambles, Thompson took the classic TV approach and offered his work pro-bono, mailing just about anyone involved with an authority and functioning mail box. And who can forget that heart-wrenching climax when he turned to the camera and said:

“What happens in the case of heavy users of video games is that when they have the virtual reality taken from them, they will set out to make it real reality,” Thompson told the newspaper. “They do this without being fully appreciative of what they are about to do.”

An AV Club review of the episode notes this statement as forced scripting, noting that an educated adult, even one with Thompson’s established history of false statements, would posit that the murder was the result of the shooter getting his video games taken away. Perhaps a decade of absence has made us forget the absurdity of the original source material.

With The Walking Dead not returning to AMC until the end of this month and Brooklyn Nine-Nine likely on hiatus until April, it looks like Primetime television may have put up just the show it needs to keep viewers attention until something more interesting comes on.

Epic Games Ends Another Lawsuit With Permanent Injunction


Back in January, MMO Fallout reported on the latest lawsuit filed by Epic Games in the district of Northern California court. The lawsuit followed the similar pattern set forth by its predecessors, seeking permanent injunctions and utilizing the natural legal progression of a DMCA takedown notice against the defendant’s Youtube videos. This lawsuit, however, charged defendant Yash Gosai, a New Zealand resident, with creating/finding an exploit that would allow him to obtain V-Bucks, Fortnite’s real money currency, without paying for them. Gosai posted the exploit on his Youtube channel and, when the video was taken down on Epic’s DMCA notice, filed a counter-claim.

Epic alleges that Gosai created, developed and/or found an exploit for Fortnite’s Battle Royale game mode; Gosai then created and publicly displayed a video on YouTube to advertise, demonstrate, and distribute the exploit; Gosai’s video contained gameplay from Epic’s Fortnite Battle Royale game; and that using the exploit, Gosai obtained Fortnite V-bucks without paying for them.

Less than a month later, the lawsuit is over with Epic Games claiming the victory. The court found in favor of Epic Games on the charges of copyright infringement, breach of contract, and conversion. The court’s decision, which cannot be appealed by either party, permanently restrains Gosai from finding, creating, promoting, sharing, or otherwise interacting with any program/cheat that interacts with any of Epic Games’ titles. As with its other lawsuits, Epic Games is not seeking monetary damages and as per the court’s ruling both sides will be responsible for their own attorney’s fees.

Since October 10, 2017, Epic Games has filed seven lawsuits against people creating/promoting cheats for Fortnite, of which four have been successfully settled. For two of the three remaining lawsuits, Epic appears to be having trouble serving the summons. In the third, filed against a Russian citizen, is allegedly being ignored.

(Source: PACER Court Documents)

NCSoft Reports Growth For Fourth Quarter 2017


NCSoft today released their fourth quarter results for 2017 and the company has posted increased earnings across the board over last year. Sales, profits, and income grew over 80% over the same period in 2016 fueled primarily by the company’s massive success in the mobile market and the launch of the latest expansion for Guild Wars 2. Mobile sales dropped 41% over the last quarter as the launch fervor of Lineage M dies down, while Guild Wars 2 gained a 73% growth over the same period.

For the year of 2017, mobile sales accounted for 57% of total earnings while Lineage 1 dropped 59% with much of that revenue being players transferring to Lineage M. Revenues from Korea and royalties grew massively while the market share from US/Europe, Japan, and Taiwan decreased slightly. Fourth quarter earnings from the US/Europe did grow despite the overall yearly drop due to sales of Guild Wars 2 and its expansion.

(Source: NCSoft)

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: Marvel Heroes and the Diploma Mill of Nostalgia


Fraudster:
2a:  a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor;

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I actually get a lot of criticism when it comes to Crowdfunding Fraudsters for apparently being too lenient on the subjects. I take a lot of time to carefully parse my statements so that we’re not making any assumptions on motivation or things that can’t be proven outright, and quite a few people take that as me trying to play devil’s advocate for what they see as an obviously shady campaign. I understand where they’re coming form, and on behalf of protecting my own legal liabilities, I humbly disagree.

Now this campaign, on the other hand, nobody’s getting sunburn with all of the shadiness present.

I introduce you to the Marvel Heroes Rebirth, an Indiegogo campaign seeking $450,000 on a promise that it can’t keep for the sale of a property that they haven’t secured the rights for. It may look like your run of the mill predatory “jump on the nostalgia” sort of campaign that we’ve seen to revive old games or port them onto new systems either without the intention of or without the attempt to secure the rights from those who hold them, but if you shovel away the first layer we come upon a whole world of oddities. But more on that later.

I’ll start with the opening statement which reads like it was written by a timeshare salesman.

A sinister villain has shut down an iconic game. Fans are outraged. There is no relief in sight. Where is the hero destined to save the day and ease their suffering??? Oh, it’s you! We have an opportunity to save a great game that would otherwise be destined for the great void. There will be challenges and risks, but a great reward for those brave enough to help save the Marvel Heroes game platform. Help us save this game making it something better, stronger and faster than before.

The developer forming up to save Marvel Heroes is called Eldermage Studios, and if you head to their website it looks pretty independent gamey, very much focused around the proposition to rebirth Marvel Heroes anew. Do they have any credentials? No, but they’re hiring or they would be I suppose if the “Join Us” led to a working link. A company like this has to have some sort of founder, big industry guy, some sort of Richard Garriot-type philanthropist who really likes Marvel. I’ll even take a nerd with no programming skills but a lot of love for nostalgia who really liked Everquest back in the day.

Now $450 grand may seem like peanuts compared to the kind of money you would expect to need to license and host Marvel Heroes, and this campaign has heard your concerns and wants you to know that there is nothing to worry about since this pitch will very likely fail miserably.

  • Unless millions are raised to fund this campaign, the odds of this option being successful are very limited.

There’s the insurance statement. But it’s not all gloom and doom because the Copyright Office is reviewing a proposal that may exempt abandoned MMOs from the DMCA protection, which would allow Eldermage to legally operate the game even without Disney’s approval.

  • If Disney is unwilling to partner with us, there still may be another path.  Through March, 2018, the US Copyright Office is reviewing a proposal that would exempt abandoned MMOs from Digital Millennium Copyright Act protection; if exempted this would allow organizations such as ours to continue hosting Marvel Heroes. However, there is the likelihood that the game could not be further developed.   For more info and to provide your feedback on “Proposed Class 8” exemptions, visit the US Copyright Office.

In which case the pledges would be useless as you either wouldn’t be legally allowed to make those alterations into the game code or it would still be illegal for you to profit off of operating Marvel Heroes. Alternately, they might strip out all of the Marvel characters and replace them with public domain heroes which wouldn’t actually be that bad of an idea. Frankly I’d love to see a Diablo-style game using mostly golden-age heroes and it’d be a great way to bring them back to the public eye. You might have something going here.

And Eldermage does explain what the money is going towards:

To achieve our plan, we are currently seeking a minimum of $450k – $900k to acquire the intellectual property, cover due diligence and legal fees, procure necessary third-party support to host the rebranded game, and restore the game to use.  Yes, this is a large expense but much less than the original tens of millions of dollars used to develop and operate the platform.

A smart business decision that worked out great for Gamersfirst with All Points Bulletin, a $100 million engine that was sold for pennies on the dollar when Realtime Worlds went bankrupt and became profitable under the new company.

Now I could talk all day about the empty promises and nostalgia baiting that accompany these campaigns all day, but I wanna know: Who is the face behind Elder Mage? Unfortunately there is no staff page and the Elder Mage domain was registered by a name hiding company in Scottsdale Arizona. Sorry, I guess that’s the end of our trip! All we really have to go on is this bit about a 501c(3) organization called Paragon Institute.

Paragon Institute is a 501(c)(3) educational, non-profit; our goal is to establish ElderMage Studios as a learning lab to partner experienced professionals with aspiring game developers to help them gain the skills and hands-on experience necessary to work in the field. This may include time spent supporting or enhancing existing titles to create entirely new ones. A secondary mission is to preserve games that are no longer supported so that those who have licensed them may continue using them and so others may learn from them.

When you go to Paragon Institute’s website, you get a landing page for Paragon Academy which appears to be ticking down to something in 386 days, it looks like the academy is relaunching or something. What really interested me was that this Institute has a physical location in Cary, North Carolina and frankly physical location is basically like filling your legitimacy pitcher halfway from the get go. So I decided to just give the address a perusal in Google Maps to see the grandeur of this institute.

It’s a cul-de-sac, and I’m 99% certain that Google didn’t mess up the address, and I’m not all that worried about privacy because it is literally on the contact page for the Institute’s website.

So I continued to check out the website to see its legitimacy because if the Institute is indeed hosted out of some dude’s house, then the rolling photos on the website depicting smiling young people in classroom settings are total nonsense. In fact, I’m not in the greatest of moods and there are only three images rotating on the website, so let’s check those out: I did a quick backtracing on the Googles and it looks like this, this, and this, were creatively lifted and slightly modified from here, here, and here.

So maybe I’m being unnecessarily paranoid. Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t find anything, despite being a seasoned master of Google-fu, and this institute looks like a diploma mill. There isn’t enough information, let’s keep searching. There are three links on the “Students, Faculty, and Staff” page. The student/staff portal leads to the Office homepage, the Portal registration leads to an Office account creation page, and the page for former Chadwick students leads to a non-existent website.

And what is Chadwick University? It’s a diploma mill founded by one Lloyd Clayton Jr., whose credentials need no further introduction than his degree in holistic massage (this is a joke, he doesn’t actually claim to have such a degree). Chadwick University was not accredited and is considered an illegal supplier of degrees in the state of Texas (among others), it offered degrees based on “life experience” and basically just shut down in 2007 with Clayton no longer answering the phone. Chadwick U was accredited by the non-recognized World Association of Universities and Colleges, whose founder Maxine Asher genuinely believed to have discovered the lost city of Atlantis thanks in part to her psychic abilities, however her research was allegedly suppressed by the “Jews and Catholics.” Asher ran her own diploma mill fraud racket and sadly passed away in 2016.

But here you have Paragon Institute, a magical academy run from a cul-de-sac somehow linked to a defunct diploma mill accredited by a defunct diploma mill founded by a psychic who discovered Atlantis, and this is the company that wants to revive Marvel Heroes if only the public will give them lots and lots of money.

Buzzfile lists Paragon’s website as virtucorp, a website that no longer exists but through the power of Web Archive appears to have been filled with lorem ipsum gibberish.

Paragon Inc’s founder and only known employee Willis Adkins is currently running for a Congress seat in North Carolina’s 2nd District. According to its 501c(3) filings, Paragon Institute Inc used to go under the name “American Southern University Inc” and for years did business under names like “SGUS Academy,” “American Institute of Independent Studies,” “ASU Press,” “Miskatonic Institute,” and “American Center for Professional Studies.” MMO Fallout could not procure any web presence, addresses, or information for any of these names. Paragon Institute has filed a 990-N each year, a card for organizations whose claimed gross receipts are less than $50 thousand. As such, we were unable to procure standard public tax records which might include more information about the organization.

But the Marvel Heroes revival has a flexible goal of $450,000 meaning that even if nobody else contributes, they’ll still be able to keep that $305 in dosh that six backers put in.

 

 

Crowdfunding Update: Greed Monger Delivering Refunds To Backers


Greed Monger is a bit of a touchy subject here at MMO Fallout, considering it’s one of the few games that we outright refused to publicize should it ever reappear on Kickstarter, but we have some positive news on the game and its creator Jason Appleton. While Appleton may not have had much success creating video games, as evidenced by the crowdfunding and subsequent fall of Greed Monger, the man does appear to have more of a conscious than your average failed Kickstarter project and a willingness to right past wrongs.

That, and an impressive portfolio of cryptocurrency, because Appleton has taken a step extraordinary for Kickstarter creators and has begun extending refunds out of pocket. Backers have received updates over the past week or so letting them know that they can submit refund requests that will be processed through Paypal (or Bitcoin if that’s your preference). The refunds have started flowing, with Appleton noting that he is limited to $2,000 per day via Paypal restrictions on transfers.

Thank you guys for being patient. Its not easy coming up with 6 figures to repay donations to a passion project. But we are going to get there.

Backers interested in receiving refunds should check out the link below. Appleton took the time to post on Massively’s coverage that this controversy had been weighing on his mind for years and that in retrospect he understands the skepticism of the original campaign.

“As for the Refunds, yes, this has been a plague on my mind for many years and finally being in a position to make it all right has been a huge load off. I truly believed this project could be done. I thought everyone telling me I was crazy for even thinking it to be possible just jealous for having gotten funding from KS. Knowing what I know now, I realize why I was branded as a scammer from before the KS even ended. If I saw me today, trying to Kickstart a similar project , knowing what I know now, I’d think it was a bullshit cash grab too. I was just very ignorant and too trusting.”

(Source: Kickstarter)

Counter Strike Co-Creator Arrested For Sexual Exploitation of Child


Seattle police this week arrested Jess A. Cliffe, co-creator of the video game Counter Strike, and are planning on charging him with sexual exploitation of a child. Valve has released a statement to Kotaku that Cliffe has been suspended until more details are made known.

“We are still learning details of what actually happened. Reports suggest he has been arrested for a felony offense. As such we have suspended his employment until we know more.”

(Source: Kotaku)

[NM] Electronic Arts Gives Wrong Numbers On Battlefront II Sales, A Lot of Websites Haven’t Corrected It


Electronic Arts released their third quarter results for the 2018 fiscal year this week, noting increased revenues to $1.16 billion compared to $1.14 billion last year with higher operating expenses. Sales were driven primarily by live games including the various Ultimate Team systems and The Sims 4, with little doubt to the notion that last November’s Star Wars: Battlefront II under performed according to EA’s expectations.

What is in dispute, surprisingly, is how much the game under performed and just how many units the game sold, and the reason behind this confusion appears to be EA’s own error. According to Wall Street Journal’s tech reporter Sarah Needleman, EA confirmed in a statement under an embargo that Battlefront II had shipped over nine million units, about a million shorter than they had anticipated.

In actuality, and according to EA’s own released prepared remarks, the game was expected to sell about eight million and fell short of that by less than one million. So EA’s own reports were upwards of two million less than what they had incorrectly stated.

For Q3, we had expected to sell in about 8 million units, but we fell short of that by less than 1 million units. However, this shortfall was significantly offset by an excellent performance from our live services. The impact of FX was immaterial on the quarter.

Needleman has acknowledged on Twitter that the numbers she was given were incorrect with the earnings call not releasing until hours after the embargo lifted. Evidently nobody informed the rest of the reporters that this information was incorrect, since as of midnight on January 31, MMO Fallout had perused at least a dozen major gaming/tech websites that had covered the story, and not a single one had followed up with a correction.

Understandable, since virtually all of the articles seem to merely copy and paste either information from Polygon.com’s coverage or directly from Needleman’s initial tweet. In fact, the only major news website that reported on this and managed to get it right appears to be VG247 who actually read the prepared remarks and highlighted the discrepancy with the WSJ’s numbers. At least one of the outlets we read actually linked to the prepared statement and even claimed that the report stated the 9 million figure, which suggests the author did not even read the document that they quoted.

Calling malice seems to be a long shot, it looks like the Wall Street Journal was sent incorrect information and while the While Street Journal corrected their story, none of the outlets that sourced the Tweet did any fact checking of their own or took the time to read EA’s following prepared statement.