Author: Admin

Star Trek Online Season 13.5: Escape From Prison


Star Trek Online is launching its mid-season update to season 13. Live today and coming soon to PS4 and Xbox, Escalation reunites players with General Rodek (voiced by Tony Todd) who joins our heroes as they enact a search and rescue mission for none other than the Klingon General Martok (voiced by J.G. Hertzler who played Martok on Deep Space Nine). The Federation is once again going to have to team up with the Klingon if they want to fend off the Tzenkethi who have been drawn to the general.

The mid-season update to Season 13 – Escalation sends players on a rescue mission for the captured Klingon General Martok, played by J.G. Hertzler from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Season 13.5 also introduces a new Ferengi Trade Alliance Admiralty and the Endeavor System, which provides challenges players can complete throughout the week for bonus rewards.

  • New Featured Episode – Players will team up with the Klingons to free legendary General Martok from a secret prison in the episode, “Brushfire.”
  • The Endeavor System – Level 60 captains can earn rewards throughout each week by completing challenges with the new Endeavor System.
  • Ferengi Trade Alliance Admiralty – The game’s Admiralty System has been updated to include a new campaign helping captains acquire trades and goods with the aid of the Ferengi Trade Alliance. This new feature is available to all captains Level 52 and above.

In Plain English: Imagos Softworks v Alex Mauer


(Editor’s Note: All information presented in this article is sourced from court dockets. As always, nothing in the column should be regarded as legal advice. In Plain English does not attempt to draw conclusions, and all parties are innocent until proven guilty in the court of law. I’ve fulfilled my legal obligation. Thank you.)

The Alex Mauer case is one that MMO Fallout has stepped away from covering, due mostly in part to the fact that every major Youtuber from SidAlpha to John Bain and Jim Sterling have more than thoroughly kept up with coverage, as well as that for a while now the story has been moving at such an incredible pace with fact mixing with hearsay that I didn’t feel that I’d be able to keep up with my morning and evening schedule freedom. I’ve always been one to avoid covering controversies until they turn into something genuine, an individual and a company shouting at one another generally leads nowhere, someone gets paid or agrees to stop shooting their mouth off, and we all go home disappointed.

But Alex Mauer’s lawsuit is different, because I think this is the first video game lawsuit in which the defendant has been ordered by a judge to stop sending death threats to the plaintiff. Here is the order:

Defendant shall refrain from making threats of harm and physical violence against Plaintiffs or Plaintiffs’ lawyer

The case of Alex Mauer really came to a head in June when she began submitting frivolous DMCA takedown notices for game footage of a property that she has no ownership of, but the drama goes further back than that. Mauer was hired by Imagos Softworks in March 2015 by Don Thacker to work on the soundtrack for Starr Mazer, a side scrolling shoot-em-up. At some point during this timeline, Alex Mauer asked for time off for medical reasons, at which she eventually left the team entirely. According to the lawsuit, Mauer came back and began claiming that Imagos owed her money, and claiming rights to Starr Mazer and Imagos’ other properties.

Mauer issued a DMCA notice against Starr Mazer DSP on Steam, forcing Valve to take the game down while the dispute was resolved, over a property that Alex Mauer allegedly doesn’t own. According to the lawsuit, which includes the contract with Mauer’s signature, Imagos Softworks retained all rights to Mauer’s work. Here is the snippet from the contract that discusses ownership:

WORK FOR HIRE: Contractor’s services will be performed as a specifically ordered or commissioned work made-for-hire, and Production Company shall own all results and proceeds of Contractor’s services rendered hereunder in perpetuity to use for all purposes, including without limitation to the exploitation of the Picture or otherwise. This agreement may be assigned to any entity by Producer provided such entity assumes all executor obligations. Contractor may not assign this agreement. Contractor agrees to maintain the secrecy of all Producer’s confidential information which comes into Contractor’s possession by virtue ,of Contractor’s participation in the Production.

Imagos is suing in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and has hired Leonard French as their attorney. Alex Mauer, in the short time that this case has been running, has hired and subsequently fired Frank A. Mazzeo. On June 26, Mauer allegedly began sending threatening messages of murder, arson, and vandalism toward Thacker and French, causing Mauer to be taken into involuntary custody while a mental health evaluation was performed. Mauer was released.

Mauer is being charged with Copyright Misrepresentation, breach of contract, defamation per se in regards to the claims of ownership, allegations of misconduct, and damage to Imagos Softworks through said allegations, as well as extortion/blackmail, following Mauer’s comments that the DMCA takedowns were to provoke content creators into contacting Imagos on her behalf.

In their lawsuit, Imagos Softworks hopes to place a permanent injunction preventing Mauer from filing additional claims, a delcatory judgement that Imagos owns its properties, unspecified damages, and any relief the court may deem necessary. The court will be conducting a hearing in regards to the application for a temporary restraining order on July 19 at 9:30 a.m.

Jagex Announces RuneScape For Mobile Devices


Jagex has officially announced the death of productivity today, as the company revealed plans to bring its two editions of RuneScape to mobile platforms, allowing millions of players to mine coal from the comfort of wherever they feel like. In a press release sent out today, the RuneScape developer revealed that both Old School and standard RuneScape will hit iOS and Android platforms, with Old School coming first during the winter months and RuneScape to follow later on.

Both versions will be cross platform, allowing you to continue where you left off on the PC. COO Phil Mansell commented that Jagex is quite excited to bring a much requested feature to the community.

“We believe in taking our games to wherever our players want them; recent player surveys showed an overwhelming 90% of active players and 64% of former players telling us of their very high intent-to-play on mobile. Our innovative approach to mobile is also evidence of our ambitions in the mobile sector, and a further indication of our investment in extending the RuneScape franchise to additional devices and territories.”

Players can head over to the official website and sign up to beta test the release.

(Source: Jagex Press Release)

Stellaris Director Blames Sexism For Poorly Received Voice Actress


Stellaris is attracting controversy over a recent trailer showcasing voice overs coming in a future update. While the video itself (above) is pretty uncontroversial, the response is. Response to the militarist voice has been rather negative, with members of the community remarking that the gravely, snarling voice sounds out of line with what players expected from a militarist, with some speculating on the single line simply being a bad script or poor directing.

Rather than take the criticism at face value, Stellaris Game Director Martin Anward instead ignored the negative response as anticipated sexism toward the “aggressive-sounding woman,” stating the following:

Let’s just say that having some men on the internet being upset about an aggressive-sounding woman was not an unexpected development.

For the record, here are a handful of responses to the Youtube video. MMO Fallout went through eight pages of responses before Wiz replied and couldn’t find one instance of complaints toward the Militarist voice being a woman.

Not a fan of the militarist one, but that’s just me.

for instance the militarist one, she sounds like she’s about to scream “blood for the blood god!”, which very well might be what player has in mind when designing his empire,
but fanatic militarist empire might be much more about war, tactics and discipline than about bloody combat.

Kinda wished the militarist actress sounded more stoic, deliberate, and overall “commanding”. She sounds more like the leader of space orcs than the admiral of a death fleet.

The militarist voice is not just annoying, it is stupid and a bit offensive. Who thinks that militarists should sound like insane Marvel Comics supervillains instead of, you know, actual professional military persons?

Honestly, I’m probably going to offend someone, but as soon as I heard the militarist one, I wanted to puke. It’s just too much. If we’re going to hear this repeating over and over again during gameplay, it’s going to be way too distracting and out-of-place.

Anward’s claim of sexism doesn’t meld with, say, the Utopia trailer which features an “aggressive-sounding woman,” yet did not receive similar complaints.

To be clear, what I am saying is not that the Militarist VO is perfect and beyond all critique, what I am saying is that we had a script for the Militarist VO that called for a more ‘crazy’ approach, and we picked the actor (after auditioning both male and female voices) that did the role best, knowing that picking a male voice would have been a safer bet no matter the quality of the actor. So it’s a bit amusing, like I said, to see the backlash and the absence of self-distance and self-reflection coming with it, because we *knew* this would happen and chose to pay that price.

So Anward admits that they purposely wrote the character to be ‘crazy,’ but the negative response over the character being crazy is apparently due to sexism. Anward also completely ignores that the strategy genre has had a long list of “aggressive-sounding women” playing the role of military advisers, from Civilization to Alpha Centauri and Command & Conquer who are well received by the gaming community.

Menaphos Expansion Will Be RuneScape’s One and Only


Menaphos was meant to be the first RuneScape expansion, big content packages dropped on players every three months introducing new mechanics, new areas, and new quest lines. By estimations, the second expansion should be on its way for a September release, however recent news has revealed that Jagex is scrapping the development style after one go. While there will be larger content packs released in the future, there won’t be a release structure similar to the planned 3 month release window.

In a post on the official RuneScape website, Jagex revealed that while the idea was sound, the development of expansions had taken an unexpectedly high amount of focus away from other aspects of the game, which suffered as a result.

For the foreseeable future, content plans include bringing back polling to gauge player feedback for updates. Additionally, the content teams will be working on updates that have been in the works for quite some time, such as the bank rework, mining and smithing updates, and invention batch 2. The team is also taking a look at other community issues such as reducing the “dailyscape” daily task grind.

Finally, the big RuneScape 2018 poll is available for players. Jagex polls the community every year and uses that information to plan the next year’s content. Check it out at the link below.

(Source: RuneScape)

Nontroversial: Secret World Legends and the Unsurprising Subscription


Subscribing to Secret World Legends is a subscription that automatically renews like a subscription. This statement may be obvious to anyone who has subscribed to a game, a newspaper, or television service, but for some reason it needs to be reiterated when talking about Secret World Legends. The community has been in a bit of a tizzy this week, which may have origins in trolling, over some misconceptions regarding the game’s subscription.

First, let’s discuss the claim that Secret World Legends signs you up for a recurring payment without explaining this. It isn’t true. The button to subscribe says “subscribe,” and when signing up with your payment details it explicitly states that you are signing up for a recurring payment. This is standard for virtually every video game with a subscription on the market and is made clear when checking out.

Second, there are statements floating around that the game sets you up for a one year subscription through Paypal when signing up. This is another falsehood. When you sign up with Paypal, you authorize Funcom to charge you the subscription fee every month as long as you’re still subscribed. The authorization lasts for a year, a limitation imposed by Paypal, but does not constitute a year-long subscription. It basically means that you won’t have to log into paypal and authorize Funcom every month. In a way, this subscription system is more restrictive as other games won’t stop after a year and will keep billing as long as the card is good.

In short, a subscriptions constitute subscribing to a service, and setting up a recurring payment means a payment that occurs more than once. It does not, incidentally, allow Funcom to take money whenever they feel like, for whatever sum they feel like.

 

NM Impressions: Crash Force


(Editor’s Note: Copy provided by publisher)

Crash Force is a great looking game with a lot of problems, which is fine since the game is in early access and that is exactly what it is good for. I’ve been playing the game for the better part of the last two weeks, and while the foundation is strong and the premise is fun, the game definitely needs more time in the oven before it can be considered fresh baked.

The premise of Crash Force is simple: It is an arena shooter where you play as hovering ships. As a modern shooter, Crash Force introduces MOBA elements in that each ship is in a way its own class, utilizing various weapons and perks to play the game in different ways. You have lighter, faster moving ships, ships with drones, ships with mines. Some can teleport, some can stun, others can even reverse time and regain health. Throw in a metric ton of decals to customize your ship with and you’ve got an arena shooter worthy of your $10.

Crash Force is your everyday arena shooter. You pick a bot, enter into a match, and shoot at your opponents until they are destroyed with the optimal goal of killing more of them and being killed the least. Your ships are tightly controlled and responsive to button inputs, and all of this takes place on an array of diverse maps with blooming colors, open fields, and tight corridors. You can play the game online, Crash Force automatically substitutes bots when there aren’t enough players who hold their own well enough.

While the game is rather fast paced, Crash Force hits some hitches with the number of stuns that can be played out at any given time. Instead of a simple indicator, the game spells out “stunned” and “confused” with a to-the-millisecond timer for how long the effect is in place. A one second stun seems like forever in a game where ships are whipping around and darting in and out of sight, while stuns and confusions can be useful in a strategic term, in the sense of gameplay they tend to be obnoxious and too common, jolting the gameplay to a halt while you watch your ship blow up.

And here is where Crash Force’s biggest problem lies: The fast paced nature of the game does not gel well with the kind of information that the game pumps into you. You have ammo/health/energy indicators in one corner, powerup cooldowns in another, the map in a third, and rankings in the fourth, with the center displaying your hits and relative combat information. There is far too much spread out too wide for this game, and it makes combat unnecessarily confusing and frustrating. Crash Force’s interface would have worked twelve years ago when most screens were still on 800×600, but you can see in the screenshots that it is far too spaced apart with too much screen space dedicated to large kill text/icons.

I’d like to see Crash Force’s UI get overhauled, and to further that point, I found a stock photo of a minimalist UI (source) to use as comparison. Rather than throwing them to the side of the screens, you could allow the player to keep their attention at the center of the screen by making the health/energy/ammo counts meld with the crosshair, with the cooldowns only on screen when activated and somewhere near the center crosshair. In this game nobody has time to count ammunition.

As a snazzy little arena shooter, Crash Force is turning out to be a solid indie title. It just needs a few simple tweaks to the interface and stun/confuse mechanics to balance it out. I’d like to take an extra look at it once it fully launches and some of the issues are ironed out. Interested parties can check the game out on Steam for $10.

[Humble Bundle] $12 For 10 Capcom Games


The next Humble Bundle is here, offering cheap games, most you’ll want to play. Running now and continuing through the next two weeks, the latest Humble Bundle offers items by developer/publisher Capcom. In short, the list is mostly populated by Resident Evil games, including the recent remake of Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil. You’ll also receive Umbrella Corps, which can be immediately deleted from your profile via Steam customer support.

At most, you’ll need to pay $12 to unlock all ten games.

(Source: Humble Bundle)

Pay $1 or more

  • STRIDER
  • Umbrella Corps
  • DmC: Devil May Cry

Pay Average or more ($7.28 as of this posting)

  • Umbrella Corps: Digital Deluxe Upgrade
  • Dead Rising 2: Off the Record
  • Resident Evil HD Remaster
  • Resident Evil 0 HD Remaster
  • Resident Evil 6

Pay $12 or more

  • Dead Rising 2
  • Dead Rising 3: Apocalypse Edition

[Column] Mobile Legends Threatens The Press, Good Luck With That


Riot Games is currently suing Moonton over alleged copyright infringement in regards to their game Mobile Legends. I’m going to reiterate that last statement because Moonton apparently doesn’t want me to tell you this: Moonton is currently being sued in court over alleged copyright infringement regarding Mobile Legends allegedly ripping off League of Legends. Those of you who are interested in reading up on the lawsuit, filed in California, can do so here. If you don’t feel like sifting through 44 pages of legal documents, I’ll be running an In Plain English article summarizing the charges. There are plenty of photos comparing the two games to gawk at, so I recommend taking a look.

The part of this lawsuit that caught my eye is that Moonton needs to read up on the free press and the definition of slander, because the company has posted a threat to the media reporting on this lawsuit: Stop, or potentially face intimidation through legal threats. Moonton posted the below statement on their Facebook page calling the stories “unreal,” and “rumors,” albeit refusing to go into detail on either aspect. For their part, Moonton has explicitly denied all claims of infringement, which can also be read in the statement below. The lawsuit is real, for a case that will occur in a real court in the real state of California.

The lawsuit notes that Riot Games had initially gone through Google and Apple to remove the app from both stores, alleging that Moonton simply changed its name, made minor changes, and put the game back on the store.

Most notably, after Riot discovered Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA and notified Google that the game was infringing, Moonton purported to remove the game from the Google Play store. But that was simply a subterfuge. Immediately after removing Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA, Moonton (without notifying Riot or Google) released a “new” game, Mobile Legends: Bang bang. However, Mobile Legends: Bang bang was not a new game at all, but in fact was the exact same game as Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA, with some modest changes. This ploy of “hide the ball” was part of Moonton’s deliberate business strategy, designed to hamper Riot’s ability to protect its intellectual property.

Winning a defamation lawsuit in the United States would be incredibly difficult. It requires that the plaintiff prove that the allegations are false (a nonstarter in this case, as the lawsuit is very real) and that the author knew that the statements were false and can prove material damage related to said statements. In cases of lawsuits, the press can’t be sued for writing about a lawsuit, provided the author isn’t making their own conclusions, and represents the allegations as just that (charges, not convictions). Moonton can’t sue the press for reporting on the allegations made by Riot Games and win, not in the states anyway.

More on this lawsuit to come.

Valve Drops 40,000 Accounts In Mass Ban


It may not surprise you to learn that Valve bans thousands of Steam accounts every day for cheating, between two to four thousand VAC bans and just as many game bans on a daily basis. A website that tracks and estimates inventory value determined that a total of $7,387 in items were taken out of the market along with the banned accounts. This makes for the highest ban day in Steam history, by a long shot.

In case you were wondering about timing, the bans were laid down right after the end of the latest Steam summer sale. VAC bans will extend to all accounts that share the same phone number and will ban that phone number from being reused for three months. In addition, players will be unable to move items from VAC banned accounts, meaning those expensive weapon skins are now permanently stuck to a tainted account.

(Source: VAC Database)