Author: Admin

[Community] Mob Mentality, Jason Vorhees, and Website Policy


For this week’s Community article, I’d like to bring up as subject that has been discussed to death over the past few years yet still remains a pervasive issue in not just the gaming community, but virtually every aspect of human life especially when the internet is concerned: Mob mentality and the internet’s ever populous septic tank of human refuse that plagues every community.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Friday the 13th developer Illfonic got caught in some hot water this weekend after a player got banned for allegedly sexually harassing a group of players including a 12 year old girl. The topic has been covered by a number of Youtubers, which you can find and catch up on if you want to know the story, but instead of talking about semantics, I’m going to summarize MMO Fallout’s response to this controversy in one paragraph:

I didn’t write about it, and looking at all of the misinformation that has come out and been repeated by various Youtubers, I am doubling down that not writing about it was the right thing to do. I throw around the term game journalist like it’s a joke sometimes, but this website does strive to follow the SPJ code of ethics, and rules one and two are seek the truth and minimize harm respectively. That didn’t happen in this case.

Among the big book of rules written for MMO Fallout, discussing reports of game bans is virtually off the table except in rare circumstances where the developer is blatantly crossing an ethical line by handing out bans for poor reviews or doing something shady and banning people in the hopes to silence that information. At the end of the day, bans are subjective, and as incredible as it sounds, people who are punished tend to lie about the circumstances surrounding their ban. I say this as someone who has a long history that includes GM’ing an MMO and owning/moderating servers for games like Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, and more. You’ll be a lot more skeptical after the tenth person you’ve banned in a month (after repeated warnings) for using racist slurs in chat shows up on the forums and says he has “no idea why he was banned for just playing the game better than everyone else.”

But more importantly, these topics tend to be eighty sixed because the internet can’t behave itself, and such coverage is only guaranteed to result in the mob mentality’s three D’s: Death threats, doxxing, and DDOS attacks. Not only has the harassment campaign by online sociopaths begun against Friday the 13th’s developers, but the servers have been hit more than once by attackers trying to either punish the developers or simply ruin the experience.

And make no bones about it, I don’t blame either the guy who got banned for airing his grief or the Youtubers for popularizing the controversy for this response, as I have written numerous times in the past, it doesn’t take much incitement for death threats to start rolling in. It’s also important that we don’t just accept this sort of action and continue to weed out and remove such bad actors.

The player in question has even apologized for what the developers have endured following his review, an act that should be commended in spite of genuinely being unnecessary. It also shows how disturbing parts of the net have become:

I know what its like to be doxxed. I know what it’s like to have your family called and have horrible things been said to them. That’s why I can no longer continue to support this. I have been approached by people on steam, asking me to??????the 12 year old I was in the game with, and to give out the people in the matches information so they could doxx them and kill them. The things people have said to me have really scared me these past couple of days and in no way shape or form did I want this to happen.

While I will never blame content creators for the actions of their community (unless said action is directly or implicitly instructed by said creator), you absolutely have an obligation to verify the facts before making statements.

Other than that I have no opinion on the matter.

Review: Antihero


(Copy obtained from publisher)

Mathilde can’t keep up. For every street urchin she sends to the Bastard’s Bath or Millstone to desperately scrape together some cash, my gang will find them and beat them back into hiding. Any thugs she uses to block the streets or gangs to route out my urchin children will be murdered and left for the rats. I’ve bribed politicians, assassinated those who couldn’t be bought, pulled strings with the church for the purpose of blackmail, and if I have to I’ll hire a Truant Officer to evict those urchins.

But that’s not necessary, because I can throw in another bribe and win the match.

Antihero is a turn based strategy game of wits set in Victorian London where you take the role of a master thief and utilize the city’s underside to expand your empire and drive others out. You do this by playing dirty, hiring street urchins to infiltrate places for the purpose of extortion, bribery, and blackmail, killing your enemies, and generally being a lethal pain in the rear. Antihero was developed by Tim Conkling and at the time this is published, will be available on Steam.

Artistically speaking, Antihero showcases a pleasant style with characters whose heads are disproportionately larger than the rest of their bodies. Animations are quick and exaggerated, and overall the aesthetic of the game feels like it’s been directly pulled from a children’s book. Characters are well stylized caricatures of what you’d expect from a Victorian London game, and while the campaign mode’s bosses are effectively one-dimensional stereotypes, they go as far as needed to convey what they are and how they will generally act.

Each turn your master thief has a limited number of moves which can be used to infiltrate buildings, burgle them, assassinate opponents, and generally thieve around. As you progress through each turn, you’ll gradually accumulate more of the game’s two currencies: Gold and lanterns, which in turn can be used to buy minions and upgrades which make it easier to obtain gold and lanterns. Your thief him/herself is also reliant on upgrades to provide more actions and better damage, and over the course of the match becomes more useful and powerful.

What makes Antihero a thinking man’s game is that it really requires you to have a plan and be willing to act on it with the limited resources at your disposal. Using your gang to clear a building of urchins means not using him to strike your opponent’s gang, or take out an assassination target, but it does starve your opponent of much needed coins/lanterns to inhibit his next turn. Likewise, thugs can be placed around the map to block passages and force your opponent to waste a turn killing them, but they can’t be moved once placed and only last a few rounds. Your thief, while able to do more per turn, is still reliant on the law of opportunity cost. Should you scout the map early, revealing buildings held by enemy urchins, scout your own buildings to allow your urchins to infiltrate and start generating money, or burgle buildings to generate short term cash, or all of the above at the cost of efficient short term growth?

While it can be easy to get ahead in Antihero, staying ahead is a delicate balance of resources that can just as easily be knocked over at the drop of a hat. Your gang gets more powerful as you beat up urchins and murder, but they never become so powerful that a master thief and their own gang can’t take him down in a turn, if they’re willing to dedicate the resources to it. Urchins can be evicted, meaning you can lose that church bribe at any given moment, and assassin targets regularly walk the streets allowing for some late game changing victory points if you can get to them fast enough.

One aspect that I really like about Antihero is the return of the long forgotten casual online mode. Back in the days of crappy dial-up connections, playing a game like Antihero wasn’t viable if you had to be connected at all times, and developers understood that, for what is essentially a board game, people want a more casual style. Antihero lets you have your cake and eat it too, with an online mode with both players present, as well as a casual mode where you can make your move and shut the game off, and take your turn when you get around to it.

Ultimately, Antihero is a pretty great game that is easy to learn and difficult to master. Check out the launch trailer below for gameplay footage.

Recommendation: Two thumbs up.

Dev Shenanigans: ZULA Offers Rewards For Positive Reviews


ZULA is described as an MMO FPS developed out of Istanbul by Lokum Games and available on Steam (your mileage may vary). The game has a lot of positive reviews, and if you look closely you’ll see players posting their usernames in the reviews for all to see. This is important, as the reason for posting such information is that Lokum is promising rewards in return for positive reviews.

The notice as posted on the main website (roughly translated into English by Google) promises a 3-day AWP sniper rifle as well as an entry for an even better gift in return for positively reviewing the game and marking said review as useful.

Here’s what you need to do to participate in the event.  We ask you to write a nice review article on your game in the store section  on Steam, and to recommend the game and mark it as useful. Also, do not neglect to write your in-game character name when writing a comment, because we have a wonderful surprise to support our players!

We present a 3 day AWP Samba to each participating actor . In addition, we will give a 30 day Cheytac Y?ld?r?m gift to our 3 players with the draw to be made at the end of 1 month . Event participation prizes will be sent every 3 days.

As an aside, if you don’t live in Turkey or have a way of falsifying your location, don’t bother clicking that Steam link, the URL will present as invalid and you’ll receive an error saying that the store page isn’t available in your region.

Offering rewards in return for positive reviews is against Steam’s Code of Conduct for sellers. It can and has resulted in games being pulled from the Steam store. Whether or not Valve will take action in this case will have to be seen.

(Source: ZULA)

Funcom Celebrates Traffic Surge, Plans Roadmap


This may come as little surprise to gamers, but Funcom today is celebrating the initial success for Secret World Legends, boasting that the game is at the highest player activity in years.

“We are very encouraged by the initial success of Secret World Legends; it has been years since we last saw a surge in player activity like this in the Secret World universe and it is a very good start leading up to Steam launch on July 31st,” says Funcom CEO Rui Casais

For players more interested in seeing what content Funcom has in store, you’re in luck. Along with the news of the population surge, Funcom released its roadmap for the months to come. This week marks the launch of elite dungeons with scaling difficulty.

Later this month will see the release of the Transylvania story missions with the special event to unlock Tokyo either in July or August and related world content. You can check out the roadmap at the link below, which goes through to next year.

(Source: Roadmap)

MU Legend Cracks Open Beta In September


MU Legend has announced its open beta will be coming in September. When the servers go live, players will be able to get their fix whether they speak English, French, German, Polish, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Dennis Czybulka, COO at WEBZEN, commented: “The September MU Legend OBT launch for the global audience has been decided with two fundamental aspects in mind: entertainment and quality.” He continued: “As a team of gamers ourselves, and taking into account the feedback from our Korean version of MU Legend, we have decided to tickle the very end of the summer for a global release, which will contain many more features than previously thought. The MU Legend team is now putting in a lot of hard work to provide the best game delivery possible. I’m very proud of the commitment they have shown, involving several departments and hundreds of passionate people utilizing their technical and gaming skills. We will keep everyone updated regularly as we continue to deploy improvements.”

Interested gamers can check out more information at the official website.

(Source: Webzen Press Release)

Red5 Studios Gives 24 Hours Notice: Firefall To Shut Down


Red 5 Studios today unveiled the announcement that should surprise few: Firefall is finally closing down its servers. Firefall has been in limbo for a long time between the staff being laid off, server outages, and a total lack of development, at some point the game completely stopped functioning past a certain point with graphics card firmware which remained unpatched. There were plans at one point to port Firefall to the Playstation 4 which quietly fizzled out, there was more than one instance of Red5 being unable to fulfill payroll, and the Chinese cashmire company that owns Red5 became effectively worthless.

With heavy hearts, we regret to inform you that after much review and analysis, Red 5 Studios have decided to suspend the Firefall efforts on 7th, July 2017. Thank you for being an important part of the Firefall experience and for your loyalty and dedication to the online community.

Your efforts and loyalty will not go without recognition, however. Firefall is currently developing a mobile version of the game and all of Firefall’s founders and players will be rewarded greatly in the new game. We will be sure to provide everyone with more updates as we have them.

Thank you for your support and enthusiasm throughout the years; we will see you at the next battle.

MMO Fallout listed Firefall shutting down as one of our 2017 predictions.

Firefall will first announce that the console version is cancelled before revealing that the PC version is shutting down either simultaneously or a week or two later. Nobody will be surprised, however the last few hours will draw in a lot of people to watch the world burn.

(Source: Red5)

One Month Later: Battleborn’s Free Trial Doesn’t Retain Numbers


It’s been one month since Battleborn started its free trial, and while the game received an early boost it looks like most of those customers aren’t sticking around. While the game peaked out on Steam at 1,561 concurrent users, the last week has seen those numbers fall to an average of 417.9. The number is still much higher than May’s average player count of 82.2, but complaints of long wait times for queues on the forums and the fact that this is just one month out of launch spells bad times ahead for Battleborn.

Overall, the free trial launch failed to bring the concurrency numbers to even 10% of Battleborn’s launch peak of 12,070 so while the number did increase over pre-trial numbers, it wasn’t by much and those numbers are falling quite steadily. Effects on population for the console versions is more difficult to determine.

(Source: Steam Charts)

Crowdfunding Fraudsters Redux: Return of the ZX Spectrum Vega+


If Retro Computers Limited wants to convince me that the Vega Plus is going to be released, they need to prove it. For those of you who haven’t seen the original Crowdfunding Fraudsters regarding the ZX Spectrum Vega Plus, you can read it here. Today we’re revisiting the ZX Spectrum Vega+, a handheld device slated for release in September 2016. It still hasn’t launched.

1. Retro Computers Ltd Breaks Out The B-Team

Where the previous Crowdfunding Fraudster article focused on figures like RCL Managing Director Suzanne Martin, founder David Levy, Chris Smith, and Paul Andrews, Darren Melbourne, and more, the follow up is going to focus on three people whose opinions are entirely present despite being exponentially more immature and irrelevant than people we’d actually like to hear from: Tamara Thomas, Lee Fogarty, and Jan Saggiori.

Thomas and Saggiori are volunteer administrators of the unironically named “Democracy” side of the  Retro Vega+ Facebook group, a title which gives superficial authority along with a ban hammer and delusions of respect. You also get gems like comparing waiting for photos of a video game console to a donated kidney and people dying:

Thomas and Saggiori’s unofficial job is to act as bullies on behalf of RCL, berating frustrated backers so when RCL pushes another delay, they can point to the people that Thomas and Saggiori have deliberately provoked and claim that the delays are due to complaining. Evidently RCL’s systems operate on juju, because people getting angry that Thomas showed up to tell them to “get over it” causes the internet to stop functioning and, thus, prevented RCL from posting photographs and video on Facebook for well over a week a few months ago, rather than RCL’s own incompetence at meeting deadlines. The group has mostly replaced Managing Director Suzanne Martin, whose primary job appeared to be selling photographs and video footage as a multi-million dollar effort.

Fogarty, meanwhile, is the web admin and definitely not the spokesman for Retro Computers Ltd, as despite his name appearing in the author box on what appears to be every news piece over at the RCL website, or constantly posting pictures with the test devices on the Facebook page, we can only assume that an actual spokesman wouldn’t be making jail rape jokes in regards to the other side of ongoing lawsuits.

Much like Thomas and Saggiori, Fogarty’s job appears to be primarily antagonizing the slowly dwindling number of backers from the relative safety of not being an employee, while simultaneously claiming complete ignorance on why anyone would be so hostile toward RCL when clearly all they are guilty of is providing a positive atmosphere with a channel where correspondence has completely died and no one posts due to the overanxious ban hammer.

Otherwise the team has pretty much moved on to the elementary school tactic of “I’m not touching you,” posting photos of beta testers and describing how much testers are enjoying their units, and then acting surprised when backers get frustrated. Why? We’re only eight months past deadline for a piece of hardware that was so much on track that it may have had the potential to launch early.

2. The Breach of Security, or, Lying to the Public

Late April, Retro Computers Ltd announced that a security breach had occurred on their domain names:

We have been made aware that late yesterday afternoon a security breach occurred on a number of domains belonging to Retro Computers Limited. This includes the zxvega.co.uk and retro-computers.co.uk URLs

Except there ultimately was no security breach, and this lie has been repeated numerous times from parties both within and outside of Retro Computers Ltd. What happened was that domains were released to the public and picked up and redirected to domains criticizing Retro Computers Ltd.

3. The Perpetual Victim Complex

It should be of no surprise that RCL’s habitual lying and perpetual status as victim often intermingle, either that or this is the first product in the history of Indiegogo to be derailed by people complaining in the comments section. After months of pointing fingers at the “hate mob,” a mostly non-existent entity that seems responsible for RCL’s self-inflicted PR wounds, was responsible for coercing developers into pulling their titles from the Vega Plus, an expose from The Register (with an increasingly immature response from RCL with each new article) shows that the reason actually may point to a dead beat dev. Turns out that, rather than by virtue of internet trolls, RCL hasn’t been paying royalties and rights holders are pulling out.

4. The Continued Refusal of Refunds

Last time we checked out Retro Computers Ltd, the company made a statement that they have never refused a refund, an idea that took all of ten minutes to disprove thanks to the dozens upon dozens of comments on the Indiegogo page claiming numerous refund requests with no response. Unsurprisingly, the Indiegogo page is still filled with complaints of unfulfilled refunds and users resorting to filing fraud claims via Paypal and through their credit card companies to force the refunds through.

5. Cooking Minute Rice In A Week

One big thing I pointed out in the last Crowdfunding Fraudster was that Retro Computers Ltd is completely incapable of performing even the most benign tasks within a reasonable time frame. The company has gone completely silent as of late, with its last announcement being on May 9.

The Roll of Honour email is coming at you this week Please log into your account to confirm all of your details are up to date as we cannot be responsible for wrong ones. And if you have chosen a ‘rude’ name, or you no longer go by a name previously chosen, give this some thought as once it is locked it is locked, and it’s very difficult to change.

Incidentally, I started writing this redux back in early June, and with it now being July and RCL still having not released the roll call list, we’ll be surpassing two months with the company unable to complete simple tasks like publishing a list of backers.

The Vega Plus is supposed to launch this Summer, but we still don’t have a game list (we don’t even have a roll of honour), and we don’t even know if the device has begun manufacturing. In standard RCL fashion, the company’s habitual lying has turned out a new low: The news announcement on May 9th ends with an apology and a promise to “update more regularly from now on.” In promising more updates, the company has gone completely silent.

6. In Plain English, But Not On This Website

I’ve received a few emails asking if I’d be doing an In Plain English in regards to the lawsuit(s) between RCL and its founders, and the answer to that is a tentative: Maybe. There hasn’t been an In Plain English piece about these lawsuits because right now all I have is information from the insanely biased sources of both sides, which contradict one another, and I don’t have the confidence to report on any of it as a result. The United States has Public Access to Court Electronic Records, allowing lawyers and press (like yours truly) to gain access to dockets. The UK doesn’t have that, to the best of my knowledge.

So it’s something I’m working on but can’t make too high of a priority because, as ridiculous as this project is, I’m hesitant to dedicate too many resources to something already outside MMO Fallout’s “scope.”

7. In Conclusion (again)

Barring sudden access to court records, this is the last that MMO Fallout will cover on the Retro Vega Plus. I had a few comments on the last piece about treating Retro Computers Ltd with kid gloves, but I stand by most of what I said. While I’d like to hold out some hope that the Vega Plus will be released, but right now RCL seems to be doing a live reenactment of the I Love Lucy candy factory scene, quickly losing whatever control they had on the situation as the conveyor belt just gets faster and faster.

[Video] Does the World Need Another Shooter? Raiders of the Broken Planet Says Yes


Raiders of the Broken Planet is an upcoming 4v1 shooter that may bring to mind Evolve due to its premise of four heroes taking on one big baddie. Looking over the developer diary from Mercury Steam, the game seems to be doing what Left 4 Dead did with the genre, introduce more of an ongoing story element to the mindless shooting. A third person shooter with cover mechanics, Raiders will have you dodging, ducking, dipping, shooting, and punching your way through waves of enemies.

An incredible discovery on one of Saturn’s moons leads a force of humans to a broken planet on the far reaches of the universe. A source of energy called Aleph exists there that grants ultimate power to who ever controls it…

You can watch 22 minutes of Raiders of the Broken Planet from Eurogamer below. The closed beta can be signed up for here, with the game set to launch on PC and consoles. MercurySteam is best known for their work on Castlevania: Lord of Shadow and their upcoming Metroid: Samus Returns.