Author: Admin

STiCLi Games on Twitter: “[People] Such As You Should Be Killed On Sight.”


In case you weren’t entirely convinced of STiCLi Games’ status as a toxic developer, another piece has come forward straight from the horse’s mouth. It doesn’t take much time to read through the entirety of STiCLi’s posting history, their account consists of 23 posts as of this publishing, but one message in particular caught our attention. The STiCLi account telling a user that people “such as you should be killed on sight.”

Some context: The conversation in question was regarding LaMia Flight 2933, a tragedy that occurred late last November when a plane crashed in Columbia. The comment that STiCLi is responding to said:

81 people were on a plane like the one in the picture? No wonder it went down

(Source: Twitter)

Snapshots: RuneScape Healing The Scar


Today’s snapshot comes to us from RuneScape. Today’s update to the ever-expanding MMO finally healed the scar in Lumbridge, where players assisted in a battle between gods Saradomin and Zamorak going on four years ago. Since then the battle-scarred land has been used for everything from holiday events to summer beach parties. With today’s update, a bit of life returns to the region with all sorts of rabbits and imps walking around.

Also part of today’s update is a major overhaul to the game’s wardrobe system.

STICLI Games: Toxic Developer With Invalid EULA


STICLI Games is the developer of Airport Master on Steam, a $15 airport simulator that by all accounts seems to be a decent game that merely suffers from a bad user interface. The developer, however, seems intent on driving their reputation directly into the river by coming right off the starting line with toxic behavior, an illegitimate end user license agreement, and enforcing trademarks that it very likely does not own.

Since we live in a world where shady, toxic indie Steam developers waste no time perjuring themselves (because filing a false DMCA is committing perjury, a very real crime) by striking critical videos, banning people who post critical reviews, and threatening critics with everything from legal action to revoking their access to the game because they had the gall to complain on or off of the forums.

But STICLI Games has taken it a step further. Imagine, as a non-business owner, what you would do to stop criticism of your game. You write it into the rules, right? While rules are fine and dandy, you need a set that has implied legal backing behind it, and that leads us to our next topic: The end user license agreement. It’s a tool that, for many small business, would never hold up in court because it wasn’t drafted by a lawyer (a competent lawyer), contains bad sections that could invalidate the whole agreement, and the owner assumes that anything written is legally binding because why not, the customer agreed to it.

STICLI Games has decided to bake justification for toxic, anti-consumer practices directly into their EULA, starting with the recognition that STICLI owns the trademarks on all properties and you are not allowed to produce content without prior written permission:

The End User recognizes that all of the rights associated with the Software as well as the rights related to the trademarks, royalties and copyrights, are the property of STICLI Games and are protected by international laws and treaties. Any use of Copyright Holder’s trademarks, imagery content, videos, graphical elements, names, plot in any activity (including but not limited to: producing 3d party video content, electronic and on-paper publishing, creation of promotional content etc.) is only possible with prior written permission of Copyright Holder.

Incidentally, we can learn a lesson from Digital Homicide’s James Romine on this subject: As he stated in his lawsuit against Jim Sterling about the use of the ECC Games name, he isn’t violating any law because ECC Games doesn’t own the trademark in the United States. And after a cursory search of the US Trademark Office, it looks like STICLI Games doesn’t own a US trademark on Airport Master. Trademark, unlike copyright, does not protect works automatically. You have to file, pay the fees, and have your application approved.

But let’s go further, because the EULA just gets better from here out.

4. TRADEMARKS AND RIGHTS TO THE SOFTWARE
The End User recognizes that all of the rights associated with the Software as well as the rights related to the trademarks, royalties and copyrights, are the property of STICLI Games and are protected by international laws and treaties. Any use of Copyright Holder’s trademarks, imagery content, videos, graphical elements, names, plot in any activity (including but not limited to: producing 3d party video content, electronic and on-paper publishing, creation of promotional content etc.) is only possible with prior written permission of Copyright Holder.

A large portion of the threatening emails I receive from developers follow this pattern, people who think they the legal authority to decide who covers their products and want to know why I didn’t ask for permission before publishing my review/editorial. Here’s the thing about copyright law: You don’t have to ask for the creator’s permission in order to cover it. I don’t need STICLI’s permission to use a screenshot as part of this publishing, I don’t need their permission to write this article about how they’d want permission from me to write this article, and I don’t need permission to review their products.

EULAs don’t magically grant companies special privileges, there have boundaries you can’t go outside of when it comes to agreeing on what can and can’t be done.

9. NO REFUNDS
Except when required by law, the Licensor shall be under no obligation to issue refunds under any circumstances. The Licensor may issue refunds basing on Licensor’s own judgement and solely as a gesture of good will.

I have seen some discussion about this clause and it isn’t technically ‘illegal’ in the basic sense because the writer was smart enough to add ‘except when required by law.’ It doesn’t make sense otherwise because STICLI doesn’t get to decide who receives a refund, that’s Valve. None of STICLI’s judgement comes into effect when it comes to Valve’s refund policy.

That means you MUST obtain prior written permission from us before uploading any videos to YouTube. Otherwise, you are breaching the EULA and we can terminate your software license without refund and fire a copyright strike on YouTube.

Also, is this a challenge? Because it sounds like a challenge, and I love a good challenge. So, in testing whether Steam would enforce Airport Master’s ‘under any circumstance’ EULA, I decided to purchase Airport Master for $14.99. I quickly came across some performance issues, including the following illegible text on most menus. It made the game, in my humble opinion, impossible to play on my system and therefore a qualifying circumstance to ask for a refund, I think most will agree.

So I asked for a refund, to which Valve said “yea sure whatever” and promptly handed it over after about two hours.

Turns out that STICLI Games’ EULA isn’t so binding after all.

One more thing: The whole argument about trademark is useless as trademark and copyright are two wholly separate entities. Trademark is all about market confusion, owning a brand and identity and being able to protect it. It is what would prevent someone from, say, starting up a business called STICKLI Games and producing a game called Airport Masters and selling it on Steam, because that is confusing the market. It stops sleazy furniture stores from advertising the “Ultimate Super Bowl Couch,” because it implies official affiliation. It does not give you full control over the use of the words.

It looks like STICLI Games is in Cyprus, and doesn’t own the trademark there either.

MMOments: The Exiled, No Land For The Sheep


(Editor’s Note: MMO Fallout received a key from the developer for the purposes of reviewing. The opinions of this website cannot by swayed by anything short of a case of Orbitz drink)

I started playing The Exiled a few days before the actual launch, and my first thought was basically the same that I had with titles like Darkfall. “Yea, it’s fun, but I have a feeling it’s going to push a lot of people away very early.” It’ll be hard to move forward with an impressions piece without talking about the ten ton elephant in the room, so I’m going to get it out of the way now: The whole labeling as free to play is going to annoy people, and already has. The game has a seven day trial, after which you have to chalk down at least twenty bucks to keep playing. Overall it isn’t a huge deal, but I feel like not mentioning this would bring up issues later on.

The Exiled is a PvP sandbox MMO with nearly full loot and a considerable number of you just crossed this game off of your wishlists. You control your character with the WASD keys, attacking through a combination of mouse buttons and keyboard commands. Your character can make, equip, and use any weapon or armor in the game without having to deal with a class system.

The rules in The Exiled are that while you keep your gear on death from other players, your inventory is open for looting. There is some solace in the fact that you drop to the ground and start regaining health, after which you get back up and can continue whatever you were doing without having to trudge back from a spawn point, since most gankers are willing to loot your bag and leave you be. The game, as you might expect, instantly turned into a numbers game with gangs of clans roving the countryside and wiping out random solo’ers.

I’m not making any big discovery by saying that this is a niche game in a niche market, if you could take the perception that games like The Exiled has and give it a physical manifestation, it’d be somewhere in the realm of opening a store, locking the door, hiding the key under the doormat and standing at the window giving the middle finger to whichever carebear customer has the gall to ask “are you open?” And if the store owner himself isn’t enough to drive away customers, you can bet that the tiny vocal minority of obnoxious, mostly toxic cult followers of the genre will do their part to make the game as intolerable as possible, be it running train through the starting zone to harass new players, shouting “gg kill yourself” in chat, and generally operating “for the lulz” because the game lets them do whatever they want and they’re too busy telling people to go back to World of Warcraft to notice the population decaying around them.

And this is where The Exiled falls shortest, in that I don’t think that the developers at Fairytale Distillery looked at similar games when they were creating this, or if they did then they didn’t learn anything. There are zero repercussions to acting like a jackass in The Exiled because there are no safe zones and no reputation system. Like I said, you can just run train through the starting zone and nothing’s going to stop you, outside of there being nobody to kill. While it’d be nice to imagine clans going up against one another, we all know that isn’t happening. Instead you have the hardcore gank squads, some of the most risk averse gamers in existence, only going into fights where the odds aren’t even close to even.

The bulk of the game is pretty shallow at the moment, comprising mostly of activating nodes and fighting off waves of mobs that try to destroy said node, hoping that at no point during the five minute wait that a clan will come along and steal the node out from underneath you. The AI is incredibly basic at the moment, as mobs mindlessly make their way toward the node with no ability to navigate the terrain aside from a straight path, not bothering to move around whatever is blocking their way.

The farming technique perfectly encapsulates how The Exiled exists now: A long, arduous grind that can and likely will be stripped from you at any given moment. Some people love this, and I won’t vilify them for their tastes. But when it comes to the genre, there are other games that have long established themselves and managed to throw in some semblance of fairness, even though you are never 100% safe.

In a way I like and can appreciate how The Exiled handles its inventory management. You gain experience through killing mobs, however there is a wholly separate material called Flux that can be used in crafting new gear or it can be converted to straight experience, which also means that if you get attacked you can at least scuttle the flux, level up in the process, and not come out of the encounter completely empty handed. Even abilities are subject to looting, since you obtain abilities as scrolls and must bring them to a dojo in order to learn the associated skill. Each class relies on a specific reagent in order to level up said skills, so killing and looting players isn’t just about stealing their stuff, you can also gain some heavy leveling materials in the process.

I suppose what makes me reel in agony even more than the long grind splattered with setbacks due to ganking is that the game wants me to do this all over again every month when the servers reset. No thank you, if you’re going to give me a job then it can either be fun or you can pay me for it. At the very least, while the MMO genre is all about a continuous carrot on a stick, gearing up to where you can run dungeons with the best until the better dungeons requiring the better gear comes out, you’re always making progress. Stripping that away on a regular basis only ensures that The Exiled will appeal to a limited portion of an already limited audience.

Right now The Exiled suffers from long time to kill on basic creatures, a lack of diversity within weapon subsets, and motivation outside of grinding resources, among other problems. That being said, the game is still in early access and early on at that. I’d recommend holding off on your seven day free trial for the moment, but keep the game on your radar. It might become something one day.

[NM] Switch Coating Designed To Prevent Children Swallowing Compels Adults To Consume Instead


The Nintendo Switch hits store shelves in barely a couple of hours after this article goes live, and if you’ve been paying attention to the industry news than you’ve surely seen the latest distraction that everyone is talking about: How does the cartridge taste? As it turns out, Nintendo actively coats their Switch cartridges with a bittering agent to stop kids from putting the cartridges in their mouths and risk swallowing them. Since the console is not readily available, the effect will have to be seen.

While the bittering agent may have been intended to stop children from putting the cartridges in their mouth, the spread of its news seems to have only encouraged adults to give the carts a taste of their own. Search for Switch Cartridge Taste on Google and you’ll find tons of websites with adults giving their testimony on how the cartridges taste awful, extremely bitter, and just overall unpleasant. So far nobody has attempted to test the Switch cartridge durability when passed through the entire digestive process, but that is likely only a matter of time.

Join Neverwinter Devs For State of the Game Q&A


Want to ask the Neverwinter developers about the state of the game going forward? You’ll have your chance on Tuesday March 7 at 2pm Pacific, as community managers Julia Fredrickson and Andy Wong are joined by lead designer Thomas Foss to discuss the latest expansion and future content development. Questions will be taken during the stream, however you can submit yours early by clicking on the link below.

Check out the details below.

(Source: Neverwinter)

Funcom Ends Major Updates For Anarchy Online/Age of Conan


In their latest quarterly report, Funcom has announced that there is no further significant work expected for both Anarchy Online and Age of Conan. Both games are presumably still profitable as they contributed a heavy portion of Funcom’s revenue this past quarter, however as far as development costs go it looks like the writing is on the wall for both titles to enter maintenance mode. The report doesn’t go into detail on what Funcom considers to be “significant work,” which may relegate both titles to bug fixes, server maintenance, and perhaps small chunks of content.

For gamers, the concept of depreciation is well known when it comes to live games and support from developers. It makes sense, as games age and with a few exceptions, they inevitably decrease in population, and thus revenue stream, and thus the ability to support themselves. Funcom has been referencing this for years in their quarterly reports, and it only seems inevitable that older titles like Anarchy Online (a 2001 release) will hit a point where simple cost of operations is higher than its income.

(Source: Funcom)

Good Reads: 12 Surprising Health Benefits of Video Games


Good Reads is a new column I’ve been thinking about starting for a while now to bring attention to some other pieces I’ve found on the web that I think are worth my audience’s attention. This week’s bit was sent to me by a reader and is a list of how gaming can actually promote healthy habits. Naturally this isn’t the case for everyone, but I do have to agree on the points of creativity, stress management, and multi-tasking, among other points.

Let’s first consider the benefit of taking our mind off things. We become so engrossed in the games that we forget about the reasons for the stress. If you struggle on a night with stress and poor sleep, you could find that a bit of video gaming helps. It will help you unwind from a long day, and you focus purely on the missions in front of you.

The title sounds pretty clickbaity, but it is an interesting read. As someone who has had some bad issues with stress management in the past, I can personally relate to a few of the points on this list.

Link: Positive Health Wellness

NEXON Invests In Tree of Savior Developer IMC Games


Nexon has announced that its subsidiary Nexon Korea has made a strategic investment in IMC Games, developer of the Tree of Savior MMO. Tree of Savior has been up and running in Korea since December 2015 and September 2016 in Japan, features fairytale-motif graphics, and a class development system for character customization. IMC Games is best known for its MMORPGs including Tree of Savior and Granado Espada.

“We’re thrilled to strengthen our collaboration with our talented partner, IMC GAMES,” said Jiwon Park, Chief Executive Officer of Nexon Korea. “We are confident that together we will continue to deliver high-quality games that leverage strength of each company in game development and publishing.”

Tree of Savior is free to play on Steam.

(Source: Nexon press release)

Get Ready: Funcom Announces Secret World “Relaunch”


If you pay attention to the media, reboots are all the rage this season (this season itself being a reboot of a previous iteration of the universe). In their latest quarterly report, outside of congratulating Conan Exiles for hitting its 12 month sales target within a month, Funcom has a lot to say about its New World Order MMO, The Secret World. Funcom hopes to rekindle interest in the MMO by bringing in new players and ex-players alike, improving the combat system and new player experience.

The Secret World will be relaunched during the first half of 2017. The goal of the relaunch is to broaden the appeal of the game through:

  • Redesigned new player experience
  • Major improvements to gameplay including combat.
  • Introduction of new retention systems such as daily rewards.
  • Adjustments to the business model, including allowing access to the story content for free.

Relaunch activities for The Secret World are set to start in March with the relaunch to occur in the first half of the year. MMO Fallout will cover the details as they are revealed.