Admin

Trion Worlds Punishes Impersonation Scam, Community Explodes

ARCHEAGE 2014-10-10 11-55-13-59

Trion Worlds has spent the better part of the past six or so months attempting to slowly detoxify the very virulent community whose actions they have actively coddled and defended as ‘in the spirit of the game,’ and that shift in management has come to a head once again with Trion reversing a trade scam against a high profile streamer during a charity event. The streamer was duped into trading expensive equipment to an imposter account during a charity stream for Doctors Without Borders, after which Trion reversed the trade and banned the imposter account.

Impersonating someone else, even if it’s by name, to separate someone from their hard earned goods is not allowed and has not been allowed in ArcheAge. In the past, there have been situations where a player impersonated another player and, in those situations, our Customer Service team has reversed the outcome of the scam no matter if it was items or gold.

Some of the anger seems to stem from the fact that the impersonation rule, while it has always existed, has admittedly not been publicized and may not even have been properly enforced until this recent incident. The majority of it, however, is coming from the ‘hardcore’ end of the community who view the idea of impersonating another player to defraud someone as fair game, with the usual attitude of ‘the victim deserved it for being stupid.’

We realize that this policy has not been made public in the past, but this high profile incident has made us realize that we need to publicly acknowledge and reinforce our stance on name impersonation within the game. This is not a new policy that was made simply for this stream — this is a policy that we as a company have had for the past year and beyond, and it is a policy that is referenced within our Terms of Use (11. Code of Conduct, Rule A.)

There are numerous false reports circulating that the rule did not exist before this event, and MMO Fallout has been able to confirm via archives of the terms of service that the rule has always been in place. Regardless of certain members of the community using wordplay, unaffiliated rules, and technical trickery as justification, it objectively was not allowed, even with ArcheAge’s lax stance on scams. The rule explicitly forbids creating a character with a name “belonging to another person with the intent to impersonate that person, including without limitation a “Game Master” or any other employee or agent of Trion.”

Still, there is plenty of valid criticism towards Trion Worlds for not bringing this rule to light until it happened to a high profile player, regardless of the fact that it existed prior to this incident.

(Source: ArcheAge)

[Not Massive] Fig’s Crowd Funding Platform Is Fading

medium

Psychonauts 2 raised more than $3 million in crowd funding using a new platform called Fig, one which Double Fine President Tim Schafer serves on the advisory board. More than twenty thousand people pooled their money together to make the sequel to 2005’s Psychonauts a reality, but did the success of a widely anticipated game bring lasting attention to the Fig platform? Judging from the followup campaigns, it doesn’t seem so.

And let’s be fair, Fig is still a very young platform, it still has a life ahead of it to blow up into a big platform for video game crowdfunding. For now, however, the platform is comprised of five campaigns overall. Psychonauts 2 and Outer Wilds were both successful in reaching their goal, however the latter only aimed for $125 grand and beat the mark by one thousand dollars. Anchors in the Drift, the third and last campaign to have ended, missed its goal by a wide margin: Just a fifth of the half a million for a free to play ARPG from the creators of Scribblenauts.

Fig’s other two remaining projects aren’t looking that great. The Rock Band 4 PC port, for which Harmonix wants $1.5 million up front, has ten days to go and just scratched half a million dollars. The other campaign, a video game based on the Jay & Silent Bob characters from film creator Kevin Smith, may see itself become the platform’s third successful campaign if it raises fifty grand in the next five days.

With the success of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, all sorts of third party groups are coming out of the woodwork with their own short-lived crowdfunding platforms, and if Fig wants to continue off of its early successes, it will need to keep the momentum going.

Brace For Death, Deadman Season 2 Begins

scapesold

Welcome to Deadman mode. On these worlds, you die.

RuneScape’s Deadman Mode has proven to be a rather successful spinoff to Old School, requiring players to stay on their toes as death means heavy losses in experience, inventory, and bank. To keep things exciting, Jagex began a seasonal Deadman mode, allowing players to level up over the course of three months with the top two thousand players gaining entry to the Deadman tournament servers, culminating in a deathmatch tournament whereby the winner goes home with ten grand in real money.

Well the first season has come and gone, and its victor has been crowned and will be receiving his money. Season 2 has begun, and all seasonal server characters have been reset. Players can log into the new seasonal servers and start grinding away.

As usual, players on seasonal deadman will enjoy boosted experience rates at the cost of heavy losses on death.

(Source: Old School)

Credit Card Fraud Hits Black Desert Online

BlackDesert_Pc_01

If you were looking to give the gift of cash shop items in Black Desert Online, you’re out of luck. Due to rampant credit card fraud, Black Desert Online will no longer allow cash shop items to be gifted. In a post on the official forums, Daum Games also announced that players purchasing from gold selling services will be “sanctioned accordingly.”

Due to abuse and credit card fraud by third parties (gold sellers and others) we will shut down the gifting feature in our cash shop. All players who purchased items/silver from those services will be inquired and sanctioned accordingly.

As a commodity that already finds itself in the grey area of the law, gold farmers and credit card fraud are two pieces that often come packaged together, using stolen cards to traffic in goods at no cost to themselves, with the funds inevitably reversed at the developer’s expense. The practice has been growing in selling CD keys purchased off of gaming websites with stolen credit cards, causing numerous developers to begin disabling associated keys.

(Source: Black Desert Online)

Indie MMO Revival Ends Development

Stage1-238d6fb0fac76d4d0405c37a76293302

Indie sandbox MMO Revival has announced that development has ceased due to lack of funds.

Starting in the very new future, you will find that homes are no longer for sale through the Dunwich and Innsmouth section of our website and future patches to the client are, at least as of now, highly unlikely. I will never give up on Revival, and I know I’m not alone, but we just don’t have the resources at our disposal that we need, and the sacrifices necessary to acquire them don’t make much sense given our goal, here.

When we first set out to build Revival, we had access to expertise and resources that aren’t available today. Making up for their loss, be it as simple as lacking sufficient animators or as complicated as losing access to certain networking expertise, has been a costly affair, far more costly than we can honestly afford to bear. So, what does that mean? Is Revival completely dead?

Not particularly, no, just delayed indefinitely. Founders will still have access to their renovation kits, their properties, etc, with no intention of shutting those down for the foreseeable future. In addition, it looks like development will still continue on Revival in some fashion, even if it is unpaid and slow. Founders will also receive Steam keys for two other games, Nexuiz and Moving Hazards.

(Source: Revival)

Early Access Fraudsters: Asteroids: Outpost

ss_4288f731964aaf18fc726086e1f154ea1ea4cb31

Generally you’d expect an Early Access Fraudster article to be about an indie developer, but the subject of today’s piece is none of than Atari itself, developed by the applicably named Salty Games, and it goes by the name Asteroids: Outpost. Asteroids is a modern day spinoff of the classic arcade title, a combination of Minecraft and DayZ that challenged players with setting up a base and defending it both from falling asteroids and the attacks of other players. It sounded like a great idea on paper, in practice it wasn’t so great.

Its continued sale is also outright fraud.

If you go on the Steam store page, the game currently holds a mostly negative rating with the top reviews imploring anyone who reads it not to throw down the $29.99 suggested retail price and to avoid the game and company at all costs. Despite the game still being available for purchase, according to Steam reviews the servers haven’t been in operation going back as far as November if not further, and there has been no contact or discussion from the Salty Games team. The official website is dead, all of the social media accounts are empty, and the game is completely unplayable.

In short: The project’s been abandoned, and either no one has bothered to tell Valve, or they just aren’t listening.

Judging by the forums, and the number of people who claim to have flagged the title over the months with no response, the latter seems more likely. Games suddenly shutting down without any notice from the developers isn’t new, as I said before, but this is something you’d expect out of an independent developer and not someone with the backing of a name like Atari. Granted, the Atari that exists today is a shell of the former corporation, one that mostly exists to license its properties out to the few companies that will buy them, but that is neither here nor there.

I tried contacting Salty Games before this article went up, the website is down and unfortunately I can’t find a single way to get in touch with the developers. The Asteroids: Outpost Steam account hasn’t been logged into in over two hundred days, and the group’s Facebook account hasn’t been posted on since last April. Salty Games doesn’t have a company website and Atari still acts like the game is still on sale on their own. If the studio has shut down, it hasn’t been announced and Google is turning up no results.

In addition, I contacted Atari’s press people to try and figure out what was going on and what happened to Salty Games. They haven’t responded. We also contacted Valve who, similarly, did not respond.

At the very least, we can sleep easy knowing that no one seems to actually be buying the game. After all, virtually no one bought it when the servers were live. According to Steam Charts, Asteroids peaked at 42 back in 2015 and hasn’t gone above 2 since. Judging by that success, it seems possible that Salty Games was shut down so fast that no one had time to shut down the Steam store page.

Regardless of their refund policy, Valve still has an obligation to remove this item from the store. It is, in all definitions of the words, abandoned and forgotten by a developer that may not even exist anymore. It died in early access yet continues selling tickets to a show that will never be performed.

Greed Monger Officially Dead…Again

monger

Greed Monger has once again been cancelled, leaving everyone who pledged the over ninety grand out of luck, again. The MMO was Kickstarted to the tune of ninety grand, only to face development issues and eventual cancellation under Jason Appleton and Electric Crow Games. Appleton handed over the title to ex-employee Jason Proctor who has, in turn, announced that the game has been cancelled.

After careful consideration giving GM’s track record and the number of people we still have in the community we have decided it’s best to put Greed Monger to rest for good. There is no way that Greed Monger could support it’s self with as small of a user base as we would have.

We’ll have to see if this is the last time that Greed Monger is momentarily resuscitated. For now, it appears that the game is back where it was always headed, the defunct category.

(Source: Greed Monger)

Digital Homicide, Jim Sterling, Lawyers, Slander, And A Lesson In Legality

ss_5884a5bc03c163727ca5cb2e5953b68191546d58.1920x1080

Digital Homicide is an enigma. All but one of its games carries a “mostly negative” rating on Steam, its games are critically panned mostly for being lazy, uninspired hobby projects cobbled together with pre-made Unity assets, and the developer is constantly getting into childish squabbles with internet critics like Jim Sterling. Despite the overwhelmingly negative response to his games, Digital Homicide continues to pump out more and more asset flips. As of this writing, DH has 18 games on Greenlight.

If you don’t follow Jim Sterling on Youtube, you may not be aware of the ongoing feud between the Youtube personality and Digital Homicide over the former’s very negative coverage of the latter’s video games. The back and forth banter culminated in a rather lengthy interview last July in which Digital Homicide threatened to sue Sterling. Nearly a year later and it looks like Digital Homicide is making good on their word, and has filed a lawsuit in Arizona district court.

Now neither side are discussing the details of the lawsuit, and for good reason. Talking about a court case in the middle of litigation can backfire and potentially lose the case. Basically lawyers are afraid that the person will say something stupid or incriminating and wind up blowing their arguments. James of Digital Homicide wants to make the details of the case very clear once it is over.

I have an excellent lawyer very interested in this case but they only take retainer. Very few lawyers take contingency now for defamation lawsuits. For this reason I will also be documenting the process of this lawsuit(not the contents or personal information) and making it publicly viewable after the case is over so that others in similar dire situations can figure out how to defend themselves from online harassers and defamers.

Very few lawyers take contingency for defamation lawsuits because doing so would likely mean not getting paid. Luckily, you don’t have to wait for the case to be over to view, as MMO Fallout has access to the Arizona public court records and will be adding this case to our In Plain English coverage.

Despite his claim of an “excellent lawyer,” James has gone ahead and filed the lawsuit early. An attempt at crowdfunding his lawsuit of Sterling was quickly shut down over claims that people were charging and then quickly using chargebacks to hit Romine with fees. Court dockets list James Oliver Romine Jr. as a “Pro Se Litigant,” meaning Romine is representing himself without a lawyer. Romine is claiming in excess of ~~$2.636 million~~ $10 million USD in libel property damage. Romine has invoked 28 US Code 1332 which grants district court jurisdiction in civil matters where the damages exceed $75 thousand and is between citizens.

Interestingly, the case also invokes International Shoe Co. V Washington, a lawsuit from 1945 in which the courts ruled that a shoe company with salesmen that sold shoes in the state were subject to Washington jurisdiction when the state sued to recover unpaid unemployment fees. Romine is claiming in the dockets that Sterling’s videos being available in Arizona is enough to give jurisdiction even though Sterling himself does not live within the district.

Romine is suing Sterling and claims in his blog post that he will be suing the people leaving anonymous mocking comments, whom he believes to be overseas competitors, and is simply building a case file for the time being.

If you believe being anonymous will prevent you from recieving said justice you will be surpised when the summons shows up, this goes for competitors in foreign markets using alternate accounts as you may be foreign by you will be sued in the US. This is the first case. More are expected to be filed soon.

What Romine may not understand about US defamation/slander law is that winning the lawsuit is heavily slanted against the plaintiff, especially when dealing with a public figure such as himself. The plaintiff is required to prove, beyond a doubt, that their reputations were harmed as a result of the allegedly slanderous material. In order to prove harm, Romine must provide quantifiable damages.

Romine claims he has been falsely accused of:

Stealing artwork
Stealing assets
Flipping projects with no work put in
Doxing
Had products misrepresented with intention to do damage
Of illegally using another companies name
Conducting illegal business activities
Impersonating someone
Being incompetent and unable to perform my job

For the record, Digital Homicide was caught stealing assets and artwork which Romine admitted to in his interview with Sterling and blamed on being a new developer, the same interview containing a thinly veiled threat of doxing, and we have covered here on MMO Fallout that Digital Homicide has used multiple company names in the past, including one of an established developer.

As is custom here at MMO Fallout, we will be offering regular updates as they become available. I may space out coverage depending on how quickly the case proceeds because access to the documents is not free and can very quickly add up and get expensive depending on how many there are and how long each document is.

Planetside 2 Shutting Down In China

planetside2image2

Planetside 2 China joins the growing list of Daybreak Game Company products that have shut down or will be shutting down shortly. As reported by MMO Culture, Planetside 2’s Chinese publisher The9 announced that it would not be renewing its contract with Daybreak to publish the massively multiplayer shooter and will be taking the servers down at the end of May. According to reports, despite the notable amount of money spent promoting the title, Planetside 2’s venture in the east never wound up receiving many updates.

The9 will instead be focusing on the upcoming launch of Firefall.

(Source: MMO Culture)

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It: