Category: Editorials

[NM] EA Fought the Law and the Law Won, Removing Loot Boxes


EA fought the law and the law won, at least that’s the lesson the company learned this week after going head to head with Belgian authorities regarding loot box sales for FIFA games.

Those of you keeping score will recall that last April, the Belgian government criminalized certain loot box systems in video games, and sent notices to Valve, Activision Blizzard, and Electronic Arts warning that several of their titles were found to be in violation of the law. The Gaming Commission warned that the loot boxes would need to be removed, otherwise the companies could face fines and even jail sentences.

Valve and Activision Blizzard took near-immediate steps to disable loot box accessibility to Belgian players, while a number of other developers have opted to either alter their titles or outright shut them down within the country. EA meanwhile decided to take a gamble of its own and face a criminal investigation in order to keep selling those sweet ultimate team bucks. Unfortunately for EA, this gamble didn’t pay off, and the developer has posted a warning that FIFA Points will no longer be for sale in Belgium by the end of the month.

In case you were worried, EA notes that this change will have no material impact to their quarterly revenues.

After further discussions with the Belgian authorities, we have decided to stop offering FIFA Points for sale in Belgium.  We’re working to make these changes effective in our FIFA console and PC games by January 31, 2019.  This means that players in Belgium will not be able to purchase points to obtain FIFA Ultimate Team packs.  Players still can access Ultimate Team and play with their existing players.  All content in the game can be earned through gameplay, as has always been the case, and players can continue to use coins and the in-game transfer market.  Any players in Belgium that have existing FIFA Points in their accounts can continue to use them, but they will not be able to purchase more.  We apologize to our players in Belgium for any inconvenience caused by this change.

We seek to bring choice, fairness, value and fun to our players in all our games.  In addition to providing players options in how they play, we include pack probabilities in our games for the transparency players want to make informed content choices.  While we are taking this action, we do not agree with Belgian authorities’ interpretation of the law, and we will continue to seek more clarity on the matter as we go forward. The impact of this change to FIFA Ultimate Team in Belgium is not material to our financial performance.

Source: EA Games

[Community] 2019: The Year In Which Walmart Messed Up My Soda Pre-Order


Want to hear a joke? I pre-ordered energy drinks. Want to hear a bigger joke? They botched it.

Last month I talked about how Walmart partnered with Ubisoft and Mountain Dew to offer pre-orders for Mountain Dew Game Fuel, an energy drink that came out on store shelves this month. For $20 you could get a 12 pack of the assorted flavors and the pack came with a Division 2 box of tchotchkes and early access to the Division 2 beta. How could this possibly go wrong? It’s soda.

To be fair, I found out that the box is actually a good deal if you like sugary energy drinks since for $20 you get a 12 pack and stores in my area are selling the individual cans for $3 apiece, which would set you back $36 for the equivalent amount. I honestly forgot about this whole ordeal since I never received an email from Walmart that the order shipped, and dealing with a funeral over the past week completely tossed it out of my memory that the soda was supposed to ship on January 14.

I never received my soda, but the beta code came through fine and so did the box of stuff. I did get an email from Walmart confirming that my case is on backorder, so not only is 2019 the year that the energy drink industry adopts pre-orders from game developers, it also takes on screwing up people’s pre-orders. I’ve been on Twitter and various social media websites and there are a fair number of other people who haven’t received their orders, or for whom Walmart lost their orders entirely. Congrats, you’re the Mighty No. 9 of energy drinks.

The goodies included in the box are an assortment of tchotchkes including a screwdriver, an odd whistle/compass/light, a hat, and an 8gig dog tag drive that appears to be breaking for some people with the connector not pulling out. Honestly I thought that if anything would go wrong with this order it would be the whole beta code being distributed properly. But Walmart proved me wrong, and the thing I actually wanted to buy is now not coming.

Walmart explained in the email that if they can’t get my order by MARCH 8 then it will be cancelled and refunded. Two months for Walmart to track down twelve cans of Mountain Dew, I hope they can pull it off.

Let this be a lesson; don’t pre-order energy drinks.

I’m Back! MMO Fallout Resuming Activity


How do you do, fellow gamers?

Those of you who keep track of the MMO Fallout news feed are likely already aware that the website has been mostly silent for the past week, especially after my posts last Sunday about all of the topics I was planning on writing about. I was discussing on Twitter about starting up a website reviewing books, I had a few things planned for this website here, and I was looking forward to finally getting around to actually following up on the first Podcast episode, as well as going back to law school for the Spring semester.

And then I got the phone call on Monday at noon that my father passed away, and everything was immediately shelved.

The past week feels like it has lasted about six months, and while I tried on a few occasions to distract myself and write a few news pieces to take a momentary break from grieving, I just couldn’t find the motivation. I try not to inject my personal life into this website as much as possible, because people have enough problems of their own without having to see me publicize mine.

My plan is to get back up to speed with posting news pieces and editorials this week, but updates may be slow over the next couple of days. I’d like to thank my readers for their understanding in these rough times, as well as to those who reached out to express their condolences.

Diaries From Guild Wars 2: It’s Time To Kill Kralkatorrik


“I don’t know.”

(Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead for the latest Guild Wars 2 episode; All Or Nothing. If you don’t want the ending spoiled, stop reading now.)

I don’t know. The final words spoken by The Commander as the screen fades to black and the latest episode in the Guild Wars 2 living story comes to an end.

This month’s episode of Living Story pulled off the kind of twist I’d expect to see in a Game of Thrones arc. Those of us who have been following the living story have been adventuring with Aurene for over three years, from the day she hatched to putting her through tests so that she might one day be a blessing on Tyria instead of a burden, through her battles over the course of the Path of Fire expansion story, and now through Season 4 as we’ve exhaustively built her powers and learned that Aurene was Glint’s second scion, destined to destroy Kralkatorrik with the help of her champion (us) and take her rightful place as a powerful elder dragon. And in this episode we successfully made it through Glint’s trials, forged the new dragonblood weapons, and finally executed the plan to kill Kralkatorrik once and for all.

And then she died.

In one swift motion, everything that we worked for was destroyed. And as the commander comes forward to view her mangled body and our friends mourn the loss of their friend and only hope for stopping the end of the world, Braham wonders what we could possibly do now. And our commander, the single person that they depend on to lead the crew and know just the right way to solve any dilemma is forced to admit: “I don’t know.” Maybe it is all hopeless.

The writing team for the Guild Wars 2 Living Story deserves an award for this quarter’s episode in how masterfully it built up our expectations only to shoot them right in the heart. Talk about playing the long game. I went into this episode of two minds, the first being that there was no way they could possibly kill Kralkatorrik when this is definitely not the season finale. The other half reminded me that I didn’t think they would kill Palawa Joko as early as episode three, and yet they did it anyway.

BUT…

I’m going to go straight into the denial stage and say that I’m not entirely convinced that Aurene is gone for good. This is Guild Wars 2, after all, a world where necromancers exist, the afterlife is occasionally a suggestion more than a demand, and people and beings have come back from the dead. Aurene did eat the lich king after all, perhaps some of his powers of resurrection transferred over to her?

Another thing to think about is the Domain of the Lost. We know that Kralkatorrik was tearing it apart before our big battle, I don’t think it would have been so specifically discussed if it wasn’t important. Since Aurene died how she did, it’s likely we will find her in the Domain, and we know from past experience that it is possible to escape and return to the living world. We did it, Balthazar did it, Joko did it, in fact there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of protection to make sure that the dead actually stay dead in this world.

There are a lot of questions to be answered going into episode 6. What did Aurene see when she went through the portal and spoke to Glint? What effect will Aurene’s connection with Caithe bring? Can we get back into the Domain of the Lost to retrieve Aurene? Was everything that happened part of Glint’s plan? It looked like Aurene managed to brand Kralkatorrik during the fight, what effect will that have? Why did Kralkatorrik just leave when the fight was virtually won, and he could have destroyed the Commander and the remaining forces right then and there?

I can say that if Aurene is dead for good, the world just got a whole lot more bleak. Our weapon against an increasingly rampaging Kralkatorrik is gone and we have no ideas on what to do next. Unfortunately we really needed a dragon to replace Kralkatorrik, because in the world of Guild Wars 2 killing an elder dragon without at least an intern to replace them will just cause an imbalance and destroy the world anyway.

We’ll find out next time on Season 4 Episode 6: The Search for Aurene (Not the actual title). In the meantime, I’m going to go back to chopping these onions. It’s the onions, I swear!

Another thought about the episode, I really enjoyed the fact that Arenanet avoided going down the standard route of having the story peppered with several fights against small health sponges leading up to the big long fight against the large health sponge. They should do this more for future episodes, in my humbled opinion.

Bad Press: Disbarred Ex-Lawyer Jack Thompson Returns, Is Still A Pathological Liar


Jack Thompson is much more than the pathological liar on a never ending quest to destroy video games. He’s also a disgraced ex-lawyer disbarred over ten years ago for no less than 31 charges of inappropriate conduct inside and out of the courtroom, for intimidating and harassing opposition, whose rambling court arguments have been described as bizarre and idiotic by the Florida court, and for coining the idea that teenagers can learn how to properly fire weapons by playing Doom, a game so primitive that you can’t look up and down in it.

But like Freddy Krueger’s sleazy uncle who sells used cars, Jack Thompson refuses to duck out of the public scope and just can’t stop lying. Unfortunately Florida’s least competent attorney has conned another newspaper into publishing his latest attempt to twist the death of children for his Quixotic quest, the Tallahasee Democrat, which we have linked in an archived form for your pleasure and their lack of advertising revenue.

Thompson, who was once scorned by a judge for faxing pornography to the court, has his sights still set on the Parkland school massacre that took the lives of seventeen students and staff members. He writes:

“Cruz’s own mother, now deceased, attributed his violence to his video games and withdrew them as temporary punishment. In “Call of Duty” you use smoke canisters to hide from your virtual reality targets — something Cruz did in reality. So video games don’t just increase the appetite to kill; they train teens to kill efficiently.”

Here we see Thompson’s master trick that I’ll refer to as “it makes sense as long as you don’t think about it.” Any child over the age of five could tell you what a smoke canister would do, but for someone of Thompson’s caliber this can only be the work of a trained killer, one trained on evil video games. Thompson likes to pepper in his conclusory statements with lies about video games that he passes off as just common fact, like the idea that games “increase the appetite to kill.”

He continues:

“The majority of video games 19 years after gamers Klebold and Harris authored Columbine, are sold to individuals whose ages are not verified.”

First, I take umbrage with Thompson’s use of the word “authored” in reference to the Columbine shooting, but this is another example of Thompson making unsubstantiated, ridiculously conclusory statements with no evidence to back himself up. The kind of conduct that would get one disbarred from the Florida bar association.

“All that is necessary for this dangerous fraud to stop is for states and the national government to apply deceptive trade practice laws that are already on the books to video game sales. This approach will be simple, constitutional and effective.”

I’ll explain this since, as a disbarred lawyer, Jack Thompson is not familiar with how the law works. We’ve already gone down this road of litigating video game sales to minors, and the fact that you have managed (without evidence) to argue that video game retailers are selling games to kids despite claiming otherwise, is irrelevant to everything. Deceptive trade practice laws have to do with lying about the features/functions of a product in order to con people into buying it, it has nothing to do with claiming that you don’t sell something but selling it anyway.

Here is the Federal Reserve’s definition of a “deceptive trade practice,” as per the Federal Trade Commission:

An act or practice is deceptive where
• a representation, omission, or practice misleads or is likely to mislead the consumer;
• a consumer’s interpretation of the representation, omission, or practice is considered reasonable under the circumstances; and
• the misleading representation, omission, or practice is material.

And as I said, we’ve already gone down this road. Feel free to peruse the case of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association to read about how our supreme court held that a law barring minors from buying mature rated video games is unconstitutional. States do not have the right to determine which video games are too violent in the same way that they cannot decide which Grimm fairytales are too violent for children.

You also have to appreciate how the Tallahassee Democrat refers to Thompson as a “retired lawyer,” which is a fancy way of saying disbarred on dozens of charges of misconduct and fined $43 grand. The website also references Thompson’s involvement in a case surrounding a school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky. They left out the embarrassing details, like how he convinced the parents of three dead highschool girls to take part in a ridiculous lawsuit against two pornography websites, the film “The Basketball Diaries,” Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, claiming that all of the defendants had a hand in inspiring the 14 year old shooter. The lawsuit was dismissed at trial and then dismissed again by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Perhaps if video games were the impressive trainers that Jack Thompson has claimed they are for the past twenty years, he could have sat down with a copy of Phoenix Wright and learned how to be a proper attorney.

MMO Fallout’s Tips For 2019: Consumer/Industry Edition


I am a neglectful person. First I barely acknowledge MMO Fallout hitting nine years old last year, and now I look back at the archives and find out that I never published a predictions piece for 2018? You really get your money’s worth with this website, let me tell you.

So in that vein, let’s look forward at 2019 with a new column I like to call “MMO Fallout’s Tips For 2019.” This one is for consumers and the industry, so strap in folks.

1. For The Industry, Know Your Audience: This is a big one, it’s going to prevent a lot of you from getting laid off in the coming years. 2017 and 2018 were the years that big players in the industry snubbed their noses at the consumer, and the consumer hit back with the kind of force to qualify as a crime in ten states plus the district of Columbia. I’m sure most people didn’t think we’d ever see a year where Star Wars, Battlefield, Fallout, Tomb Raider, and a whole host of other games would crash and burn in the same 12 month period, but here we are.

So lesson #1 for 2019 is know your audience, and you may notice that I didn’t say “do whatever you’re told.” You need to know your customers, and that means filtering out the voices of people who aren’t going to buy your product. For instance, you wouldn’t listen to a vegetarian’s advice on the proper way to market steak because they will never buy a steak and their threat of boycott is meaningless. Imagine that, but with video games. For example, Battlefront II took what people hated about EA’s other games (the heavy microtransaction use) and amplified it up to eleven for this release. It didn’t work.

Compare that to Spiderman, a game that while having its flaws figured out what people wanted out of a Spiderman game and they were rewarded in piles of cash money. Square Enix, despite their constant claims that people don’t want turn-based RPGs, released Octopath Traveler on the Switch and lo and behold it made bank. In fact, a lot of big publishers who ported their games over to Switch saw an enormous return on their investment. Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s almost as if we exist in a customer driven industry and listening to the customer will get you paid.

2. For Consumers, Spend What You’re Willing To Lose: This is the part where most Youtubers and consumer advocates will tell you “stop preordering,” and frankly most of you would do well by following that advice. I hate to impune on my audience or gamers in general, but the vast majority of you do not have the strength of will or patience to deal with the industry’s increasingly shoddy development practices, and you could save yourself a lot of money and anguish by simply not preordering that new game simply because it has a cool keychain that you’ll lose within the next two months.

But I’ve been writing in this industry long enough to know that making ultimatums just ensures that people are going to do the opposite of what you say, so instead of “don’t preorder,” I will suggest that you don’t spend what you’re not willing to lose. Is $20 too much for Planetside Arena if the game comes out and it sucks? Great, don’t preorder it. If that game in early access were to cease development tomorrow, would you not buy it today? Then don’t buy it. Why subsidize a disappointing failure when there are so many others willing to throw their money away? And let’s be fair, there’s millions of games available for you to play. If you don’t get that release now, are you really going to miss it in five months if it isn’t good?

3. For the Industry, Start Working On Those Lootbox Replacements: I consider myself to be pro-market, which is a fancy term meaning that I sit in my ivory tower and watch people be exploited by the evil games industry. Big thanks to my college civics professor for this apt description.

I think it’s safe to say that loot boxes, while not about to die completely, are in a decline across AAA premium priced games, as well as more notable free to play titles. Developers are going to need to move on to safer waters if they want to remain viable (or avoid the ire of the base) in the years ahead. Thankfully the work has already been done by Epic Games, and many developers are moving on to seasonal battle passes as a way to sell cosmetics without their game being banned in Belgium.

Personally, I love the battle pass. It’s basically an incentive to keep playing the game and just do what you’d do anyway, and I assume tit for tat it probably provides a more stable basis of income for many developers. Particularly I like it in games where you have the ability to cheapen or fully pay for future passes if you maange to do well enough, such as Fortnite or Realm Royale. There’s also merit in the Annual Pass, similar to Destiny 2 where you pay $35 and it gives you access to expansions over the next year.

This does mean actually developing content so we’ll see how it goes.

4. For Consumers, Don’t Place Your Bets On Launch: MMO gamers will be well aware of this tactic because they’ve been dealing with it for years. How many MMORPGs have launched with the promise that they will never go free to play with cash shops? How many have kept that promise? Unlike the MMO industry, however, where free to play is done to avoid bankruptcy and sunsetting titles, the rest of the industry is a bit more insidious in its operations. In case you haven’t noticed, 2018 brought in a number of titles conveniently delaying their cash shops until a while after the game launched. Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption, Battlefield, and a few others come to mind.

Because they weren’t ready? Nonsense, whenever we see games that launch too early the cash shop is always the first thing to be finished and presented in its full form. Is it because they don’t want review scores and day one purchases to be affected by the presence of a cash shop? I think we’re getting closer to the truth. 2019 is going to see more games pulling this maneuver, launching without predatory pricing models and then putting them in once the initial sales are done and everyone is past their refund limit.

5. For The Industry, Choose China Carefully: The Chinese gaming market is one that has only become more divisive over the past year. Culturally Chinese gamers see less of a fuss in cheating, leading to many western games being overrun with hackers to the extent that the Chinese government has made cheat development for online games a jailable offense. I wish I was joking. The market is also massive and growing at an exponential rate, leading many developers to begin catering to this growing audience. And that’s where the problem lies.

You see, for as massive as the Chinese market is, it is also under the authoritarian rule of a virtual dictatorship that puts strict controls on what its population can see. This came to a head late 2018 when Ubisoft made a large number of aesthetic changes to Rainbow Six Siege in order to ready the title for release in China, sparking a backlash by existing players. PUBG has faced a nationwide ban because the concept of survival deviates from socialist core values, and numerous games have allegedly seen demands to make changes for various offenses including blood/gore, sexualized female characters, “inharmonious chat,” missions including fraud, and rewards based on rank.

With 2019 here, you can certainly expect more developers to start altering their titles to pander to the Chinese government. Whether western gamers will be willing to tolerate it is another factor entirely.

Bonus: Get Yourself A VPN: Those of you who read MMO Fallout know that I’m not a big fan of sneaky data collection, but you might not know that I do a fair bit of work through a VPN. A proper VPN can keep your data secure, your identity private, and even allow you access to content that is arbitrarily closed off to your country. to your country. Thanks to my VPN service (I use NordVPN, but there’s a good review of the best ones here), I can trick Netflix into letting me watch Rings, the 2016 horror movie where a killer video is uploaded onto the internet, and is exclusive to the UK for some reason. I watched the cursed video from behind a VPN, and now Samara thinks I live jolly old London England. She won’t be finding me anytime soon.

Beta Perspective: Realm Royale On Playstation 4


I’ve been spending most of my PS4 time over the past couple of months playing H1Z1 and now Realm Royale, and I have to say I find the Battle Royale genre far more enjoyable on the consoles than on PC. Maybe it’s because of the rampant cheating on PC, maybe it’s because I’m 30 and my reflexes just don’t hold up on a platform where the base can shoot a hair off of a fly from two miles away. Regardless, I’m enjoying myself.

Realm Royale is Hi-Rez Studios loading the style and gameplay elements of Paladins into a cannon and firing it at PUBG. While the base gameplay elements will be familiar to those who have played other games in the genre, Realm Royale is carving a niche all of its own. On the familiar side, you have up to 100 players jumping from a flying bus on to a giant island where they must battle either alone or part of teams in order to be the last person/team standing. Each player starts with a melee weapon and must scrounge around for better quality items so that they may rain down death upon whoever happens to get in their crosshair.

I haven’t played Realm Royale on PC in about a year, so my knowledge of that version is too far out of date to make comparisons. While the base concept is the same, Realm Royale has quite a bit that sets it apart from the competition in terms of meta gaming and quality of life features.

Before the round begins, the first thing you’ll do is choose a class. There are four classes, each with their own perks and weaknesses, such as the assassin gaining 300 health on each kill and the warrior having a higher maximum health and dealing more damage with melee weapons. Each round in Realm Royale starts with you jumping out of the bus and careening down to a spot of your choosing. The goal from here on out is a prolonged arms race in which you travel about the countryside, opening chests, grabbing weapons, and murdering anyone who happens to cross paths. As time progresses, a circle of fog gradually encircles the map, restricting the play field until one person is left standing.

One quality of life feature I like about Realm Royale is that everyone has a mount, accessible with a simple d-pad click. In games like H1Z1 where your starting location is predetermined, it’s possible to get screwed because the game stuck you in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the map with little access to weapons or transportation, leaving you to spend the round just barely keeping ahead of the fog if at all. In Realm Royale, you always have the ability to get where you need to go and fast, and the map is populated enough that you’ll have no problem amassing an arsenal. The balance to this convenience is that you can be knocked off the mount with a single hit.

In addition to your pistols, rifles, shotguns, and magic staffs, player power is also strengthened by picking up various runes and powers scattered around the world. Powers can vary in usefulness, such as one that turns you invisible for a short period of time, one that grants temporary flight, concussion grenades, incendiary grenades, shields, health, etc. Runes, meanwhile, are passive powers that can give you a hell of an advantage on the field, offering perks like regenerating shields, making survival as a chicken easier, and resisting knockback.

Even death in Realm Royale is handled differently. Most battle royale games have a knock-down mechanic in squad modes, where you aren’t instantly killed but instead are knocked out and can be revived by a teammate. In Realm Royale, losing your HP (even in solo) means turning into a chicken that can run and jump around. If you manage to survive until the timer hits zero, you’ll get back into the fight with a certain amount of health. If you are killed as a chicken, or you get turned three times, you’re out of the match. Certain runes found during gameplay can increase your speed, your health, and decrease the timer while in chicken mode, giving survival a strategy all on its own.

The benefit of this is that you rarely get that sudden game over that accompanies other similar titles just because someone with an epic sniper rifle managed to blow your head off through an open window. It also makes encounters with multiple people all the more dangerous, as you can be easily popped while chasing after the player you’ve just chickened, or similarly being the first to go down may present an opportunity to escape and recuperate while everyone turns the guns on each other.

Another thing Realm Royale has going for it is the ability to break down weapons you come across and use shards at forges to craft new items. The catch is that each forge can craft one of each category: health, armor, weapon, runes, ability, and revival (squad mode) so you can’t amass shards and use them to bulk up on potions. The crafting forge takes time and makes sound, which can mast incoming players. It also displays a timer that can be seen by other people, so you can tell when someone is waiting inside. You don’t need to be physically near the forge in order for the time to count down, so you can easily start the queue and hop off to a vantage point to stay safe.

There are also nuggets that you’ll find by looting chests, killing players, and making rank. Nuggets are the in-game currency for Realm Royale, usable to buy cosmetics from the in-game shop. Gaining generally less than a dozen per game, and considering that most rewards are in the realm of thousands of nuggets, it’s a feature that isn’t even worth paying attention to.

I do like that Realm Royale’s battle pass seems to be very easy to level up, I have personally managed one level about every 1-2 matches, but that the game also rewards you with crowns. The first battle pass costs 750 crowns and can reward about 1,100 crowns if you manage to level it up all the way. By this logic, it should be possible to heavily discount or get the next pass completely free, depending on how many crowns you obtain during the course of the season.

The season does not indicate when it ends, however, or if crowns can be used for the next season. I contact Hi-Rez about these details and have not received an answer.

One aspect of Realm Royale I find odd is the inclusion of bot players, mostly because they aren’t indicated as such and Hi-Rez to my understanding and research doesn’t acknowledge their presence in the game. I’ve been playing shooters for more than twenty years, I can generally recognize when a game is using bots by their very obvious behavior. Realm Royale is clearly using bots, as I was able to repeatedly confuse bots causing them to go into animation loops or completely break, being unable to properly walk through a door or constantly moving back and forth on the same spot of land making movements that a normal player shouldn’t be capable of.

Let me be clear on this: I’m not against bots being in a battle royale game, I just find Hi-Rez’s actions surrounding their implementation to be strange. I reached out to Hi-Rez for an official comment and despite stating that I would receive an answer over a week ago, I have not. I will update this piece if I do receive a comment on the season pass questions or regarding bots.

My only real gripe with Realm Royale right now is in relation to a certain unbalanced pistol that can be found/crafted in-game. The poison/fire pistol is severely unbalanced, extremely powerful, and can basically win you a match. The weapon is trash and going up against anyone with one is guaranteed to ruin your mood.

Editorial: Wild West Online Doesn’t Care, Can’t Even Be Bothered Cleaning Its Forums


Wild West Online, the latest racket supported by the industry’s lead fraudster Sergey Titov, has landed itself in a shallow grave along with all of Titov’s other half-baked products. Given Titov’s modus operandi when it comes to releasing games, Wild West Online has been abandoned not even half-finished and plans are already underway to launch a spin off! Yes, everyone’s favorite Wild West shooter will be made free to play and fired back onto the internet in the form of Frontiers, the base game, and Magnificent 5, the battle royale title.

As of this writing, Wild West Online has one player online on Steam. As for WWO Partners Ltd, or whatever new shell company Titov has set up to continue this game’s existence, they’ve stopped keeping up a facade of caring. The forums have descended into a mess of spam and scam links, and of the six staff members listed on the forums, nobody has bothered posting in nearly two months while most haven’t even logged in since May or earlier.

Which is all par for the course for Wild West Online and its predecessors.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Editorial: And It Only Cost Perjury and Your Community’s Respect


I can’t imagine that Battlestate Games thinks there is any possibility of them coming out of this on top.

It must be the end of the year, because everyone’s favorite “Worst Developer of 2018” awards are coming up on your choice Youtube channels and Battlestate Games has decided to make a last minute entry. The Russian developer behind Escape from Tarkov, a tactical first person shooter, recently issued at least 47 DMCA takedown notices against a Youtuber named Eroktic for spreading false information regarding a data leak and due to his criticisms of the game itself.

As part of an effort to dig its grave deeper, Battlestate Games has made several posts confirming that it had in fact filed the spurious DMCA takedowns against Eroktic to silence what they call “negative hype” and because Eroktic had supported people who took a “hostile” position toward BSG, with hostile translating to “critical.”

“Lately Eroktic decided to settle on the concept of negative hype and started ardently supporting people who obviously designate their position as hostile to us. Eroctic released a video in which he, in a tendentious manner, accused us of incompetence that allegedly led to a leak of two million profile credentials. The video was based on someone else’s document which described the process of obtaining basic information about profile through rating tables (a nickname, ID, statistics from the rating). Nevertheless, after our check we were convinced that no leaks have ever happened. Eroktic began to spread rumor that cheaters can steal your account and get you banned for cheating. All of this was and remains false.”

Right, except this isn’t a copyright claim and you filed a copyright claim to bring the videos down. Youtube, incidentally, has defamation claims you can file against channels that can be used in cases of defamation. Instead of going down that road, BSG decided to abuse the copyright process and commit perjury in the process. Now their chances of being punished? Slim, I would even argue nonexistent especially since they’re a Russian developer.

Thankfully we don’t have to look far to show that Battlestate Games is flat out lying about not being receptive to criticism because they admit to filing the takedown notices due to Eroktic’s “hatred” in the same message. How does one dodge the claim that they are silencing criticism? Refuse to acknowledge the criticism as valid criticism, that’s how.

“The decision to address YouTube concerning video on the Eroktic’s channel had to be made in order to stop misinformation and hatred. Moreover – we did not want and we do not want this person to be associated with our game in the first place. His purposefully destructive actions cannot be considered “criticism” no matter how you look at it. Eroktic has a long history of negative attitude towards our project, the company and players, and with the recent actions he crossed the line.”

The backlash to BSG’s conduct has prompted content creators to begin dropping their coverage of Escape From Tarkov, including the resignation of one Emissary (affiliated content creator), as well as several other Youtubers. Meanwhile, the news revolving around BSG’s conduct has spread all over the web, including to websites that hadn’t previously covered Escape From Tarkov. The result? In its heavy handed attempt to silence criticism, BSG has ensured that more people than ever will see not just the accusation that the game’s data was leaked, but that BSG is willing to abuse the copyright law in order to silence people for criticizing them.

So Battlestate Games took down two videos, and it only cost them their public relations, the good will of their community, an avalanche of negative press coverage, business relations with content creators, and the long term trust of their customers. Hope it was worth it.

 

Jeremy Soule More Than Five Years Late On Album, Starts Patreon Asking For More Money


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

When it comes to fraudsters showcased here on MMO Fallout, Jeremy Soule may be the worst. The composer of famous soundtracks for numerous games including Skyrim, Guild Wars, and Baldur’s Gate, Jeremy Soule’s talent in composing music haven’t exactly translated into successful businesses.

In 2005, Soule founded the company DirectSong with the purpose of selling albums from his various creations. At best, the service was a wholly incompetent mess that delayed orders by months into years on end and couldn’t figure out digital distribution of simple MP3 files. At worse, it was a running scam and never had any intention of providing the products that Soule was selling at a premium cost. I brought this up in my initial Crowdfunding Fraudsters piece, but check out reviews of the service and you’ll see people who waited 3+ years for their soundtracks to be delivered, and others who had to wait upwards of a year for a response from DirectSong’s customer service about refunds.

The Northerner: Soule Symphony #1 was crowdfunded on Kickstarter back in 2013 with an estimated shipping date of September 2013. Five years later, it has still not released and all signs point towards the songs not even being fully written. But Jeremy needs money, so he’s started a Patreon account in order to solicit additional funding for his works. For $5 per month you’ll gain access to old and new music from Soule and for $10 per month you’ll have the rare opportunity where Soule will actually talk to you, about music product and business techniques. $10 for advice on business, you really get what you pay for.

Meanwhile if you check over at Kickstarter, you’ll see hundreds of comments from people discussing their horrible customer experience of dealing with Soule and the Max Steiner Agency, with refund requests taking close to a year, others not being responded to at all, emails bouncing from the company’s refund address, and more. Soule is more than five years late putting out an album that should have been out in September 2013, and he doesn’t seem to be anywhere near completion.

The Northerner Diaries, a sketch album released by Soule in lieu of the album that backers paid for, is available to listen to for free on Youtube.