Category: Editorials

[Column] PUBG’s Ridiculous Ownership Claim on the Frying Pan


PUBG Corp has finally decided to pull up its britches and sue NetEase for copying Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, a move that will certainly make for some monumental court precedent. While I do have coverage coming for this 155 page complaint once I get done reading it, one bit that caught my eye was on PUBG Corp’s list of concepts it claims copyright ownership of, the frying pan as a weapon.

Especially the part where PUBG Corp claims that ‘previous shooter games did not include the use of a frying pan.’

“One very beloved aspect of creative expression in BATTLEGROUNDS is the game’s iconic frying pan. Previous shooter games did not include the use of a frying pan… When
so equipped, as a purely artistic and creative expression injecting humor into the game, the frying pan is the only indestructible armor in the game (i.e., armor that can absorb infinite hit points without deteriorating), providing complete protection against projectiles aimed at a character’s posterior. “

Right, except the frying pan has been a comedic weapon in literature popular media for decades, if not longer, likely longer than many of the PUBG Corp employees have been alive. If you want to keep the conversation strictly limited to video games, the frying pan as a humorous weapon has become iconic as far back as 1996 with Princess Peach and the release of Super Mario RPG but can be found in games like Earthbound (1994), Fable (2004), and Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001). Dead Rising had a frying pan weapon and Dead Rising 2 even utilized the mechanic of having said frying pan block bullets.

Left 4 Dead 2 (2009) had a frying pan as arguably its most powerful melee weapon, which was then transplanted to Team Fortress 2 in 2010 with the sound effect of a successful hit meant to be both humiliating for the player on the receiving end and humorous for the game as a whole.

Full coverage of the lawsuit is on its way, but this is just one of a large number of concepts that PUBG Corp is claiming copyright ownership of that it had veritably no hand in creating, including the phrase “winner winner chicken dinner,” and the concept of starting with nothing and building up an arsenal, or virtually every RPG since the 80’s as well as the Unreal Tournament games, to name two examples.

Let’s Talk The Future of MMO Fallout


Before we begin: MMO Fallout isn’t shutting down, I’m not going away, nobody else is taking over, I’m not selling the domain. I’m burying the lead with this note but I personally don’t like when other publications/people start with this headline and then make you read an entire article to find out if it is their farewell address. This isn’t my farewell address.

One concept I’ve maintained over the years with MMO Fallout is complete transparency, I promised that if this website ever attained the kind of revenue that would allow me to peruse the dollar menu at McDonald’s that this website would for all intent and purpose (barring that in a legal capacity) become a completely transparent organization. I haven’t had to do this because, as I’ve said numerous times, MMO Fallout doesn’t generate revenue. I’ve briefly considered starting a Patreon a few times in the past, mostly after viewers suggested it, but I can definitely say that the chances of that happening at this point are about 0%, and I don’t say that with the same kind of certainty as when your favorite MMO says “we are definitely not shutting down” only to file for bankruptcy yesterday.

This also isn’t headed down the road of “I’m not starting a Patreon, but here’s other ways to send me money/stuff.”

Over the past month or two I’ve been busy, and you may have noticed a shift in content because I definitely have noticed a shift in traffic. I haven’t been so forward in talking about this because I don’t like discussing my personal life, but I think it’s important enough to warrant a conversation.

I’m going to law school, or more specifically right now I’m currently studying for the Law School Admissions Test which is going very well, with the intention of going to law school starting as early as this fall. Is this why there’s been more of a focus on industry legalities over the past few months? To tell the truth, the latter had more of an influence on the former, as well as my continuing discussion with the MMO Fallout legal team over the past couple of years. Yes, my comments on having lawyers are not facetious. They’re great lawyers, they have given me a lot of information on avoiding trouble while also defending this website against multiple threats over the past nine years years.

So what does this mean for MMO Fallout? At least until my test in June, I’ll be pushing less content. A lot less. In fact, I’ll likely focus on the kind of pieces that are less deadline-intensive and keep the breaking news to a minimum of topics that are of tangible importance (big announcements and stories) over the kind of things that this website has generally avoided out of lack of time and resources, like covering every game’s patch notes. Things I can work on late at night to release the following day and not worry about being old news by that point.

I may also start accepting more guest posts, as I have admittedly been hesitant to do in the past and has been suggested to me numerous times by readers.

This website isn’t going anywhere, although I will have to apologize to the people who have no doubt grown weary of my increasingly delayed responses via email. I am still here and MMO Fallout is still a labor of love that will be around long after nobody is still reading it.

Other than that I have no opinion on the matter.

[Column] Fact Check: You Can’t Teach An Old Jack New Tricks


Who would have thought that reality, not unlike Hollywood, would start running out of ideas and reboot failures from the 90’s for the modern day audience?

Grab your Nintendo 64 controllers and crack open a Mountain Dew Surge kids, we’re going back to the past to give a platform to one of Florida’s worst attorneys. Jack Thompson, best known for his failed campaign against the games industry ultimately leading up to being disbarred in disgrace for disparaging litigants, making false statements to tribunals, etc, has once again returned to exploit school shooting victims and this week ran an op-ed in The Washington Examiner (archived) to remind us of something we all know: Jack Thompson has no qualms about lying to push his agenda.

So to follow up this piece (and I do recommend reading it for yourself), I decided to roll a point by point fact check for Jack’s major topics.

1. The FBI finds fascination with violent entertainment to be a trait of school shooters

This is true, and Jack even links to the FBI report which, since I read the thing, also recommends not doing exactly what Jack did, create a profile of the typical school shooter calling it “shortsighted, even dangerous.” As it also turns out, people with violent tendencies tend to be infatuated with violent media, however there hasn’t been a conclusive study that would indicate that the latter can cause or enhance the former.

“One response to the pressure for action may be an effort to identify the next shooter by developing a “profile” of the typical school shooter. This may sound like a reasonable preventive measure, but in practice, trying to draw up a catalogue or “checklist” of warning signs to detect a potential school shooter can be shortsighted, even dangerous. Such lists, publicized by the media, can end up unfairly labeling many nonviolent students as potentially dangerous or even lethal.”

2. Jack filed a lawsuit on behalf of the families of students killed by Michael Carneal

This is true, what’s also true is that the lawsuit went horribly for Thompson and crew. The case can be researched as “James v. Meow Media,” and if you want to see Jack’s poor grasp on the law even going back to 1999, just take a look at this case. Thompson and crew sued two porn websites, game companies, and the distributors of the films Natural Born Killers and The Basketball Diaries, whose products were all consumed by the shooter.

The lawsuit made claims on negligence, product liability in regards to producing a “defective” product, and the RICO act. Let’s focus on that last charge to prove my above point, RICO for those outside the loop stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, it is a law specifically built for bringing down criminal organizations allowing prosecutors to take down bosses who order crimes committed despite not actually committing those crimes themselves, and Thompson thought that they could use this against porn websites for allowing a minor to access their content.

The case was dismissed on all counts and then appealed to the 6th circuit who in turn dismissed it. According to both courts, it was beyond a doubt that the plaintiff had no facts to support their claims.

“A complaint should not be dismissed for failure to state a claim unless it appears beyond doubt that the plaintiff can prove no set of facts in support of his claim which would entitle him to relief.”

3. The Columbine Shooters Trained on Doom

This was beyond incorrect in 1999 and it still is wrong despite Thompson’s desire to repeat it as though it were common fact. Anyone with the most basic level of understanding of video games would be able to tell you that Doom, with its technology so basic that it has auto-aim and does not allow the player to do things like look up or down, can not train someone in how to fire a gun, how to maintain a gun, real world tactics, or anything else related to the operation of a gun or battlefield tactics.

The idea that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris “trained on Doom” is pure nonsense.

4. The American Psychiatric Association found that violent video games shift teens toward the aggressive end of the spectrum

Again, more false claims from Jack. An APA review from 2015 found that there is a link between video games and increased aggression, however they also state that there is no conclusive evidence linking violent media to actual criminal acts of violence. The APA even released a statement calling claims like the one Thompson makes a “disservice.”

“Journalists and policy makers do their constituencies a disservice in cases where they link acts of real-world violence with the perpetrators’ exposure to violent video games or other violent media. There’s little scientific evidence to support the connection, and it may distract us from addressing those issues that we know contribute to real-world violence.”

Thompson also notes the “American Pediatric Psychiatric Association,” an organization that we could find no evidence of existing.

5. The World Health Organization has classified video game addiction as a mental disorder

That has no bearing on this conversation.

6. The military uses video games to desensitize soldiers to killing

Purely fictional statement, one created and repeated by fellow anti-video game zealot David Grossman. There is no evidence that the military uses video games to desensitize soldiers and the Army and Marine Corps have vehemently denied claims of such training methods. This claim is nothing but an urban legend created by people with goals similar to Jack Thompson’s, to be thrown out as fact by people like Jack Thompson.

7. An FTC Sting Operation Found That Retailers Are Still Selling Violent Games

Another sentence, another lie. I know this because the FTC publishes its papers and in 2013 found that “video game retailers continue to enforce age-based ratings, while movie theaters have made marked improvement in box office enforcement.” The sting found that only 13 percent of undercover shoppers were able to buy an m-rated game.

8. The Fraudulent and Deceptive Trade Practices Act Could Be Used Against Retailers

No, it couldn’t. I’m going to explain this in clear terms because Jack doesn’t seem to understand the difference between video games and cigarettes or alcohol. Cigarettes are age-restricted by federal laws created by the Food and Drug Administration. You need a license to sell cigarettes, alcohol, actually any legally age-restricted merchandise and that license comes with agreements to follow laws and regulations on what you can sell, who you can sell it to, and how much you can sell and when.

It is illegal to sell alcohol or tobacco to minors, in fact it’s illegal in a lot of places to be a minor in possession of alcohol (but not cigarettes, incidentally). There is not a law in the United States that makes it illegal to sell violent video games to minors. Jack Thompson should know this, he spearheaded legislation in Louisiana that was shot down and referred to as a waste of taxpayer money.

9. Conclusion

When the Florida Bar disbarred Jack Thompson, they note that he had showed a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of his inappropriate conduct, concluding that there was no evidence that Thompson would be open to rehabilitation or even appreciate the basis for why such rehabilitation would be needed, and removed his privilege to practice law permanently and without the opportunity for reinstatement.

Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes. He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him.

Nearly ten years later, it looks like the Bar’s opinion was correct. Jack Thompson hasn’t changed his tactics. He still doesn’t understand the law, apart from the pieces he’s willing to twist far outside of their legal definitions to fit his claims, and he still doesn’t understand the basics of video games. He is willing to lie, throw out hyperbolic opinions as established fact, and has seemingly no ability for self-awareness.

I’m not going to call on the Washington Examiner to censor Thompson, but running an op-ed by a man who torpedoed his professional career by lying to the courts, especially without noting the man’s long history of absolute falsehoods in regards to the topic that his editorial is covering, is giving undeserved credibility to the simply incredible.

[Not Massive] Preview: Ion Maiden Plugs Old School Into New School


Ion Storm is the perfect level of ridiculous to be almost believable. Imagine for a moment that in 2018 I’m trying to tell you that 3D Realms is not only releasing a new game, but it is a first person shooter on the Build Engine starring a character who is essentially Duke Nukem’s lady alternate.

In a world where crispy M&M’s, French Toast Crunch, and Jumanji are all making a comeback, it only stands to reason that a shooter actually built out of a twenty year old engine would be eaten up like, well, crispy M&M’s. Ion Maiden is currently in early access on Steam with an anticipated release date of later this year, and people are loving it. It currently holds a 97% approval rating and clocks in at a hard drive busting thirty two megabytes.

Without a doubt, Ion Maiden is the Duke Nukem game we all wished had released instead of the depressing episode that was Duke Nukem Forever, and likely evidence that 3D Realms might still have the Duke rights if George Broussard hadn’t catapulted his company into the sun in the pursuit of fancier game engines. Everything you’d want from a Duke Nukem iteration is in Ion Maiden from the fast paced gun action to the cheesy one liners, pop culture references, and maze-like maps with tons of hidden areas.

The Build Engine has been modified and upgraded throughout the years to include a 3D renderer and be capable of showing off really good looking sprites. Those of you who don’t wax poetic about the virtues of 90’s shooters might not find the aesthetics as appealing, considering anything and everything in the world is a two dimensional sprite that moves its orientation to face you no matter how quickly you circle around it. Still, 3D Realms has created nothing short of magic with this engine since it debuted in 1997, and while it may not impress anyone with its graphical fidelity, it is by no means simple.

It’s especially impressive when you consider that the Build Engine isn’t technically 3D, it just tricks you into thinking it is.

Right now there is only a sample campaign available that should take you about an hour to finish and a hell of a lot more time if you decide to try and track down every one of the campaign’s dozens of secret areas. There are only a handful of enemies and the preview is rather short, so I can’t fault anyone for simply waiting until the full game comes out later this year especially since it’ll still be a cheap $20.

Chaturday: Have You Thanked Your Local National Supreme Court Today?


Given the recent climate in and around the gaming industry, the average gamer can’t really be faulted for being at least a little afraid of the path that our beloved medium is heading down, one that millions of you have turned into an industry larger than television and film.

After all, certain forces have seemingly catapulted their efforts to demonize violent video games, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, and the White House and President himself have invited those very people to hammer down on their propaganda. People like Dave Grossman, who famously referred to violent games as “murder simulators,” would be pushing his unsupported views on a president whose own quotes seem to imply a rather lackadaisical view on the whole matter:

“It’s so incredible. I see it. I get to see things that you would be — you’d be amazed at. I have a young — very young son who — I look at some of the things he’s watching, and I say, ‘How is that possible?’ And this is what kids are watching.”

We shouldn’t be scared, and I can sum up why with one Supreme Court ruling with one majority opinion written by one Justice Antonin Scalia.

One constant throughout the industry is that retail stores do not sell (to the best of their ability) mature games to underage customers, but the reason why isn’t as clearly understood. Ask around and you’re bound to hear answers from both customers and retail workers that the reason is because it’s illegal, others point to store policy. The latter are correct.

There are no laws on the books in the United States that criminalize the sale of mature rated games to underage customers and if there are, they’ve gone unnoticed due to not being enforced, and if they’ve been enforced they’ve been overturned. Of all the things I talk about being without precedent, this is definitely not one of them.

And you can thank Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator Leland Yee for this ruling, because in 2005 the California State Legislature passed a law that banned the sale of violent games to anyone under 18 and imposed a fine of up to $1,000 for each violation. Senator Yee sponsored the bill and Governor Schwarzenegger signed it. A strong proponent of regulating video games, Lee was later arrested in 2014 and convicted of felony racketeering, money laundering, public corruption, after he was caught buying firearms from Philippine terrorists and attempted to sell them to an undercover FBI agent.

Representatives of the industry including the Entertainment Software Association were successful in suing the bill before it went into effect, with California appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court, only to have the court find the act unconstitutional as it compelled speech that was not factual (the law required violent games to affix a warning to each box). The law was appealed again and went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the law was unconstitutional and violated the first and fourteenth amendments. Majority opinion was written by Justice Scalia who noted the lack of compelling evidence linking video games and violent behavior, the successful self-regulation implemented via the ESRB, and the notion that violent games were entitled to just as much protection as violent cartoons like Looney Tunes.

So if you’re afraid of a looming war against games, don’t be. The organizations that fought against the bill in California and the nearly dozen other states where similar laws cropped up are still around, the ESA wouldn’t let such legislation go without a fight, and we have the Supreme Court on our side ruling that any such legislation would be unconstitutional.

Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.

Beta Perspective: OldSchool RuneScape Mobile Weirdness


As MMO Fallout’s official only staffer and the internet’s number one games journalist, I’ve seen a lot. Betas, alphas, pre-alphas, day one patches, you name it. Last year I reviewed to rather poor reception the pre-release build of Shadow of War, and while the preview was condemned as “tone deaf” and “stupid,” I came out of that experience pretty sure that I would never encounter an odder product. And then this week I was sent what I can only assume is a beta build of Old School RuneScape Mobile.

Now I’ve been in some strange betas before, including one for [redacted] where the developer asked us to download a Torrent and then had the nerve to ask us to seed it for each other, but this takes the cake. My beta instructions came in a fancy little box which, upon opening, revealed its contents to be mostly powders and some strange doohickeys: stars and little bits of paper that say “RuneScape Old School” on them. The beta version I was sent is code named “Vanilla Cupcakes,” suggesting that someone at Jagex is taking cues from the Android style of naming updates.

A little bit odd, but I had a job to do.

Now I don’t know much about technology, being a tech journalist, but I do know that one of the basic tenets of mobile is that apps are supposed to be simple to start. Take the photo app I’m using to capture these pictures, I click once to start the app, then click once for every photo I want to take. The setup for this beta has eight steps, the first of which includes preheating the oven and creaming some butter.

Clearly this must be some kind of trial, after all RuneScape is about overcoming bigger foes and if I can’t 1v1 some butter, then what kind of scrub would I be to take on the full beta? This is like one of those Man Crates, that novelty item where the contents are delivered in an actual crate that you have to open with a crowbar. The first half of the tutorial asks you to solo pk some butter, followed by cupcake mix and two eggs at the same time. I’ve been playing RuneScape long enough to remember the Recipe for Disaster quest so none of this really blew my mind. I had to provide my own eggs though, I hope this is going to be fixed for the full release.

All this butter drops on death is more butter.

The OldSchool RuneScape beta comes in the form of six consumables, not unlike how Nintendo handles demos on its systems, and they appear to expire after a couple of days once loaded and you pretty much have to prepare them all at the same time, so I’ll have to make good use of each one. I went onto the RuneScape Reddit to see if anyone else was complaining about this style of beta build but couldn’t find a single person talking about it. I guess this business model is just accepted now.

And then I saw this note and everything became clear.

Silly me, this isn’t the beta itself, it’s a quest that will inevitably lead me to the beta. Just to show there was no hard feelings, I took the six “mobile devices” I was sent and decided to toss them in the oven to think about what they’d done. A good seventeen to nineteen minutes at 325 degrees will teach a valuable lesson about coming into my kitchen and bamboozling me to get my eggs. Boy does it smell like vanilla bean in my house.

While I let those hotheads cool off, a statement which I’m pretty sure doesn’t qualify as a pun, I went back to the task list. Next step was to cream more butter and beat it with the icing mix. You know it’s hard to fully comprehend just how much butter is in 200g of butter until you see it sitting out on a measuring plate. Hint: It’s a lot of butter.

As I creamed the second batch of butter, I got to thinking about the possibility that I’ve been doing this whole thing wrong and that the list of instructions may have just been a metaphor not meant to be taken literally, like I’d come to find that it’s not the cupcakes on the plate that matter but the cupcakes in my heart. Perhaps this was a sort of strange live event and, upon my completion, my door would be kicked in by Mod Ash who would grab the cupcakes and make a run for it. Maybe, just maybe, I was the target of the world’s most genius, not to mention expensive, plot to trick someone into baking snacks for some hungry, tired developers. Ocean’s Eleven, but British and with only six people.

The last two steps are to cover the cupcakes with icing and then decorate with the stars and those bits of paper with the RuneScape logo on them. The instructions call them “wafers” which apparently mean edible paper, as if implying that the stuff you use to print documents isn’t edible, but I digress. I’ve decided to dub these “ScapeCakes,” because it flows off the tongue easier than “CupScapes.” It might still need some workshopping, I tried to float the idea past my roommate but she was wholly uninterested in the ordeal and seemed more content with napping in front of the heat of the oven.

In conclusion, I’m 35% certain that I was never actually playing any OldSchool RuneScape during this whole process, but I learned some important life lessons along the way like how there’s really never a bad time for cupcakes, I should probably take a class in cupcake decoration, and that this crew of Jagex staffers will get their mitts on my cupcakes when they pull them out of my cold, cupcakeless hands. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t qualify as a preview since I didn’t play anything, but I’m frankly too full of cupcake to remember what the original intention of this article was.

Verdict/Disclosure: 4.5/5 – Jagex has discovered an innovative and delicious new way to deliver beta content, albeit this version isn’t as mobile as a game played straight from the phone. Thank you to Jagex for sending the cupcakes, this is not a sponsored post but more of an example on why I’m not allowed nice things. I don’t actually have access to the Old School Mobile Beta.

Old School RuneScape Celebrates Five Years


Time flies when you’re grinding for that 99 skillcape, and nobody knows that more than the players of Old School RuneScape which this month reaches its five year anniversary. It’s hard to believe that five years ago we were talking about Old School RuneScape (which MMO Fallout for some reason consistently referred to as ‘OldScape’) as this small project that we had no idea if it would be popular enough to be sustainable, with the high end of the hopes being that Jagex could commit just enough personnel to make very small content updates and ban some bots. But just as luck would have it, the game exploded in popularity over the next year and drew in enough people that it receives regular content updates and rather massive, exclusive additions.

In 2015, MMO Fallout managed to snag an interview with Matthew Kemp, product manager for Old School RuneScape not long after Deadman Mode, the game’s hardcore spinoff, originally launched. Deadman mode, where players can kill each other virtually anywhere and can lose large amounts of their belongings on death, in turn spawned its own massively successful eSports spinoff in the form of seasonal Deadman tournaments, with winners taking home $10 grand in cold hard cash.

Senior Product Manager Matthew Kemp (the very same) had the following to say on Old School RuneScape’s coming year:

“2018 is a huge year for Old School, and not only because of these anniversary celebrations and the launch of the game’s own dedicated Twitch channel. We are currently in the middle of a pipeline of closed beta tests for Old School RuneScape on mobile, and already are getting some excellent feedback from those lucky enough to receive an invitation. In fact, the feedback so far has more than validated our decision to make the full game available on mobile platforms for new, returning and current players later in the year.”

Both Old School RuneScape and RuneScape 3 are in the process of being ported to mobile devices.

(Source: Jagex Press Release)

Fraudster Update: Will Adkins and the Open Letter to MMO Bomb


It’s been nearly two weeks since MMO Fallout published our piece regarding the Marvel Heroes Rebirth Indiegogo project, Marvel Heroes and the Diploma Mill of Nostalgia, and the article has garnered quite a bit of controversy by which I mean accusations of plagiarism and a demand that we link to a blog you might formally know as MMO Bomb. Now I’m not here to disparage our fellow denizens on the internet, since that’s the job for our subject of interest, but I’d just like to make a small 100% unrelated anecdote before we begin that when Johns Hopkins university measures the radiation coming off of the sun, they didn’t necessarily bounce their research off of, nor do they need to cite Aunt Sue walking outside and noticing that the sun sure is bright today.

But I’m not a jealous person, and since there is the distinct possibility that an ambitious editor in chief of said website (linked above here and below mine) decided to point out to anyone who covered the story that they broke it first, I have enjoyed the normal increase in traffic that Crowdfunding Fraudsters provides along with the boosted revenue ($0) with the safety of knowing that the inevitable legal complaints will not be coming my way because someone else decided to raise their hand and take the brunt of the attention. The less time I have to spend filing complaints to the State Bar Association in response to frivolous threats, the better.

Now, since our article was published, the Indiegogo campaign has been shut down with a message on the game’s website giving an explicit accusation that “a gaming blog” ignored the facts in order to publish false allegations for the sake of driving traffic and generating revenue, along with a small hint toward potential further action over irreparable damage to Paragon Institute.

“The bankruptcy hearing that would lead to the sale of Gazillion assets has been delayed; this would give us little time to react once the outcome of the hearing is known. Secondly, the landlord that controls the offices for Gazillion is petitioning the court to take possession of all on-site assets per his lease agreements (including the servers containing source code and game assets); it is now possible that the assets will not make it to a court-led sale.

We are aware of the false accusations originating from a gaming blog; we have been in contact with their president in an attempt to resolve this.  They have elected to ignore the full facts and  seem motivated by the goal of driving traffic to their site and generating revenue. These false allegations have caused irreparable damage to Paragon Institute. More details will follow as we are able to share.”

I know they’re not talking about me because MMO Fallout has no revenue to generate, and nobody from Paragon has been in touch. There’s also the little matter that nothing we said was false and, just to throw an example out of the blue, our piece didn’t make any potentially actionable statements like musing on the possibility that Paragon Institute may be looking to continue the diploma mill practices of Chadwick Institute. I’m just throwing statements out there.

But imagine my surprise late afternoon on February 10 when a comment showed up on my piece by none other than Will Adkins himself, or at least a private Disqus account signed up for with none other than a Virtucorp email address (for more information on Virtucorp, see the above link) and a lot of information. The long comment, interestingly enough, was a direct open letter not to myself but to the other author of this fine coverage (again, linked above). I’m willing to take a shot in the dark that this was posted on the wrong website, because it was almost immediately deleted and then re-posted on the actual article that Adkins was responding to. Thankfully the internet never forgets, and I’m sent a copy of all comments posted here by email for record keeping purposes which according to the MMO Fallout legal team gives me permission to re-post for your viewing pleasure.

The good news is, according to this commenter who we’ll refer to as “Will Allegedkins,” in the unlikely event his credentials turn out to be forged, we now have an answer for the connection with Chadwick University, the defunct diploma mill who ceased granting diplomas back around 2007 and not a few years ago as has been reported on other websites. The website for Chadwick University has since come back online since our piece, directly explaining the link between the two organizations:

This site is maintained by Paragon Institute, Inc. (a 501c3 non-profit) to facilitate transcript requests for former Chadwick University students and share site content as it existed in 2007; Paragon Institute has not been involved in the academic operations or conferral of said degrees. Except as otherwise noted, the site reflects policies and standards as implemented during operations.

See, a simple question given a simple answer, Paragon is acting as a custodian to Chadwick’s transcript requests because it may be a thankless job, but someone has to do it. According to the Web Archive, this explanation has been up for at least several years now, the archive doesn’t go further back than 2015, so don’t get the impression that it has suddenly been updated.

But what about Paragon Institute itself, the 501c3 non-profit? We tracked Paragon Institute to Virtucorp, another website that has seemingly risen from the dead since our piece and, as we stated originally, is still filled with Lorem Ipsum gibberish and doesn’t actually include anything about anything.

I did note in the original article that Paragon Institute originally operated as American Southern University and according to its 501c3 filings for the past ten years, did business under several names of which MMO Fallout was unable to procure any evidence of any of these entities doing anything or existing in any substantive way for that matter. I’m not saying they didn’t exist, but if they did they have all been forgotten by the elephantine memory of the internet.

In addition, the ASU filed its form for organizations that claim less than $50 grand annually, which explains the lack of institution-esque work and the fact that we can’t identify anyone associated other than Mr. Adkins. There is zero web presence for any of the names, none of them show up on the official list of accredited institutions, nor do they show up on lists of unaccredited institutions for that matter. We have no information about them, and given that fact I tried to quickly move on from discussing their existence at all.

But Paragon Institute, as I later learned, hasn’t really done anything either. After the Web Archive decided to start working for us again, we went back as far as we could into Paragon’s past, 2014, and found that the institute was still in its re-launching phase even back then. We’re inclined to believe Mr. Adkin’s statement that the institute never issued a single diploma because such a statement would be easily disproved if it were a lie.

“Paragon Institute has been legally empowered since it was formed, as American Southern University in 2008, to award diplomas. However, it has not issued one during that time. The original intent was to create MOOCs and partner with other institutions to award accredited academic credit. As other providers moved into that space, the organization has pursued other initiatives more targeted at niche markets – such as STEM training and the one proposed with the IndieGoGo campaign. JASON – can you provide ANY evidence that Paragon has EVER awarded a diploma, legitimate or otherwise?”

Mr. Allegedkins has a point here, there is no evidence that Paragon Institute has ever awarded a diploma, and by our research there is no living evidence on the internet that it was ever a functioning institute, accredited or otherwise. It’s like the podcast I talked about starting back in 2010, it certainly exists in theory but has never actually gotten around to producing episode one. The statement goes on to say that Chadwick University probably wasn’t a diploma mill, and this is one of the few points I have to disagree with Mr. A-kins on.

“The main reason cited for being a diploma mill is that Chadwick University granted credit for life experience. Particularly during that time, accreditation was more about protecting faculty and the school rather than students”

Not necessarily true. We know Chadwick University was a fraudulent institute just by looking at its founder, Lloyd Clayton Jr., a quack whose degree in the faux medical practice of Naturopathy has gifted him with expertise in the arts of herbology and massage, whose school was slammed with class action lawsuits, and whose (also unrecognized) accrediting institution was founded by a woman who believed that the “Jews and Catholics” were suppressing evidence of her psychic link to the lost city of Atlantis. You see, there is a purpose on why MMO Fallout went into more detailed coverage of Lloyd Claton Jr and Chadwick University than other outlets did, it paints a clearer picture than simply saying “some people have called them a diploma mill.” Chadwick U was never accredited by anyone who mattered, it was however licensed to operate until Alabama decided to crack down on (you guessed it) diploma mills.

Legally speaking, we are not accusing Chadwick University of committing a crime because operating an unaccredited institution was not illegal at the time that it existed in Alabama. We simply pointed out that it is illegal to use a degree from Chadwick University in several states to obtain a job.

I didn’t spend too much time on this in the original piece as to not get off track, because I’d like to make it perfectly clear that the activities of Lloyd Clayton Jr. and Chadwick University have no bearing on the credibility of the Paragon Institute, and I am emphasizing that out of my own free will, but since we’re on the topic, Clayton’s other college (Clayton College of Natural Health), also defunct, offered courses in topics like aromatherapy, spectro-chrome therapy, therapeutic touch, and imaginal healing. If you’d really like to get off topic, we can start discussing the unlicensed doctors who graduated from Clayton’s schools who are now serving prison sentences for peddling fake cancer cures, duping and in some cases possibly causing the death of their patients via bogus treatments. None of Chadwick University’s actions have any bearing on Paragon Institute, I’d like to remind you.

“As a side note, not being recognized by Texas does not mean that Chadwick wasn’t a good education. I don’t expect most people to know about academic licensure, unless they claim they do and portray it incorrectly. In Texas, you must either be accredited or be based in the state for your degree to be recognized. Period. It’s not based on academic quality in that regard.”

Accreditation is absolutely about quality, in fact it’s literally in the mission statement on the Department of Education‘s website.

“The goal of accreditation is to ensure that institutions of higher education meet acceptable levels of quality.”

You can’t get accredited unless your institute adheres to guidelines on the quality of education, performance of the students, meets certain financial viability requirements, as well as the credentials of the staff. I know this because while in college the institute I was attending was being audited to determine its qualification for continued accreditation (which happens every few years), and I discussed with several professors who were directly associated with keeping the school accredited the qualifications required and the things that they needed to prove.

Now does that mean that every school that isn’t accredited is because it is not of acceptable quality? Of course not, that would be a logical fallacy. The process is, after all, voluntary and not all institutes are willing to go through what is a very difficult and expensive process. It’s like being certified by the Better Business Bureau, except the accreditation institutes have actual authority.

It’s like the difference between a deli being certified kosher and another just claiming to be kosher. They could theoretically both be going through the exact same process, with the latter simply deciding not to pay the required fees to be certified by a third party agency, and the former suppressing evidence of the lost city of Atlantis. Both outcomes may result in food that is equally kosher, but one comes with the approval of a guiding party that can reasonably be assumed is demanding that certain standards be kept, and the other is on the losing end of a barrage of lawsuits and busy dealing with the federal government trying to get them shut down and thrown in prison for fraud, like that Kevin Trudeau guy.

But let’s talk politics, did you know that Will Adkins ran for Congress in 2008?

“The third-party needed to pull in 2% of the vote across the state to remain on the ballot. This paved the way for future campaigns. It was a clean race, ran in only a few months v. a year for other candidates, helped achieve the desired goal, and was run without taking contributions from our citizens. I knew that I wasn’t going for the ‘win’ and could not take funding knowing that.”

For the record, I did do a lot of research on Will Adkins the man, 99% of which I left out minus what is likely his house (and address of Paragon Institute) and the fact that he was planning on running for Congress this year. I left out the part where he ran in 2008 as a libertarian because it’s frankly irrelevant to what he’s doing now, and would probably just come off as petty and disparaging to talk about the results, or I could make a comment about how Adkins’ performance in the second district actually strengthened the Libertarian ticket and may have had a direct hand in increasing turnout for the following two elections, making for the strongest election periods for the Libertarian party in the recent history of the second district of North Carolina, but that probably sounds like off-topic praise coming out of nowhere.

Allegedkins goes on to mention that they had some former Gazillion staff on board, however the perception of the project is too negative at the moment to proceed, ending with a parting shot against the article’s author.

Yes, the IndieGoGo campaign has stalled. Much of the feedback I’ve received attributed it to your article which was a misleading attempt to drive traffic and revenue; this then spread to other sites. We have been in contact with former Gazillion staff members (a limited number albeit) and was looking forward to announcing this soon. Even though they understand the situation, they feel the perception of the endeavor is too negative right now.

Jason, I get that you’re not a real news organization; you are a well-read gaming blog, but your readers still expect integrity just the same. In this case you are attempting to make the news rather than report it. We don’t know if it is malice on your part driving this or an inability to do real investigative reporting. We hope it’s not ill intent.
-Will Adkins

Now that’s rough, but since the campaign has been cancelled and doesn’t look like it will be returning in the near future, I guess that ends this saga of Crowdfunding Fraudsters. Hopefully we all learned something important from this experience.

Tune in this April when we cover the official launch of the ZX Spectrum Vega Plus, and tune in later this year when In Plain English covers the case of Paragon Institute v Defendant.

(Source: My Email)

Beta Perspective: RuneScape’s Mining/Smithing Beta


Mining & Smithing are widely regarded as extremely antiquated skills in RuneScape, as Jagex essentially filled out the skill without much future proofing. Both skills were released in 2001 and have received sporadic updates throughout the years to boost their usefulness, but it can hardly be argued that either skill has been left behind as the game has progressed. Requiring 85 mining (of the 99 skill cap) to mine Rune and 85-99 smithing to create its equipment made a lot more sense in 2001 when rune was the best armor in the game (which it still is for non-members) and rune was incredibly rare with two very slowly spawning nodes deep in the player-vs-player wilderness.

One thing that’s obvious about this planned update is that both skills are see a slowdown in production,

Mining appears to be going for predictability and ease of access. In current RuneScape, mining is essentially handled by dice roll, with every strike giving the chance to collect an ore based on your mining level, the level of the rock, and your quality of pickaxe. For most ores in the game, the rock depletes after one strike and you have to wait for it to refresh before it can be struck again.

Under the new system, instead of offering a chance with each strike, Jagex is going for predictability by introducing a timed slider which grants an ore once it fills up, its speed decided by your level, quality of pickaxe, and quality of ore. In addition, it looks like all of the ore will be moved over to a community, non-competitive style with ore nodes that do not deplete. While this does mean that it’ll be more possible to mine while not paying full attention, you’ll still want to check in every so often and click the ore to restore your stamina bar, which will slow down gathering as it depletes.

Smithing on the other hand appears to be going for slower production but more returns per creation, so you won’t be pumping out hundreds of swords per hour but the experience you receive per sword will be better than the system that currently exists. Right now smithing is a simple operation of clicking on an anvil with the ore in your inventory, selecting what you want to create, and pressing a button. The new system appears to be promoting creating less items by putting more emphasis on re-smithing what you’ve already created. Items can be upgraded six times up to “decorated,” at which the item can no longer be equipped but can be traded in for a lump sum of experience. According to Jagex staff’s in-game comments, upgrading is intended to be the fast, expensive method of training with leveling by creating items from scratch being the slow, cheap method.

Smithing anvils will be situated next to forges, and now you have to keep your metal heated in order to work it into shape (for realism). This translates into a heat meter that depletes as your creation meter progresses, meaning you’ll occasionally need to stop and reheat the metal before continuing. Right now this process is incredibly slow, but there are planned changes to make your heat last longer as you level up. Coal has also been replaced with a new luminite ore as an ingredient to smith adamant and rune armor, and the existing equipment has been condensed down to level 50 with new ores/armor filling in the remaining levels.

Finally, there is an idea of convenience that has been sorely missing from mining and smithing since its inception. Since both skills are built around the idea of mass production, a lot of the time is currently spent running with limited inventory (28 spaces plus some limited options for holding coal) running to and from the bank. With this rework, players will be given an ore bag which can drastically increase the amount of time you spend mining before having to go bank. The numbers will most likely change before launch, however during the beta I could fit about 200 tin ore (level 1) and 100 living ore (top level) into the bag. On the smithing side, you’ll be able to fill a universal hopper with ore and bars that can be accessed from any anvil, removing the need to go to and from the bank with a sack full of ore.

Looking at some of Jagex’s available design documents, the company is taking into account all of the potential issues that this rework will create, including possible threats toward the value of existing, non-craftable equipment.

I’m looking forward to how this new system will shake up a system that has more or less stayed the same for the last seventeen years.

Chaturday: The Jack Thompson Reboot


This Chaturday I want to talk about Jack Thompson, because as we all know Hollywood and that means endless reboots and sequels of franchises, the kind we wish would have gone away after the last sequel flubbed in theaters.

The Jack Thompson reboot comes nearly ten years after the film franchise ended what was an otherwise spectacular and gripping series finale. Thompson, perennial anti-gaming lawyer of the series, played an opportunistic attorney and from 1997 to 2007 made himself into the anti-hero of sorts, chasing digital ambulances and wasting no time in taking advantage of murders to forward his zealous campaign against the evils of violent games. We got to see Thompson’s trademark “bad cop, incompetent cop” routine as he took all roads necessary to get results, from harassing defendants to intimidating witnesses, quoting non-existent studies and generally making false statements. We enjoyed Thompson’s antics because, much like Wacky Racer’s Dick Dastardly, at the end of the day he was destined for failure. The modern day Al Bundy.

And in 2007 we learned that the Jack Thompson series would come to a close with a gripping series finale in which Thompson was brought before the Florida Bar and disbarred for his various activities over the series, from making false statements to disparaging lawyers, and even that short mid-season spinoff where Thompson was practicing law outside of Florida. We were left with Thompson sitting on his motorcycle, driving off into the sunset with one parting message. “I’ll be back.”

Granted I could be mistaking the Jack Thompson show with something that happened in real life.

The season premiere has been covered by Rolling Stone, Jack Thompson has officially returned to prime-time television and this season is starting off with Thompson returning to offer his assistance in a school shooting in Marshall County, Kentucky in which a fifteen year old shot and killed two students, injuring 21 others. The shooter, it’s discovered, may have been a violence-addled video game addict and only one man is up for the job.

Thompson (the character, not the actor) is still trying to get back on his feet after we saw him ride off ten years ago. Without his license and with his credibility still in shambles, Thompson took the classic TV approach and offered his work pro-bono, mailing just about anyone involved with an authority and functioning mail box. And who can forget that heart-wrenching climax when he turned to the camera and said:

“What happens in the case of heavy users of video games is that when they have the virtual reality taken from them, they will set out to make it real reality,” Thompson told the newspaper. “They do this without being fully appreciative of what they are about to do.”

An AV Club review of the episode notes this statement as forced scripting, noting that an educated adult, even one with Thompson’s established history of false statements, would posit that the murder was the result of the shooter getting his video games taken away. Perhaps a decade of absence has made us forget the absurdity of the original source material.

With The Walking Dead not returning to AMC until the end of this month and Brooklyn Nine-Nine likely on hiatus until April, it looks like Primetime television may have put up just the show it needs to keep viewers attention until something more interesting comes on.