Crowdfunding Fraudster Update: The Year Of The Northerner


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

It’s that time again. Two years have passed since I posted the first Crowdfunding Fraudsters dedicated to Jeremy Soule and The Northerners and the fact that we are coming back for round three should tell you everything you need to know about how much progress has gotten done in the last two years. December 2019 now marks over six years of delays since The Northerner was originally supposed to be launched, that being September 2013, and keeping on brand with Soule’s incompetence as a businessman, the latest launch date promise has come and gone without as much as a peep from the man himself. In fact, it’s gone without a peep from the Kickstarter community.

I can’t imagine there is anyone left with faith in Soule’s ability to deliver a product.

1. Jeremy Soule Is A Talented Fraudster

I said it before and I will say it again, Jeremy Soule isn’t some two-bit hack fraud who managed to dupe people into giving him money for an album he wasn’t capable of publishing. No siree, he’s a two-bit hack fraud of a businessman who managed to dupe people into giving him money for an album he was completely capable of publishing yet has not. Just ask about his DirectSong business. One that more than six years after the intended release date has still not been released! Remember back in the good old days when Jeremy Soule promised that the only risk that might delay the project was scheduling during the summer months?

“I will be working with the same team that has provided reliable and excellent support throughout my career. Recordings aren’t easy to make, but if planning is done within a reasonable time frame, the process can go smoothly. As we have delved into the initial planning stages of the recording session, scheduling for the summer months affords us enough planning time for a recording of this nature.” -Jeremy

Summer scheduling. Oh and we later learned that the instruments Jeremy Soule had planned to use in creating The Northerner Symphony hadn’t been invented yet and wouldn’t be for some years after, but why would you want to put that as a risk on the Kickstarter page? Telling people you are technologically incapable of delivering the thing you are asking for funding for might put them off of giving you a large sum of cash money with virtually no legal strings attached.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note that Soule had released a new single this month; Friðr. It’s from the album The Moon & The Night Sky. I’m not sure if the person who uploaded it to Youtube has permission to do so, but you should listen to it now just in case since Jeremy Soule thinks that music piracy is just as bad as the holocaust.

More on that later. Actually, more on that now.

2. This Article Profited Jeremy Soule By $10

Jeremy Soule made $10 from me writing this article, and much like backing The Northerner it was mostly a complete waste of money. I didn’t back The Northerner.

Last time I wrote about Jeremy Soule I noted that he had launched a Patreon, which December 2018 me was smart enough to know wouldn’t provide anything useful within the “weekly Q&A” sessions that Soule publishes once every whenever-he-feels-like-it. This time around I wasn’t that smart, and I ended up giving $10 to Soule’s Patreon so I could get access to all of his posts in the hopes of finding something relevant. I didn’t. Only a lot of curated Q&A’s asking Jeremy why his farts don’t stink.

Back in January, Jeremy posted his grand announcement that he would be releasing two new albums in 2019: On the Spring Equinox we would see The Northerner: The Moon and the Night Sky.” On the winter solstice we would finally get our hands on The Northerner. Pretty freaking grand, huh? Two albums in one year! Well I see your two albums in one year and raise you…no albums in one year.

Yea, The Moon & The Night Sky was more like The Pie In The Sky, and didn’t release. Who could have seen that coming, am I right? Jeremy Soule posted on his Facebook page:

“I’m currently putting the finishing touches on this album. It’s taken a bit longer than expected, but I want it to be right, and it’s close. While I had hoped to have had it to you sooner, I’m proud to say that this music is amongst my best work. This is the official album cover and I’m also excited to say that I have brought the Old Norse language to life in an operatic setting.”

And as we all know, when Jeremy Soule says he’s just about done with a project, he’s just about done with a project. Except for every time. To the best of my research (Soule’s Patreon, Kickstarter updates, social media), I was only able to find the single posted above as the only release related to Soule’s new side-album, in addition to Kickstarter posts from 4-5 months ago lamenting that this new album will also never be released. Screw the Spring Equinox, Friðr got released on December 5.

Enjoy the $10 Soule, I hope it goes to a good cause like a big paper calendar. Because you’re terrible at release dates.

3. The Max Steiner Agency Pulls Out

In preparation for writing this article, I sent an email to the Max Steiner Agency under the guise of someone thinking Soule would be releasing his album on the twenty first as announced, and inquiring about any planned press releases. The response I got was astounding: Max Steiner is not managing The Northerner and has no information about the status of the album. They are still working with Soule generally, just not on this album.

Crazy huh? Because I’ll be honest with my readers. I don’t have the greatest memory of stuff I wrote two years ago, but I distinctly remembered The Max Steiner Agency being a big part of the original Crowdfunding Fraudsters piece. So I looked back and found that yes indeed, they were a big part. Specifically Gloria Soto who made a completely unprofessional jerk of herself in an email to Kotaku.

“It still rings true. All the Backer did was re-post what Jeremy has said in the past. Which is still true. What part do you want to understand? Are you a Composer that has ever tried to write a symphony?”

The context of this piece should be noted for clarity. Soto here is attacking a Kotaku writer after her agency incompetently mistook a fan-written apology for an official statement by Jeremy Soule and posted it as an official update to the Kickstarter campaign. Like any professional adult, Soto attacks the question and condescends to the author’s intelligence, on the grounds that Kotaku writer never wrote a symphony, so shut your stupid fudging mouth on our PR snafu. Oh and in case you’re wondering, nobody has clarified the post’s authenticity to this date directly to backers. Soto at the time went on to separate the “true fans” from the “trolls” asking for refunds, noting that she was working with Kickstarter to get them removed as they had already been refunded.

Narrator: They were not removed, and many of them allege they were not refunded.

“What I do know – is that we are receiving a lot of support from the true fans. Currently- The ones making noise are backers that I have refunded – have become trolls – which I am currently working with Kickstarter to get them removed from posting on our page.”

The Northerner has so many true fans that as of this writing (noon on December 22), not a single person has bothered to comment on The Northerner not meeting its latest deadline. Or at all in the past two weeks. Boy for a company that isn’t managing The Northerner, the Max Steiner Agency put its name on the Kickstarter campaign, was handling refund requests for angry backers, and was actively attempting to work with Kickstarter to shut down dissent over the minor issue of the campaign being years late.

Now I’m not saying that Max Steiner is lying to me. After all two years have passed since these comments, it is completely reasonable (and likely) that the agency told Jeremy Soule it would no longer be managing his project. I can’t imagine having their name attached to The Northerner has been anything but negative, cue Gloria Soto making the company look even worse. It would also explain why the sparse updates to the Kickstarter campaign began being signed by “The Northerner Team” as of January this year, whereas before they were being signed by Jeremy Soule himself.

4. It’s Gone, It’s All Gone

The more astute MMO Fallout viewers might notice that this article is lacking in the citation department. That is 100% 2017 Connor’s fault, as he did not archive anything.

Here’s the problem: A lot of our statements from Jeremy Soule came from his Facebook page. Back in August, Jeremy Soule was accused of sexual misconduct. That’s not the focal point of this piece. Soule was not arrested, nor have charges been filed, but all of Jeremy’s social media accounts have been nuked from orbit in the interim. These quotes we got back in the first Fraudsters article are gone, you can go back and check the links to see that they are mostly all dead. This is my fault. We generally archive comments in case of exactly this type of scenario. It wasn’t done.

I’d fire myself, but I’m good friends with the boss and I’d just be back in the office tomorrow like nothing happened.

I decided to do some digging to check out the other missing links in this whole racket, and unsurprisingly nothing else is functioning. The Northerner Facebook Fan Page URL has been hijacked and currently redirects to a blog by someone named Carol Causey who hasn’t updated her Weebly page since 2016 and appears to be a spam page for another service that is equally no longer operational. The Jeremy Soule Facebook Fan page link redirects to a parked domain that was apparently once used to spam human growth hormone products. Fun times.

I looked up Jeremy Soule’s symphony website: http://northernersymphony.com/, since Soule’s Kickstarter has people sending emails to this domain to change their address in case they moved in the last six years. I sent an email myself to this address and have not received a response which judging by the Kickstarter comments is not out of the ordinary. The domain itself however is nonfunctional and a quick look at the Wayback Machine shows that it never was, displaying a “Server Engine Upgrade In Progress…” since May 2017.

And since we’re checking out URLs, it’s probably germaine to point out that Jeremy Soule’s DirectSong service no longer appears to be operational. You can read up on the original Crowdfunding Fraudsters about the DirectSong fraud racket.

5. In Conclusion…Again

One positive side of this piece is that with $10 I gained access to uncompressed copies of Jeremy Soule’s music, and through the magic of internet I now have those copies sitting on my computer forever. What isn’t forever is my Patreon membership which was promptly cancelled. Enjoy the $10, Jeremy. I hope it goes toward something productive like a sourdough bread starter since we all know it’s not going toward printing Kickstarter rewards.

Otherwise I get the idea that I’m the only one paying attention or even caring about The Northerner at this point, and I didn’t even back the thing. As a fan of Jeremy Soule’s work, I came into writing this Crowdfunding Fraudsters article with the slim hope that December 21 would come around and my skepticism would be proven to be totally unfounded, but I can’t say I’m surprised.

If there are any Northerner fans in the audience who are still holding out hope for a release, I’d like to hear from you. Mostly just to know you exist.

One Year Later, Edengrad Remains Offline


Edengrad

MMO Fallout has been keeping an eye on everyone’s favorite MMO Edengrad for the past year, and at the conclusion of 2019 I can definitively say that the game is still dead.

It feels like forever ago that the Edengrad servers went offline, but the calendar suggests that the actual date might be closer to 2018. Probably around the time that its developer Huckleberry Games went bankrupt. News from the bankruptcy suggested that Huckleberry was receiving attention from investors as well as the government to get them more funding and put the train back on the tracks.

And back on the tracks they were put. Back in November 2018 a dev account just called “office” posted an ominous ‘we’re back soon’ message. How soon is too soon? Thirteen months, since the company hasn’t posted anything to the Edengrad community since then. Huckleberry Games is still alive and kicking, and more importantly pulling money from investors. The company just filed actions a couple of days ago to issue new shares and bring in more revenue. Bully!

The only thing the company doesn’t seem to want to talk about are its games. Will Edengrad come back? If so, when? What else is Huckleberry working on? Does the company exist to do something other than vacuum in investor money? Who knows.

What I do know is that the Edengrad website remains offline, although you can’t buy the domain. I tried. For everyone else, we’ll just have to wait and see if 2020 brings any news.

Diaries From Destiny 2: Milky Vex Nipple Christmas Cookies


The MMO Fallout lawyers have informed me that I cannot legally say that the Vex in Destiny 2 have nipples. But I’ve seen them. Up close.

I wanted to talk about Destiny 2 because I’ve been playing this game quite a bit since the new season launched. Destiny 2 is in the midst of what you might refer to as a “Christmas Event,” notably because the event is taking place around Christmas and includes such things as sleighs and other Christmas-themed delights. In addition to the Christmas event, Destiny 2 is also knee deep in Season 9 and the accompanying storyline.

For today, let’s go through the Christmas event since it is what I based the title of this article around. The Dawning 2019 is the latest edition of the winter-themed event and has you once again going around collecting ingredients to bake up cookies in your Destiny-themed Easy Bake Oven®. You get ingredients based on what creature you killed and how you killed them, like “delicious explosive” is from explosive weapons and chitin powder comes from the Hive mobs. You also get rather disgusting ingredients, like cabal oil. I’m not sure what I find more off-putting, the fact that the Vex (a race of time-traveling robots) drop milk or that the Taken drop their milk pre-churned into butter. Or maybe it’s the idea of taking these ingredients and baking delicious cookies out of them.

Thankfully my automated Vex nipple-plucker will take care of the need to farm that resource. Patent pending. You can milk anything with nipples. The good news is that the Holiday Oven 2.0 app has evidently retained all recipes that you baked last year, and includes something new to get those appetites whetted. Vex milk.

All of this is a fancy way of getting you out into the world and completing activities, and you’ll need to complete those activities because every recipe is founded in one common ingredient: Essence of Dawning. The only way to get that ingredient is to complete events. Lots and lots of public events, as each event grants 5 essence and you’ll need 15 per cookie. 10 per cookie if you bake every recipe and upgrade your oven, and I would recommend putting a priority on completing your recipe list. You don’t need to complete last year’s recipes again if you already did that.

The holiday event is fine, by which I mean it is absolute bull shee-ite once you are hundreds of kills deep and still can’t convince the game to drop one of those Personal Touch ingredients that is rarely dropped via melee kills. In my humble and expert opinion, the Dawning event is best completed as a side-thing that you make progress toward while doing the main grind which is Sundials and leveling up your obelisks for the current season.

Destiny 2: Saint-14 Now Present In Tower


Finally time to deliver those cookies.

Those of you playing through the Destiny 2 Winter event may have found yourself caught up on a bit of a hitch: The Lavender Ribbon Cookies that you bake up have instructions to deliver to Saint-14 in the tower hanger. The problem? When you get to the tower hanger, Saint-14 is nowhere to be found!

Saint-14 is the latest character reintroduced to Destiny 2 thanks to the Season of Dawn event. This season’s activities are centered around finding and saving Saint-14 after he went missing and was presumed dead in the Infinite Forest. Thankfully Guardians have managed to canonically save Saint-14 and at the end of his raid players are told to meet up with him back at the Tower. Until today he has not arrived.

Thankfully you can now deliver your cookies to Saint-14 and take part in a number of quests in return for goodies. Saint-14 can be found in the hanger behind Amanda Holliday. All players should see a notification upon login that Saint-14 is now present in the Tower.

Not Massive: Postal Goes Free On Steam, Gets Mass Botted For Trading Cards


(Update 12/21: That didn’t take long. It looks like Valve has killed trading card drops for Postal as of this morning)

Postal is free on Steam, and if you keep track of the top played Steam games you might be wondering how this little shooter from 1997 managed to amass more than four hundred thousand concurrent players on Steam. I mean, it’s good. It’s not that good.

Well the answer is fraud, but not on the part of developer Running With Scissors or Valve. Postal has trading cards; five normal and five foil, which makes the game an easy target for bots seeking to farm the cards and basically launder money on the black market. The cards were initially added back in 2014.

The good news for players is that if you’re looking to max out that Postal badge, doing so will assuredly be as cheap as it’s going to get. You’ll just have to swallow the possibility of your thirty cents going toward a criminal Russian mafia operation. The bad side is that Valve has a history of outright disabling card trading for free games that become the target of botting, so if you’re going to buy those badges do so now before the hammer of justice swings down. There are five badge levels until you max out, plus one foil badge level.

Check it out.

Source: Postal, Steam Charts

An MMO On Steam: Spelling Quest Online


Spelling Quest Online is certainly a game and is absolutely on Steam.

I’ll come right out and admit that I downloaded Spelling Quest Online because it is free to play and in early access, and also because it is tagged in the MMO category. Spelling Quest Online is multiplayer free-form scrabble, which is a fancy way of saying that nobody takes turns as much as you just throw down tiles and hope for the best. You can connect to random boards and just go to town for the ten minutes until the game gets boring and you want to stop and play something fun.

The boards have words that people can easily spell, like anal and bruv. There is a dictionary check when you want to make a word, but I’m not sure what dictionary the game cross-references that thinks bruv is a word because while the Cambridge dictionary recognizes it, the Oxford dictionary does not. There are daily quests that offer you gold which can be used to replace letters. I assume that most of the people playing this game are cheating. I cheated and used a Scrabble helper website because my gaming skills are only second in their inadequacy to my knowledge of words.

I will readily admit that I quit after ten minutes when completing words left me with a hand consisting almost entirely of Y’s, V’s, and X’s and literally no way to continue playing (I didn’t have any gold) on that map. I probably could have found a spot to put one or two of the Y’s but I didn’t feel like putting more effort than this game is worth. Which is nothing.

As for the developer Craig Schwartz, I will continue to love your character in the film Being John Malkovich, even if they didn’t give you anything to do in the sequel; Being John Malkovich 2: District Dafoe.

Destiny 2 Updates Credits To Include Everyone Who Worked On Game


And now something heartwarming.

Generally when stories about credits come up, it’s because someone got snubbed and didn’t receive recognition for their work. Games, movies, the press, it happens a lot more than it reasonably should. This week however, we have a story coming out of Bungie regarding Destiny 2 that should warm the hearts of our readers.

Bungie’s Drew Tucker took to Twitter to note that Destiny 2 has received an update which credits everyone who has worked on the game since launch.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

The sentiments were echoed by other Bungie staff including Steve Dolan who apologized that the credits had taken so long and expressed his happiness that the people involved could finally see their names.

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Pearl Abyss Reveals More On Plan 8, Exosuit Shooter


Plan 8 is one of several games recently revealed by Pearl Abyss. It is an exosuit MMO shooter built on a new proprietary engine being developed for PC and console Minh Le, co-creator of Counter-Strike. A key feature surrounds finding and equipping different gears to the suit which Pearl Abyss promises to create a unique shooter with MMO gameplay elements.

A number of new screenshots have been released for Plan 8, which we have shared below. For more details, check out the official website.

Virtually Everyone Possesses Duped Cash In DC Universe Online


DC Universe Online has a problem; An exploit allowed players to inject a gross amount of money into the game’s economy. How gross? According to Daybreak, trillions. Enough that virtually everyone in the game is now in possession of the fake cash, regardless of whether or not you’re aware of its origins. The cash has made its way through the economy and into so many player’s hands that Daybreak shut down trading cash and use of the broker while they figured out what to do about it.

The answer? Fix the exploit, ban the exploiters, and enforce a one-time “progressive tax” to fix the economy. You rich folks aren’t going to like this.

We have settled on six tax brackets for this one-time event, totaled at the ACCOUNT level, which are as follows:

  • Cash below $500,000,000 is not taxed at all.
  • Cash between 500,000,001 and 10,000,000,000 is taxed at 5%
  • Cash between 10,000,000,001 and 15,000,000,000 is taxed at 10%.
  • Cash between 15,000,000,001 and 20,000,000,000 is taxed at 20%.
  • Cash between 20,000,000,001 and 25,000,000,000 is taxed at 25%.
  • Cash above 25,000,000,001 is taxed at 100%.

Daybreak has admitted that the goal is not to fix the economy in one swoop, but to get rid of most of the cash that was introduced with the exploit. Their “look on the bright side” explanation is certainly something.

“We also want to maintain some of the scale of wealth legitimately present in the game. You may have less cash after this tax, but for the most part you will still have more than the people you had more than before, and less than the people you had less than before.”

On the plus side, if you had your investments wrapped up in items instead of cash, you’re pretty much safe from the number squash.

Source: DCUO

Stadia: Borderlands 3 Launch Is A New Embarrassment For The Platform


Stadia’s holiday launch is an embarrassment of riches. Well it’s an embarrassment anyway. At least you’d be laughing if you’re not among the astroturf social media accounts who coincidentally just registered and only post to lie about Stadia and its competition.

Borderlands 3 is out on Stadia today, and nothing says embarrassing quite like your console-free game being woefully out of date. One positive of the Stadia experience is that you don’t have to download or update your games, and Gearbox has sweetened the deal even more by simply not updating the game. As posted on the official website, the Stadia edition of Borderlands 3 has launched with the most recent version of Borderlands 3 up to October 24. Gearbox hopes to achieve version parity around early 2020.

“We aim to achieve feature parity for all versions of Borderlands 3 early in 2020, but for the moment the version of the game that you play on Stadia has benefitted from the updates and fixes that were released through October 24. Noteworthy features coming soon to the Stadia version of Borderlands 3 include endgame content like the Takedown at the Maliwan Blacksite and Mayhem 4 difficulty, dedicated loot pools for bosses, and additional bank space.”

Borderlands 3’s first expansion content titled Moxxi’s Heist For the Handsome Jackpot launches on December 19, whereas Stadia players will need to wait until early 2020.