Nontroversial: Blizzard and the Disappearing Half Million


Now I’m mad at Blizzard just as much as the next guy, which is why this article is going to hurt me more than it does the people who I am about to point out.

Today is October 31, 2019 of the year of Arnold, and that can only mean one thing; it’s time for the internet to do what the internet does best and that’s to deliberately misconstrue a statement in order to justify being outraged at something that the collective net already does not like and has no interest in viewing criticism of with any sort of rationality or objectivity.

Blizzard! They’ve done some crappy stuff lately. Today marks the start of Blizzcon with Overwatch World Cup preliminaries today and the festival really kicking off tomorrow and running through Sunday. One of the highlights of the event are two World of Warcraft tournaments called the MDI and AWC, the Mything Dungeon International and Arena World Championship respectively. Today’s nontroversy surrounds outrage about the wording of the prize pool, specifically that people are coming out and claiming that Blizzard used deceptive tactics to withdraw $500 grand in promised prize money.

In the run up to Blizzcon, Blizzard sold items for World of Warcraft with the following language:

“For a limited time, every purchase of the Transmorpher Beacon or Lion’s Pride and Horde’s Might Fireworks, 25% of the proceeds will contribute toward the year’s finals LAN event prize pool for the Arena World Championship (AWC) and the Mythic Dungeon International (MDI) with a guaranteed minimum prize pool of $500,000 USD ($250,000 USD for each event.) Your support will help take the WoW esports prize pool to the next level.”

The wording is pretty clear; 25% will go toward the prize pool with Blizzard guaranteeing a minimum prize pool of $500k if the collective sales don’t meet that amount. But this is the internet, where outrage is king. Cue Cloud9’s Adam Chan claiming that Blizzard pulled their “base contribution” of $500k.

“Blizzard did not contribute a single cent to the AWC & MDI prize pools this year. They pulled their own ‘base’ contribution of 500k when they realised how well the crowd funding did ($2.64m USD).”

Youtuber and outrage merchant Bellular News, speaking on behalf of the WoW community, claimed that audience expectations looking at practices of companies not-Blizzard would interpret the wording as Blizzard contributing a base $500k and then the amount from the toy sales being added on top of that. He refers to the wording as “ambiguous,” which it isn’t, and he says that it is technically the case, but morally isn’t, which doesn’t make any sense.

He goes on to state that the practice is not industry standard, which it may not be. That doesn’t change the fact that the wording is very clear; The minimum prize pool will be $500k, it does not even imply that Blizzard is putting forward a base of $500k. But when you’re an outrage merchant, you gotta ramp up that hyperbole. He goes on to make numerous nonsense statements like “it goes against the spirit of such a system” which doesn’t mean anything, and how flabbergasted he is and how disrespectful the whole ordeal is to the community! Rabble rabble rabble!

I’ll be frank: There’s no fancy wording at play here, if anything Blizzard is speaking at probably a fourth grade level. Even MMO Fallout’s muse Massively has joined in to take Blizzard to task over “false pretenses.”

Right; here’s two things. Blizzard didn’t withdraw anything, let alone in a stealthy way, and there were no false pretenses. Nothing was ever stated or implied that Blizzard would put forward $500k and the money from those toy sales would be icing on the cake. It simply didn’t happen. It’s also being trumped up by players who have a financial incentive to gin up a faux outrage campaign to shame Blizzard into increasing the prize pool as well as Youtubers whose channels traffic in outrage.

It’s very plain language.

Mystic Character Class Available In Black Desert (Xbox)


Black Desert today released a new update introducing the Mystic class to the Xbox One. The Mystic utilizes the gauntlets and vambrace and prefers close combat.

More information can be found at the official website.

RuneScape In Your Pants: Mobile Early Access Is Live


RuneScape mobile has entered early access on Android phones, allowing gamers their dream of finally carrying the MMO around in their pants. Users who take advantage of the early access will be gifted a mobile founder’s pack which contains a steel panther combat pet, a unique rest animation, and radiant dawn armor. Product director Jason Millena stated;

“Given RuneScape’s 18-year long heritage, in addition to being recognised by Guinness World Records for ‘The Most Prolifically Updated MMORPG Videogame’, to have the whole of RuneScape running on mobile is a massive achievement. We couldn’t be more excited to launch in Early Access and welcome those who know RuneScape the best – our members.”

You can get mobile early access here.

Valve Changes CS: Go Keys To Combat International Fraud


Counter Strike: Global Offensive is making some changes to its keys this week and you can thank international fraudsters for that. Starting today, Counter Strike container keys will no longer be traded or sold on the market. Players are able to earn cases that contain weapon skins while playing Counter Strike but must buy keys in order to open them and see what loot is inside.

According to a statement put out by Valve, the keys recently became the preferred method of cleaning money by international fraud networks to the point where almost all key purchases are believed to be fraud-sourced.

“Why make this change? In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers. However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced. As a result we have decided that newly purchased keys will not be tradeable or marketable.”

This update does not affect keys that were already on the market.

(Source: Counter Strike)

Bad Press: Kotaku’s Owner Demands Removal of Article Criticizing Obnoxious Ads


How do you guarantee that something will gain traction on the internet? Try to silence it.

Kotaku today penned an editorial from the staff explaining to readers that ads are not at the discretion of the editorial team. More specifically, the editorial team has no input over the obnoxious automatically playing video ads with sound that are popping up on the website. The article dutifully pointed users to where they could complain to Kotaku’s parent company, G/O Media.

Had the story ended there, there wouldn’t be anything worth covering. G/O Media has since apparently ordered the article taken down, as the article is now gone and Jason Schreier posted on Twitter; “This article is no longer up. The staff of Kotaku did not remove it.”

In G/O Media’s attempt to silence the article, they have only ensured that a lot more people will be talking about it.

IPE Update: Epic Games v. ABC Moving Forward


Epic Games is moving forward with its lawsuit against Acceleration Bay (ABC) following an order denying the defendant’s motion to dismiss.

Taking the initiative upon itself, Epic Games filed suit several months ago against Acceleration Bay, seeking a declaratory judgment that their game Fortnite did not infringe on patents owned by the defendant. The lawsuit was predicated on contacts between the two parties where ABC appeared to be offering a “mutual resolution” to avoid potential litigation, as it believed that Epic Games had infringed on a patent owned related to network technology. Epic got snarky with its response, noting that ABC appears to exist solely to litigate patents it buys in bulk from third parties.

Last month Acceleration Bay filed a motion to dismiss on grounds of lack of subject matter jurisdiction (wrong court) and lack of controversy (there must be reasonable anticipation of a lawsuit in order to file for a declaratory judgment). Following oral arguments on October 22, the court denied the motion. Acceleration Bay must file an answer to the lawsuit no later than November 5.

As always, MMO Fallout has uploaded the relevant dockets to our Google Drive. You can view the decision at this link. The file included a motion to seal certain exhibits so you may see some of our documents get replaced/removed/redacted in the future depending on circumstances.

ArcheAge Disables ArchePass After It Collapses Economy


New version, same old tricks. Gamigo has announced that the ArchePass, ArcheAge Unchained’s version of the battle pass, has been disabled following massive backlash from the community regarding the pass’s impact on the in-game economy. Player frustration grew to a boiling point over claims that the pass introduced an overwhelming amount of gold to the economy with nothing in place to remove the gold.

The announcement was made on Gamigo’s Discord server.

“The ArchePass has been temporarily disabled on all North American and European ArcheAge: Unchained servers. All existing progress has been saved and the Diligence Coin store is still accessible. We are evaluating the range of issues that have been presented from gold reward values, to quests distributed repeatedly, the level of effort required to progress, and overall enjoyability of participating in the related progression.”

There has been no comment on when the pass may come back, however all player progress has been saved.

Source: Discord

Review: The Outer Worlds


(Editor’s Note: I received a review copy of The Outer Worlds on Playstation 4. Given I have an Xbox Game Pass subscription and would have had access less than 24 hours later anyway, this has not changed my opinion on the game)

Why are you reading my review of The Outer Worlds? You can literally get access to this game right now on PC/Xbox One for $1 as part of the Xbox Game Pass trial subscription. Get the game, download it, play it, maybe read my review while it downloads? Buy an ewin racing chair using the MMO Fallout discount code (that’s promotional humor, please don’t kill me).

Those of you who read MMO Fallout may be aware that my passion for video game stories has, shall we say, waned a bit in recent years. I’m currently loving The Division 2 even though its plot is rather thin, but I play a lot of massively multiplayer games and that means that the story is pretty threadbare. It also doesn’t help that a lot of AAA games have gone toward the open world sandbox where you’re basically spending dozens of hours taking out bad guys you didn’t know before the mission and don’t care about after. Not all games, obviously, but enough that I have found it difficult to get engaged in stuff.

I have really been missing a good Obsidian-built world.

If you haven’t left this page and started downloading The Outer Worlds, let me just sum it up in one line: The Outer Worlds manifested itself when you were taking a bath and said “gee, I wish they would make a modern Fallout: New Vegas that wasn’t jank as hell.” I’d also like to sum up the humor of the game as taking the absurdity of Borderlands and stripping the memes away. Yea, it’s like that.

The Outer Worlds takes place in a futuristic science fiction world where the universe has been colonized and mega corporations run everything because William Mckinley was never assassinated and the United States did not legislate antitrust laws at that time. The game beats you over the head and neck with this narrative from the beginning where you create your character in a way that looks like you’re literally buying them from a store. You are part of a colony that was cryogenically frozen and for purely bureaucratic reasons your ship was never thawed out, left to become a myth as your people float around in the deepest recesses of space. You are rescued by an anti-corporate activist of sorts and land on a planet to start your journey pissing off the big corporation.

I made the comparison to Borderlands because The Outer Worlds is clearly an absurd story about intergalactic corporations and it knows how silly that concept is. The first person you come upon is a slogan-spouting corporate shill who gets angry if you try to heal him because he’s not allowed to use a competitor’s product. Your first experience with one of the megacorps is my personal favorite; Spacer’s Choice whose slogan is “it’s not the best choice, it’s Spacer’s Choice.” Spacer’s Choice sells products that are cheaply produced, low quality and prone to breaking, but very cheap to repair. There’s some dark humor, like how employee suicide is considered a crime of destroying company property.

One aspect of Obisdian storytelling that I love in The Outer Worlds is that choices are not specifically good or evil. Without spoiling any details, I had to think long and hard about the first major choice in the game. Your starting zone is a town based around a Saltuna factory (try the white chocolate saltuna!). You have numerous side quests that you’ll take on while helping out in the main story, but the gist of the conflict you find yourself in is that you need a power regulator to get off of the planet. The town has one and so do the deserters who left because they were getting screwed by Halcyon’s (the big umbrella megacorp) policies. The power generator cannot properly fuel both groups, so you need to act as arbitrator and figure out the best outcome.

Gameplay in The Outer Worlds is handled as a first person shooter. You can explore the multitude of indoor and outdoor areas, utilizing your various skills to hack computers, loot all the goods, and chat up the locals. As you would expect from an RPG made by Obsidian, there are many situations that you can either fight your way out of or, if your character has high enough speech skills, talk your way out of. Want to be a rootin-tootin bandit shootin desperado? You can do that. Want to go in with your sword and beat your enemies to a pulp? You can do that too. Want to be a smooth talking friendly type or intimidate your opposition into giving you what you want? Check and double check.

One aspect of The Outer Worlds that I can appreciate in theory but didn’t find much attachment to are flaws. Flaws are sort of a unique new feature that pop up once you have done a certain thing enough times. For example, getting hit with enough plasma damage will offer a “plasma weakness” flaw that has the effect of increasing plasma damage by 25% while also offering you one perk point. It’s an interesting idea, but your payout is always one perk point and frankly those just aren’t valuable enough to outweigh the detriments you receive. The game also doesn’t do a great job of explaining some of the more nuanced flaws, like a fear of heights decreasing your perception score while high up.

Loot in The Outer Worlds drops like someone’s making a profit off of it. It isn’t as excessive as it is in Fallout where you’ll find every piece of armor on a person’s body, but you do get plenty of resources and equipment from each person that you kill. Equipment can be tinkered with, modified, and broken down into its components to use on other items.

New Vegas players will love the breadth of freedom that you get for roleplaying in The Outer Worlds. There are dialogue choices out the wazzoo, and you’ll see indications for perception, science, medicine, persuasion, intimidation, and all sorts of options to talk your way through a situation. Want to be a corporate foot licker and do everything for the greater good of intergalactic capitalism? You go for it. Want to stick it to the man and eat the rich? You can do that too. The game gives you the opportunity (although I didn’t take it) to just rat out the guy who saved your life, since he’s a wanted criminal on the run from the greedy Board that controls the universe. You can do that, the game lets you, and apparently it takes the plot in quite a different direction.

Specializing in various skills unlocks a ton of information about the world. The barber? He just kinda prepares the dead for burial. The Saltuna factory whose workers are dealing with the plague? It’s not quite a plague and their remedy isn’t exactly medicine. In many games that I play, I tend to skip through a lot of the side characters commentary because it’s usually very unimportant to the overall plot. Whenever I get into a new area in The Outer Worlds, I am like a Presidential candidate going around and making sure I talk to everyone and see all of their dialogue choices.

Your character has access to a few tricks to survive, including time dilation which is a natural sequel to Fallout’s VATS. Activate time dilation and you’ll have a small period where time slows to a near crawl. Level up and that time increases. The shooting is not great; it is a marked improvement over the jankness of New Vegas but The Outer Worlds won’t be winning any awards for its combat system. Still, it’s more than serviceable despite it being occasionally difficult to keep track of your health in the middle of a fight.

Speaking of which, you may have noticed from the screenshots that The Outer Worlds has some very deep contrasting colors. For the most part they are beautiful. There are some points including one I have shown above where these colors make the game quite painful to look at. Literally. My eyes hurt after some segments where the screen blows out with bright neon colors.

The Outer Worlds is a beautiful game. I played it on a Playstation 4 Pro system and it worked fantastically. I plan on having a piece up once I find some time to start playing on PC.

Ubisoft’s Stock Drops Following Ghost Recon Disappointment


This week Ubisoft announced that it would be dramatically scaling back income expectations following the “very disappointing” reception and sales of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. The latest game in the Tom Clancy franchise left both gamers and critics angry over the abundance of game-breaking bugs as well as what was perceived to be an egregious reliance on over-monetization of various aspects of the game.

In the time since that announcement, Ubisoft’s stock prices have plummeted both in the United States as well as in France. Ubisoft’s NASDAQ listing dropped from $12.60 on Monday to a low of $10.06 before rebounding slightly to $10.35. Bloomberg meanwhile reports that stocks in France fell as much as 29% which brings the year decline to 38%.

In addition to the disappointing reception of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, Ubisoft announced that all of its major releases for the rest of the fiscal year have been delayed until next fiscal year. Investors were not entirely satisfied by the announcement.

Source: Bloomberg

In Plain English: The Grinch Who Spoiled Fortnite


Dear internet,

That video game nondisclosure agreement that your buddies tell you doesn’t matter because “it’s video games” and thus not enforceable in court? It’s probably enforceable in court. In fact it’s very likely enforceable.

To the shock of the world and heaven in the sky, Epic Games has filed a lawsuit this week against a user of Fortnite. The lawsuit targets Ronald Sykes (aka “@Snipa_King2k,” aka “@FNGzus,” aka “@invisiblellama9”) and alleges that Sykes spoiled the surprise of Fortnite Chapter 2 in breach of a nondisclosure agreement.

“Epic is suing Sykes because he broke his contractual obligation to keep Epic’s secrets about the upcoming season of Fortnite®, Epic’s popular video game. Information is currency. Sykes cashed in on what he learned as a User Experience tester for Epic. He did so at the expense of Epic and those in the Fortnite community who were anxiously awaiting the new season of Fortnite only to have some of Epic’s planned surprises spoiled by Sykes’ leaks.”

Sykes was a member of the User Testing Experience, which is fancy talk for confidential beta tester. He along with a number of others were given the opportunity to test Fortnite’s big new update, presumably so it would be as fine tuned as possible before Epic released it to the masses. Sykes allegedly disclosed those secrets before they were meant to be public.

Fortnite Chapter 2’s reveal for those who weren’t glued to their computer for the weekend was massive. The servers went offline for two days as the game was literally engulfed in a black hole, resulting in all sorts of streaming records being broken as people watched a black hole in anticipation of what would come next. The event had been preceded by easter eggs being dropped into the game throughout the past seasons of the game, and ultimately it was a major product of Epic’s work.

Epic is seeking civil relief under the Defense Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA) as well as the North Carolina Trade Secrets Protection Act (NCTSPA). The DTSA allows for damages for actual loss, any unjust enrichment caused by the leak of trade secrets, and in cases of willful and malicious disclosure, exemplary damages may be awarded of up to two times the actual loss/unjust enrichment.

The NCTSPA is similar in that the language allows for compensation for economic loss or unjust enrichment, as well as punitive damages in cases of willful violation. The lawsuit alleges that Sykes created several Twitter accounts to leak the new map introduced with Fortnite Chapter 2 as well as a number of new features coming to the game.

Epic seeks injunctive relief as well as attorneys’ costs and fees, and economic damages as well as punitive damages as allowed under law. As always, MMO Fallout has provided the relevant documents at our Google Drive for those who wish to read them.

Source: Google Drive