Bad Press: The Curious Case Of Anthem And Stream Bans


For today’s bad press, I’m going to single out a certain Youtuber who goes by The Quartering even though he isn’t the only offender here.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to Youtube drama news over the past couple of days, an incident occurred last week after a user began streaming alpha footage of Anthem, the upcoming game by Electronic Arts. Anthem is still under a nondisclosure agreement, meaning anyone playing it is not allowed to talk about it or show it to the general public. These NDAs are very common in the gaming industry both for official testers and members of the press. I am personally under at least one NDA at any given time, usually in regards to timed press releases.

In this specific case, a number of Twitch users clipped a stream in which the user is booted from Anthem only to find that not only has EA revoked his copy of Anthem, but that his entire library is just gone. More interesting, it didn’t seem that the user’s account was banned, but just that his library was emptied by EA.

Cue the outrage, dial up the EA hate squad, and tell my wife I won’t be coming home for dinner. An unknown user has posted video of an unverified story with unfounded accusations and generally no real evidence to back up the claim. When has anyone ever lied on the internet? Why wouldn’t it make sense for EA to just wipe an account with no warning or notification, instead of simply banning the player? Did anyone receive confirmation that the guy even owned any games on the account? Did anyone follow up with the streamer? Did anyone follow up with Electronic Arts? Did anyone do any critical thinking or investigation whatsoever?

But the pesky concept of facts and evidence didn’t stop Youtube channels like The Quartering and the internet’s dramasphere from jumping on the drama with an overblown and arguably reckless disregard for the truth, with the headline “EA STEALS Players Entire Collection Over Anthem Alpha Stream!” What games did the user lose? I’m sure Jeremy can’t tell you and hasn’t performed any actual research outside of reading an article he found online. He even reads in the video that it is possible that Anthem was the sole item in the user’s library but continues regardless with the baseless accusation that EA STOLE from him.

I’m singling out The Quartering mostly because of Jeremy’s consistent advertisement of an Indiegogo campaign for Exclusively Games, a service that he is launching in order to get the politics out of games and focus on the games journalism. The campaign claims to be tired of “the same BS Hot Takes from our existing options in terms of video game news,” and yet here’s Jeremy. Making BS Hot Takes, putting out conclusive headlines with no real evidence. Imagine if he had, say, checked the user’s stream and was able to find a clip where it showed prior to entering the game that there were no games in the user’s account?

None of this changes the fact that EA would be within their rights to ban the user’s account for violating the nondisclosure agreement, and that an account ban would be the least of the person’s worries depending on the terms of the contract. But hey, everyone hates EA right now. Why bother putting in the basic amount of research or verifying the facts when few people are going to come to their defense?

Is this the kind of integrity that $68 grand buys?

Daybreak Game Company Hit With More Layoffs


Daybreak Game Company has decided to round out 2018 by laying off more employees, marking the second round for 2018 and one of many over the past few years. In a statement to Gamasutra, the developer referred to the layoffs as “optimizing our structure” to ensure continued success in the years to come. While Daybreak has not confirmed exact numbers, former head honcho John Smedley posted on Twitter that upwards of 70 people are now without jobs. Smedley has since deleted his tweet.

“We are optimizing our structure to ensure we best position ourselves for continued success in the years to come. This effort has required us to make some changes within the organization and we are doing everything we can to support those impacted in this difficult time. As we look to improve efficiencies and realign resources, we remain focused on supporting our existing games and development of our future titles.”

Ex-Daybreak employees have seen the usual outpouring of support that follows layoffs of this size, with open job offers from other developers oddly enough including NantG Mobile, the company headed by Jace Hall who MMO Fallout readers will recall is currently partnered with Daybreak and actively developing Z1 Battle Royale on PC.

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Source: Gamasutra

Z1 Battle Royale: We Ban By Hardware ID, and Hardware ID Scramblers


Z1 Battle Royale has been on a warpath since being taken over by NantG Mobile, and Jace Hall wants everyone to know that the company is taking cheating very seriously. In a post on Twitter, Hall noted that over 800 accounts were banned on December 7 alone with plenty more to come.

In response to another user’s question about cheaters coming back, Anthony Castoro responded that the company implements hardware ID bans as well as bans on HWID scramblers.

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Source: Twitter

Korea Criminalizes Boosting For Profit


Korea. It’s a country where you can be jailed for cheating at video games, now one you can be arrested for selling account boosting services.

Today’s news comes from ESTNN, an e-sports website. The Korean government has passed a law set to go into effect in six months that will see professional account boosting, being paid to log into someone else’s account to increase their ranking, punishable with criminal charges. Individuals found guilty can be sentenced to up to two years in prison or a maximum fine of about $18,000 USD.

Source: ESTNN

Typhoon Studios Unveils Journey to the Savage Planet


Montreal-based developer Typhoon Studios today formally announced Journey to the Savage Planet, a first person adventure game set to launch on PC, PS4, and Xbox One in 2019.

As an employee of Kindred Aerospace, which proudly touts its rating as the “4th Best Interstellar Exploration Company”, players will be dropped onto an uncharted planet deep in a fictitious, far-away corner of the universe. Launched with high hopes but little equipment and no real plan, players are tasked with exploring, cataloguing alien flora and fauna and determining if the planet is fit for human habitation.

“This is a passion project for our team, many of whom came from larger companies including Ubisoft, Eidos and WB Games to embark on this indie game adventure with us,” said Reid Schneider, executive producer and co-founder, Typhoon Studios. “It was a dream come true to reveal our project at The Game Awards,” added Yassine Riahi, technical director and co-founder, Typhoon Studios. “We were thrilled to see the positive reaction from viewers and we’re eager to get Journey to the Savage Planet in your hands next year!”

Typhoon Studios is made up of industry veterans including Alex Hutchinson (Far Cry 4, Assassin’s Creed III), Yassine Riahi (Batman: Arkham series, Army of Two) and Reid Schneider (Army of Two, Batman: Arkham Series).

Maplestory 2 Receives Biggest Update Yet


Maplestory 2 has revealed the first phase of the Skybound Expansion, introducing a new class, new events, and special rewards.

The update promises to be the game’s biggest yet, bringing with it the new Soul Binder class. The Soul Binder is a hybrid magic damage dealer and healer. Players will continue their Epic Quests with new missions assigned by each faction leader and travel to the Sky Fortress, a new staging ground warship that flies high above the world. Additionally, Skybound sees the release of the Maple Arena, a 1-on-1, best of three matchup where players can show off their skills and obtain new PvP gear. New chaos raids are being added with hard adventure dungeons adjusted to help players gear up for them.

For the first month of the update, players over level 10 will receive a care package including 30 elixers, 30 master potions, and a level up booster ticket. Once players hit level 60, they can claim additional items including a level-up potion to instantly boost an alt to level 50.

For more information, check out the official website.

[NM] PSA: How To (Possibly) Fix Battlefield V’s Tides of War Progression


This week Battlefield V released the Tides of War, the first chapter in what will be a seasonal event similar to season passes in other titles but without the extra fee. Week 1 runs from December 5 to December 12 and rewards a medium machine gun for completion, the VGO. Since this is a Battlefield game, you may have noticed that this feature has launched in a rather buggy state. Many players are noting that various challenges are simply not functioning, specifically the final task of getting one kill with a stationary vehicle.

MMO Fallout has discovered a possible workaround that should fix this for many (your mileage may vary) of you. It looks like most of the progress-stopping bugs can be fixed by specifically playing on the map Arras. I was able to test other maps and couldn’t get any kills to register the task, but one kill with the stationary machine gun on Arras and the task was complete.

Again, your mileage may vary. In many cases it appears that the other tasks down the line are simply not registering until they miraculously start for no rhyme or reason.

Bethesda’s Support Website Leaks Personal Information


Fallout 76: It’s a game that was afforded maybe two hours of good press before Bethesda drove it straight into a brick wall.

Bethesda’s games are notoriously buggy, but evidently not even their support system can escape the company curse. Such is the story of Reddit user Jessiepie who found her account suddenly able to view the support tickets of other users including their email addresses, home addresses, receipts, credit card details, and every problem that they are currently having with Fallout 76 and more specifically receiving their replacement canvas bag.

For their part, Bethesda claims that the issue has been resolved. As one user on the forums put it,

“That’s a shocking departure from their usual meticulous attention to bug-free systems. “

Line of Defense To Split: Line of Defense and All Out War


Turns out Daybreak isn’t the only company that can split its games in half.

It’s been a while since we last heard from Derek Smart’s Line of Defense, the Planetside-competing open world shooter. According to the latest dev blog, 3000ad is wrapping up remaining features and continuing to port the game to Unreal 4 engine.

“The current focus is on improving the art assets, wrapping up remaining (the game is already content and feature complete, so there’s nothing to cut) WIP features, tweaking and debugging several items, and completing the game while continuing on with the UE4 port in parallel.”

As a result, Line of Defense will be split into two products: Line of Defense will become a session based game with up to 64 players per server while Line of Defense – All Out War will continue the persistent MMO version that has been in development for the past few years. The closed beta servers are expected to go online at some point in early 2019.

“We are expecting to push a new test build to those with access to our CBT servers at some point in Q1/19. No firm date yet. And no, we don’t expect to open the game to additional testers at this time. Those of you who already own a copy via the CBT which we ran for over a year, will retain access until final release.”

Source: Line of Defense

Epic Games Offers 88% Revenue Cut To Developers


Epic Games this week has announced the unveiling of the Epic Games store, a new digital distribution platform that aims to court third party developers and publishers with lucrative rates. The digital platform will launch with a library of hand-curated titles on PC and Mac and will eventually expand to Android and other open platforms throughout 2019.

What Epic is offering is a platform where developers take a cool 88% cut of revenue. This puts the platform in stark contrast to Steam where the developer takes home 70% (65% if using the Unreal engine). For developers using the Unreal engine, Epic is willing to eat the usual 5% royalty fee. Epic also promises that developers will have control of their news feed with no store-placed ads or cross-marketing of competing games visible.

More information on Epic’s store will be available on December 6 at the Game Awards.

(Source: Epic Games)