Bad Press – MMO Fallout

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.

Bad Press: Witness One Angry Gamer Content Manager’s Racist Meltdown (Language Warning)

Photographed: Disgraced ex-attorney Jack Thompson and not William Usher.

Today’s Bad Press article is less of an article and more of an image gallery. It comes to us from One Angry Gamer, specifically content manager William Usher (BillyD) having an absolute emotional breakdown over people criticizing the game Star Citizen, of which Billy has personally invested a substantial amount of money for a video game. You can see his true colors come out in the comments below.

Comments were snapshotted by myself to authenticate, and the page has been archived (also by myself) to preserve it on the off-chance that they get deleted. This is one angry gamer, and these comments are certainly not for the faint of heart. It appears that at least one contributor to One Angry Gamer has already quit the website over Usher’s tirade.

Obviously his comments speak only for himself and not for the rest of the OAG staff or its readers.

Bad Press: The Internet Falls For Another Con Artist [Fortnite Edition]

The internet has a such a vibrant imagination.

For those of you healthy adults who don’t follow Fortnite news, Epic yesterday was accused of stealing artwork and using it as a cosmetic costume in their battle royale shooter. The tweet highlighting the claim showcased a Deviant Art user’s creation submitted September 2018 compared to the Fortnite model released in November of the same year. Taken at face value, the models look very similar, almost too similar to not be a coincidence.

Here at MMO Fallout, I pride myself very highly on my BS detector. It came at a very high price, my eternal soul which upon my death will be stored in a garage in Buffalo. Not all too different from my living soul. This gift has come in very handy as in MMO Fallout’s nine years of existence, I have had to correct perhaps one or two pieces in total while breaking some stories that were later confirmed by third parties as genuine and preliminarily offering my doubts to numerous other stories that turned out to be fake.

So when yesterday’s story started hitting that Epic Games was being accused of plagiarism of a Deviant Art…artist, my detector shattered six coffee mugs and bolted down the street singing Queen. Maybe it’s the difficult task of taking seriously a person whose username comes from a television show for toddlers. Maybe it’s because Deviant Art is a bastion of plagiarism under the guise of “this is my OC character, plz donut steal.” Perhaps I just found it very hard to believe that an Epic Games artist would look at this drawing and think “I need to rush this into production yesterday,” funneling the skin from original post to seeing it to designing a knockoff to modeling to testing to release all within two months. That’s an artist with pull.

That could be it. It could also be that I’m aware of Deviant Art allowing people to change photos without altering the “user submitted” date. Such as with this 2009 creation.

The story didn’t fool many people outside of the reactionary Youtube news vlogger circuit, but it did manage to snag the attention and coverage of none other than Forbes Magazine. And why not? Their coverage of the faux-controversy has gathered nearly 140,000 views as of this publishing, far more than discussion of The Walking Dead, Fear The Walking Dead, and the Epic Chinese Avengers poster. Web hosting doesn’t come cheap, folks, and clickbait doesn’t have time for verifying your facts. If you think about it, the fact that the accusation happened is news in and of itself. Basic investigative skills are for nerds like Twitter user Ding Dong who decided to check the website’s cached version and found that the art was swapped. Maybe Forbes should hire Ding Dong instead.

Perhaps the other side of this coin is the general habit of the public to immediately believe anything bad about an individual/entity that they don’t personally like. This claim was instantly believed by large swaths of the internet because Epic did a thing and made a game they wanted exclusive, so why wouldn’t this no-good scumbag literally-Hitler company steal artwork from an innocent 13 year old? It boggles the mind to think that a company you don’t personally care for wouldn’t be guilty of every half-baked accusation that gets laid out over Twitter.

But of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Bad Press: No, NDTV, Civilization VI Isn’t Milking Its Users For Data

Civilization VI has become the latest Steam title to play victim to review bombing, and players are incredibly unhappy about recent changes to the game’s End User Licence Agreement. But are they correct in their conclusions? It doesn’t seem so.

The gist of the controversy seems to be coming from this particular extension of the EULA:

“The information we collect may include personal information such as your first and/or last name, e-mail address, phone number, photo, mailing address, geolocation, or payment information. In addition, we may collect your age, gender, date of birth, zip code, hardware configuration, console ID, software products played, survey data, purchases, IP address and the systems you have played on. We may combine the information with your personal information and across other computers or devices that you may use.”

It sounds bad, even disturbing if you’re Rishi Alwani writing for NDTV without doing the bare minimum research. You might for instance find out that the quote above doesn’t appear anywhere in Civilization VI’s EULA which Alwani has presumably not even bothered to read or cross-check for accuracy, because if he did he would have found that it doesn’t exist. He might also have found that the last update for the End User License Agreement he is quoting a false version of, was in January 2018. The quote he’s taking as proof of the EULA is citing an old review from last year as well.

It might also have stopped Alwani from making the embarrassingly reckless if not slanderous claim linking the “new” (January 2018) EULA to the notion that Take Two is “milk[ing] its existing user base,” and that this deplorable action is somehow turning Civ VI into spyware to collect on some investments. I’ll throw some calendar knowledge down on Rishi; January 2018 is in fact not one week after February 2019.

“With its earnings call taking place last week before the change to Civilization VI’s EULA, it is possible that its below expectations performance has resulted in a move to milk its existing user base as much as possible. That said, it is deplorable that despite shifting over 17 million units of Red Dead Redemption 2 in under weeks, Take Two still thinks it’s not making enough to keep it or its investors happy, perhaps playing a part in turning Civilization VI into spyware.”

In short, Alwani didn’t bother (1) fact checking anything and (2) didn’t even verify the date of the post he was quoting as though it was official. Don’t quit your day job, Rishi, unless this is your day job in which case you might want to read up about how defamation covers statements made with reckless disregard for facts.

“[r]eads the new EULA for Civilization VI.” No it doesn’t. There is no new EULA. This article falls over itself so hard to try and create a controversy that I thought it worth calling out directly. Where the text does appear is the Take Two privacy policy, and Alwani’s posting of the text leaves out a very important preface that this information corresponds to data gathered through voluntary activity. (click on photo to enlarge)

The personal information that is collected by this policy is in reference to voluntary acts. When you sign up for services, websites, jobs, purchase DLC, post on the forums, respond to surveys, request technical support, download demos, etc, you’re going to voluntarily give information along the lines of your contact info, games you play, your purchases, your PC specs, mailing address, etc, and various other personal information. While playing the games themselves, they are also aggregating information like your achievements, scores, performance, etc. Very basic info.

By the way, the privacy policy was last updated in May 2018, so Alwani is lying both on where the text comes from and when it was added.

Ultimately it’s not some clandestine intelligence gathering operation that you’re agreeing to, nor is it Firaxis or Take Two digging their greedy little hands into your computer to try and find some personal data to sell. Steam user Panic Fire does a great job of explaining why the blowback is undeserved (full text here):

“The “EULA” everyone keeps posting is actually Take 2’s privacy policy and not actually found in the EULA for this game. (Crazy I know) And take 2’s privacy policy covers everything take2 does from Running a forum, technical support, selling products (aka games to you), and all sorts of other things. The points to take home is that all the information gatherd by Take2 in this case are things you directly tell them or that they use to facilitate a direct service to you. (EX giving them your name and credit card information to facilitate an online purchase) Edit: The Privacy policy hasn’t changed since last May and the EULA since Last January.”

You can find Take Two’s EULA here, including all of the details you need to know about what personal information is collected and how. If you don’t want Take Two to get their mitts on your information, your best method is not filling out surveys for their products. If you want to read the actual facts, I suggest avoiding Rishi Alwani’s coverage.

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