Tag: Cosmetic

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.

TERA Korea Patch Adds In Cosmetic Cash Shop


Ahoy, TERAns! The great part of being on the lower end of the development scale is that kTERA gets all of the updates before we do here in the West. On one hand this does annoy a certain portion of the base who see the developer playing favorites, but on the other hand you might also see the Korean community as something of a guinea pig, to taste test the content for poison before it is brought over to the west. We saw this particularly with the Russian community in Allods Online a couple of years ago and TERA is no exception.

Over on the Korean TERA front, Bluehole Studios has added in a cash shop featuring time-limited and unlimited cosmetic items. There are eye glasses that sell for $2.50 for 30 days or $4 for 365 days. The mount sells for about $21 for 365 days. Before you explode into the comments section, it is important to note that the 365 day label is a farce, the items are listed for 365 days also have a note that they do not get destroyed after 365 days.

While the cash shop is cosmetic, there are gameplay changers included. Each item gives the user a set amount of T-Cat coins (22-30 for glasses, 304 for horse) which can be used currently to purchase twelve hours of crystal protection (no longer lose crystals upon death) and special sealing scrolls which are normally expensive items and are used in crafting.

You can check out the items here. So far no word on the cash shop making its way to North American and Europe.

Guild Wars 2 Opens Door For Non-Cosmetic Cash Shop


By now, I hope that I don’t have to lecture any of you on how important wording is in this industry. When Realtime Worlds said that they had no intention of shutting down All Points Bulletin, they didn’t factor in the results of their ongoing chapter 11 bankruptcy forcing the game to shut down. When Turbine stated that they had no intention of selling equipment with stats at the time, they technically spoke the truth. When Sony answered the free to play question by saying they would not alter existing player’s game, and launching a separate product, they were telling the truth.

Guild Wars Guru has noticed an alteration made to the Guild Wars wiki by user JohnSmith, who is a confirmed Arenanet employee. Previously, the article read:

Yes, micro-transactions will exist. These will be cosmetic additions which will not affect balance or gameplay, similar to the transactions offered by Guild Wars.

Now the article reads:

Yes, micro-transactions will exist. Be assured goods and items bought for cash in GW2 do not offer any advantage over those available in the game through the investment of time.

So the wording changes from only cosmetic items to not being more powerful than existing items. Now, this could simply be referring to Arenanet’s plan to include mission packs and transmutation stones in the cash shop, or the possibility of boosters, or it could open the door for selling equipment that is only as powerful as equipment found in-game. Martin Kerstein of Arenanet weighs in later in the thread.

As usual, everybody just needs to calm down a bit. This change was done to actually make the wording easier to understand – seems like that was not the case.

But the statement in it is still the same: Nothing you will be able to buy in the in-game store will give you an advantage over people who are not buying anything. That is the baseline.

So the outcome is that Arenanet, for now at least, is being vague on a familiar level to companies of the past. For now we’ll simply have to wait for clarification by Arenanet on an exact list of what will be sold in the Guild Wars 2 cash shop.