Tag: developer

[Not Massive] EA (Possibly) Caught Shilling Battlefield V On Eurogamer Review


Battlefield V is out, at least for EA Access subscribers and deluxe edition buyers, and reviews are already piling in. Eurogamer’s review stays in the middle, also noting that the game is launching in the glitchiest and most technically troubled state that DICE has been in since Battlefield 4.

“Battlefield 5 is a spotty experience, beset by bugs and glitches that continually pull you out of it all. The new animations don’t seem fully baked, with legs prodding out at inhuman angles and players warping through the floor, while elsewhere quirks and server lag rear their heads. I had one particular game of Frontlines the other night that, thanks to a bug that prevented the round timer working properly, went on for well over 90 minutes, ending up in a strange armistice as players got tired of shooting each other and camped peacefully under a bridge together instead.”

Eurogamer’s review received a comment by user TimidExplorer, who posted that Eurogamer’s review is “something that our industry can do without”:

A game developer being angry at the perception of another developer’s work being criticized is understandable, but TimidExplorer’s comment wouldn’t have been newsworthy if Eurogamer staff didn’t point out shortly thereafter that he was posting from an Electronic Arts computer.

“There’s no mockery intended at all – I’m writing about the game, and its war stories, and they’re simply not very good. It’s also a bit weird that you’re posting this from an EA provided ISP.”

TimidExplorer rather quickly deleted his account afterward.

(Source: Eurogamer)

Steam Cleaning: Valve Has Banned More Than 150 Games This Month


Who says Valve doesn’t clean up their trash? Other than everyone.

Back when Valve issued a new directive that the company would no longer be curating titles with the exception of illegal games and troll titles, opting instead to merely allow its algorithm to bury lower quality titles in the furthest depths of the Steam store where nobody will see them anyway. More recently, the company has been on a bit of a ban spree, seemingly taking out developers releasing shovelware and asset flip titles.

According to Steam Tracker, Valve has banned more than 150 titles this month alone. Most of the titles appear to fall into categories of asset flips, obvious troll titles, and low quality flash-looking games. We were unable to ascertain how many developers this list spreads across, but Valve often deletes a developer’s entire catalog when one title is banned. Many of the titles had initially released as far back as January/February, but some others hadn’t even hit the market yet.

[Steam Direct] Valve Isn’t Doing Basic Checks On Marketplace Items For Scams


Actions speak louder than words, and for Valve and Steam nothing furthers the allegations that the company doesn’t put much stock in the quality of its services than the repeated instances of outright fraud that have occurred on the Steam platform over the past few years. We’ve seen meme games, troll games, asset flips, abusive developers, Greenlight vote fraud, a developer taking critics to court, and of course the repeated return of Ata Berdiyev who Valve repeatedly ignore until whatever latest game he is involved with starts bringing embarrassing attention to the Steam store.

Our latest controversy comes to us in the form of scam artist indie developers and Steam items. Valve has opened up the floodgates allowing developers to give their games inventories with tradeable items on the Steam market and, as usual, they have put absolutely zero effort into quality control and as a result, some shady developers have come out of the woodwork to start exploiting the unchecked system. Reports are popping up from numerous communities of developers uploading items that are visually identical to items in Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2, in order to con unsuspecting players into making trades.

This type of scam is different than what we’ve seen in the past, although it has been spotted before, because it directly implicates that game developers themselves are knowingly taking part and likely even perpetuating the scams. In addition, it shows that Valve is doing next to nothing in regards to checking against its sellers shenanigans. Are they vetting logos? No. Are they vetting tradeable items? No.

In the case of Abstractism, that includes tradeable items like the Team Fortress 2 rocket launcher knockoff shown above, the game has shown that Valve isn’t even properly vetting their games for viruses or other malicious programming. Abstractism has numerous negative reviews noting that the game is being flagged by several anti-virus programs as containing a trojan horse virus, uses a shady looking steam services executable that may or may not be authentic, and thanks to the work of several sleuths on the net, has more or less been shown to be a cryptocurrency mining operation.

Both games we’ve shown in this article, Abstractism and Climber, have been removed from Steam and their developers presumably banned from selling further titles. It does show, however, that Valve’s commitment to dealing with troll or illegal games is hollow, if not mostly fabricated.

[Community] Wild West Online, Everquest Next, and Guaranteed Refunds


I refuse to advocate or advertise Wild West Online’s preorder scheme, but I am going to tell you why I don’t trust buying into it and how it all comes back to Everquest Next, zombies, and Sergey Titov.

As one of the most incompetent and shady developers in this industry, MMO Fallout takes great caution when covering any game that even smells lightly of Titov’s touch. The rumors that he was involved in Wild West Online’s development, in fact just the idea that the game is using the engine that his company made, is enough to warrant intense scrutiny. If you’ve been following the game’s impending alpha launch, then you’re probably aware of the next “too good to be true” marketing trap: The guaranteed refund.

Let’s look at Wild West Online’s guaranteed refund policy, shall we?

So, up until the second phase of Alpha testing, we’ll let you refund your early bird purchase with no questions asked. This gives you a chance to play the Alpha yourself, and opt-out if you think the game won’t develop into the game you wanted. There are no restrictions on amount of time you have played, and there are no limits on how long you owned the game — so long as you decide before September 27, 2017 you will be granted a full refund.

Sounds great, right? No questions asked refunds for the first alpha wave, what could possibly go wrong? Well, let’s go back to Titov’s The War Z, which also had a no questions refund policy going into its alpha. The thing about getting rid of that policy so early in development is that developers tend to promise features that are coming if players just hold on a little longer, until after the refund window has passed. War Z waited until beta and launch day to implement some of its more egregious cash shop items, including the four hour respawn timer, making unpopular changes and refusing to implement features that it promised would be available for launch if players just held off on hitting that refund button.

Even more, let’s take a look at Daybreak Game Company and Everquest Next: Landmark, a game sold entirely on the premise that if you wanted a refund during alpha, you could have it with no questions asked. Of course, it wasn’t until after the refund window passed that Daybreak would announce the cancellation of Everquest Next, Landmark’s sole reason for existing, and basically doom the game to an early death while simultaneously telling players “hey, we offered you a refund window and you didn’t accept it. Tough luck.”

Steam has a refund window of two hours of gameplay, fourteen days after purchase, with exceptions in the case of developer malfeasance. Rather than buy into, and vicariously promote, players supporting a system that will present them with a completely unfinished game, one that has historically used a disguise of customer friendliness to hide a system that can be easily abused and then defended under the premise that the customer should have known that the product was incomplete, I’m going to go with this website’s running policy: Don’t preorder on a system that looks too good to be true.

And to wrap up, I don’t trust a refund system by Xsolla as far as I can throw the company (and if you haven’t figured out, I can’t throw things far). Once again, let’s go back to a name that finds itself on some of the industry’s sleaziest con jobs, and talk about the War Z’s guaranteed refunds. Back in 2012, War Z had a guaranteed refund policy which Xsolla promptly rendered moot by denying refunds. They pulled every excuse out of the book, from losing orders, not being able to find accounts, transitioning companies, and even quoting the terms of service saying that all sales are final.

The one that Hammerpoint copied from League of Legends.

So with Sergey Titov’s engine and Xsolla “all sales are final” handling the refunds, I’m going to do all I can and simply recommend that players don’t get caught up in the “guaranteed refunds” system like it is a safety net. It isn’t, and until you have the much more reliable safety of Valve overseeing the transaction, I recommend sitting it out on Wild West Online.

[Community] Mob Mentality, Jason Vorhees, and Website Policy


For this week’s Community article, I’d like to bring up as subject that has been discussed to death over the past few years yet still remains a pervasive issue in not just the gaming community, but virtually every aspect of human life especially when the internet is concerned: Mob mentality and the internet’s ever populous septic tank of human refuse that plagues every community.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Friday the 13th developer Illfonic got caught in some hot water this weekend after a player got banned for allegedly sexually harassing a group of players including a 12 year old girl. The topic has been covered by a number of Youtubers, which you can find and catch up on if you want to know the story, but instead of talking about semantics, I’m going to summarize MMO Fallout’s response to this controversy in one paragraph:

I didn’t write about it, and looking at all of the misinformation that has come out and been repeated by various Youtubers, I am doubling down that not writing about it was the right thing to do. I throw around the term game journalist like it’s a joke sometimes, but this website does strive to follow the SPJ code of ethics, and rules one and two are seek the truth and minimize harm respectively. That didn’t happen in this case.

Among the big book of rules written for MMO Fallout, discussing reports of game bans is virtually off the table except in rare circumstances where the developer is blatantly crossing an ethical line by handing out bans for poor reviews or doing something shady and banning people in the hopes to silence that information. At the end of the day, bans are subjective, and as incredible as it sounds, people who are punished tend to lie about the circumstances surrounding their ban. I say this as someone who has a long history that includes GM’ing an MMO and owning/moderating servers for games like Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, and more. You’ll be a lot more skeptical after the tenth person you’ve banned in a month (after repeated warnings) for using racist slurs in chat shows up on the forums and says he has “no idea why he was banned for just playing the game better than everyone else.”

But more importantly, these topics tend to be eighty sixed because the internet can’t behave itself, and such coverage is only guaranteed to result in the mob mentality’s three D’s: Death threats, doxxing, and DDOS attacks. Not only has the harassment campaign by online sociopaths begun against Friday the 13th’s developers, but the servers have been hit more than once by attackers trying to either punish the developers or simply ruin the experience.

And make no bones about it, I don’t blame either the guy who got banned for airing his grief or the Youtubers for popularizing the controversy for this response, as I have written numerous times in the past, it doesn’t take much incitement for death threats to start rolling in. It’s also important that we don’t just accept this sort of action and continue to weed out and remove such bad actors.

The player in question has even apologized for what the developers have endured following his review, an act that should be commended in spite of genuinely being unnecessary. It also shows how disturbing parts of the net have become:

I know what its like to be doxxed. I know what it’s like to have your family called and have horrible things been said to them. That’s why I can no longer continue to support this. I have been approached by people on steam, asking me to??????the 12 year old I was in the game with, and to give out the people in the matches information so they could doxx them and kill them. The things people have said to me have really scared me these past couple of days and in no way shape or form did I want this to happen.

While I will never blame content creators for the actions of their community (unless said action is directly or implicitly instructed by said creator), you absolutely have an obligation to verify the facts before making statements.

Other than that I have no opinion on the matter.

[Video] RuneScape: Invention Batch 2 Diary


The next RuneScape expansion is right around the bend, and Jagex is talking about a major update to Invention coming along with the update. For now Jagex is taking community feedback regarding changes to Invention as well as new device ideas.

Mods Ollie, Deg and Erator take you through what they have planned for the second batch of invention, due to be released with the next RuneScape expansion. Check out the video and give us your thoughts and feedback on what you would like to see added to invention, as well as how to complete the skill.

Interested players are encouraged to head over to the official forums and Reddit to voice their suggestion.

  • Benefits for reaching higher levels
  • New devices, focusing on 99+
  • Machines, which will slowly automate simple processes for you
  • Quality of life improvements.

And more!

(Source: Youtube)

Akaneiro Developer Shows Up: Fixes Game


Akaneiro is alive, and appears to have someone back at the helm. Way back in September, I wrote about how Spicy Horse Games had shut down, that its customer support had closed, and that American McGee had left his game to rot. The servers had slowly become unstable to the point where they were no longer functioning, with no response from the person/people allegedly in charge of keeping the service running.

Well it looks like the server is not just back up and running, there is still someone left at Spicy Horse. Literally the last employee left at Spicy Horse has begun posting on the forums, noting that the servers were reverted back to their previous state and that more bug fixes are coming.

I’ve been able to restore server to it’s original state (before migration to new hosting). Everything related to steam is up and running. I also have full sources for game client so eventually I’ll release update to fix some annoying client bugs.

The employee is inviting players to report bugs and any questions at the link below.

(Source: Steam)

What Happened: Missing Ink Edition


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What Happened is a series of articles partially inspired by you, the community, and otherwise brought on by a fleeting moment where the flapping wires in my brain connect and memories are able to get through. Given the long development nature of MMOs, it isn’t uncommon to have a game announced and then never hear from it again, the developer drifting silently into the night only to resurface somewhere in another dimension.

I last talked about The Missing Ink in 2014, even then asking what happened to the game and its development crew at Redbedlam. The game (pictured above) shut down in early 2014 with the note that it would be coming back later that year, and we haven’t heard anything since. None of the social media accounts have been maintained since that announcement, and the game is clearly dead.

So what happened to Redbedlam? Are they dead as well? You might think so, but they are alive and kicking. They released a game last October, a shooter called Bedlam that has quite an odd mishmash of visual styles. Bedlam is available on sale today both on Steam and on Indiegala, the latter being much cheaper, and it currently holds a “very positive” rating on Steam.

It’s safe to say that The Missing Ink has probably been shelved for now, if not indefinitely, but it’s good to see that Redbedlam is still actively creating games that people like to play.

[Community] Should Developers Start Blacklisting Customers?


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Did you know that Riot Games maintains a very small blacklist of players deemed so toxic that they are banned from having an account for life? They do, and while it takes a lot to be added to the list, the end result is that any account that can be verified as owned by said person is immediately handed a permanent ban. Sounds fun, right?

It’s important to note that these blacklisted players aren’t one-time offenders, or even two-time. If you look at their stories, the players that Riot Games decides are no longer welcome in their community have gone through a multitude of accounts, all banned for death threats, denial of service attacks, and other actions that are toxic at best, illegal at worst.

While developers are constantly looking at methods of lowering the bar of entry, by converting their games to free to play or having regular sales, the increased convenience has only made it easier for the communities of said games to be infected by the rampaging plague that are cheaters and anti-social gamers. People who have no intentions on playing fair or fostering a welcoming community, but are only interested in watching the world burn, in a manner of speaking. And because creating an account is so easy, developers waste precious time and resources trying to keep problematic re-offenders from getting back in.

Valve recently adopted a policy in Counter Strike: Global Offensive to rid the game of cheaters. In order to use the “Prime” matchmaking service, you need to have two-factor authentication with a valid phone number. Get banned for cheating, and all accounts associated with that phone number will also receive a VAC ban. In addition, the phone number cannot be used for three months.

It goes further: If you don’t own the banned game, you can’t even purchase it on any of the affected accounts. Every time a phone number is banned, the ban length gets longer. With 95% of the Steam community making use of mobile authentication, according to Valve, it’s a lot harder to avoid.

So the question this week is, should developers begin blacklisting repeat offenders? If so, how should they go about doing it? Riot Games bans accounts completely and bans that person from competing in sanctioned tournaments, while Valve’s stance has always been to segregate said players to their own corners of the game where they can be ignored.

In MMOs, the issue of cheating has raised a lot of contempt between players and developers, the latter of whom have been seen on multiple occasions being lenient towards cheaters. As it turns out, the guy who spends a fair amount of real money to cheat in a game also tends to spend a lot of money in the game itself, and like an abusive customer who also happens to bankroll a small business, they are unwilling to throw him out the door without a heaping helping of warnings.

Riot Games is regularly accused of not dealing with abusive customers unless there is enough publicity to cause actual harm, like said abuser being a streamer with a large following. We’ve seen numerous accusations against companies like Trion Worlds for allowing high-paying guilds in ArcheAge to get away with exploits.

Would a blacklist work? How would you go about identifying a problematic customer and getting rid of them? Let us know in the comments below.

Community: Another Indie Dev Meltdown


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(Editor’s note: minor language)

When it comes to indie development, I consider myself to be a big fan of the genre. After all, gaming would look monumentally different if the small, poorly funded developers of the early days, and even those of the modern days, didn’t throw caution into the wind and give ideas a shot that the AAA developers had tossed aside, like sandbox and horror games. Still, being a section of the gaming industry that literally anyone can get into, indie gaming today has become something of a Big Brother household. A few people with talent fighting for attention with a whole lot of egotistical nuts who either don’t have the abilities to find a job in game development, or are unhirable due to their unprofessional conduct.

Recently, Jim Sterling over at The Escapist posted a let’s play video of The Slaughtering Grounds, and his impressions of the game were not good. In response, a Youtube account called “Review the Reviewers” popped up with a copy of Jim Sterling’s video with a text overlay going point by point and making childish remarks about the video (it starts with “I’m Jim Sterling and I’m a fucking idiot). The video appears to have been created by the developer since it was posted as an announcement on the game’s Steam page, and the developer now uses the Steam username “JimFnSterlingSon” in the game’s community hub.

The video response posted by the developer is one of the most childish meltdowns I have ever seen here at MMO Fallout, and fits in easily next to Mike Maulbeck’s rant on Twitter and Phil Fish’s regular diatribes leading up to his eventual self-termination from the industry, in the realm of witnessing occupational suicide in action. How did the game get on Steam? Simple, the developer promised free keys to anyone who voted for the game through Greenlight. It’s amazing how many people you can rope in by offering free stuff, even if what you’re giving away isn’t worth what little effort you had to do to get it. Evidently this didn’t translate into much traffic, because Steam Charts shows an all-time peak of 3 players.

The internet, in its infinite capacity for a Sherlock Holmes level of investigatory prowess, quickly discovered that Slaughtering Grounds isn’t just a bad game by a developer who censors the forums and likely creates fake reviews, but a game filled with stock blood splatter images sourced from Google, stock assets from the UNITY store,  and stolen art used in advertising, which the developer has since blamed on a third party and removed from the store page after at least one poster claimed to contact the original artist.

The developer has decided to try and embrace the hate, so to speak, by changing his username to JimFnSterlingSon and posting a contest thread asking people to leave a comment on why they hate the game and then promote that comment elsewhere on the internet, in return for a free copy of said game.

Just remember, Valve wants to decrease curation by phasing out Greenlight altogether and allow anyone to put their games on Steam. When that happens, you can expect many more stories like this to pop up.