Back in 2009 when Jagex created the bag of dice, an item that allows a player to roll a set of dice and broadcast the results to his clan chat, they didn’t exactly anticipate that players would take their invitation of emergent gameplay and go ahead and turn the item into a tool for underground gambling systems run by shady, often fly-by-night operators. And when Jagex threw the nuclear switch and knocked all of the bots offline a few weeks ago, the number of players sitting at the grand exchange (and elsewhere) advertising their dicing services rose exponentially. Barring one shattered poodle, Jagex was forced to step in and proclaim that this is why we can’t have nice things, Pepper.
In response to the growing complaints over spam, scams, and shady business, the dice have been disabled and will be removed upon the next content update. Mod Mark commented:
Don’t gamble! There are too many people who will try to scam you or alter the odds in their favour. It’s never supported by JAGEX unless it’s about gameplay (like the duel arena). It’s likely that dice scammers will move over to another method of trying to scam you, so please, be vigilant and remember… if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably a lie.
Of course, dicing will simply be replaced by another popular method, assuming one hasn’t already. Still, busting bots and blasting a scam method in succession is rather impressive, even if the latter was essentially Jagex’s own Frankenstein’s monster.
Here at MMO Fallout, I have a simple philosophy: You throw me a game, I’ll make sure that people have an avenue to get into it. As many of you have pointed out over the years, I will defend any game to the point of its death as at least worth trying and I can’t honestly think of the last time I ever advocated against dealing with a specific company on this website. Back in April last year, I had a serious talk after Mythic’s billing servers exploded. At that point, I applauded Mythic for quickly dealing with an issue that was not their fault (billing for most MMOs is handled by outside companies). You may remember that, by the time Mythic had an announcement ready the company was automatically refunding extra-payments. You may also remember the Mortal Online quote I had at the bottom:
“If it had been Star Vault making the account error, they would have simply replied with “Your carebear bank account just can’t handle our hardcore billing system. Go back to WoW, noob!”
-Hypothetical, satirical view on what Star Vault might have said.
Well, back on Sunday Mortal Online’s billing servers exploded, causing a number of players to be charged double, and even triple charged. I emailed Star Vault at the time to inquire whether reimbursement would be automatic, or if players would need to contact, and received this answer:
Players will need to check their accounts and bank statements and contact us if necessary.
It was getting this statement back from Star Vault that almost prompted me to completely remove Mortal Online from MMO Fallout, a difficult task indeed, however I draw the line when the line begins to rest on fraud. Foregoing the comment on the previous article about the lack of an apology, for a company to erroneously charge customers, and then turn around and require the customer to contact them in order to obtain a refund, well that sounds legally questionable. Essentially what Star Vault is saying here is “yes we double charged people. If they don’t contact us? Well we keep their money.”
For the record, I am not in the camp that believes this was intentionally done to gain money from people who might not check their accounts. Star Vault has said that they will refund any double/triple charges, and I have to take their word until proven otherwise. My concern stems from the fact that Star Vault is not actively seeking out accounts with extra charges, and crediting back the cards, a process that should be as simple as checking which cards appear twice or more in the same day, checking which accounts those cards are tied to (to ensure the person isn’t simply paying for multiple accounts) and refunding when you find an erroneous charge. If this occurred to a low number of subscribers as I’ve been told, such a process should be quick and easy.
I was going about my daily Facebook activities (posting creepy Woody pictures), and lo and behold, I came across the following ad:
You’ll notice that this ad links to “secure.jagex.com,” and I quite honestly expected that this was either A.) a scam ad that managed to get through, or B.) Jagex was advertising on Facebook, which I don’t believe that they do (with my activities, I’ve seen almost every MMO developer that advertises on Facebook). So naturally I clicked on the ad, and was taken here
Really? Runes of Magic? Take one more look at the URL in the Facebook ad. “secure.jagex.com.” The screenshot in the ad appears to be from Runes of Magic, but someone who has never played either game wouldn’t know that. The ad does do a good job of tip-toeing around, but outright claims to be Jagex by inserting a false link to Jagex.com. This isn’t parody like Global Agenda’s ads or Rift’s “We’re not in Azeroth anymore.” This ad is explicitly misleading people into believing they are viewing an ad for a Jagex product, when really they are being directed to Runes of Magic.
Facebook is already aware of the fraudulent ad, and information has been forwarded to Jagex’s legal department. If this is a third party ad agency, Frogster needs to drop them before they wind up on the receiving end of a false advertising (and likely fraud) lawsuit. If this is Frogster’s doing, someone in the advertising office should be getting his pink slip, yesterday.
[Update 6/29/10]With the overwhelming response this article has received, both here and on other websites, I’ve posted a followup below the original article.
Mortal Online is part of a major turning point in the massively multiplayer online industry, but in a way that has little to do with the content of the game itself. I’m not talking about the engines that MMOs run on, or the way that players interact in the growing worlds, or even the size and scope of the world itself. I speak of the way these titles are run, and the communities who pay for them, the promises that are kept, and the breaking point of patience and willpower. Continue to read and you will understand why the era of false promises, infinite delays, and broken dreams is over, but more importantly, why some MMOs will die because of it (not necessarily Mortal Online).
Up to a year ago or so, the typical mantra for buying a game was if you bought a console game and you didn’t like it or it was broken, you could always sell it used for a small payback on the cost of the game. For PC games, up until around 2004, it was possible to just transfer your cd and the key to another person, like a used game sale, but without the option for turning to Electronics Boutique or a real store to sell it for you. With MMOs, on the other hand, there has never been a legitimate way to sell. You have to transfer your account with the game, which risks the account getting banned if the company detects it, leaving you with no money, and no game.
This should not be taken as a generalization when I say that a lot of MMO developers quickly latched on to this idea, and several of those used it to put a choke hold on the player. In recent years, the focus has shifted to giving an MMO enormous amounts of hype prior to release, to pump up the pre-order sales before the closed beta is even done with, the NDA lifted, and the game can be talked about. A few developers walk the same borderline of fraud that you see in commercials, where what they say isn’t technically fraud, but it’s certainly misleading. As an example, many of you have likely mocked the commercials where the advertiser states “prices starting at under twenty five dollars!” only to find that the price starts at $24.99 for a barely working piece of trash and immediately jumps to $100 for the next step up.
Before an MMO launches we are subjected to countless claims of features that are delayed for months on end, if not years, if not scrapped entirely at some point in a secret manner. But these same features are used to advertise and gin up pre-orders, and then the executives sit back and wonder why virtually every subscription MMO in existence has such a low retention rate following its first month. The player is out fifty bucks, and might even convince himself when the developer claims that the feature he wanted that was missing at launch is coming “soon” (read: following two years of delays before it is eventually cut), that he should continue his subscription for a few months just to see how the game turns out.
I am picking on Mortal Online specifically in this article because this is the MMO that really popularized the new fight against the idea that once players pre-ordered, they were at the mercy of the developer no matter how many times/years the game was delayed despite accepting orders, and how many features ended up not being in the game, or being broken, at launch. Players issued charge-backs in large numbers on Mortal Online, so much so that many third party forums relating to MMOs/Mortal Online were regularly filled with information, accounts and advocacy for players to perform said charge-backs.
The moral lesson with Mortal Online is that developers can no longer promise features, and then use initial box sales as a fund to develop those features for actual release some months down the line. After several years, patience and tolerance for this has reached its breaking point, and players are sending a message that these acts that have become so commonplace in the MMO market, are no longer going to work. The legitimate use of a charge back is gaining momentum, and I have no doubt that at this rate it will be powerful enough to utterly destroy an MMO before it even makes it out the door.
As much as I am against resorting to a charge-back, the old “shit happens” excuses just don’t cut it anymore in defending companies that launch unfinished or wholly broken MMOs. In any other video game genre, the kind of stuff developers pull would never be tolerated, and the momentum is moving in such a way that it will no longer be tolerated in MMOs either, especially when companies make the same mistakes over several titles.
Always buy an MMO with a credit card, and never preorder an MMO on Steam (in the event where you issue a charge back, you entire Steam account will be completely disabled). Remember: A charge back is not to be used as an excuse to bum-rush your way into a game without doing any research on it, and is not for buyer’s remorse. It is strictly for cases where what you are promised is not what is delivered. In the case where it is found that you issued an illegal charge back, you can be sued for wire-fraud or theft of merchandise, among other charges, depending on where you live.
[6/29/10]
I wanted to address a few comments I’ve been seeing on various websites in regards to this article, mainly that I was not informative enough with the original article. I was afraid, and apparently rightly so, after I published this that it would gather some notice from the Mortal Online community, on both sides, and it has.
My intention with this article wasn’t to bash any game in particular, but to focus on the broad-spectrum themes that lead up to Mortal Online becoming the scapegoat for a new trend. It has become all too common for developers to start talking far too specifically about a title long before those features are even finalized, or approved in some cases. Interviews about the content of the game now merely run down to throwing out whatever is in the concept stage to get the most ooh’s and aah’s. Although there’s been a few criticisms of my “poor research” in not providing examples for a few arguments, this was by design, as the instant I pointed out a single MMO, or even a selection of MMOs, I would be immediately slammed for “having a grudge” against said game/company. Rather, my goal was to indulge the reader and allow them to fill in the blanks with their own experiences.
One thing I do hold Mortal Online guilty towards, and this stands for a number of other MMOs, is the “here’s a list of features, but not all of them will be in after launch.” Before Warhammer Online launched, Mythic removed most of the capital cities, preferring to have two decent cities at launch rather than all of them in a poor state. The cities, along with the removed classes, would be launched at a later time once the game shipped. Mythic has caught up on classes, but there hasn’t been much as to when, if ever, the capital cities will see release. Given the number of MMOs that have used the undisclosed-future-release plan where the content was silently cut or radically changed, I think it’s safe to say that Star Vault’s lack of specificity was to their detriment.
I have always advertised MMO Fallout as having a focus on the MMO industry as a whole, with insights into the companies, trends, and such, but I often feel that I assume and demand too much out of my readers, by which I mean that I occasionally get ahead of myself and assume that the rest of you have been following my blog since the start (which is why I always try to begin with summaries of what is going on).
The key to this article is that the player will always vote with their wallets in the end, on the issues that really matter, and in this case that issue is the tolerance of players with regards to developers making vague promises with the hopes that the player will continue to stick on until whatever feature it is is released, assuming it is at all.
I stuck Mortal Online in because it is indeed the poster child of the reaction, but not necessarily all factors of the cause considering how newly released it is. Although MMO Fallout didn’t exist at the time, I was closely following the months leading up to the launch of Warhammer Online and Age of Conan. In both of those cases, the populations of the game plummeted following release, especially given that both of these titles broke a record on pre-orders. Although players were disappointed at their purchase, they simply wrote it up as a $50 loss and moved on.
Mortal Online got the short end of the stick because of pre-release fear rather than hype, especially when one staff member talked about their troubles with funding, that caused some players to issue charge backs out of fear that Star Vault was bound to go bankrupt before the game ever launched. Other players saw what they believed to be an irresponsible length of delays, and yes, a great number just rode on the bandwagon with the mantra that “I’ll preorder it, and if I don’t like it I can always do a charge back and troll the forums about how I got my cash back.”
Ultimately I believe Mortal Online became the poster child for this because Star Vault is a tiny company that has seen a lot of stumbles, and people decided that even if they were in the wrong, there was little to no chance of retaliation from a company with pockets so thin that they were selling pre-orders in order to fund the beta.
Here at MMO Fallout I stand up to core principles that I never give a disincentive to trying out a title. The closest you will find to reviews here are the month-in-review articles I do where I give short, one or two sentence thoughts about the MMOs that I am playing at the time. I could increase my hits by a mile by converting MMO Fallout into a website where I plaster ads, talk about why x company wants to rip you off, review MMOs based off of twenty minutes of gameplay, call John Smedley the devil, make funny photoshops of Bill Roper, and generally jump on the troll bandwagon, but I would rather give players the avenue to form their own opinions.
I crack wise-ass jokes about companies and their games, but at the end of the day you will always find me encouraging people to try out the game, no matter what the content of the article, and regularly blast trolls. I recommend people try the game out for themselves, rather than make their decision based off of a review, or something someone wrote on a forum, which is why I regularly post sales, trial information, and more avenues on how to get into MMOs for the lowest price possible. I suggest you read the following, along with the rest of MMO Fallout:
I’m not a man without morals, so I apologize to the Mortal Online community that the original article ended up coming across as a misdirected, poorly sourced flame pit. I rarely follow up articles like this, and hopefully this long-winded response will tie up some loose ends.
The Atari of old was a great company that brought gaming to the home platform, with Pong and later consoles. Between the Pong box, the Atari 2600, Atari defined the industry, and was responsible for the classic games before the games we now consider classic, not to mention a console that spawned thousands of shovelware titles.
When the discussion comes to the new Atari, there is a different story. I believe I referred to Atari on a website that is not MMO Fallout, as an empty shell of a company that not only couldn’t keep itself on the NASDAQ stock listing, had a failed European branch, and has undergone more cosmetic surgery to change face than any other company in the business. Despite being relegated to the position of publisher for any notable title over the past decade, Atari has been downsized to the elderly man who keeps talking about his youth, and he buys up the younger crowd so he can live through them, even though his limbs are falling off from years of mistreatment.
I usually don’t talk about publishers, but since Cryptic Studios is obligated to use Atari as their publisher (being a subsidiary and all), I’ll make an exception. If you are considering buying a title that was published by Atari, it is in your best interest not to buy them directly from Atari’s store, especially if you may need to use any factor of their customer service.
Granted...
As a rule of thumb, I always do research to confirm a story before I write up about it. In this case, several players informed me that Atari has “purposely” broken their customer service in order to stop any cancellations of Star Trek Online before the game is released. Naturally, I went directly to Atari’s customer support page to investigate. What I found was that, when not busy formulating plots against Turbine (allegedly), Atari is busy not fixing their customer support contact page.
When attempting to contact customer support, one must first include a purchase number or email address, and choose from the drop boxes which category they are looking for. I filled out the first drop box with no issue, but then the problem hit me: The second drop box does not load, making it impossible to fill out the form. Having tried this with every major browser, on several computers through multiple networks, I can now say it is impossible to contact Atari’s customer support for their online store. Not only is it impossible to get refunds, but it is impossible to cancel orders, get support of any kind, or even contact the company to let them know that their support is broken.
If Atari is unaware of this problem, they must be feeling very proud of themselves that they must be making such great products that not a single person is emailing in with a problem. If they are aware of the issue, and if what the players are telling me is true about how long it has been broken, then this is just a drop in the bucket of Atari’s long history over the past decade of increasingly poor customer support.
I can’t say how Atari’s support is for download games, but if at all possible consider buying from another digital download service. Just remember that if something goes wrong, your only avenue will be dealing with your bank in the form of a charge back, because Atari (for all intent and purpose) is sitting in the corner with its fingers in its ears shouting “la la la la, I can’t hear you!”
The Atari of old was a great company that brought gaming to the home platform, with Pong and later consoles. Between the Pong box, the Atari 2600, Atari defined the industry, and was responsible for the classic games before the games we now consider classic, not to mention a console that spawned thousands of shovelware titles.
When the discussion comes to the new Atari, there is a different story. I believe I referred to Atari on a website that is not MMO Fallout, as an empty shell of a company that not only couldn’t keep itself on the NASDAQ stock listing, had a failed European branch, and has undergone more cosmetic surgery to change face than any other company in the business. Despite being relegated to the position of publisher for any notable title over the past decade, Atari has been downsized to the elderly man who keeps talking about his youth, and he buys up the younger crowd so he can live through them, even though his limbs are falling off from years of mistreatment.
I usually don’t talk about publishers, but since Cryptic Studios is obligated to use Atari as their publisher (being a subsidiary and all), I’ll make an exception. If you are considering buying a title that was published by Atari, it is in your best interest not to buy them directly from Atari’s store, especially if you may need to use any factor of their customer service.
Granted...
As a rule of thumb, I always do research to confirm a story before I write up about it. In this case, several players informed me that Atari has “purposely” broken their customer service in order to stop any cancellations of Star Trek Online before the game is released. Naturally, I went directly to Atari’s customer support page to investigate. What I found was that, when not busy formulating plots against Turbine (allegedly), Atari is busy not fixing their customer support contact page.
When attempting to contact customer support, one must first include a purchase number or email address, and choose from the drop boxes which category they are looking for. I filled out the first drop box with no issue, but then the problem hit me: The second drop box does not load, making it impossible to fill out the form. Having tried this with every major browser, on several computers through multiple networks, I can now say it is impossible to contact Atari’s customer support for their online store. Not only is it impossible to get refunds, but it is impossible to cancel orders, get support of any kind, or even contact the company to let them know that their support is broken.
If Atari is unaware of this problem, they must be feeling very proud of themselves that they must be making such great products that not a single person is emailing in with a problem. If they are aware of the issue, and if what the players are telling me is true about how long it has been broken, then this is just a drop in the bucket of Atari’s long history over the past decade of increasingly poor customer support.
I can’t say how Atari’s support is for download games, but if at all possible consider buying from another digital download service. Just remember that if something goes wrong, your only avenue will be dealing with your bank in the form of a charge back, because Atari (for all intent and purpose) is sitting in the corner with its fingers in its ears shouting “la la la la, I can’t hear you!”
MMO Fallout 