As its players have pointed out to me in the past, there is really not much difference between Evony and other video games. It’s a game, for starters, it is played with a keyboard and mouse, and is played entirely through a browser. It is owned by a Chinese gold farming company, and did I mention that most companies use scantily clad women (or just shots of breasts, as seen above) to sell their games? Don’t forget, you can play it free forever.
Here is a question for the budding internet lawyers in the room: How does a Chinese company pretending to be American justify suing a British blogger in Australia? The whole thing sounds like either a poorly put together joke, or the kind of litigation taught in the same university that Jack Thompson received his degree at (Vanderbilt Law School, for those keeping track). Needless to say, this is exactly what happened when UMGE, I mean Evony LLC, decided to sue UK blogger Bruce Everiss, veteran games industry marketer.
The charge was libel, the evidence? Claims by Everiss that Evony was run by a Chinese company, and that company was linked to a goldfarming operation. The lawsuit has been pretty quiet for a while now (these court cases take a long time to get going), until the unveiling that Evony LLC has dropped the case only two days into proceedings. The official reason for the dropped case, according to Evony’s legal division, was feedback and criticism from their player base.
Evony will be required to pay the A$114,000 in addition to a second fee of A$80,000 or else the court proceedings will reconvene. According to The Guardian, the cost of their legal strategy alone could run Evony more than double the hundred grand they will be forced to pay for Everiss’ legal fees. In Australia, only companies with fewer than 10 employees can sue for libel, this likely being one of the factors that ultimately killed the lawsuit.
The intrigue doesn’t stop there! In his thank you post, Bruce Everiss gave a special show of gratitude to Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard, whose “testimony to the court helped enormously.” Everiss did not go into detail on exactly what the testimony was, but I think it’s safe to say that Mark Gerhard has made his way into the good grace of plenty of gamers.
Between aiding the potentially suicidal, stopping theft, and fighting crime, it seems more and more MMO developers are striving to prove that the customer-business relationship doesn’t have to be so distant. Maybe if UMGE sues me for this article, Mark Gerhard will come to my rescue.
A monetary barrier to a game can often be the deciding factor for a prospective player. Because of the daunting realization that a company will have to sell not only the client (unless you are Warhammer Online) but a subscription on top of that, it becomes almost mandatory in the MMO genre to have some form of trial, with some titles (Warhammer Online) going as far as releasing entire sections of the game for free, forever, so players don’t feel boxed in by a “15 day” trial.
Free to play and freemium games have it easy, because their business model already works on offering something for free with certain incentives for paying. A cash shop game brings in players with the idea that they can play the game for free, forever, but get some perks by buying items from the cash shop. If the player becomes addicted, the mantra of “I will never pay for anything” becomes “well, I’ll pay for a couple items” and so on. Freemium titles hope to get the player hooked on the free content, and then over time coax them into paying for the membership. Even in the free play realm, however, do you find barriers of entry. Runescape, for example, has a lower barrier of entry than Cabal, because of the lack of a client to download.
Jagex must have decided that even this barrier was too high, and players were being turned away from the free game for the sole reason that they did not want to create an account, and thus the Instant Demo was born. Logging into Runescape, I came upon this:
Even more strange was the quote from Mod Nexus on the official forums:
“”The demo mode does exist (no I’ve not been hijacked by Mod Emilee) it just wont appear for the majority of users, no matter your cookies/and free or members account(s) you have.”
-Mod Nexus, Jagex
According to the login screen, the “Instant Demo” mode contains 9 quests, 10 hours of gameplay, and requires no registration. Owing to Runescape’s registration being rather quick (two minutes, tops), it raises the question: Is creating an account really that high of a barrier? If so, Alganon should drop its client price, because it isn’t the cost of the client that raises a barrier, apparently the simple act of requiring people to register accounts does just as fine of a job.
Update: For reasons I was unable to uncover, this article was originally published as a blank slate. Although I lost what I had written, I was able to recover the original draft and reupload it. Remember to always keep a backup of your work!
“Gonna kill myself.”
-Any MMOer
How many times have you typed that out in chat? In jest, of course, not in a serious manner. Something goes wrong, you get killed, you lose something, you accidentally destroyed your favorite and most powerful weapon, or someone backstabbed you and the only conveyance of your disappointment in yourself or the game is to make an off-color joke about suicide.
Unfortunately for players, and unlike Walt Disney, Jagex doesn’t find suicide very funny, in any context. Following a somewhat high profile suicide that was posted on the Runescape forums several years ago, Jagex has since been taking threats of suicide very seriously, no matter what context it may be in. Players reportedly threatening suicide in order to have their accounts banned started receiving this message instead:
But a talking to may not be the only thing you receive. MMO Fallout has received several reports and accounts of players being reported for threatening suicide, only to have the police show up to investigate a reported threatened suicide. It appears Jagex has joined a small group of developers who are taking no chances and forwarding all threats to the proper authorities.
I know this is going to get some comments about free speech and taking jokes too seriously, but the difference between “I’m gonna kill myself” and “I’m gonna kill myself” is nonexistent when in the form of text, unless the sarcasm is very explicitly pointed out. This is one issue online that many people continue to forget, and are surprised when what they say is taken verbatim.
I am not going to try to force my sense of humor down your throat (because it is far less appropriate than jokes about suicide), just keep in mind who may be listening in. You don’t joke about bombs in an airport, and you don’t joke about guns in a school, so don’t be surprised when your joke (by perception) is taken with less humor than you would like it to be.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have made the connection between Jagex and Evony several months ago, because I don’t think I’ll be able to play Jagex’s latest title to go into open beta, War of Legends, without thinking of microtransactions, gold farming companies, and breasts. War of Legends plays out much like Evony, and similar titles. Players start a city, they become more powerful, and they branch out into other areas of the world. Eventually player vs player combat is allowed and players can ransack each other’s cities, and build new cities, and trade, and pay for everything out the tooth with microtransactions.
War of Legends also happens to be Jagex’s first take on microtransactions in the form of Jcredits (The J presumably standing for Jagex), a move the company displayed interest in several years ago, but noted that doing so in Runescape would not be beneficial to the game’s economy. War of Legends does, of course, set up the possibility for future titles (IE: Stellar Dawn) to incorporate some form of payment system similar to this, however no word from Jagex has arrived.
And before the inevitable comparisons start, yes War of Legends looks suspiciously like Evony, minus being developed by a gold farming company, and advertising with breasts. Micro-payments are nothing new, and Jagex is just one of the many companies to dive into it this year, including Blizzard who many thought would never “sink so low” (their words, not mine.)
While logging into Lord of the Rings Online several days ago, I noticed the above warning on the main page. Turbine is banning anyone who exploits a bug with the skirmish system, without warning (no slap on the wrist) or appeal. They can tell who is doing it, and are watching for those who attempt to slip by.
This, alongside other examples I will get to, continues to make me ask: Why do MMOers need to be constantly reminded not to break the rules? Are we that exploitative, selfish, greedy, or ignorant that we have to be reminded that exploiting the system, cheating in some fashion, or otherwise break the rules is, in fact, against the rules and is punishable? Or does this small minority just have the mindset that they are invincible, that they won’t get caught. To me, this is akin to a police officer who greets with “now you know stealing is against the law, we will arrest you if we catch you doing it,” to everyone walking down the street, because a couple unruly teens in the neighborhood decided to ransack and beat the tar out of one of the older gentleman’s house down the street.
More after the break.
Jagex is one of the companies I don’t get to talk about much on MMO Fallout, mainly because their main MMO Runescape doesn’t break much ground, and the upcoming Mechscape/Stellar Dawn title has been under heavy wraps, barring a few breaking news pieces.
Enter Jagex’s Twitter: @OfficialJagex, which revealed today a new title: War of Legends. The game is touted as a free multiplayer strategy game, although it is yet to be known if this will be an MMO or not. It is completely possible that this is a title for Jagex’s partially free game service, FunOrb, although not much else is known on the matter at this time.
More on Jagex as it appears. War of Legends releases early 2010.
It always pains me to see an MMO fail before it is even launched. As is the case with Mechscape, Jagex’s upcoming Science Fiction MMO, a spiritual successor to Runescape, as CEO Mark Gerhard confirmed to Eurogamer today that the title is indeed canned.
In an interview with Mechscapeworld.com, Mark Gerhard had this to say:
“Sadly the game was not as complete as we wanted and we spent the first few months trying to “fix” the game where we could. About a month or so ago we took the decision to stop trying to “fix it” as we still wouldn’t have the game we wanted and the game certainly did not meet all the objectives and specifications established in the original game design document and therefore it would be better to go back to the founding principles and build the game we always wanted –Andrew [Gower] is now overseeing the project and working very closely with the team to build Stellar Dawn, not all was lost as we naturally have developed the game engine substantially over the last few years and the new designs benefits massively from this as well as a ton of experience within the team as to what works and what doesn’t. So whilst the content and a lot of the game play will change from what was previously built almost everything else will go straight back into Stellar Dawn.” – Mark Gerhard
With the death of one comes the rise of another. Innovations brought about by the production of Mechscape have gone towards the production of Stellar Dawn, a different yet somehow similar MMO to the little guy who never had a chance.
Hopefully Jagex has learned the same truth that Richard Garriot learned with Tabula Rasa: Just because you are an established name, does not guarantee all of your products will succeed.
On that note, it is good to see Jagex catching up to the rest of the mmo world in terms of features. The company just launched a name changing service, and is currently beta testing a feature to see a log of your character’s activity, including amount of time played (see WoW Armory)
All two of you who visited my message boards will see that I am not a big fan of being explicit with rules. In fact, there are three rules on the Orb Boards; Don’t incite a flame war, keep your account secure, and don’t be a spambot. Apart from those basic rules, I don’t think the rest needs to be explained. What it comes down to is: Anything you wouldn’t do in real life, don’t do here. Unless you make a living out of stealing people’s identities, in which case…still don’t do that here.
I often like to see Game Masters getting intuitive when it comes to removing problems that may not warrant a complete rule, or that may be such a special case that putting a rule would be far too generalizing. Say, for example, the issues Aion had when it launched last month. Players were clogging the servers by going away from keyboard so they could sleep, go to school, etc, without being logged off. Rather than pull out the ban-stick and taking things far over the edge, NCsoft quickly released a patch making such an exploit impossible.
The idea is that you don’t have to issue permabans to get a point across.
More on Aion, World of Warcraft, and more after the break.
Continue reading “With Scammers At Bay, The Players Will Play”
Jagex, makers of the browser based MMO Runescape, recently struck a marketing deal with Zapak to bring Runescape’s marketing and distribution to India. For those not familiar with Zapak, the website is a portal of web based games. The Indian version of Miniclip if you will.
But one bit of advertising caught my eye: On Zapak’s front page, the following image can be seen advertising Runescape:
I’m hoping this is Zapak’s artwork because, if it is, we can play it up to ignorance. Evony, formerly Civony, was widely panned for its continuing advertising campaign, featuring nothing but women with large breasts, a marketing campaign that spiraled down into just breasts. In fact Evony was voted the most despised game on the internet for just that same reason.
Then again, it could be worse. Jagex could be owned by a goldfarming-I said nothing. Maybe I’m just a little tender to anything that reminds me of Evony, considering I would estimate 60% of the spam comments I get are advertisements for this scam game.
Some Evony banners, and breasts, after the break.
MMO Fallout 