News – MMO Fallout

First up the big news is that RuneScape is getting a new skill. Archaeology will see players digging up fossils and all sorts of relics and powerful objects that have been lost to time. Archaeology is set to hit in January 2020. Second up on the list is an update to player owned farms, bringing animal husbandry to the land out of time where players will be able to raise, trade, and breed dinosaurs. The ranch will be available by the end of the year. Third up is a series of questlines and lore set to hit RuneScape sometime in 2020.

RuneScape Mobile will go live for all members in early access for all members this year along with an overhauled interface to really put that phone to use.

Over on the Old School side, the Morytania expansion will see more of the vampire world being opened up to players including new quests and the ultimate showdown against the big baddie Lord Drakan himself. The Morytania expansion hits in early 2020. Before then, players will be able to take part in seasonal leagues starting in November 14. These temporary leagues will see players tackling ironman content on the continent of Zeah in return for rewards in the main game.

Phil Mansell, Jagex CEO, was quoted:

“Revealing and sharing our plans for future content is always exciting and this year’s keynotes brought blockbuster news, including our headline new Archaeology skill in RuneScape, Early Access coming to RuneScape Mobile, and Old School’s new Morytania Expansion. The announcements showcase our ongoing commitment to creating significant and meaningful content for RuneScape and Old School, and it was truly rewarding to see the reaction from our players in person and on the live stream.”

Source: Jagex press release

Steam Library Beta Shows Life After Clickbait Spam

The new visual update for Steam is here! Well the beta is, anyhow. You can download the beta by going to your settings and opting into the beta branch of the Steam client. It’s very simple and doesn’t require any external downloads unlike the previous trick to get ahold of the early version.

The new Steam is all about ease of use. Click on any game and you’ll see all sorts of information provided by the developer. See your achievements, your trading cards, DLC releases, timed events. Anything your heart desires and more that you might have had to navigate through multiple windows to find before is now in one easy place. What isn’t there? The clickbait spam.

One big complaint that users have had of the Steam News section for each game is that Valve thought people really wanted to see clickbait spam from bloggers like Rock, Paper, Shotgun, PC Gamer, etc. It’s basically a glorified RSS feed that pulls stories based on certain websites that Valve trusts (for some reason) tagging their articles with the games in question. The result? An embarrassing deluge of articles that have little if anything to do with the game they are tagged in.

Well those of you unhappy with Valve’s handling of the Steam News will be glad to know that the clickbait spam newsfeed is officially gone as of the new library. It will be interesting to see how the traffic to the websites is affected once they are no longer getting free advertising on a massive platform for their clickbait.

Bad Press: Saudi Arabia Did Not Ban 47 Games Over Child Suicides

If you’ve been reading the news this week, you may have come across a story that the Saudi General Commission for Audio-Visual Media has banned a list of 47 video games following the suicide deaths of a 13-year old girl and 12-year old boy. You might be more confused by the fact that the two were playing the “Blue Whale” social media game and not a video game at all, let alone one on the list of banned titles. The news piece caught me by surprise as I was fairly certain that I had read about games like Yo Kai Watch and Okami being banned in Saudi Arabia years ago.

Your confusion would be well founded, because much like the Blue Whale game itself, this appears to be a case of fake news with patient zero as none other than the Associated Press. Other than the AP’s claim that the ban list was associated with the Blue Whale Game, there has been no confirmation and the AP article even admits that the agency did not specify a connection. If you try to check local Saudi news on a new video game ban wave, you won’t find anything.

Thankfully the crack investigative team at MMO Fallout was able to get their hands on a list of prohibited games dating back to June 2017, showing that not only is the AP report incorrect, but that the conclusion it leads to is rather easily fact checked. Through the power of the Web Archive (please excuse the slow servers), you can view the list of prohibited titles published in June 2017. The list includes numerous titles that are on the current list: Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil 6, Yo Kai Watch, God of War, Assassin’s Creed, etc.

Unfortunately the web archive only goes back to 2017 for the Saudi website, but it is evidence enough that the AP’s report on the General Commission is inaccurate. MMO Fallout is not the first to bring this to light, as Ubisoft’s head of communications and localization for the Middle East took to Twitter to call out the Associated Press and request a retraction on the article. The AP report is still up as of this publishing, as are most of the websites that source their news stories from the AP.

One inaccurate article from @AP has caused a heap of mess externally and internally.

Saudi has not issued a banning of 47 games on Monday. These are legacy banned titles.

I beg you AP, please remove the article and clarify the mistake. It’s insane to see (cont.)…

— Malek ???? ? (@malekawt) July 17, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Among the press that carried this coverage, Nick Santangelo over at IGN pointed out that there are no secondary sources for the AP’s claim. Games Industry has fully retracted their article. None of the other press websites at this time appear to have altered or retracted their coverage.

Column How Reddit Once Again Bamboozled the Media

I have a distinct advantage over traditional media with MMO Fallout; I don’t run ads, I don’t have sponsors, and I have given minimal thought to opening a Patreon. As an entity, I am completely unaccountable for boosting views to their maximum potential, and as a result I enjoy the unique trait of not being beholden to being the first to publish a breaking story. I do try to keep the news relevant, but at least I have the time to do some fact checking.

Which leads me to this week’s failure to communicate: A number of news websites are running retractions and corrections after it was revealed that stories on Reddit are not entirely trustworthy. A user in the Star Citizen community claimed that he had managed to obtain a refund in excess of $45,000, in the form of three $15,000 refunds for his clan, and that the process had been a "nightmare." This got picked up by a number of websites, I won’t be calling them out because that’s not the point of this article.

So let’s go through the piece and I’ll offer my thought process that came to ignoring this news piece:

"It was a nightmare getting the refund, we are a commercial org and pooled the money to buy the completionist packages, and used a corporate card to buy them, so we had major issues with getting refunded to the same card, paypal and then providing ID. Total it took about 5 weeks to get sorted. A lot of time was spent trying to explain the situation to some woman called "Schala" and just getting the same answers copied and pasted backwards and forwards, they definitely try to delay you as much as possible in the hope you’ll forget or give up."

First let’s get out of the way that this is a first party Reddit story and therefore automatically less credible than your average "Zombie Elvis Lives in Reno" story on the Enquirer (he still performs in Vegas as a member of the Blue Man Group, as anyone knows). On policy, I don’t trust anything that is posted as a story on Reddit, even if the person has "evidence" in the form of easily doctored screenshots and gifs, and doubly so if said poster claims it’s "impossible" to fake navigating a website in a video. It is possible, and it’s very easy.

I also had trouble believing the part of the story that they were trying to delay as much as possible in the hopes that the issue would be forgotten or that he would give up. I don’t think any company thinks that a customer is just going to give up on nearly fifty grand.

Now I don’t claim to be a licensed journalist with a fancy journalism degree, but I know enough from experience and from watching all three seasons of The Newsroom to know that stories must be verified before they are printed. In the thread, another moderator independently verified the refund claims, a factor that isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on. You’re verifying an anonymous source with another anonymous source.

So the proper thing to do would be to contact Cloud Imperium Games for confirmation which evidently nobody did before rushing this story to print. CIG has come out since then and stated that the refund was more along the lines of $330 and that the refund was handled smoothly and without issues, also noting that most of the story regarding delays was completely fabricated.

And in case you had any remaining doubts, the user subsequently deleted his account. Case closed. I’m hesitant to attribute the story to "haters" as some in the Star Citizen community have, if anything this is a case of an attention-grabbing headline driving the news on the backs of "well we did say it was just an allegation." And judging by the number of comments on individual articles, it was a success.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

ArcheAge 4.0: All The News That’s Fit To Print

ArcheAge 4.0 hits PC in the fourth quarter this year, and Trion Worlds has released a fact list showcasing some of the features coming to the titular MMO. More information will be coming at a later date, however Trion Worlds has showcased the following new features coming with the next big version update:

20 player naval battleground: ArcheAge’s first PvP naval battleground. Take your crew of five and go up against three other crews. Naval Battlegrounds promise new cross-server arenas as well as new rewards.
Open world raid finder: Exactly as it sounds, find or advertise your raid.
Simplified gem system: Streamlined lunagem system purported to be more user friendly.
Crafting updates: A new crafting tutorial quest line, new crafting interface, and specialization.

(Source: Trion Worlds press release)

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