Here at MMO Fallout, we strive to constantly bring you the most exciting content we can find on the internet. In lieu of that, today we have for you nearly an hour and forty five minutes of exclusive gameplay footage from Magnificent 5, the award winning battle royale spinoff title from the award winning Wild West Online.
Strap into your seats and have your secretary hold all calls, because you’re going to want to leave.
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.
Fraudster:
2a: a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor;
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I actually get a lot of criticism when it comes to Crowdfunding Fraudsters for apparently being too lenient on the subjects. I take a lot of time to carefully parse my statements so that we’re not making any assumptions on motivation or things that can’t be proven outright, and quite a few people take that as me trying to play devil’s advocate for what they see as an obviously shady campaign. I understand where they’re coming form, and on behalf of protecting my own legal liabilities, I humbly disagree.
Now this campaign, on the other hand, nobody’s getting sunburn with all of the shadiness present.
I introduce you to the Marvel Heroes Rebirth, an Indiegogo campaign seeking $450,000 on a promise that it can’t keep for the sale of a property that they haven’t secured the rights for. It may look like your run of the mill predatory “jump on the nostalgia” sort of campaign that we’ve seen to revive old games or port them onto new systems either without the intention of or without the attempt to secure the rights from those who hold them, but if you shovel away the first layer we come upon a whole world of oddities. But more on that later.
I’ll start with the opening statement which reads like it was written by a timeshare salesman.
A sinister villain has shut down an iconic game. Fans are outraged. There is no relief in sight. Where is the hero destined to save the day and ease their suffering??? Oh, it’s you! We have an opportunity to save a great game that would otherwise be destined for the great void. There will be challenges and risks, but a great reward for those brave enough to help save the Marvel Heroes game platform. Help us save this game making it something better, stronger and faster than before.
The developer forming up to save Marvel Heroes is called Eldermage Studios, and if you head to their website it looks pretty independent gamey, very much focused around the proposition to rebirth Marvel Heroes anew. Do they have any credentials? No, but they’re hiring or they would be I suppose if the “Join Us” led to a working link. A company like this has to have some sort of founder, big industry guy, some sort of Richard Garriot-type philanthropist who really likes Marvel. I’ll even take a nerd with no programming skills but a lot of love for nostalgia who really liked Everquest back in the day.
Now $450 grand may seem like peanuts compared to the kind of money you would expect to need to license and host Marvel Heroes, and this campaign has heard your concerns and wants you to know that there is nothing to worry about since this pitch will very likely fail miserably.
There’s the insurance statement. But it’s not all gloom and doom because the Copyright Office is reviewing a proposal that may exempt abandoned MMOs from the DMCA protection, which would allow Eldermage to legally operate the game even without Disney’s approval.
In which case the pledges would be useless as you either wouldn’t be legally allowed to make those alterations into the game code or it would still be illegal for you to profit off of operating Marvel Heroes. Alternately, they might strip out all of the Marvel characters and replace them with public domain heroes which wouldn’t actually be that bad of an idea. Frankly I’d love to see a Diablo-style game using mostly golden-age heroes and it’d be a great way to bring them back to the public eye. You might have something going here.
And Eldermage does explain what the money is going towards:
To achieve our plan, we are currently seeking a minimum of $450k – $900k to acquire the intellectual property, cover due diligence and legal fees, procure necessary third-party support to host the rebranded game, and restore the game to use. Yes, this is a large expense but much less than the original tens of millions of dollars used to develop and operate the platform.
A smart business decision that worked out great for Gamersfirst with All Points Bulletin, a $100 million engine that was sold for pennies on the dollar when Realtime Worlds went bankrupt and became profitable under the new company.
Now I could talk all day about the empty promises and nostalgia baiting that accompany these campaigns all day, but I wanna know: Who is the face behind Elder Mage? Unfortunately there is no staff page and the Elder Mage domain was registered by a name hiding company in Scottsdale Arizona. Sorry, I guess that’s the end of our trip! All we really have to go on is this bit about a 501c(3) organization called Paragon Institute.
Paragon Institute is a 501(c)(3) educational, non-profit; our goal is to establish ElderMage Studios as a learning lab to partner experienced professionals with aspiring game developers to help them gain the skills and hands-on experience necessary to work in the field. This may include time spent supporting or enhancing existing titles to create entirely new ones. A secondary mission is to preserve games that are no longer supported so that those who have licensed them may continue using them and so others may learn from them.
When you go to Paragon Institute’s website, you get a landing page for Paragon Academy which appears to be ticking down to something in 386 days, it looks like the academy is relaunching or something. What really interested me was that this Institute has a physical location in Cary, North Carolina and frankly physical location is basically like filling your legitimacy pitcher halfway from the get go. So I decided to just give the address a perusal in Google Maps to see the grandeur of this institute.
It’s a cul-de-sac, and I’m 99% certain that Google didn’t mess up the address, and I’m not all that worried about privacy because it is literally on the contact page for the Institute’s website.
So I continued to check out the website to see its legitimacy because if the Institute is indeed hosted out of some dude’s house, then the rolling photos on the website depicting smiling young people in classroom settings are total nonsense. In fact, I’m not in the greatest of moods and there are only three images rotating on the website, so let’s check those out: I did a quick backtracing on the Googles and it looks like this, this, and this, were creatively lifted and slightly modified from here, here, and here.
So maybe I’m being unnecessarily paranoid. Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t find anything, despite being a seasoned master of Google-fu, and this institute looks like a diploma mill. There isn’t enough information, let’s keep searching. There are three links on the “Students, Faculty, and Staff” page. The student/staff portal leads to the Office homepage, the Portal registration leads to an Office account creation page, and the page for former Chadwick students leads to a non-existent website.
And what is Chadwick University? It’s a diploma mill founded by one Lloyd Clayton Jr., whose credentials need no further introduction than his degree in holistic massage (this is a joke, he doesn’t actually claim to have such a degree). Chadwick University was not accredited and is considered an illegal supplier of degrees in the state of Texas (among others), it offered degrees based on “life experience” and basically just shut down in 2007 with Clayton no longer answering the phone. Chadwick U was accredited by the non-recognized World Association of Universities and Colleges, whose founder Maxine Asher genuinely believed to have discovered the lost city of Atlantis thanks in part to her psychic abilities, however her research was allegedly suppressed by the “Jews and Catholics.” Asher ran her own diploma mill fraud racket and sadly passed away in 2016.
But here you have Paragon Institute, a magical academy run from a cul-de-sac somehow linked to a defunct diploma mill accredited by a defunct diploma mill founded by a psychic who discovered Atlantis, and this is the company that wants to revive Marvel Heroes if only the public will give them lots and lots of money.
Buzzfile lists Paragon’s website as virtucorp, a website that no longer exists but through the power of Web Archive appears to have been filled with lorem ipsum gibberish.
Paragon Inc’s founder and only known employee Willis Adkins is currently running for a Congress seat in North Carolina’s 2nd District. According to its 501c(3) filings, Paragon Institute Inc used to go under the name “American Southern University Inc” and for years did business under names like “SGUS Academy,” “American Institute of Independent Studies,” “ASU Press,” “Miskatonic Institute,” and “American Center for Professional Studies.” MMO Fallout could not procure any web presence, addresses, or information for any of these names. Paragon Institute has filed a 990-N each year, a card for organizations whose claimed gross receipts are less than $50 thousand. As such, we were unable to procure standard public tax records which might include more information about the organization.
But the Marvel Heroes revival has a flexible goal of $450,000 meaning that even if nobody else contributes, they’ll still be able to keep that $305 in dosh that six backers put in.
MechDefender is a recently released game by developer Elite Games Ltd, Vadim Starygin, and one that currently has zero concurrent players, a factor that probably won’t change much so long as Elite Games refuses to give keys to the customers who purchased them. You see, MechDefender was partnered with the OtakuMaker Greenlight Bundle, a Steam bundle where players are given the ability to buy games before they are greenlit on Steam at a major discount in return for a key once the game is approved and on the store (this is not a Valve-sanctioned bundle).
Except that while MechDefender was successfully Greenlit, the developer has no intention of actually giving players keys. Why? Despite no doubt knowing how much money he’d be making from each sale, the developer decided after already taking part that it just wasn’t enough.
So I`m about to close this topic. I`ll give out a few keys to play&test in next topic after patch.
Here is bottom line of this disccusion:
1) At this moment I do not have money from “this bundle”.
2) If you wanna get your four cents back – ask for refund at place where you “spend” your cents.
So the developer sold copies of his game cheap in order to get it approved through Steam Greenlight, and then reneged and has decided that the price is too cheap and the buyers won’t be getting their copies. Normally MMO Fallout takes a position of presuming incompetence over malice, but this practice is an outright scam, one that were it to be pursued in a western court would most definitely result in Elite Games on the losing end.
But Elite Games will happily provide a refund, which it has valued at 4 cents.
And, no, I didnt get any ‘real money’. I would love to give it back. It is around 4 cents per copy. At this point we trying to work out a solution. Any suggestion is welcome.
The developer goes on in the linked thread to begin awkwardly going through the play histories of people criticizing his business decision, questioning their play styles and making conclusions to not give them keys based off of perceived motivations which, as far as consumer law goes, is none of his business.
Alright, alright, he’ll send out the keys. But only to people who have been nice…
Since MechDefender is moving towards release candidate.
Lets try first round of keys? To nice ppl – who wasnt calling me names or put in his??????list.
But you people aren’t real customers in his eyes…
“Just wanna add – you are not my customer. I dont consider you a customer – even if you spend four cents and demanding a gift a 5$ value…”
“…I meant not you personaly – but all users who want copy for four cents. They are not customers – including or excluding you – depens on your deeds. I did lost count and stuff.”
And don’t think you scumbag customers thinking you’re entitled to a product just because it was sold to you are going to get this deal again in the future, because you won’t.
And for other games – I can only do this with MechDefender. You have to meet me at half-way.
If you dont like this plan, and insist on more games for four cents – that will not happen. Ask for refund.
A quick glance at the forums shows a familiar field of banned accounts that has become so common with developers engaged in shady practices. While Elite Games has sworn off of Otaku bundles going forward, perhaps it is best for consumers to keep in mind exactly how Starygin feels about his customers, or whatever he calls them because they aren’t customers in his eyes.
Elite Games was founded by Russian developer Vadim Starygin and his wife Tatiana Budarina. The company operates out of Kaliningrad and has been releasing titles for nearly ten years.
Action Henk would rather you pirate their games than support shady resellers like G2A, one of the game’s two programmers posted on Reddit following last week’s controversial statements over the key reseller. Consistently the ire of developers, G2A came to attention once again last week after allegations surfaced that the service sold $450 thousand in stolen keys from developer Tiny Build.
This G2a thing goes beyond Hearthstone. I’m a game developer with a game on steam and please just torrent my game instead of supporting shady resellers, I’ll even give you the download link. I understand people aren’t always able or willing to pay full price for a game, but seeing people play my game is the most important thing to me. Just torrent it instead of putting money in the wrong hands.
G2A is a grey market key reseller that allows users to sell cd keys to games that they no longer want. Theoretically, the service exists as a digital Ebay of sorts, especially relevant since Ebay forbids the sale of virtual items. In practice, the service has become a haven for criminals using stolen credit cards to buy keys in massive quantities to sell cheap. The cards are eventually reversed, leaving the developer with nothing and the thief with all of the profits.
It has been difficult to divorce G2A from the gaming community since the company has played its hand by sponsoring many of the top game streamers, and paying quite well apparently.
Developers have attempted in the past to find a way to push customers away from G2A, with larger developers spending the resources to revoke fraudulent keys. For smaller developers like Tiny Build, such a process is prohibitively expensive.
(Source: Reddit)
I have no idea if ZombieRush is a good game, its Steam page would definitely seem to imply so despite the top two most helpful reviews being overwhelmingly negative.
The most recent review (as of this publishing) is by user tyXYDelcatQU, who I will call Ty for the foreseeable future. I looked into Ty’s account and he appears to be playing Electric Zombies. Ty has three reviews for the 44 products in his account, two of which are exactly the same: “Very simple, straightforward gameplay but highly entertaining. 9/10.” All three games have 3.9-4.1 hours invested in them.
But whoever said lacking creativity was a crime? Let’s go down to #2, user yXSSkittJH, who I will be referring to as Skitt. Now Skitt has three reviews out of 44 games in their library and has reviewed ZombieRush, BaseSquad 49, and The Culling of the Cows, the same three games as Ty above with identical reviews on two games. Skitt was also playing Electric Zombies at the time of this publishing.
Alright, two could still be a coincidence. Let’s look at the following set of reviews to see if there is a correlation.
There appear to be around 200 fake reviews in a row, and I know because I counted all of them, all by accounts with the same three games, same review structure, same comments in many cases (reviewing two games exactly the same and then reviewing Culling of the Cows as ‘gg’). Like every instance of mass production, the reviews come in blocks. Thirty reviews in a row from accounts with 44 games and 3 reviews, followed by another fifty of accounts with 50 games and 4 reviews.
So it’s obvious that Zombie Rush is buying reviews in bulk, thinking that the average consumer is too stupid to notice hundreds of positive, one line reviews written by accounts with generated names and the same number of games/reviews, all playing the same games.
ZombieRush was developed by Arthur Kariev.
Battlefield 1 is making big headlines and with E3 just days away, it only makes sense that some unscrupulous individuals are piggybacking on the hype to defraud users. According to reports popping up, the URL http://www.battlefieldbeta.com has popped up, among others, with fake signup links that steal your EA username and password.
MMO Fallout traced the domain back to Whoisguard, a service in Panama that allows for anonymous domain registration and, unsurprisingly, is used to hide the identity of people engaged in fraudulent and criminal activity. As always, users should remain vigilant when browsing the net and pay attention to the domain when deciding where to enter your credentials.
Trion Worlds has spent the better part of the past six or so months attempting to slowly detoxify the very virulent community whose actions they have actively coddled and defended as ‘in the spirit of the game,’ and that shift in management has come to a head once again with Trion reversing a trade scam against a high profile streamer during a charity event. The streamer was duped into trading expensive equipment to an imposter account during a charity stream for Doctors Without Borders, after which Trion reversed the trade and banned the imposter account.
Impersonating someone else, even if it’s by name, to separate someone from their hard earned goods is not allowed and has not been allowed in ArcheAge. In the past, there have been situations where a player impersonated another player and, in those situations, our Customer Service team has reversed the outcome of the scam no matter if it was items or gold.
Some of the anger seems to stem from the fact that the impersonation rule, while it has always existed, has admittedly not been publicized and may not even have been properly enforced until this recent incident. The majority of it, however, is coming from the ‘hardcore’ end of the community who view the idea of impersonating another player to defraud someone as fair game, with the usual attitude of ‘the victim deserved it for being stupid.’
We realize that this policy has not been made public in the past, but this high profile incident has made us realize that we need to publicly acknowledge and reinforce our stance on name impersonation within the game. This is not a new policy that was made simply for this stream — this is a policy that we as a company have had for the past year and beyond, and it is a policy that is referenced within our Terms of Use (11. Code of Conduct, Rule A.)
There are numerous false reports circulating that the rule did not exist before this event, and MMO Fallout has been able to confirm via archives of the terms of service that the rule has always been in place. Regardless of certain members of the community using wordplay, unaffiliated rules, and technical trickery as justification, it objectively was not allowed, even with ArcheAge’s lax stance on scams. The rule explicitly forbids creating a character with a name “belonging to another person with the intent to impersonate that person, including without limitation a “Game Master” or any other employee or agent of Trion.”
Still, there is plenty of valid criticism towards Trion Worlds for not bringing this rule to light until it happened to a high profile player, regardless of the fact that it existed prior to this incident.
(Source: ArcheAge)
Today marked the day that Valve took a leap forward for the cause of customer service and announced that players would be allowed to return their games, no questions asked, within two weeks or two hours of game time, whichever comes first. There are certain caveats to the deal on what can be returned and what can’t, but as far as the crucial details go, two weeks or two hours is all you really need to know.
Before I start to get critical, I’d like to point out that I have been calling for a refund system on Steam for years, as their “all sales final” policy has been more and more problematic when coupled with their laissez faire policy on curation allowing broken games to make their way into the store space. Valve already does what it can to deny these games front page coverage, but this policy will be the silver bullet to possibly knock specific developers off of Steam forever. You know the ones I mean.
I also don’t see this as a big problem for independent developers putting out cheap games at low prices. As has been echoed by other voices on the web, I feel that anyone who would buy a short indie game to play it for an hour or so and then refund it wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of buying it in the first place, and would likely pirate it. The only measurable notice that the dev will see are the sales going up, and then slightly coming down.
One are where I do see this having a harmful effect on a legitimate developer is in the realm of review bombing, an issue that is already prevalent on free to play and low cost items, but will now be easier if groups of people can buy easily buy a game, bring the overall rating down, and then all request a refund and walk out without a loss of their own. Review bombing is a problem as it is.
For PC gamers, this system is great. The small demo or benchmark download is, with some exception, just about extinct, and with the variety of PC builds available, there is no way of knowing for sure if a game will run on your system without forking over the sixty bucks and praying. Additionally, it also knocks out a good source of income for developers releasing poor quality games and cashing in before word of mouth spreads.
Which brings me full circle to the point of this article, Valve has put a bullet in the head of fly by night developers peddling their wares on Steam. Not only do they struggle to find an audience, thanks to a lack of presence on the main page, but now their source of income (ill informed customers) has been cut off at the neck.
I’ll end this by recommending that you don’t assume that every developer that has concerns about the system is hiding bad intentions, just as well that any customer who applauds the system is just looking for some easy free games. Valve’s lack of specificity and reminder that each refund is handled case by case means that we’ll need to wait until the system is actually used to see where it is ripe for abuse, and where Valve draws the line.
Overall, this system is a major leap forward for Valve as a company and Steam as a platform.
Steam Early Access has seen a lot of criticism, from the fact that most games don’t see completion, to the sale of titles that are at best misleading and at worst engaging in outright fraud. It has also become the source of indie devs putting games up for sale only to engage with the community for a few months before disappearing with whatever money they had managed to gain in that time frame. Customers, on the other hand, generally have no recourse if their purchase turns out to be for nothing.
Such is the case again with Into The War, developed and abandoned by the now absent Small Town Studios. According to Steam reviews, the servers for Into the War haven’t been operational going back to early April, possibly even further. The developer’s website is offline, and their social media has gone silent.
In addition, the game’s forum currently contain a sticky telling players to not just avoid buying the game, but to report it to Steam (typos left intact).
On the store page you will see a Flag icon at the right side of the page. Use it to report the game and describe it as abandoned by the developers.(use the “Broken” option) and it’s nothing more than a scam now, with the devs running away, deleting their site and social media presence, while the game remains unplayable.
Despite the servers being offline and the developer unreachable, the game is still up for sale as of this publishing for $4.99. Those who bought the game may have a glimmer of hope, as Valve has issued refunds for other early access games abandoned by their developers and left in a broken state.
For critics of Early Access, this is just another example in an ongoing demand for more curation on the Steam platform.
(Source: Steam)
MMO Fallout 
