Digital Homicide’s James Romine has filed a subpoena against Valve in Phoenix to discover the identities of what appears to be 100 anonymous users who had made statements about the company in the past. The documents were filed and the subpoena granted this week. The case has been assigned to Magistrate Judge Eileen Willett. Romine is representing himself and is demanding $18,000,000 with the nature of the suit being personal injury.
More information as it appears.
[Update: we have received notice from Digital Homicide that the issue below is due to an error in the Steam API, and not part of any deliberate decision by Valve. We apologize for the error.]
The game above is Daisy’s Sweet Time Cupcake Mania, one of numerous clone games up on Greenlight by esteemed developer Digital Homicide. This title, along with nearly a dozen others, were submitted on June 2nd to Greenlight only to be marked as incompatible on June 3rd.
Very quickly after, someone at Valve marked the game as compatible on June 6th. Evidently, the Valve employee who allowed the title is at odds with another, because the game was marked as incompatible again on the 9th, only to be marked compatible again the same day, to be marked and then unmarked again on the exact same day. The same thing happened on the 10th, the 15th, the 21st, the 27th, and again today on the 5th of July this cupcake game has been marked incompatible with Greenlight.
And, as always happens to be the case, the story gets stranger. This back and forth marking/demarking is present on virtually every single one of Digital Homicide’s current Greenlight games. In fact, in the time it has taken me to write this, someone at Valve has already re-marked the games as compatible.
Who are these two employees, locked in an endless struggle over the fate of Digital Homicide’s Greenlight titles? Are there people arguing over the Valve office coffee machine about the artistic merits of Not In My Crapper?
Just take a gander at the history of Daisy’s Sweet Time: Cupcake Mania and recognize that this is pretty standard for DigiHom’s games. I looked through a massive amount of other, random titles on Greenlight and the only other games with this history of back and forth have been removed.
MMO Fallout would like to issue a public service announcement to remind our viewers that the Steam Summer Sale begins June 23rd and runs through July 4th. In preparation for the sale, we’ve listed some tips to help you spend wisely.
If you have any tips of your own for Steam shopping, leave a comment in the box below and let us know.
Developer Juvty Worlds has announced that their open world sandbox MMO Wild Terra has successfully been voted on by the Steam Greenlight community. Juvty thanks the nearly six thousand users who voted to pass the title, bringing it to the top 5 voted games and winning the approval from Valve.
With all of the recent hubbub over developers fraudulently buying votes and reviews, it’s good to see a small developer that can be trusted. I’ve had a few chances here and there to play Wild Terra and have found the game to be very enjoyable.
More coverage of Wild Terra to come.
(Source: Juvty Worlds press release)
In the world of Steam and shady developers, no name has drawn quite as much hatred from the gaming public like Digital Homicide. Not unlike similar personalities including Uwe Boll, Digital Homicide’s notoriety is only superseded by the fact that the perception of its following is much higher than the real numbers. What it does have, however, is the ability to flip Unity engine assets and turn those into cookie cutter games that are quickly becoming parodies of themselves.
Fast forward to Steam Greenlight, a service that Digital Homicide has flooded with dozens of titles. As of this publishing, the company has more than forty titles in its Greenlight section. You read that correctly, more than forty. In their rush to clutter the service with as many titles as possible, Digital Homicide has resorted to putting out entire series of games that appear to be quite literally the exact same game but with different stock images.
To the left is Daisy’s Sweet Time: Cupcake Mania 3. It is identical to the other two iterations of the game plastered on Greenlight, and functionally it is also identical to Merle Wizard Extraordinaire #1, 2, and 3, all posted on the exact same day. Those games, in turn, are identical down to the placement of enemies, to Sarah to the Rescue, and its four sequels. Eleven games, all posted to Steam on the same day, all completely identical except for the art. As of this posting, there are more than a dozen Space Inavders clones up on Greenlight through Digital Homicide.
And the list goes on. Games that are reskins of other Digital Homicide games, sequels upon sequels that are the exact same title coming out at the same time as the original, functionally identical except for slight changes in art.
Because I am a veritable soothsayer of the gaming industry, I started this piece yesterday to convey the message that Valve should do its job and strike these games down. As so happens in the magical box that is the WordPress draft folder, my wish was granted and Valve has struck down many of Digital Homicide’s current Greenlight games.
If you head over to their workshop, you’ll notice that a good two dozen of Digital Homicide’s games have been blackmarked by Valve as “incompatible with Greenlight.” Whether or not this fully disqualifies titles for release is up for debate, however Valve has clearly shown their disapproval for Digital Homicide’s release tactics.
Overall, 22 of Digital Homicide’s games have been slapped with an incompatible tag. Despite being labeled as incompatible, Wyatt Derp 2 is still available for purchase. Granted, the game was made available before Valve tagged the title, so the future of Digital Homicide’s presence on Steam is certainly in question.
MMO Fallout will update with more information as it becomes available.
It’s been ten years since Valve announced Half Life 2: Episode 3 and the internet is pretty much convinced that the game will never be made. Originally conceived back when episodic gaming was nowhere near as prevalent as it is in this post-Telltale world, Valve hoped that splitting one giant game (Half Life 3) into three parts and releasing them episodically would shorten the wait between releases.
The idea worked, at the start. Half Life 2 launched November 2004 with Lost Coast bridging the gap in October 2005, Episode 1 in June 2006 and Episode 2 in October 2007. It was a big change from the wait between Half Life 1 and 2, a problematic development cycle that saw a six year wait.
But even the wait between Half Life and Half Life 2 seems like small beans compared to the ten year wait that players have endured just for the small confirmation that Valve is even working on the title. In that time, Steam has grown to become a platform more profitable than Google. We’ve seen Valve launch several titles, a lucrative skin market for multiple games, mold their games for eSports, run numerous high profile tournaments, launch a hardware brand, VR, and more.
And yet, despite this massive success, the company refuses to comment on Half Life.
The lack of information coming from Valve has only fueled the speculation on why Half Life 3 hasn’t been fully announced. Is it because they are making too much money elsewhere? Because they waited too long and believe that the game missed its mark? Or because they are waiting for major engine updates to Source? Or because they’re figuring out a way to add microtransactions to a single player game?
Either way, we’re looking at the tenth anniversary since Valve announced the next Half Life 2 game with just as much information as we had ten years ago.
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.
(Editor’s Note: The article incorrectly stated incorrectly that the ban on associated accounts lasted three months. The ban on the phone number itself lasts three months, the ban on accounts is permanent. Thank you to Matt in the comments for correcting our mistake.)
Imagine a world where cheaters use burner phones to mask the identities of their individual Steam accounts, not unlike drug dealers, because just such a scenario could become more prevalent with a recent policy change at Valve.
Presently, if you are caught cheating in a VAC-protected game you are banned from VAC-enabled servers on that game. But what is stopping a person from buying Counter Strike: Global Offensive when it goes on sale for fifty cents (or whatever low price it hits during seasonal sales) and stocking up on 10+ accounts? Or Team Fortress 2 which is free to play? Nothing, and it is a noticeable problem in both titles.
Valve is taking on the issue two-fold: The first is to institute a matchmaking system for Counter Strike: GO that only links players whose accounts have phone numbers attached for two-factor authentication. The second is to ban any Steam account associated with that phone number if one of the accounts cheats. The bans on associated phone numbers lasts for three months, during which the number cannot be applied to any other account.
The benefit is that it is effectively impossible to buy a new phone only to find out too late that the guy who held the number before you was VAC-banned and still on probation.
(Source: Engadget)
Valve has issued a warning to server owners in Counter Strike: Global Offensive that modifications that falsify player inventories are not allowed and must be removed before “further action is taken.” Since Valve’s games are heavily modifiable, players in the community quickly figured out methods to alter servers in order to provide players with weapon skins, items, and other goodies normally only accessible through random drops, lockboxes, and through the paid campaign modes.
The blog post warns that further action will be taken to servers that do not comply with these rules.
We will continue to monitor the players experience on community servers, and may reevaluate if further actions need to be taken to ensure that server operators comply with the request above.
A few servers are already reporting bans via their Game Server Login Token with lengths of two decades. For the unaware, Counter Strike requires game servers to register a GSLT via a persistent account in order to accept players that aren’t on the same network. A new Steam account with a new qualifying phone number is required to open a new GSLT account.
(Source: Counter Strike: GO)
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