Sergey Titov’s scam gets busted.
Tag: Wild West Online
New Frontier Officially Leaves Early Access
New Frontier is the current iteration of the fraud racket formerly known as Wild West Online, and as of this week it is officially in release mode. MMO Fallout has been covering New Frontier since the original shell company 612 Games was denying involvement from the industry’s most relentless shyster Sergey Titov (spoiler: He was and is involved). New Frontier was developed by Free Reign Entertainment who were behind the godawful reskin releases-slash-commercial failures that were Romero’s Aftermath, Shattered Skies, and Burstfire.
Don’t give Free Reign Entertainment money.
[Video] Magnificent 5 Exclusive 105 Minute Game Preview
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.
Editorial: Wild West Online Doesn’t Care, Can’t Even Be Bothered Cleaning Its Forums
Wild West Online, the latest racket supported by the industry’s lead fraudster Sergey Titov, has landed itself in a shallow grave along with all of Titov’s other half-baked products. Given Titov’s modus operandi when it comes to releasing games, Wild West Online has been abandoned not even half-finished and plans are already underway to launch a spin off! Yes, everyone’s favorite Wild West shooter will be made free to play and fired back onto the internet in the form of Frontiers, the base game, and Magnificent 5, the battle royale title.
As of this writing, Wild West Online has one player online on Steam. As for WWO Partners Ltd, or whatever new shell company Titov has set up to continue this game’s existence, they’ve stopped keeping up a facade of caring. The forums have descended into a mess of spam and scam links, and of the six staff members listed on the forums, nobody has bothered posting in nearly two months while most haven’t even logged in since May or earlier.
Which is all par for the course for Wild West Online and its predecessors.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
Wild West Online Looks At Reboot Two Months Out Of Launch
A lot has happened since Wild West Online launched in May. The review score has boosted quite positively toward 61% from 37% overall, although population has dropped to a few dozen concurrent players. 612 Games as an entity has vanished as quickly as it showed up, with its name seemingly being scrubbed from everything related to Wild West Online and no indication that the entity still exists. Oh and DJ2 Entertainment plans on rebooting the game just two months after launch.
As posted on the official forums, Wild West Online is to receive a relaunch of sorts, one that will focus more on the rootn, tootn, shootn, cowboy gameplay that people seem to enjoy. The update will add on to the map, introduce new animal hunting, and drastically increase the number of vendors present in the world.
“What this “relaunch” plan means for you – our existing players ? to be honest it doesn’t really gonna affect you much – it will for sure will bring new players to the game, as well as add more stuff to do in a game, making user experience more in line with it being PVP shooter game.”
When asked about female characters, a feature promised for launch but still undelivered, they were referred to as a cosmetic feature of low priority.
“Female characters are coming, but with all honesty – this is pretty low on our priorities – it’s a cosmetic feature, not something that makes or breaks the game.”
Wild West Online To Offer Free Trial As Traffic Drops
Wild West Online is preparing to implement a free trial as its Steam numbers continue to drop. Having released barely a month ago, Wild West Online launched to a peak of 559 players on Steam and currently sits at less than 40 as of this writing with a 24 hour peak of 84.
“We’re adding free trial version of the game. It’ll be available both at our website as well as thru Steam on a game’s store page. Free trial version will let users to play game as a normal player, but with some restrictions.”
Trial accounts will be restricted to level 20 and will not be able to unlock achievements or receive rewards. Wild West Online currently sits at a 37% “mostly negative” rating on Steam.
(Source: Steam)
Wild West Online On PvE “They Have Literally Nothing To Do And Never Will”
Wild West Online launched to mostly negative reviews and a peak of 559 players on Steam that has since continually dwindled downward. In a post on the official forums, 612 Games is pitching ideas on overhauling certain aspects of the game including the faction systems and offering players activities that aren’t devoted to just shooting other people. In response to a player concern that the activities would take the game in a more player vs environment sort of direction, 612 responded that the game is not being developed to care about PvE players and never will be.
No, this is not what we want to do. We want game to be PVP game, but we also want to allow PVP players to enjoy other activities as well. Here’s what happening right now in a game – PVP players, who LIKES to shoot other players are sitting in a safety of towns until Town Capture or other event starts. Then they teleport to the event, shoot each other brains out and then retreat back to safety of towns.
Our goals is improve that part, not care about PVE players. Game is not for them. they have literally nothing to do in a game and they will never will. It’ll never be a PVE game.
More on the proposed changes can be found on the official forum.
(Source: Wild West Online)
[Community] Wild West Online, Another Bad Weekend, and Humble Pie On Refunds
Wild West Online might be the worst game of 2017, and its alpha weekend rollout might be the worst pitch to buy a game that I have seen since The WarZ did it years ago, but I have to give some kudos to the team. Let’s talk.
This weekend marked the second alpha test weekend for Wild West Online, a game that I have not shown much mercy to. The first weekend was written off as a technical test, an idea that I fully rejected at the time and will continue to do so. Once again, it doesn’t matter what WWO Partners calls the weekend. From the perspective of a customer, I don’t really care that all you were hoping to do was test server capacity and various other bugs. WWO offered two weekends to test the game before the guaranteed refund period passed, after which you’re out of luck and stuck with whatever the game gives you.
This is, regardless of what you or the community call the weekend, a trial period for the product, where you’re trying to convince people that the game will be worth their money. To present the offer of two whole alpha tests to figure out of the game is worth keeping your pre-order, and then to turn around and showcase that with much of the game’s content turned off, is at the very least mildly insulting. It’s like a restaurant offering free samples on its soup, but the sample itself is an uncooked piece of an onion that was part of the recipe. It’s a poor indicator of the full product and you start to wonder who in the kitchen decided to use this to gauge consumer interest.
The second alpha weekend did some polishing on the first, but didn’t really add anything new. As a result, I once again have to conclude that there isn’t enough in the game to warrant buying it at this stage, and that the preview weekend wasn’t enough to convince me that the game can’t go entirely south before launch.
I will give kudos to the team for holding up their end of the bargain this time. After seeing how little progress had been made with the second weekend, I submitted an email to Xsolla’s support with a simple message with my receipt code and game key and asked for a refund. I received it, barely a half hour later. I’ve offered my doubts on Xsolla and Wild West Online, especially after how the refund policy for WarZ was botched, but I will give credit where credit is due: They held up their end of the bargain and gave me my refund with no questions asked. Looking at the forums, it appears that other users also aren’t having an issue getting refunds as well and most are receiving responses within a half hour as well.
So kudos for that, Xsolla.
Beta Perspective: Wild West Online Is Hot Trash A La Mode (Hold the Ice Cream)
An empty wilderness, terrible sound quality, cheap animations, and unfinished assets everywhere with nothing to do but die and see your character irreversibly bricked. It may be in alpha, but Wild West Online is easily a fast contender for worst game of 2017, what is looking to be a shoddy title with questionable connections to one of the most incompetent developers in the gaming industry. Read this preview and stay far, far away.
One thing I’d like to ask about developer 612 Games: Who are they? Do they have a website? No. Does WWO Partners have a website? No. According to the Wild West Online website, the name is trademarked under the US Trademark system by WWO Partners and others. So I decided to do some digging and found exactly what I was looking for:
DJ2 Entertainment Inc. DBA WWO Partners
DJ2 Entertainment doing business as WWO Partners, or in layman’s terms WWO Partners isn’t a real company. Imagine DJ2 Entertainment is Adam Sandler in the Jack & Jill movie and WWO Partners is when he puts on a wig and pretends to be his own sister.
The announcement that Wild West Online is following the model of The War Z, another low effort shovelware title pushed out in connection with Sergey Titov, immediately red flagged this game in my book. Impressively, War Z also had such a refund. It wasn’t until after the refund period that OP Productions (or Hammerhead or whatever they’ve changed their name to these days) stopped pretending that it would live up to certain promises and started coming down hard on the invasive microtransactions. Let me also remind you that War Z was one of the first games to be involuntarily pulled from Steam over fraudulent advertising.
But this game has nothing to do with The War Z or Free Reign Entertainment, the company just by coincidence uses the same engine, had similar website/forum structure, utilizes the same payment processor, and creative director Stephan Bugaj happens to be friends with Sergey Titov on Facebook. DJ2 Entertainment just happened to have worked on Romero’s Aftermath, the equally low quality War Z clone pushed out after the original was abandoned, and was similarly abandoned in short time. Wild West Online’s PR is being handled by Vim Global who, you guessed it, also worked on Shattered Skies. And finally Wild West Online’s trademark was filed by Steven A. Bercu of Lime LLC, also responsible for filing trademarks for all of Titov’s other shell corporations under a slightly different forming of his name.
In case all of the companies I’m listing is confusing you, don’t worry. Sergey Titov and his Free Reign Entertainment crew go through LLCs like they’re candy, each new reboot of War Z was created by a completely new developer with absolutely no online corporate presence, that seems to exist in name only just like WWO Partners.
This weekend’s alpha test is supposed to sell you on Wild West Online, this much is obvious to everyone but the community manager and its tiny cabal of fans. It’s one of two alpha tests before the refund policy ends and you’re up poop creek without a paddle (unless you know how to dispute a transaction via Paypal or issue a chargeback), so rather than treat this like a stress test with minimal features, I’m going to preview Wild West Online like it’s already trying to show off for my money. Which it is.
Everything I need to know about Wild West Online, I learned in the first half hour. A wild west shooter, the game starts you out with a six shooter and no money in a safe zone town somewhere on the open world map. I went to the shop to find that I couldn’t buy anything, watched players run around town, and ran off toward adventure. About three minutes out of town, another player ran up and started a shootout. I lost. Upon respawning, I found that my gun, my medicine, and my ammunition were gone. My character was effectively dead and couldn’t even be deleted it seemed.
And that’s pretty much it. The graphics are nowhere near what we saw in earlier videos, the towns are barren of bystanders, and the world doesn’t have any NPCs roaming around. Your character doesn’t make any footstep sounds when running around, there are hundreds and hundreds of unfinished assets lying around, and the developers don’t seem to understand how skin tone works.
This is what black people looked like in the wild west.
I am hoping that Wild West Online isn’t being developed by the guys who made The War Z, and I say this only because it would mean that the team has become even less competent. While War Z’s alpha may have been a two-bit hack job, it at least masqueraded as what could potentially become a competent product. Wild West Online shows up to work with yesterday’s clothes and a half-empty bottle of whiskey, still drunk because it never stopped from the night before.
Wild West Online is an embarrassment, both in the idea that it is a paid alpha and that WWO Partners expects players to use this to judge whether or not they want to refund their purchase. And they can complain to unhappy customers all they want that this weekend was clearly a “technical test” and was deliberately gutted of content, it doesn’t change the fact that players have two weekends to decide whether or not the game is worth keeping their money in, and WWO has clearly squandered its first of two impressions.
[Community] Wild West Online, Everquest Next, and Guaranteed Refunds
I refuse to advocate or advertise Wild West Online’s preorder scheme, but I am going to tell you why I don’t trust buying into it and how it all comes back to Everquest Next, zombies, and Sergey Titov.
As one of the most incompetent and shady developers in this industry, MMO Fallout takes great caution when covering any game that even smells lightly of Titov’s touch. The rumors that he was involved in Wild West Online’s development, in fact just the idea that the game is using the engine that his company made, is enough to warrant intense scrutiny. If you’ve been following the game’s impending alpha launch, then you’re probably aware of the next “too good to be true” marketing trap: The guaranteed refund.
Let’s look at Wild West Online’s guaranteed refund policy, shall we?
So, up until the second phase of Alpha testing, we’ll let you refund your early bird purchase with no questions asked. This gives you a chance to play the Alpha yourself, and opt-out if you think the game won’t develop into the game you wanted. There are no restrictions on amount of time you have played, and there are no limits on how long you owned the game — so long as you decide before September 27, 2017 you will be granted a full refund.
Sounds great, right? No questions asked refunds for the first alpha wave, what could possibly go wrong? Well, let’s go back to Titov’s The War Z, which also had a no questions refund policy going into its alpha. The thing about getting rid of that policy so early in development is that developers tend to promise features that are coming if players just hold on a little longer, until after the refund window has passed. War Z waited until beta and launch day to implement some of its more egregious cash shop items, including the four hour respawn timer, making unpopular changes and refusing to implement features that it promised would be available for launch if players just held off on hitting that refund button.
Even more, let’s take a look at Daybreak Game Company and Everquest Next: Landmark, a game sold entirely on the premise that if you wanted a refund during alpha, you could have it with no questions asked. Of course, it wasn’t until after the refund window passed that Daybreak would announce the cancellation of Everquest Next, Landmark’s sole reason for existing, and basically doom the game to an early death while simultaneously telling players “hey, we offered you a refund window and you didn’t accept it. Tough luck.”
Steam has a refund window of two hours of gameplay, fourteen days after purchase, with exceptions in the case of developer malfeasance. Rather than buy into, and vicariously promote, players supporting a system that will present them with a completely unfinished game, one that has historically used a disguise of customer friendliness to hide a system that can be easily abused and then defended under the premise that the customer should have known that the product was incomplete, I’m going to go with this website’s running policy: Don’t preorder on a system that looks too good to be true.
And to wrap up, I don’t trust a refund system by Xsolla as far as I can throw the company (and if you haven’t figured out, I can’t throw things far). Once again, let’s go back to a name that finds itself on some of the industry’s sleaziest con jobs, and talk about the War Z’s guaranteed refunds. Back in 2012, War Z had a guaranteed refund policy which Xsolla promptly rendered moot by denying refunds. They pulled every excuse out of the book, from losing orders, not being able to find accounts, transitioning companies, and even quoting the terms of service saying that all sales are final.
The one that Hammerpoint copied from League of Legends.
So with Sergey Titov’s engine and Xsolla “all sales are final” handling the refunds, I’m going to do all I can and simply recommend that players don’t get caught up in the “guaranteed refunds” system like it is a safety net. It isn’t, and until you have the much more reliable safety of Valve overseeing the transaction, I recommend sitting it out on Wild West Online.
MMO Fallout 