Evony (formerly known as Civony) have been distributing the following email and a few sites have published it. As you can see it makes defamatory accusations against my good name.
From: Valerie <valerie@evony.com>
Date: Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 11:17 PM
Subject: Update from Evony
To:
Dear Evony Supporter,
As you may have heard, Evony has recently been the victim of malicious
and libelous attacks by a UK blogger by the name of Bruce Everiss.
Through your previous online outreach efforts in support of Evony, we
know you share our commitment to the unique experience we have
developed for our fans and we wanted to reach out to you directly with
an update on the latest developments regarding these libelous
allegations.
Despite the numerous fraudulent statements made by Mr. Everiss to
date, we have tried for several weeks to avoid taking our grievances
into the legal courts, hoping instead to persuade Everiss to come
clean and stop his online campaign of untruths and outright falsities.
Unfortunately, he has ignored our requests.
As fans of Evony, you know better than most, that these attacks have
caused significant damage to our brand and the gaming experience for
Evony’s millions of users and fans around the world.
Unfortunately, we have been unable to reach a solution with Mr.
Everiss and in the coming days our legal team will be proceeding on
multiple fronts against the libelous assaults that been have leveled
against our company and our game.
As fans of the game and industry insiders, we wanted to reach out to
you in advance to address several of the clear violations of
international libel standards perpetrated by Everiss and his
supporters. Several of the most egregious violations are also the most
clearly dismissible and we hope that with your help we will be able to
finally clear the air. The facts are clear:
1. Evony, LLC has had at no time any association with a company
called WoWMine. In addition, the company is not owned nor has it ever
been owned or managed by an individual by the name of Eric Lam. To be
clear, Evony has absolutely no legal or financial connection to this
individual.
2. Further, despite the blatantly false claims of Mr. Everiss,
none of the owners, directors or employees of Evony has ever been, or
are currently parties to, any legal action by Microsoft Corp.
3. Evony and our developers have in no way ever infringed upon
the intellectual property of any other game or developer. There have
never been proceedings against our company for any such violations of
intellectual property and this accusation is entirely fabricated by
Mr. Everiss.
4. Evony has never distributed any form of malware to our users.
Any such action would directly impact the user experience of our
millions of fans and damage the credibility of both our corporate
reputation and diminish the fan base of Evony. Evony’s popularity
speaks for itself – more than five million users in dozens of
countries around the world have helped to grow the game in popularity
without any need for malicious software.
5. Evony is in no way a Chinese based company. Evony is a
registered corporation in the United States with millions of active
players in dozens of countries around the globe.
It is our hope that Mr. Everiss will now understand the error of his
ways and correct the public record for his readers.
As a blogger yourself, we know you understand that in the digital age
in which we now live, online journalists and bloggers must strive for
a higher standard of integrity and accuracy. Mr. Everiss’ complete
disregard for even the most basic tenants of journalistic integrity
and responsibility have left our company no alternative but to take
these legal actions.
Please do not hesitate to let us know if we can provide you or your
readers any additional information as to the facts about this case and
our efforts to hold Mr. Everiss accountable for his illegal actions.
For the most up-to-date news, announcements and tips be sure to follow
Evony on Twitter and join our fan community on Facebook.
On behalf of the entire Evony team, thank you for your continued support.
Kind Regards,
Valerie
Evony™ – Free Forever
www.evony.com
So lets look at the real facts.
1) Evony have been trying to deny their Chinese associations. However the internet doesn’t forget. As you can see in this Google cache for UMGE:
| Game: | Evony |
| Server: | Evony Server Beta |
UMGE is part of the WoWMine web of companies as you can read here. UMGE’s website has the url 59.37.4.244 and their service provider is China Telecom as you can see here. And here is an article about the development of Civony (Evony) by UMGE in China.
2) The owners of Evony live behind a web of companies and identities in many countries, with proxies and fronts that serve to disguise who really owns what and who controls what.
3) Evony have definitely infringed upon the intellectual property of 2K Games. Evony is largely a clone of Sid Meier’s Civilisation IV as any google search of independent reviews shows. Typical is this: “The game is a standard online strategy game, looking like Sid Meier’s Civilization, actually looking TOO much alike, so much that lots of gamers question the IP of the game and think it’s just a rip off.” And this: “Like Civilization 4, each technology description begins with a quote. In fact, like Civ 4, each technology description begins with the quote from Civ 4.”
Evony also stole images from costume catalogues for their advertising as you can read here.
4) I have never said that Evony is malware. However in this article I collected a lot of suspicious user experiences. However I very clearly state “Now I am not saying that Evony has a trojan in its client software.”
However Evony have distributed iEvony, according to them: iEvony Client is software that easily, quickly and safely delivers a private game invitation to your friends. With just a simple click, iEvony Client will automatically import your entire buddy list from MSN, Yahoo or Skype IM. iEvony Client allows users to choose their selected friends and send them a short invitation. The software will record all the invitations and translate them to credits for you!
This is something I definitely wouldn’t let near my computer.
5) Evony is definitely American, in that they have registered a Delaware company. This can be done over the internet for $99.
However we know that the game comes from UMGE in China.
More interesting than the Delaware company would be knowing where the millions of dollars came from to finance the Google advertising campaign. Anyone who has done any research into this knows what the answer is.
So as you can see Evony are spreading misinformation in an attempt to cover the real facts and in the process have committed heinous libels against myself.
30 comments ↓
Good luck with this fight, Bruce!
hmm , i don’t know if Australian Law is like English law,… but surely if you have a “legal” case brewing , you don’t go blasting your evidence all over the internet in an attempt to discredit the other party,
….maybe an “Evony just shot itself in the foot” thread is in order.
;P
I think Evony is doing more to hurt itself than anyone else. They don’t need anyone to tell people how shitty their game is, it will speak for itself!
Ha ha.
As for #5 “Evony is in no way a Chinese based company.”
Look at their official Wiki: http://www.evonypedia.com/evony/links/evony/umge
Evony is owned by UMGE (Universal Multiplayer Game Entertainment). Founded by a small group of avid Chinese game developers, UMGE is based in Guangzhou, China and develops online multiplayer games.
I quit evony over suspicions that they were going to exploit credit-card info. Buying stuff thru micro-transactions was strongly encouraged, and it got harder and harder to use Paypal – eventually the Paypal option was buried at the bottom of an “other type” drop-down list. Only using a personal credit-card was and easy-to-use option. Why would any legitimate company do that?
#4 Bruce Do, you ever READ your sources? Wiki clearly states Evony is owned by EVONY, LLC.
These people act like Scientologists.
Here is the Google Cache page of the link in Bruce’s reply (#4). The page has amazing disappeared from their wiki.
http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:www.evonypedia.com/evony/links/evony/umge
In reply to Kempoin (#6), clearly Bruce does read his sources since his post is a direct copy/paste of the (now missing) wiki page.
FIGHT! FIGHT! Evony and it’s ads have to dissappear! it;s annoying and OFFENSIVE to females! they are abusing boobs!
So it’s defamation when an individual expresses their right of free speech, but it’s considered acceptable when a company does it to an individual; these guys should be Scientologists, lol.
Next time you’re in court, show the judge this email then do the funky chicken dance in front of the prosecution team and ask them if they’d like to suck your ***** dry, or just write you a cheque and kiss your ****.
Thanks, Bruce. The Internet needs people like you.
I found this blog by accident, read the string of Evony posts, laughed my ass off, then opened up a link to watch a movie online to find two identical Evony advertisements below the media player.
Sounds like you both are taking jabs at one another. None of my multiple, top-notch detectors have ever detected even suspicious behaviour from Evony.
@Brian.
What would be the point of a Trojan if your detectors could see it?
Because you can’t see anything it doesn’t mean that nothing is there. And obviously they can change the client every time you log on.
I love how Evony ‘is a clone of Civ 4′ because ’some reviewer says so’. I also play Civ 4, do you? VERY different gameplay. The description text is NOT the gameplay. I’ll give you IP violation for the text itself, that is to say what text CIV didn’t quote directly from other sources), but the text is NOT the Game. While the gameplay may turn out to be a combination of elements from different games, what game is not? Recombination of elements is acceptable art.
Tell me, where in Evony is:
Advanced Flight
Aesthetics
Alphabet
Animal Husbandry
Artillery
Assembly Line
Astronomy
Banking
Biology
eh? How about:
Calendar
Chemistry
Civil Service
Code of Laws
Combustion
Communism
Composites
and on and on and on..
Know why they’re not there? Because it’s not a Civ4 clone in spite of what “any google search of independent reviews shows”. Stop doing google searches and compare the two games with your own journalistic eyeballs. If anything, the gameplay most reminds me of a BBS Door Game called Barren Realms Elite, which you could argue the Civ games ’stole from’, but you’d have to go back maybe 15-20 years for that. Judging from the level of technical ignorance in these threads I’m guessing that’s well before anyone’s time.
@Bob
You sure sound like you work for Evony. Just because they missed out some features doesn’t prove anything.
And it is very easy to prove that lots of graphics came from the Microsoft game Age of Empires 2. Here is detailed proof: http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2009/08/27/watch-evony-plagarize-age-of-empires-right-before-your-eyes/
I sound like I work for Evony? Did you miss the post where I told everyone to go post their nutty malware claims in a forum where people are reverse-engineering the Evony client and making cheats?
“I work for Evony but please, everybody go look in the cheater forum so you don’t need to line my pockets anymore” — I am in awe of your mastery of logic.
Missed out on “SOME” features? How about 90% of the features? Would that still a CivIV ‘Clone’?
“Sure it’s missing like 90% of the tech tree, but it’s EXACTLY like Civ 4!”
Since you mention the graphics, they certainly don’t look like that anymore. In fact I’ve been playing for months and have never seen those graphics in Evony before. I wouldn’t be surprised if they rolled out the Civony Beta on a shoestring using AOE2 graphics thinking “we’ll get to it”, and then changed them. POSSIBLY after getting a letter from Microsoft. However, at the time of your post, on July 16th, I am QUITE certain that the graphics you’ve linked to were no longer in the game, very especially certain indeed that those graphics were gone by August 27th, being the date on the article you’ve linked to.
The graphics have been changed. Whether resolved by Microsoft’s legal department, or of their own free will I don’t know, but certainly not as a result of your heroic blogging, because that happened after-the-fact.
Would you like me to link to a recent screenshot?
“Bob” really does sound like a shill, although he comes off as a bit pompous for a paid PR guy.
But I suppose it’s possible that he is just some random guy that just happens to spend copious amounts of his free time defending the honor of a multi-million dollar corporation that he has no interest in.
Bob – can you tell me how I install the evony client from my computer? There didn’t seem to be an uninstall – why would that be?
Who cares if they are from China? It’s a free international market people.
Hundreds of games clone other games. Every year companies make money from creating similar dynamics and content to other games. This is nothing new and nothing to be up in arms about.
I’m sorry to say, but sex sells. Marketing an ad to a target audience is not a crime. This is not your kid’s first grade classroom. This is the internet. These types of ads are here to stay whether you like them or not.
I’m not a lawyer but I don’t see a legal basis here to take any action against a company just because you don’t like them. What exactly are you trying to accomplish here? Putting them out of business?
Chinese owners (not that there’s anything wrong with that) of a US registered company take a pommy (English to you) blogger to court in NSW, Australia.
Hmmmmm…..
As a NSW taxpayer I believe this is a waste of the legal resources of my state and I am not happy.
Also Evony deceived me with the girls with the big boobies advertising. OK I am a sucker. I admit it.
Hopefully the case is thrown out of court.
@Jason
I think you’re a little confused here my friend. Evony is taking him to court for libel due his claims that Evony is a pretty pathetic excuse for a game, uses sexual imaging to lure in players, and could possibly contain malware.
Fight the good fight mate! Damn Chinese gold farmers. Cheers!
alright, sorry I was a bit confused. So I don’t agree with your accusations of Evony, buuuut the fact that they are taking legal action against you however is totally ridiculous. I regret what I said before. Libel? I’m from the states and I know we have that here but I don’t know the laws in the UK or Aus are like. Sounds like an infringement on a right to free speech to me. In the words of Voltaire, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” Good luck
I wonder if Valerie has seen this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFb9QKkNDU8
It reduces her credibility somewhat.
I know they claim that they dont give you malware of any kind, but since i started playing, i’ve noticed bots adding themselves to my msn messenger and sending me spam messages to visit this, check out this. it didnt happen until i started playing their game.
Thank you Bruce.
I hope you can shut them down forever, those Evony ads get real annoying and they’re everywhere.
it’s funny cause while im on this page the advert is for Kingory.
Most of the cached pages are now off the internet, hopefully people who need them have made copies.
This kind of thing is just a nightmare – games firms using a game to load malware onto a PC is going to lead to significant distrust of browser-based games, which is the last thing the industry needs right now. Hint for the public: don’t run your games in admin mode (so use a normal user account), and if the game requests admin priviliges, just quit, uninstall and move on to some other game.
@Bob I can confirm I’ve definitely seen those graphics. they are very much so the same last i checked was just last December. So I’m sorry but you must be lying on that one maybe you are with Evony’s “owning company”
Next off people probably wouldn’t care as much if the advertisments weren’t false advertising, and also going way overboard on the sex advertisment campaign.
The False Advertising is is that you would save a “beautiful princess” or something along those lines, there is no princess to save. It said that when i first signed up to try it. What has been getting to me lately is their sexual advertisement campaign. Every advertisement focuses more on their panties from boobs to t he crutch area. while evony isn’t the only advertising group doing this their doing this just for a game, there is of course sites like “mate” which are advertising sex as well but they’re also tryign to sell it which are also annoying but Evony go further than those other sites tend to go with the raceyness of their addvertisements which is rather ironic that they’re not the ones doing it the worst when I’d normally if I did not know Evony was doing it worse would expect sites like Mate to have the most racey of the advertisements on the websites all over.
So my advise to Evony is stop the advertisement campaign gone wrong, Start a different advertisement campaign if your game really is as good as you guys try to claim then it will not be hurt by the changing of the racey advertisements infact, it will likily pickup more people instead thus becoming more popular. Althrough for me personally I found the game play rather dry, and Travian like but I expected as much.
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