I receive a lot of supporting emails about this whole Evony situation. Many with really good evidence which I can use in court to totally prove that what I have said is right. Obviously I am not publishing these. However I have received this by email which shows another side of Evony that is unpleasant:
Bruce,
Attached is an audit trail of my communication with Evony support. I don’t know if you want to blog about this or not. (I would like to keep my name private).
I just thought I should tell someone in the public spotlight of the willful disregard for the antisemitism found on Evony’s gaming community. I have written to Evony over 1 month ago, and they still refuse to take this character down. There has been several communications I have written, but all I get is their canned message that someone will look into it.
In my opinion, this is blatant promotion of hate for jews with no action on Evon’y part at all. I have attached two screen shots.
Thank you for your time.
XXXX
From:
Date: Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 8:18 PM
Subject: Re: Thanks for Your Help
To: Evony Customer Support <reportname@evony.com>
Server 46… Below are screen shots
Dear player,
We are sorry for the disturbance brought by the player’s inappropriate naming. Circumstance described in your mail has been reviewed by Evony team and prompt investigation would be put forward. Thank you again for reporting the problem with us for a more healthy and peaceful gaming environment.
Note: Please provide us with the server you are playing. A screenshot of the inappropriate name or offensive mail will help us to deal with the issue more efficiently.
Regards
Evony Team
I find that you allow someone to name an alliance \”Nazi\” very offensive. If you want people to join the Evony community then you need to hire someone to do some prudent censorship. You want us to write a review? How about if someone wrote a review that you allow hate speak and anti semitisim on your servers? How would that be for a review?! I should not have to accidentally stumble on to this. There should be some filters already in place.
32 comments ↓
wow im surprised he even got a response evony staff are useless and normally dont reply to any complaints
when i played it i started complaining about a bunch of players who started an anti-homosexual/blacks guild nothing ended up happening besides being completely ignored
Well, as long as the people behind Evony gets paid, I doubt they’ll do jack shit. It is after all, the next generation of “gold farming”.
I’m surprised Evony actually provided a human customer service response. Some games are so eager to automate customer service that they would totally miss this kind of problem.
That said, IMHO the gold-farming connection is enough to avoid Evony like the plague.
This isn’t related to the lack of account policing (which I thought they had done when there were only a handful of servers) or bad-word-filtering (a rather Sisyphean effort), but I can’t believe that they have 46 servers! I remember when they added the second through fifth and the attitude was one of “How many more do they need?”
I suppose their ads, while tasteless and often inappropriate, are quite effective? I hate to offer the alternative suggestion, which is that they’ve just nailed the dangling-carrot game design so well that word of mouth has caused so much of their growth (although I will sadly admit that I recruited my fair share of new players to the game in its infancy).
I think you need to look yourself in the mirror and figure out what exactly you are trying to put out there, Bruce. You wrote one article complaining that Evony was against free speech and that they were trying to shut you up. But, here I see that you are trying to stop their players from being able to use their right to free speech for their own entertainment. If people can’t get used to assholes in games then next thing you know everyone will complain about every little thing. “Oh, no! There is a Nazi alliance! There is anti-this and Anti-that!” You’re going to find that everywhere. Suck it up. Game developers can’t be everywhere at once. I think it’s good enough that they filter swears. And even if they didn’t, who cares??
I have copied and pasted some of your articles and some comments to them. I did this with your permission when I saw the comment you left saying something about free speech and letting people copy and paste your articles anywhere they please.
“This is a massive story, so I thought that I would expand on the original article. If it was in the automobile industry or the banking industry it would be front page headlines. But the old people who are in charge of the media don’t understand games. So firstly I will do some explaining.” * Now… I’ve been on your site and I have seen that you have a picture posted and an introduction; “I’m Bruce Everiss, a veteran games industry marketer.” Okay, seeing as how you yourself aren’t in your raoring twenties anymore and you use the term veteran towards yourself, maybe you shouldn’t be commenting that they are “old people”.*
“Gold farming I have written about before. It is the practice of playing games to generate valuable in game items which are then sold in the real world to lazy Western players who can’t be bothered playing the game properly themselves…. They are amongst the bad boys of the internet.” * Nice choice of words there, pal.*
“Eric Lam is a Chinese businessman who owns or is associated with a whole cloud of companies and websites. He was sued by Microsoft for online advertising click fraud. It is thought that Lam owns the gold farming company Wowmine and that he could be earning as much as half a million dollars a day from this alone.” * This needs no comment. it is THOUGHT and he COULD… Piece that together*
“Now it looks like Lam has decided to go first party with his own MMO, thus cutting out the middleman. That game is Evony. And its heritage shows. When you play the game, just about everything in the game can be obtained by paying instead of playing. A blatantly exploitative business model never seen before.” * This is where you become very wrong. The game is free, you can play without spending a dime for as long as you want and do perfectly fine. Of course, same as any other internet game, you could choose to spend a set amount of money in order to propel yourself in the game. I would have thought you knew this, seeing as how you used to play this game.*
“The game itself is so flaky and bugged that it is very easy for things you have paid good money for to just disappear. Lots of people are losing money this way. And, surprise, surprise, Evony never give a refund.” * I have paid for Evony cents, and continue to, and this has never happened. Nor have I ever heard of this happening. Big whoop, they don’t refund. But, during the time that I have played Evony they have shown themselves as decent game owners. Their servers had crashed and no one could log on for a few hours, so when they got it back up all players on that server were to receive a compensation pack. I received this and was satisfied. Game owners shouldn’t have to jump over the moon for their players. They all are in this to make money.*
“Something very devious is iEvony. This is an application that you download into your PC to invite your friends to join the game in exchange for in game rewards. This could very well be a Trojan designed to harvest email addresses messenger passwords and much else. Would you trust a Chinese gold farmer inside your computer? Many gullible people are.” * And yet iEvony is not mandatory to play this free-if-you-want-it-to-be game. Sure it COULD be a trojan, but, on the other hand, you COULD be a transvestite angry because there are no inter-gender player pictures.*
“The advertising for Evony consists of fairly lurid female imagery. These images were mostly lifted from lingerie catalogues and, amazingly, have zero relevance whatsoever to the game. Evony are carpetbombing game websites with these adverts using multiple accounts of Google AdWords. When website owners block one source of these adverts another appears. Site owners have complained repeatedly to Google, but to no avail.” * I thought these “fairly lurid female imagry” advertisements were amusing and made the game not so serious. A sense of humour is a good thing. You never know, they COULD have enough money for modeling. *
“But advertising isn’t the only marketing going on. Evony are using automated spam programmes to add comments to articles on blog sites. Not once or twice. No, they are blanketing game related blogs with comments that advertise the game. Exactly what you would expect of a Chinese gold farmer.” * I’m sorry, why do you keep say Chinese? Do you have proof that whomever you are reffering to is from China??*
“This article just skims over what is going on here. There is enough to write a whole series of articles or even a book. What is for sure is that Evony is best avoided by everyone. Go and play Runescape, Habbo or Free Realms instead.” * Please don’t write that much. Your articles only caught my attention because of how desperate you seem to want to slander a company. They’re just trying to bully you, right? Well, I beleive you started it with the over-kill of articles. I won’t play Runescape. It was boring and slowed my computer down terribly. Habbo is for petophiles and teens, and I have never heard of Free Realms but I think it’s a downloaded game. Which sucks.
And lastly, Bruce. You must be American. Your contradicting, pariotic, conspiracy theorist articles give it away.*
Feel free to respond to this comment by sending mail to katt-bacardi@hotmail.com As I wil NOT be on this shit site again.
Too be quite honest, I’m no so sure it is as popular as they all claim. Sure they might have had as many accounts signed up from the beginning til now as they claim. But the question is, how many off those accounts are still active. The short time I played, I found alot off towns around where I was that were for all intents and purposes apparently inactive.
What a long and utterly useless pile of troll post from katt. Apparently according him/her, The freedom of speech also includes the freedom to advertise killing groups off people or promoting hatespeech, which if he/she would even be half assed to check would find out it does not. As with any freedom, freedom of speech gives you the responsibility to do what’s right, not the freedom to do whatever you like. Something alot off people fail to realise.
@Katt
Not the cleverest of comments I have seen here.
There is a huge difference between free speech and racism.
Also you seem to actually know much about what you are talking about.
I too have witnessed racism within Evony, so the evidence offered here is most certainly correct and the screen shots appear untailored. There have been numerous attempts to challenge the anti-Semitic behavior that transpires within Evony within the vBulletin forums. Naturally it has been largely ignored, or perhaps more correctly, it has been ignored until Evony decided to challenge Mr Everiss over libel.
Racism and other inappropriate comments often appear in any online product where the company concerned is foolish enough to permit users to offer material for publication directly onto their website without moderation or approval. In this respect Evony will be liable for all entries in their website, be they made by users or staff. However, there is a common denominator here, and this is the forum license to many browser games is Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd http://www.vbulletin.com/about.php. In this respect it may be worth examining their website carefully to see what guidance they over racism to their vBulletin license holders.
I note that through examining some of the above comments, “Katt” has stated something of interest: “But, here I see that you [Bruce Everiss] are trying to stop their players from being able to use their right to free speech for their own entertainment.” I find it rather interesting that a person who appears to be a member of the game has confirmed that people obtain “entertainment” value out of making anti-Semitic comments within Evony. A similar issue transpired with Blizzard in 2006 when it sought to prohibit the advertisement of a friendly LGBT guild http://www.lambdalegal.org/our-work/publications/page-32007393.html. Unlike Blizzard, Evony permits its teams to advertise for racist members. In this respect the natural counter to comments like this will be for teams to advertise that they are friendly towards Jewish people or indeed any group that happens to be discriminated against within Evony. The involvement of Lambda Legal with Blizzard over a LGBT issue clearly shows that public interest law firm will become involved in anti-Semitic issues. This is legal reality. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
I would suggest that anyone offended by these anti-Semitic comments that are made within Evony to approach The Becket Fund for general guidance http://becketfund.org/.
Shalom,
AC
seems like evony is pulling out another similar game
under another “company” name
Soho International Ltd.
http://napwar.com/
it’s in close beta
invitations are sent to some of the evony players
which link to a registration page that ask for your
email in a similar fashion as the evony one
without any terms and conditions at all, yet
and the game play is pretty much identical to evony
@DC
Yes I can confirm that too. Gaming invites are now being sent out to promote Fog of War – Napoleonic War. To encourage participation it claims to offer $100,000 worth of gifts and packages. It claims to be copyrighted to Soho Union International Ltd and is powered through napwar.com. The invite marketing is coming from Madmimi.com http://www.madmimi.com/. This could be important because a simple matter of deduction will identify the source from where these emails have been obtained. In my case they are likely to have originated from Civony, Evony or Kingory, but I will know for sure later today.
The initial game picture is very similar to the original Evony advert. It consists of wheatfields, backlit clouds and an attractive female positioned in the right side of the screen. This time she is dressed in Napoleonic battle costume and is looking at the viewer through a telescope rather than posing as a medieval lady.
The advertisement pictures show a hero system and general combat system that appears to mirror some elements of Kingory.
It claims to be an open beta, but appears to be closed. It runs from 28th September to 15th October. The catch phrases is “Play for free without any limits.”
AC
Here are a few other issues:
Moderator Zim’s stance on anti-Semitism: “It is common on most servers for players to make racist or otherwise offensive alliances names and declare on top alliances [The name given to an Evony team]. This is merely for attention. Try not to get too offended as it is most likely some insensitive person who feels the intended joke is actually funny.” http://bbs.evony.com/showthread.php?t=19022&highlight=Nazi
Comment: In other words Evony does not plan to take any action to ensure that racism does not transpire within their product. Rather they leave it to their gaming community to deal with this matter in a gaming context. Here is a typical example of how racist promoters are permitted to behave within Evony http://bbs.evony.com/showthread.php?t=6682&highlight=Nazi. As you can see, in accordance with what the Evony moderators have claimed, racist promoters do declare war on specific teams. This is generally intended to ensure that all Evony users within that server examine their profiles and read “Death to Jews.”
Here one can see how the gamers are obliged to tackle this form of racism http://bbs.evony.com/showthread.php?t=6682&highlight=Nazi. As you can see a number of alliances band together to attack the account. But this of course is futile because the account merely disbands and sets up again with a new email address acting under a proxy server.
So, all Evony moderators know that racism transpires with the game and the confirmed policy for dealing with this is to appeal to the gamers to ignore it.
But users are not just informed to ignore racism; they are also informed to ignore a host of other undesirable issues too. For instance, Evony claims to be a US company, yet it freely permits alliances to be named Al-Qaeda as can be evidenced in this comment made by a person claiming to be Sgt. Kangas, United States Marine Corps (Afghanistan,Iraq veteran): http://bbs.evony.com/showthread.php?t=56288&highlight=Nazi. In this respect I wonder how the US authorities will act when they know a proxy US company does not act responsibly towards terrorist threats?
These sort issues reflect the general immaturity to which many browser game companies operate and behave. They function almost entirely on a prosumer basis and as such there is little to no operational management.
AC
-: Important Privacy Issue :-
I have explained that my invite to Fog of War – Napoleonic War through napwar.com has come to me through Madmimi. This can be identified by looking at the URL in detail if you click on the “Can’ t properly view this email? Check the web version of this email out here” link at the top of the email. I have now conferred with a former journalist who has looked at these links with me. She has highlighted that these invites contravene the Madmimi privacy agreement. As you can see, Madmimi has a strict privacy policy whereby its clients may only email people who are already are their customers or have offered them their private emails with permission http://madmimi.com/legal/privacy.
Soho Union International Ltd (in small lettering at the bottom of the Fog of War email) is totally unknown to me and my agreement with Civony/Evony was through UMGE – a company that Evony now claims to have no contact with. Therefore I can only conclude that Soho Union International Ltd is using the private email addresses offered to UMGE and/or Civony and Evony.
This is a very dangerous game for these Chinese concerns to be involved in, given that they are reputedly businesses acting within the United States.
I would strongly recommend that anyone facing issues with UMGE, Civony or Evony, who has received an invite from Soho Union International Ltd, report the matter to Madmimi who appear to be a legitimate New York-based company.
AC
Full support to you Bruce. The game is well evil (lol) I do not go near it. And have all their ads blocked. Good luck on your court case.
Maybe sue them for harassment/libel of you.
http://www.hkcompanyname.com.hk seems to be an off the shelf company set up by Trade Business Consulting Co., Ltd. Shenzhen Central. China.
http://www.hkcompanyname.com.hk then seems to have set up a whole batch of off the shelf companies including Soho Union International Ltd. Which seems to be a British Virgin Islands company set up on 28 March 2009.
I see. It appears that the British Virgin Islands (BVI) have a role to play too. Here another direct link to the company concerned but do note the date of its set here is listed as the 23 March 2009:
http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:zA3HU4sP5YMJ:www.hkcompanyname.com.hk/bvilist/listbvi.pdf+Soho+Union+International+Ltd&hl=en&sig=AFQjCNFwm1C_E0Q2jgJsLQ3OgH59rrJIcA
S323 Soho Union International Limited, established 23-03-2009.
This looks like a Chinese version of Who Own Who. The only thing is it appear to lack a great deal of detail.
Thanks for this information Bruce.
AC
I see an old friend of yours is taking ads from them.
http://tinypic.com/r/2z57gqs/4
I hope you never stumble upon Eve Online if that company ignoring a few nazis bothers you. The largest alliance in the game is composed of thousands of people who believe that declaring everyone around them to be Jews, faggots and niggers is the pinnacle of comedy.
@Lenny. That largest alliance on EVE also has been in a scandal where one of their players was a dev for that company. And was giving them free stuff. Of course when he was busted nothing happened. Lol
Is this what online gaming is coming to? Who ever has the money is right?
Lenny, its always been like that. Its nothing new, they’ve just stopped bothering with the hush hush and sneaky coverups, and hence its more visible now.
Agree. But still, they dont have a company’s website, there is no contact, their lawyers are based in Australia. They are so afraid of revealing themselves to the public.
It is so easy to It’s been all the same since the beginning of time: Evils live in the dark.
What do you expect from a group of people who started playing a game by clicking on a woman’s breast? That’s Evony’s target user group, and of course on the other side, do you really expect a game company that uses scantily-clad women to promote the game to do anything about in-game anti-semitism?
And BTW, do Chinese understand the concept of anti-semitism?
What’s does a player starting an alliance called Nazi have to do with Evony?
That’s like trying to indict a homeowner because one of their guests made racial slurs.
You can’t have it both ways and accuse Evony of censorship, but then advocate that they censor their users.
I think that the best thing that you could possibly do, is to not be whimpering and crying about this, but instead,… get a bunch of friends together and get on the server that this NAZI alliance is on,… call yourselves something like “Judan” “TheJews” “Poland” “Gypsys” “Homosexuals” “TheSick” “TheElderly” “TheInsane” “TheHandicapped” “Israel”,… or a host of other names of groups of people that Nazi Germany originally abused or try to exterminate,… and build up a big enough alliance (even if you have to spend a little money to speed up the process,… and anihillate, smash, squash, and destroy their alliance. There would be nothing more embarrassing for that alliance than that, and you would definitely get your point across.
Talmadge S. Bradley? are you a complete moron or do you just play one on the internet?
why in the world would you think that people would want to join and financially support a game that tolerates anti semitism and racism? anti semitism and racism isn`t a game, it is a very serious real world issue.
I`ve read at various places on the internet that evony is using anti semitism and racism in the manner that you have suggested as a marketing tool to attract new paying players to the game.
I wonder how eager evony would be to tolerate hate groups in its game if anti asian hate groups started popping up all over it`s game and website.
“I wonder how eager evony would be to tolerate hate groups in its game if anti asian hate groups started popping up all over it`s game and website.”
nbforrest- Money talks with these scamming scumbags: as long as the credit card numbers come in, they won’t care what you say. Hell, they’d probably sell out their own grandmothers to make a lot of money from scamming people; they’d probably scam those people the most, even.
And it’s pretty funny to see the Evony forums as a guest and seeing a HUMAN tragedy (not just a Jewish one), violence against women, genocide and sociopathy (to name a few) being seen as “just a joke” and then everyone goes “OMG OFFENDED!!!!1111″ at (probably the same person) making an Al Qaeda name. As one of the people there said, “If you defend hate groups and terrorists, you deserve what you get.” A taste of their own medicine directed at them: now they know how it feels to be offended by a tasteless and degrading “joke”. One of them even suggested that the “Al Qaeda Server Guy” might actually believe in what they are “saying” and another applauds the “Sgt.” for calling out his/her behavior, which is what the “other side” have been doing and saying for years while they were being told to shut up and stop taking the Internet so seriously by the same group of people: “‘Jokes’ are just anger masquerading as humor.” and “Tolerating something equals approval.” If I were some hotshot mind researcher trying to study the psychology of people, I would read the Evony forums. But then, if I were some hotshot, I’d most likely be ruled by money, not truth.
In short, I would have to say one good thing about these scammers and ad-whores (ad-whores as in people who annoyingly do everything and anything to “market” themselves-thank you Universe for AdBlock Plus-not the sexist name for women who don’t conform) called Evony\Civony\Kingory\etc.: They’re scamming the very people who can dish it plenty but can’t take it. I am not condoning that Reagan-supported (during the Red Hysteria) terrorist group Al-Qaeda; I’m saying that those people usually do not find Israel’s actions of genocide, displacement, walling people in a ghetto that is bombed every day, threatening a whole nation with the “My big brother is the top bully and imma nuke you” card and condoning the killing of Muslim mothers as “One Shot, Two Kills” as “terrorism”. These are also the same people that say that approving a fascist group that threatened to kill “everyone else” is “just a joke”, imagine that. God, I hate hipsters.
-end rant-
@nbforrest:
It would be interesting if somebody actually tried that to see the reaction.
To all of you berating Katt for the comment: You collectively don’t understand the limitations of the 1st amendment. If you’re not in US, then ok you live under tyranny I understand you have no rights to say anything, I feel sorry for you. But if you DO live in the US, you DO have freedom of speech. You don’t have teh freedom to cause HARM with your speech but that harm must be tangible and provable, i.e. “broke my arm” is harm “hurt my feelings” is *not* harm. So while it is true you cannot yell “fire!” in a crowded place without impunity, it is the damage that *clearly* could be caused. From Schenk vs United States: “the question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”
No one will ever argue successfully that players in an MMORPG making racist remarks or expressing racism presents any clear and present danger to anything except a few feelings. Freedom of speech isn’t saying anything you want, it’s hearing things that infuriate you and tolerating the freedom of the expresser. While we have stamped out concentration camps (an actual harm done by racist people) you will never stamp out racism. (and you shouldn’t cash in *your* freedom of speech in an attempt to)
“8 Bruce on 09.29.09 at 12:31 pm
@Katt
Not the cleverest of comments I have seen here.
There is a huge difference between free speech and racism.
Also you seem to actually know much about what you are talking about.”
Free speech is FREE SPEECH. You can spew whatever type of racist crap you want in the middle of the street, the consitution allows for it, as it is free speech.
If you were actually an american you would understand this, I have no clue what country you are from. If you were actually an American, you would already have known this. As on the news constantly in the U.S. they discuss certain racist groups having rallies in many cities, and protests against them. They are allowed to have those rallies because free speech does not mean only things you consider good. It means you must allow both good and bad for it to truly be free.
Everyone cries about freedom of speech, yet most people have no clue what it truly means. This is because most people that cry about it are not U.S. citizens. They only want to cry freedom of speech and complain or whine about how they aren’t being allowed freedom of speech as they slander someone.
Slander is a whole other issue that is not allowed by freedom of speech. Bruce does nothing but slander, quite a few of his “facts” are pure conjecture and are completely false. He has put forward what he calls proof, it is not proof beyond a doubt. Proof beyond a doubt is what is required to convict someone of something here in the U.S.. How Bruce has so many followers and supporters is beyond me. If he were to write in a credited news paper, he would have been fired and disowned by that paper already for his slander and false statements.
So good luck Bruce in your crusade, I hope you end up like the original crusaders, dead and on display for all to see as an example that everyone should be a bit smarter.
Nope, sorry Brian you are wrong about proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
In the U.S. as in most countries slander is a civil case not a criminal case. Civil cases in the U.S. do not require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. a preponderance of the evidence is what decides a civil case.
Defending racism and antisemetism on evony by saying that evony believes in free speech, is a joke.
spend a little time in the evony forums and you will see exactly how evony feels about freedom of speech.
@Nick and Nils
That scandal was about Band of Brothers, who are now irrelevant because they were destroyed and dispersed by the Goons. My post referred to the Goons.
Yawn. Are you for real? Yes I want my cake and eat it too. I read these comments from people who claim to be players but their comments belie this. There are problem players on EVERY free game site I have encountered and most tend to be unsupervised children. Parental control might put an end to the AntiSemitism & Racism. It’s a frelling game & someone needs a life. I’m off to play Evony.
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