One of my original doubts about Evony concerned their client software. This loads into your computer when you first play Evony and effectively gives them power over your machine. They even say this in their Terms of Use: WHEN THE GAME IS RUNNING, REGAN MERCANTILE US, LLC MAY OBTAIN CERTAIN IDENTIFICATION INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR COMPUTER AND ITS OPERATING SYSTEM (Regan Mercantile is the company that Evony players have their contract with and are where the money goes, in Hong Kong).
I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.
To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.
Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.
Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.
I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.
There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.
Thank you for reading this.
Lee
Shortly after this Evony forced all their players to change to a new client. There was discussion about this on the Evony forum but, surprise, surprise I can’t find it anymore. The upshot was that Lee wrote another comment to update us:
I got the new version Evony 3.08. My older version was 2.16.
The new version has all references to Eric Lam and UMGE removed.
Neither the comments in the hex code nor the decompiled Actionscript have anything that refers to them.
Also the scripts that enumerated the active programs and sent and retrieved data with the remote servers is gone,
except for the actual game network link to the Evony.com game servers.Even the code is a bit neater and more efficient.
At least the heavy scrutiny on them is having some pluses. lol.
Another attempt to doctor the evidence. But one that hasn’t worked because I still have a copy of the old client software with all the incriminating evidence.
Back to the Evony forum. This must be one of the most censored online forum in the world. To the point where most players have given up posting on it and those that persist joke about the incessant deletions. The deletions include thousands of complaints from people who paid money to Evony and did not receive what they paid for. To see what I mean try clicking on these links to the Evony forum which were threads about players losing money:
In fact the censorship and deletions are so great that they are fairly widely discussed on the net. Look at these for instance: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
And what do Evony have to say about their attitude to freedom of speech? Their mouthpiece in the West is Thalin Athasian. On the forum, in the real world he is Benjamin Gifford. Here is a direct quote: “Actually we don’t hate free speech at all.” It shows.
Next. Under Australian law a company can only sue for libel if it has less than ten employees. Amazingly Evony claim that they run a company with an MMO having nearly 20 million players with less than the critical ten people.Yet when they placed an advert for new staff on the industry website, Gamasutra, they said that they had 20 employees! Of course this would have made their case against me in Australia null and void. So very quickly the advert was changed to say 5 employees. Which number do you think is closer to the truth? If you know anything about Evony employees anywhere in the world please use the comments facility at the bottom of this article or send me an email.
So a few more examples of how evidence for a trial is being massively tampered with to favour the prosecution. There are many more, but there is enough in these two articles for you to plainly see what is going on.
Windows Phone is a synergistic combination of Xbox Live, the Bing search engine, Zune MP3 player and the Windows Mobile operating system. All these elements have been upgraded to become state of the mobile art and to work together seamlessly. And it looks like Microsoft have designed it for real people instead of for “business”, which is a massive step in the right direction.
This has changed the smartphone game. The Apple App Store may have lots of applications, but it has nothing like the user resonance the Xbox Live provides. Google may have lots of very nice proprietary software, but then so does Microsoft. Android may be used by many different phone manufacturers, but so is Windows Mobile.
So now the war has hotted up. Between iPhone/iPad, Android, Symbian/Maemo and Windows Phone. There are others such as RIM (Blackberry), which is currently still the second most popular smartphone, but whose “business” bias and walled garden could see them left behind. Also Palm, who have their Treo operating system but have also used Windows Mobile, so they will probably major on the new Windows Phone O/S. And finally there is Samsung Bada, of which little is known.
This is going to be fantastic for consumers as the industry brings out new models, update their software and bring out new services and apps, all at breakneck speed. This is a billion handset a year business they are fighting for so they are playing for massive stakes.
This week it is the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the world’s largest mobile technology fair. Things are getting critical now as manufacturers, operating systems and browsers jockey for position ahead of the big explosion.
The next biggest news is that that Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, is giving the event’s keynote address. His Android operating system is the fastest rising star of the smartphone firmament. This is vital for Google as web traffic, and the advertising revenue that goes with it, moves away from the desktop and onto mobile devices. There are going to be more than 50 new Android phone models announced at the show from manufacturers such as HTC, Samsung, Motorola, Dell, and Sony Ericsson. Also Android is developing very rapidly with Swype word input, voice recognition and lots of location based services all on the way.
The war just now is between the handset manufacturers and between the operating systems. New developments are almost alarmingly fast. Because these devices are online their operating software can be and is constantly updated to try and keep up with or maybe even ahead of the opposition. Handsets that are a year old are virtually obsolete. Take out a two year contract and you will be using a museum piece by the end of it.
But it isn’t the handsets and the operating systems that will make all the money. Just like with your desktop PC, the handset manufacturer will become increasingly irrelevant. Also the operating system on its own will generate little revenue and people will replace their operating system on a whim, much as they now do with PC web browsers.
The real money will be in advertising (and other marketing) and applications. Our current best effort at smartphone applications, the application store, is close to being a broken business model as price has collapsed and piracy run rampant. Expect more and more applications to be offered as services, with subscriptions. And we know all about that in the gaming world, just look at World of Warcraft and Xbox Live.
I have written on here about some of the totally execrable, violent films that are out there in the cinemas, available for the public to see. Antichrist and Waz have far, far worse content than any video game. And remember that film violence is far more traumatic because it is imposed on you, at least in games you can take action in response.
Paranormal Activity is one of the most profitable movies ever. It cost just $15,000 to make and has grossed over $100 million. And it is massively disturbing. Specialist horror movie website Bloody Disgusting said the following: “Paranormal Activity is one of the scariest movies of all-time. YOU WILL BE AFFECTED as it’s hard to ignore the imprint it leaves on your psyche. You know it’s fake, and yet, you can’t shake it. Nightmares are guaranteed.“
Now it is being shown in Italy and this is what the Daily Telegraph reports:“Emergency services received dozens of on calls on Saturday from cinema-goers having prolonged panic attacks after watching the film. The most severe case was that of a 14-year-old girl who was brought into hospital “in a state of paralysis”, an emergency services spokesman said.”
So what I want to know is where is Keith Vaz when you want him? How he can have the temerity to criticise a video game yet is not denouncing this film to Parliament is totally beyond me.
The case Evony are bringing against me for libel in Australia is unusual in that nothing exists in the real world, it is all online. Evony itself is an online game, my articles describing their activities are in this online blog and all the facts, proof and evidence to support what I said are also online. But unfortunately that which is online can be deleted or altered. And that is precisely what is happening as vast amounts of online content that is evidence for my defence has mysteriously disappeared or been changed.
Let’s take a look at the official Evony Wiki. At the time that I wrote my original Evony articles they had this page:
As you can see they were very proud of their heritage: 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.
But after Evony started their legal case against me their Wiki changed to this:
And suddenly they are saying a completely different thing: Evony is owned exclusively by Evony, LLC, an independent video game developer and publisher based in Delaware, USA. There is no connection to UMGE. Not so proud of their heritage now. And if you go to the Evony Wiki today you will see that even this page has disappeared.
And it is not just pages that have disappeared. Just take UMGE (who owned Evony), they had a website UMGE.com. And it has disappeared, totally. Robtex tell us that it existed and that it is “missing”. They also give us a handy little diagram of its DNS record showing its connection with Evony.com.
So as you can see there is a link between UMGE and Evony LLC
I am amazed that evidence in an important legal case can be tampered with like this. It is incredible that it is allowed. And the examples I have given so far are just the tip of the iceberg. There is a huge amount more that has been deleted an altered. More to come in part 2 of this article.
For very many years Electronic Arts were the biggest game publisher on earth. They have an income of billions every year and they employ thousands of people all around the globe. EA are very important indeed for the video games industry. But they are no longer undisputed number one. The marriage of Vivendi and Activision, fed by the cash cow that is World of Warcraft, with mega hits like Modern Warfare and Guitar Hero and very ably led by Bob Kotick are now probably established at the top of the heap, especially when it comes to profit. (Amazingly they were bankrupt in the early ’90s.)
So again, very unsurprisingly, Electronic Arts have issued more bad financial results. They lost $82 million in the quarter ended 31 December (the best time of year for video games!). Their stock price took another hit. They can’t blame the industry, big global publishers like the aforementioned Activision, and also Ubisoft have done very well indeed. Even Sega have managed to get themselves back into profit. I have written about EA’s problems on here before. Repeatedly.
This generation of HD home consoles have awful business models to develop for. Basically making a game costs far, far too much. Several times the cost of games for the previous generation. The root of this is that HD games need a massive amount of content which is still largely hand crafted. The next generation of platforms will have enough power to run lots and lots of middleware so development costs should drop back to sensible levels. In the meantime we are stuck with the PS3 and 360 and they are causing a lot of problems.
The Wii has been a black hole for many third party publishers. Their fault. They mostly haven’t made the games that Wii owners want to buy. Just look at the Metacritic for Wii to see this. Electronic Arts on the Wii published NCAA Football 09 All-Play (Metacritic 49), Celebrity Sports Showdown (Metacritic 50), NBA Live 09 All-Play (Metacritic 51), G I Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Metacritic 51) and many other such gems that should never have seen the light of day.
There is a trend on the more casual platforms for developers to self publish. This removes discipline from the market, especially on price. The job of a publisher is to provide editorial control, finance and marketing. Self publishers tend to use the price mechanism as their main marketing tool. Done competitively this rapidly collapses the viability of a platform. Electronic Arts have not taken the grip that they should have, thus allowing upstarts like PopCap to gain traction. Also they were late on the scene for emerging platforms, such as Facebook.
It is not all doom and gloom. The losses are less than they were. The management are cutting out the non block buster games. EA moved away from licensed products so have built up the beginning of a portfolio of good IP that they actually own. There are huge economic advantages of scale in publishing, which positions EA very nicely indeed. The world’s consumers will spend more on games in the future than they are now. The next generation of home consoles will reward those with enough clout to invest heavily in middleware. And EA do have some excellent employees.
At the gym yesterday the TV news in the changing room carried an item about Advent Computer Training going bust. One of the guys there said that he had been a victim of this company. He said a high pressure salesman had come to his house and promised him a highly paid career and that they would help him find a job. So he signed up to a finance agreement with Barclays for £5,000. When the course arrived it was no good for him and he gave up on it. But he still has to pay off the £5,000 to Barclays with several years of monthly payments. Even with Advent bust he will still owe that money.
It appears that what finished Advent off was Barclays stopping the supply of such student loans. In their words: “Barclays Bank are the main student funding partner and we have worked with them closely for several years. Just before Christmas Barclays informed us that they were pulling out of the student training sector with effect from 31st January 2010.”
So you can see what was happening here. Barclays were giving out loans to students and then handing the money over to the company. The company should have held that money in trust and only used it as the course progressed. But they didn’t. Obviously it was being spent, going somewhere, almost immediately. So when the supply of new money dried up there was nothing left to finance the training that the students had paid up for. Within weeks the company was bust.
I don’t like this business model. Why should the provider of a service (in this case training) be paid in advance with a lump sum for several years of that training? Universities and colleges don’t do this.
In my opinion using a finance company, like Barclays, is also pernicious. The student’s relationship for their course is with the training company, yet their relationship for paying for the course is with the finance company. This is not good.
You can see why Barclays may have got out. Even if the course is brilliant there are still going to be a percentage of people who have bought the wrong thing. And they are caught in a trap with years of monthly payments ahead of them. So they won’t be happy bunnies and, inevitably, they will take out some of their ire against the company they are paying the money to. Barclays don’t need this flack.
And remember that these courses are targeted at the young, the weak, the vulnerable. They are for people who are under educated and want to improve themselves. These people stand no chance against a highly trained high pressure salesman. Many of them become victims, they receive nothing yet have to pay out large payments every month for years. You can read about such victims here, and here.
Don’t these people realise that there are better ways to get an education? The Open University for instance. These guys don’t use high pressure salesmen, don’t use finance companies, have world class course material, give qualifications that are universally recognised, have first class training staff, don’t demand several year’s financial commitment up front and yet only cost a fraction of what some commercial trainers charge.They even hand out financial support to lots of students!
The Open University say: “Want to get a qualification that will help you develop or change your career? Learn a subject in depth? The Open University – voted top for student satisfaction for three years running – could provide the flexibility, the qualifications and the top-class teaching you’re after. For most courses you don’t need any previous qualifications. And with our world-leading blend of supported open learning and innovative course materials, you’ll get an exceptional learning experience.”
At Advent, we not only provide excellent IT training courses, but we also offer specialist careers advice and support to help our students get a job in IT.
We understand how the industry works and we know what employers are looking for. We constantly research IT jobs in the UK to make sure our courses are up to date, providing you with the skills you need to get a job in IT.
Support Every Step of the Way.
Our certified trainers work closely with you to monitor your progress, making sure you move forward to the next stage only once you are absolutely ready. No-one is left to fend for themselves and everyone works at their own pace.
We also give every student comprehensive study guides, practical advice on exam preparation / technique and unlimited email and phone support throughout their course.
Whats more, our unique, introductory modules provide essential background information to enable you to understand more about computer skills in the IT environment and to be able to talk with confidence at interview or in a job situation.
Advent Training’s technical expertise is recognised through Microsoft’s Certified Partner accreditation.
