[MUD-Dev] Blacksnow revisted

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

Here we go again...

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Funcom Press Release on Blacksnow Interactive

We wanted to let you know about a dispute between a company called
Blacksnow Interactive and Funcom. As you probably know, Blacksnow
Interactive is a company that owns various web sites and sells items
from all the major MMOGs on those sites. They are currently in a
lawsuit with Mythic Entertainment because that company banned their
accounts in Dark Age of Camelot
(http://www.camelotexchange.com/PressRelease.asp). Blacksnow has now
sent Funcom a letter from the same law firm with the threat to sue
us too. Here's what has happened:

We have a small team of employees who are responsible for finding
exploits, reporting the exploit to the dev team, and then banning
the players who are using them. In this process, we apparently
banned 22 accounts of Blacksnow employees. We banned them in the
regular course of finding any player who has violated our rules of
play. These accounts were very serious offenders: they were
increasing multiple levels at impossible speeds (sometimes within
seconds) and we found that they had multiple, massive duplicates of
items (in the hundreds and thousands). These were not minor
exploiters. Funcom is taking exploits very seriously because we feel
that they ruin the balance of the game for all of the legitimate
players. We will be doing everything we can to prevent cheaters from
destroying the economy on Rubi-Ka. In the letter from the attorney
retained by Blacksnow, they have threatened to sue us if we do not
reactivate these accounts. We will not reactivate these accounts.

Please let us know if you have any other questions about our stance
on this issue. We just wanted to let you all know that we are doing
everything we can to maintain the best environment for the players
of Anarchy Online.
-------------------------------------------------

Press Release from BSI regarding the Press Release put out by Funcom
yesterday:

-------------------------------------------------
March 15th, 2002
1:08 PM PST

False Statements in Funcom's Press Release Regarding Dispute With
BSI.

Funcom's Press release dated March 14th, 2002, contained Statements
that were inaccurate or outright false. An example of these
statements would be that our lawsuit with Mythic involved our
accounts being banned for exploiting. This is a clear and factual
misrepresentation. All of our accounts with Mythic are in good
standing and none of our accounts are banned, nor is our lawsuit in
any way related to exploitation or in-game misconduct in anyway. Our
dispute with Mythic is solely related to the sale of DAOC related
services outside of the game.

Other statements made in Funcom's press release are also false, and
we are considering seeking legal redress for the damages caused by
libelous statement(s).

Lee Caldwell
-------------------------------------------------

In addition, there are a series of articles on this at:

  http://www.unknownplayer.com/

Five in total so far, so probably more than its reasonable to
crosspost.

With regard to Lee Caldwell's statement above, it sounde like his
response is pure hot air as all the factual inaccuracies lie in
passing comments made about the Mythic case. Then again these guys
really are jokers imho.

Dan
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