onlinegamers.org

08:14 AM Friday March 15th, 2002

There’s been a small shitstorm, and we’ve got some news to tell.

According to this article from pc.ign.com, full-time farmers BlackSnow Interactive have threatened to sue FunCom to get back 22 banned BlackSnow accounts that had been banned because they were suspected of using exploits.

The IGN article would have you believe this is The Man coming down on the enterprising young people.

From what our sources say…BlackSnow is blowing smoke up collective rears.

We received an email from FunCom early yesterday morning:

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. 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.

And so we did.

April Jones of FunCom sent us a significant amount of information regarding their dealings with BlackSnow, as did Lee Caldwell of BlackSnow.

The popping sound you heard was my head imploding as I read logs and email exchanges and received phone calls regarding all of this.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, things are strange. Before I drop these on you, no major players’ names have been changed, but phone numbers and email addresses have been removed and account names have been marked as [deleted]. Our cast of characters today includes:

• Andre Backen, President, Funcom
• April Jones, head of US Public Relations, Funcom
• Adam Young, Lead Database Admin/Engineer, Funcom
• Lee Caldwell, Director of Sales, BlackSnow
• “Wes,” Programmer, BlackSnow
• Mark Jacobs, President, Mythic Entertainment (yup, they’re involved too!)

First thing, the emails…

The emails we got from BlackSnow tell us that initial contact regarding the accounts was made on January 24th of this year by Adam Young, Lead Database Admin/Engineer at FunCom. He contacted “Wes,” the person listed on the accounts to apparently try to locate information on how they were exploiting parts of the game. The emails quickly become hostile, including a response from Wes indicating, “I know you have no intention on releasing my accounts, so I have no intention on helping you figure how I legitimately built the characters.” Also included is Adam Young himself giving BlackSnow inside information regarding how best to “stay underneath the radar” of other admins besides Adam.

The Funcom emails contain an exchange between Andre Backen, president of FunCom and Lee Caldwell, Director of Sales for BlackSnow. It seems that even in this email, BlackSnow was the group to initiate the legal proceedings. It also mentions that should BlackSnow decide to file these papers to begin a lawsuit against FunCom, it would have to be in Switzerland under Swiss law, not according to our strange and convoluted legal system here in the U.S.

But the killer are the ICQ Logs given to us by BlackSnow’s Lee Caldwell…within this set of logs is some stunning information, but seemingly more harmful to BlackSnow than to FunCom. In it, not only does Lee admit that BlackSnow has hacked, macroed and duped their way to their $60,000 a month income, but he offers Adam Young $7000 to “leave us alone and protect us, and we will always tell you the exploits as they come out and that is undoubtedly
a win win for funcom and us.”

A win? Bribing somebody internal to the game, responsible for maintaining the intergrity of the experience? Adam turns this down, saying “It is a mater of integrity. Moving what I feel to be non dangerous characters is one thing. What you [sic] suggesting is a conflict of interest as I am being paid by Funcom to track down exploits and protect the integrity of their data.”

Even more alarming is that Lee doesn’t stop after being told no: “what if i were to hire your brother for 7 thousand dollars a month for some small web designing.” [sic]

Adam again turns it down, telling him “Keep the money. If I ever need a job, offer it to me then.”

The rest of the ICQ log is a stunning admission of the methods of duping, trading non-drop items, macroing and token-selling. What is amazing in this case is that according to sources, Adam was told to negotiate getting the macros and exploits from BlackSnow in exchange for releasing some of the less-dangerous accounts. The problem that cropped up is that Adam slowly overstepped his bounds and began warning Lee of ways to “keep their characters under the radar,” so to speak.

Perhaps Adam was just trying to bait BlackSnow into giving up everything, but the shocking development was that when Lee Caldwell was told that none of the accounts would be returned, he told them that “you are really leaving us no choice in our course of action.”

About an hour later, he tells Adam, “We are forced into a corner. We have seen that by suing mythic we got a very serious recognition and immediate phone call and a very nice settlement. As of 1pm PST we will instruct our attorney, Steven Krongold of Arter&Hadden, to immediately file a lawsuit in Federal Court. Since he has the lawsuit vs. Mythic already done, it will cost us almost nothing. I am tired of this silly chess game with you. I think this kind of publicity will be the worst kind for AO, but that is a determination for you and your company to make. And please dont take me for a bluffing type of person. Ask Mythic if I bluff.”

When asked if FunCom should expect a legal action, Lee responded with “Absolutely. We will proceed no later than 1pm tommorrow afternoon PST.” This occurred on February 12th.

This means that, yes Virginia, this has been going on since late January. And it also asks another good question: Did Mythic settle? Pulling information from the ICQ logs from February 7th, leaked by Lee Caldwell, Mark Jacobs himself called to settle the dispute over their item selling. Sorry, time selling. Whatever. Unknown Player contacted Mark Jacobs last night and we received the following quote today:

There is no settlement agreement between mythic or blacksnow, either agreeded [sic] to, ready to be signed, or signed as of this morning. Due to the requirements of confidentiality I can’t comment specifically on anything regarding possible settlement talk between blacksnow and mythic. On the other hand I do think this issue should have gone away last month.

It’s also interesting to note that apparently this method of “sell and sue” has been BlackSnow’s plan all along, because from the note dated January 30th, Lee says “…Verant is next.”

Is this the plan, Lee? Hack, dupe and exploit your way to the top? Using third-party applications to (again, from your own ICQ logs) level from 1 to 50 in 12 minutes? Legality has been claimed, yet lawsuits were threatened. The amazing thing here is that this didn’t get out sooner.

On top of that, BlackSnow continues to solicit for donations to its legal fund, despite the claim of settlement with Mythic over a month ago. What gives? Is this yet another part of the plan?

From what I have read in the logs and emails and information received over the phone, what FunCom was trying to do was no different than Turbine and Asheron’s Call: offer the duper or exploiter something in return for giving up their knowledge. The problem became that when more was promised under the table by an employee on the inside, it got so far out of hand that the entire thing needed to be put to a stop.

FunCom figuratively said “we’re taking our toys and kicking you out of our sandbox.”

BlackSnow’s response was to get a lawyer to take FunCom’s toys and force their way back into the sandbox.

Recess time, kids. Chew on this for a while, I’m sure there’s more to come.