“What we’ve got here is…failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it…well, he gets it. I don’t like it any more than you men.” — Captain, Road Prison 36 from Cool Hand Luke

Some more information is surfacing. The following people are currently embroiled in a pending lawsuit with the FTC:

• Richard Phim
• Carman Lee Caldwell
• Shade Delmer, aka Shane Delmer
• Naomi Ruth Anderson

Take a look at the Legal Doccuments posted by BlackSnow, The Plaintiffs:

• Lee Caldwell
• Forrest Parker
• Richard Phim

Documents are available from the Federal Trade Commission. The complaint itself is here, Adobe Acrobat Viewer required. Also available are the Default Judgement, the Application for Default Judgement, and a request to serve papers by publication. The FTC lawyer for the case commented that

“I think the complaint, as well as our motion for default judgment and an earlier motion requesting leave to serve the summons on Richard Phim by publication, would state our case as well as could be stated. The motion for default judgment also describes the status of the prospective settlement with Phim and Caldwell.”
John Jacobs
Federal Trade Commission
Western Region-LA

Lee Caldwell of BlackSnow was given two opportunities for comment and refused comment both times.

For those of you joining us late, here’s a chronology of this saga:

* Part 1, in which the exploiting/hacking story breaks and the logs are posted
* Part 2, Adam Young’s rebuttal to statements by BlackSnow
* Part 3, BlackSnow issues a press release, calling FunCom’s statements “inaccurate or outright false”
* Part 4, we went digging and asked about a link between the Lore network and BlackSnow
* Part 5, Obsidian Technologies officially tells us they’re not involved

Part 6? You’re soaking in it. Keep in mind this has all been since Friday morning. It’s now Wednesday, and the snowball doesn’t look to be stopping. Stay tuned.

Disclaimer: We are not saying that these documents are the same Lee Caldwell as BlackSnow, nor are we accusing anyone else associated with BlackSnow of being involved in this federal lawsuit. Readers are encouraged to make their own decisions. © John “Rasputin” Lyden, 2002.

Also in a phone conversation with Forest Parker AKA Stryder, Sunday night, Forest admits to still using the @everlore.com e-mail address to get into betas and get gaming information from companies. Huh?? Isn’t beta where people find lots of bugs?

If Everlore, CamelotExchange and Obsidian are all the same people, then what does this mean for the gaming community at large? Even if it’s only that Stryder and Forest work(ed) for both, how could someone involved with a legitimate site condone the actions of exploiters by working with them and providing e-mail and other services or information?

If they are working for them, what does Bryan Reynolds, the owner of Obsidian and the Lore.com sites get out of it? Phat lewtz? Free powerlevelling? Or is he involved in BS himself? Hell, maybe he gets $7000 a month! That’s what BS offered Adam to look the other way, isn’t it? Assuming this is all correct, this becomes no less than tacit acceptance of exploiting by Obsidian/Lore.com/Bryan Reynolds.

How deep does this rabbit hole lead? Where else could we wind up? One thing is for sure, this saga isn’t through yet…

My original, unedited portion of part IV went along these lines:

On a whim, I threw the info for Camelotexchange.com though the Internic WHOIS system. What I found surprised me, and started a bit of a brainburner with UP and I.

Here’s the log of sites I ran. The thing that got me was the administrative contact listed for Camelotexchange.com is Stryder@everlore.com.

But the administrative contact is listed as an employee of Obsidian-Tech.com, which is the same company as Obsidianonline.com. The employee listed is presumably the brother of “Wes” from Part 1. We’re also privy to the information that Wes works for Obsidian-Tech.com as well…and he’s also noted as the creator of the BS macro program that gained characters 50 levels in 12 minutes.

And Everlore is currently running paid advertisements for Anarchy Online.

Did we mention that Lee Caldwell of BS is also the alternate contact for XShard.com?

What it all boils down to is that the major Everquest fansite is intricately linked to BS and their exploiting ways, by way of the people running them.

If Everlore, CamelotExchange and Obsidian are all the same people, then what does this mean for the gaming community at large? Even if it’s only that Stryder works for both, how could someone involved with a legitimate site condone the actions of exploiters by working with them?

What does he get out of it? Phat lewtz? Free powerlevelling? Or is he involved in the exploiting himself? Hell, maybe he gets $7000 a month! That’s what BS offered Adam Young to look the other way, isn’t it? This becomes no less than tacit acceptance of exploiting by Everlore.

How deep does this rabbit hole lead? Where else could we wind up?

There’s nothing worse than duping a newbie, with the exception of duping a newbie for real money. After all, this is the same company who wanted to know when exploits would be fixed so they could maximize their profit.

That’s right, their profit. Wasn’t this suit with Mythic for “players’ rights?” And this propsed suit against FunCom would be for “players’ rights” as well, wouldn’t it?

Come off it, Lee. Admit what we’re all capable of seeing. This suit isn’t about players’ rights. It’s about the Almighty Dollar. The Phat Lewtz.

Thinking of what’s going on makes my stomach turn.

Yours should too.

Holy hell, this sucker keeps rolling downhill, folks…

Many thanks to Unknown Player who popped this onto my IM. According to Anarchy Oline, BlackSnow (for brevity’s sake, hereinafter referred to as “BS”) issued a press release sometime yesterday. This one sez “OK gang, we’re really thinking harder about suing them because they said we were banz0rd when we weren’t.”

Think I’m kidding?

Press Release
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
(888)491-4949
Sales@camelotexchange.com

www.camelotexchange.com
www.aoexchange.com

Now, mind you this is not on their website at all. They may have taken it down. I don’t know. I do know that their press release section still only pertains to the Mythic situation.

We think we’ve pinpointed the portion of the ‘press release’ that they’re bunched up about. From the first paragraph of the original e-mail we got from FunCom:

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 ).

Inaccurate, yeah. Libel, nah. In the strict definition of the word, yes. But dig a bit, and you’ll find that, as far as I can tell, BlackSnow has to prove actual malice as opposed to just mistaken circumstances. Being that it’s a company and not a private individual and all. At least as far as I can tell.

But with all this talk of suing…how about letting the players in on it too?

A group of guilds are forming a coalition to drive BlackSnow out of the game. In the post on BS’s own boards, Michael “Vanguarde” Webb states:

Several of the most powerful guilds have banded together and are putting together a case vs. Blacksnow Interactive ourselves. We will not stand for a bunch of freeloaders coming in and charging people for playing a game they sould be playing in the first place.

We have been in contact with Mythic and they agree with us.

We are going to work out a way in which all people who use these services get ‘branded’ so all the other legit players know in game they did not earn their level and rank and will have a special marking that clearly states they are a ’serviced’ player.

In this way, along with the support of almost all of the top guilds playing Dark Age of Camelot, it will allow Blacksnow to still run it’s ‘buisness’, yet it will let the people decide in game if they want to group with someone who has used one of these services.

We are positive branding players who use these services to get levels and status not through skill and time, but through pure cash, will find that in their quest to become powerful by paying others to do the work they should have, that they will find no groups, no guilds, and no fun in the game world.

We are not a company, we are not in this for money what so ever like both Mythic AND Blacksnow are. We are in this to preserve the gameworld we enjoy and love so much. We, as hundreds of the players in the top guilds across several servers will not ALLOW this to happen, and ‘branding’ the people who use these services is the answer we strongly believe.

Our group is over 400 players strong, and represent a large chunk of the most powerful guilds across several DAoC servers. We will not sit back and let these kinds of companies profit off of other peoples work, nor will we let them destroy the economy in DAoC which is so important for the fun in the game.

Feel free to email me at mikewebb@si.rr.com I am one of 4 members of this group, who call themselves the ‘Omega Plan’ that has been selected to speak for everyone in these times.

We are 100% behind Mythic, and respect the hard work they have done in this project. We are 100% negative towards Blacksnow, and as we have done to the semi-famous seller in the past, know as ‘Grem’, we shall help put these people who seek to profit from others hard work, down and out.

Thank you for your time, and Blacksnow, you can expect to hear from our lawyers in a few days.

This was posted on March 13th…eerily prescient, I’d say.

Either way, we’ve got a heck of a lot more info coming your way Monday morning. Stay tuned. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.

We received an email from Adam Young of Funcom. Yes, THE Adam Young. It’s a rebuttal and a “my side of the story” type of thing.

In response to the IGN article, Mr. Caldwell’s claims and the ICQ log.

Within negotiations, to obtain information, one has to attempt to gain the other parties trust, to make them feel as though you are one of them. Additionally, the other party has to feel that they are getting a fair deal in exchange for what you will receive. This is no different in the case with the personal discussions that I had with Mr. Caldwell. Additionally, I made it explicitly clear to Lee that I was not acting as an official spokesperson for Funcom, and that this conversation was strictly off the record. I repeatedly requested a point of contact from Wes, Andy, and Lee but was told time and again that they were not interested in receiving an official letter from Funcom explaining why their accounts had been banned and would not be released. The ICQ log was me having a personal conversation with Mr. Caldwell, attempting to get him to assist in resolving these exploits, at no point did I harass him, and was after the issuance of formal emails informing them that their accounts had been closed due to an apparent exploit.

With any story there are always two sides, Mr. Caldwell certainly has the art of spinning a story down pact.

In exchange for their cooperation in resolving the rapid level exploit, I discussed the possibility of releasing some of their accounts. That was until the characters were looked over and some serious item duplication exploits were found. This altered the negotiations, as I could no longer return the other accounts due to the extreme nature of the exploits present. The final arrangement was that I would allow them to retrieve legit personal equipment and credits from their personal AO play characters to transfer to new characters in addition to some tokens. My rational being that two 1000 token boards on two characters was a worthwhile compromise for eliminating eight serious exploits from the game.

Now what ended up occurring was that Mr. Caldwell also transferred some legacy stacks of armor and other items from this character and proceeded to use an exploit that he had informed me of to duplicate this stack of armor and stacks of tokens in order to generate credits for resale. Now if you note in the log, I advised them that if they were still going to continue to dupe stacks of items then they should build the stack up from non-stacked items and run there dupe exploit from there as the stacks of items were going to be removed from the game (this was me trying to win over their confidence to get them to finally provide the exploit details) at no point did I say that I would not ban an account if I caught them doing so. I had their word that these tokens were not going to be exploited, which they did anyway. After discovering this, these accounts were banned as well. Not for the potential that they might resell credits or items but that the account was using an exploit.

As for the advancement guidelines, this is what some of our best players are capable of accomplishing using legitimate in game methods.

From the IGN article:

“They didn’t ever ban our accounts,” says Caldwell. “They just had a rogue employee shaking us down in a very unprofessional way.”

Nope I personally blocked their access to our game servers from certain IP addresses until we could look into things further. A little history here, we had a serious exploit a while back involving some rather creative individuals who had hacked the data stream and were sending modified packets to the servers to rapid level their characters. This exploit was fixed and Black Snow Interactive’s macro looked to be the same issue. Sine the initial packet exploit, with issues this serious it is customary to deny access to the game servers to prevent damage being done to the system. Once it was determined that the issue was not the same, the exploited (rapid leveled) accounts were banned along with associated accounts and the IP subnet released so as not to deny service to any other players while still maintaining control over the situation until a more thorough walk through could be conducted. By the time this had been completed, Mr. Caldwell and I had already spoken and they were informally informed as to why the accounts had been banned. When asked to provide an address to receive the official letter as to why they had been banned his response was that he didn’t care for the letter. Within the ICQ log I cut and pasted an official response regarding the reason why the account would not be returned and why they would not receive a refund.

Rogue actions, nope not at all I kept Marius, Henning and Thomas abreast of the developments. Although, the log looks a bit rogish, this was intentional on my behalf to set an atmosphere in which these individuals would confide in me. Not to mention the good cop bad cop routine with me playing the role of the good cop and painting the Exploit Team lead as the bad cop. All information provided was already available, either from the Test Live Server for upcoming changes in 13.6 and or from external sites which are tracking character level progression. At times one has to bend a little in order to benefit the AO community as a whole. While discussing monitoring methods, I disclosed some minor methods that, at the time, were used to monitor for illegal activity. The actual tool set is much more complex and sensitive than what I eluded to. And has been enhanced since this incident.

The statement that they have ‘obtained all items and levels in complete accordance with Anarchy Online’s terms of service is incorrect as the EULA explicitly prohibits the use of 3rd party tools to alter the intended game play. As for the items, those were not obtained through normal game play either. How can one state that 5 to 6 backpacks full of stacks if 16K High Quality Medium Tank armors all with the same stack number, all of the same Quality Level, and all possessing the same item identifier are obtained through normal game play, not to mention the stacks of tokens. Yes they used the client to duplicate the items, but this is not the intended function of the code, thus they used a bug (irregularity in the code set) to achieve what is clearly an unfair advantage over other players who work hard to play the game by the intended rules.

Henning has given the go ahead to release the ICQ log between myself and Mr. Caldwell.

Adam “De’Valos”Young

(aka. “Rogue Employee” still ROFL about that one)

Lead Database Administrator/Engineer, Funcom Inc.

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.