There is now a lot of interesting stuff about this Chinese browser game on this blog. Much of this has been contributed by readers with experience of the game, so I strongly suggest that you read the comments after every article, they contain some absolute gems.
The Chinese gold farmers came to my attention when they first started spamming the forums and blogs that I run. Gold farmers are part of the underbelly of the interweb alongside pornographers and fake Viagra sellers, so they use the same black hat marketing techniques that abuse the internet and its users and which are illegal in many countries, such as spamming everything they can spam. One of these gold farmers is an organisation with many names including Super Continental, UMGE and WoWMine. Article:
Then earlier this year Bruceongames was comment spammed regularly by a Chinese MMO called Evony, which was publicising itself as being the product of UMGE. (They have since gone into denial and tried to remove all mention of this association from the internet, including deleting the whole website UMGE.com). Because of the spamming I recommended that people avoid Evony in this article:
The response to this was so big that I found out a lot more about this game. And so on July the 15 this year I wrote the article More about Evony. On the same day The Guardian newspaper published an article: Has Evony become the most despised game on the web?
As a result of the feedback from this I got a lot of information from players of the game saying that it was causing problems with their computer, so I put this together as an article on July 16, specifically pointing out “I am not saying that Evony has a trojan in its client software”. This article attracted further comments from players with bad experiences:
Evony were obviously unhappy with the truth about themselves reaching the light of day so they made a tactical change. On 22 July they incorporated Evony LLC, a Delaware company. They then tried to become American and removed all mention of their Chinese heritage from the internet. Evony LLC then started to act against me for what I had written before they even existed! I got a threatening letter from Dean Groundwater, a solicitor from the Australian small town firm Warren McKeon Dickson:
Evony want to sue me for telling the truth
At about the same time Valerie from Evony distributed an email that told a whole pile of easily demonstrable lies about Evony, the issues I had raised and about me. I reported this and rebutted the lies with this article:
Then on September 14 Evony issued a press release saying that they were taking me to court for telling the truth. In the press release Dean Groundwater accuses me of fraud, a very serious allegation.
I then wrote an article explaining more about the people behind Evony:
Eric Lam, UMGE, WoWMine and Evony
I have also written a few background articles to try and put some of what is happening here into context.
The game mechanic and its subversion
How the internet is being censored
I also reported a few further bad things about Evony, brought to my attention by readers of Bruceongames. Racialism and the online gambling in the game:
Along the way we have also had some fun:
Evony advert ridiculed by PopCap
I don’t like Evony, that much should be obvious. I don’t like their black hat marketing, spamming blogs and spamming Google adsense. And I don’t like the way they have put gold farming inside the game, subverting the game mechanic by the payment of money so as to extract the maximum wealth from the player. But most of all I don’t like the way they try and suppress freedom of speech by trying to censor the internet to prevent people knowing the truth about them.
