Accused of salacious and misleading advertising, spamming, plagiarism, and possibly filling your computer with identity-thieving software, the online fantasy strategy game Evony is heavily criticised online (Guardian; Bruce on Games more; Coding Horror). It's "free forever" and therefore needs to advertise on the cheap and get your money other ways: its tools are breasts and comment-spam. If you've been on a website carrying ads in the past few months, particularly one aiming for a geeky/technology-savvy/teen market, it's hard to escape its exhortations (examples here) to rescue a buxom wench from some unnamable evil. It also offers "play discreetly now", which makes it sound like a porn site; early ads included images of lingerie models but now they are using drawn fantasy art that looks like it's cut out from the cover of a romance novel. Bruce On Games claims these ads have no relation to the game content, but teenage boys like boobies, is probably the advertising strategy.
The game is free to buy, but almost anything you want to do in the game (get equipment, speak to other players) costs money. It was produced by Eric Lam, a Chinese businessman who specialises in gold farming (definition: paying people pennies to play online games and selling the items and in-game currency they earn by playing; Wikipedia). According to the Guardian, Microsoft is suing its Chinese owners Universal Multiplayer Game Entertainment for click fraud (definition: exaggerating views to increase advertising revenue; WP again). It's being promoted by comment spam, the practice of posting irrelevant comments on blogs and discussion boards (Popehat.com; Bruce on Games).
But is it a good game? Free online gaming is becoming popular with games like Runescape, Habbo, Maple Story, and Free Realms, so there is a market here. People like free things. Bloggers say Evony is buggy and rather derivative, copying games like Age of Empires and Civilization (Arksark.org) - it was nearly called Civony - although not all reviews are bad (The Big Critique). Bruce On Games reports that its downloadble iEvony client may be doing evil things to your computer, possibly installing malware.
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I got the new version Evony 3.08. My older version was 2.16.
ReplyDeleteThe 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.