As news breaks about War Z being unfinished, even through it found it’s way to digital shelves, there are deeper problems with the game that just haven’t come to light. Yes, Destructoid and Kotaku are both correct in reporting that the game is far from being finished, and that it’s nothing more than a glorified beta. Yes, Hammerpoint Interactive is trying very hard to make this turd shine as brightly as they possibly can, but there is a lot more under the surface that hasn’t come to light yet. Like who is Hammerpoint Interactive? Why did they ban a bunch of accounts recently?
For those that don’t know, War Z is the name of a new zombie survival game that has been released to Steam’s digital shelves for 14.99 USD. Hammerpoint Interactive touts their own game as being “the world’s first zurvival mmo Zombie Game.” Continuing on with their quote, “You may have played Zombie Games before – now it’s time to live one.” If you think about it, and knowing about the Arma II mod DayZ is, this is very egotistical coming from a developer that is completely unknown.
Our own Video Producer, Josh, was excited by the game knowing the amount of hype that Day Z had when it first appeared. He decided to buy into the beta, at the $25 USD level. Not only being able to play in the beta, but he was also given 3 guest keys for 24 hours to give to his friends and 15 USD worth of in game currency. Like anyone else, he downloaded the game and played it for about an hour.
He returned the next day, and when he tried to log in he was greeted with a message that said he had been banned, from the beta. Josh isn’t the kind of guy to go into a game looking to hack it and cheat his way through it. In fact, with only an hour worth of playtime to his name, he found it difficult to believe that he was banned for cheating.
As just about any one of us would do, he contacted customer support, only to find out that a different company is handling customer support, Xsolla Support, a company known for payment transaction services. After asking why he was banned, he was given a blanket statement:
It has come to our attention that your account has been banned.Your game account was blocked due to a violation of Clause 2.a which is one of the User Agreement clauses:Clause 2. a. Use cheats, automation software (bots), hacks, mods or any other third-party software designed to modify, enhance, or otherwise alter the Service, the Game Client or the Game experience without the express written consent of OP Productions.Upon completion of your payment you accepted the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.At this point we are unable to initiate a refund.If you feel that you did not violate the Terms of Service, please contact game support at:support@thewarz.com. Once Game Support has completed their investigation, they will email you with their findings.
The response given was very cookie cutter, and very professional even though it wasn’t from Hammerpoint Interactive, or anyone really associated with how WarZ runs. He has since gotten a hold of WarZ support, and hasn’t heard from them at the time of writing. His original message to support was on December 15th.
We found out that Josh wasn’t the only person smacked with the ban hammer on December 14th. In fact anywhere from 250 – 500 players of WarZ were hit with a ban and a blanket statement saying they were cheating. When people started to take to the WarZ forums asking about why they were banned and if they were going to get their money back, because the game was still in beta at this point in time, the forums turned into a war zone.
Things got so bad that the forums were put on lock down. Players weren’t allowed to open new threads on the forums, new players couldn’t register on the forums, and posts about being banned from the game were being deleted as fast as possible as forum moderators were starting to drink deep from their powers. Reasons for banning people went from professional blanket statements to rude, vulgar and unprofessional taunts, two examples from earlier in the month are pictured below.
One of WarZ’s former moderators, Devin Hutchinson, took to other forums out there to report on the unprofessional actions of other WarZ moderators. He revealed that most of the PR and Community management for WarZ is being taken care of by unpaid volunteers saying, “I then made a post on the forums about how I knew this was coming; and I was sorry and would [no] [longer] be supporting a company that did not support their unpaid volunteer Moderators that spent over 100+ hours answering THEIR CUSTOMERS questions and concerns as well as relaying them the ideas the community had for their [cruddy] game.” Devin also publicly stated, “They randomly ban accounts that have a certain amount of time spent playing in-game, knowing they are hooked on the game so they re-buy the game” (found here)
Why don’t they employ a community manager? Wouldn’t it be better to have a paid professional taking care of customers and dealing with the messy work of bans. And it’s not like smaller indie companies don’t employ community managers. Putting that much power in the hands of unpaid volunteers is not a good business model.
The crux of the issue isn’t that they just rushed a game through beta to pop onto digital shelves. It’s all the questions that we are left with, starting with who the hell is Hammerpoint Interactive? I have never heard of a studio/development team not having a website, let alone not having a facebook page, twitter account, youtube channel, or even a twitch TV channel. The War Z twitch TV channel is run by Arktos Entertainment who is the publisher of the game. Also, Sergey Titov the head of Hammerpoint, is also the head of Arktos Entertainment, OP Productions (who is credited at the bottom of the War Z website, Online Warmongers, and War Inc. (The game that War Z is ripped from). Hammerpoint Interactive isn’t even the company listened on the War Z’s domain registry.
This whole situation and the game stinks of foul play and appears to be nothing more than a cash grab. This is also one of the few reasons why buying into a game before it’s even released is a bad idea. Shady company, shady dealings, and games that don’t live up to their promises. The best advice I could give here for anyone, is make sure you know who you are giving your money to before you buy into a game early. You never know exactly what is going to happen to it. Josh lost his 25 USD, so you shouldn’t have to.
UPDATE:
War Z was removed from the Steam store this afternoon. I am curious to find out how many folks that bought it on steam got a refund. We also are working on something else having to do with Hammerpoint, look for that in the coming days.
I have to agree, though I’ve been hesitant to purchase the game based on the sudden swiftness on “development” from announcement to a released Alpha. The DayZ Mod became popular earlier this year, and suddenly The War Z comes out from the shadows, seemingly from no where.
I got a 48-hour pass to The War Z. I installed it (after many hours of failed download attempts), I launched the game and played for 2-3 hours. I logged off and I had other commitments. I went back to play the game and I no longer had access, my time had expired. It turns out when you activate their timed guest passes, you literally have 48-hours to play, not 48-hours of game time. Something not up-front.
Once in the game though, I wasn’t impressed. The suggested AI Zombie hordes were nothing but a nuisance. Something you’d expect to be better developed than DayZ, but that wasn’t the case. The graphics were pretty good, and nice, but not anything spectacular.
The movement speed was severely crippled. It felt like walking/running on ice. The game is a blatant copy of War, Inc. and replaced with zombie models and sold as a full game. It’s despicable what they’re doing and I do understand that there are legitimate fans, but it is hard that they do not see the problems here.
I too am upset that Steam is promoting a game of this dubious quality. While I could see similar bans occurring in more popular, mainstream games, WarZ fails in its shady marketing. Please read my write-up below, which was written two months ago:
My impressions of the WarZ: the game has significant flaws. I realize it’s at alpha status but I’m not sure their dev team has the ability to make it happen. The biggest insult is that the WarZ website shows proof-of-concept screenshots that I doubt will ever depict gameplay.
The lighting system is decent but you quickly get tired of the spartan, empty interiors. There are no working doors in the game. A house is either wide open or a solid impenetrable block. For a game that consists of looting urban areas, you’d think that this could be done better.
Zombies sparsely populate urban areas and tend to glitch a lot by getting stuck in place. It’s practical to exploit their AI by trying to put vehicles/buildings between you and them when being chased. Combat is a tedious and un-enjoyable affair with little feedback as to how much damage you’re dealing. I hit a zombie with a hammer for 20 times while it stood there making pain noises and then I somehow died. Apparently you have to aim above zombies’ heads with melee weapons (I should say weapon, there is a hammer) to hit them.
Guns and ammunition are currently extremely sparse. In ten hours of playing, I found one loaded handgun with 13 rounds of ammunition. To add insult to injury, weapons tend to spawn at set locations. Each game server holds 30 players and items have a chance of spawning every so often (20 minutes?). Because of weapon scarcity, it’s common for players to server hop after reaching weapon spawn points in hopes of reaching a lucky drop. Posts on the forum indicate that a player might gain a weapon after server-hopping for 30-40 minutes. This is a common practice for the hardcore.
Player animosity is increased due to: 1) don’t have a weapon? nothing to lose, try to attack someone who does, and 2) found a gun? shoot anyone who comes near or risk hours of lost playtime. Due to the lackluster player-zombie combat, unlikelihood of acquiring a firearm, and incentive to avoid other players, one quickly feels a sense of purposelessness after playing for a few hours.
The Alpha forums (unlocked for paying customers) are a mixture of the above complaints and snarky retorts from hardcore server-hopping farmers as mentioned above. There is clearly a large crowd of players who have migrated from DayZ, as the forums are active, but it does not appear to be a mature community.
It costs $30 to join the alpha as a medium-level participant and begin playing. For this amount, I participated in betas for Tribes Ascend, Planetside 2, Natural Selection 2, and others. War Z is not worth the money.
Wow, I feel for Josh. Based on the the number of people experiencing this treatment and the comments made by the former moderator, it sounds like a complaint should be issued to the BBB. No guarantee anything will be done so best thing to do is spreading the word. Thanks for letting us know JPS! Will be sure to avoid this game and the developer.
I guess they’ve already got an F rating on the BBB. Probably from all the mis-fired bans and lack of CS!
i like turtles
Considering they have banned over 3,000 in one day… items that are in game used as traps for banning others because they duped them or got to a place they literally have placed in a location not even that hard to get into.
I wouldn’t even drop 15 bucks on the steam copy for this game let alone support a company that treats their community like garbage…
at least IGP and PGI treat their community better in the MWO games than these guys.
Dear Josh,
If you read this, call your card company or paypal or whatever you used to pay for WarZ and claim Indemnity.
This will force the card company/paypal/bank to repay you what you paid and force them to get in contact of who you bought from to pay them.
They are more likely to pay a financial firm than an end user.
Still pretty shocking and blatantly obvious they did this on purpose to get more money, funny how most people who bought the game + in game currency at same time are fine.
I played the beta… if you can call it that and was not impressed, lack of anything didn’t help with the immersion. But obviously the companies main income will be in game currency for items you can’t find in game so it will be pay to win.
Hopefully Steam will recognise what is going on and remove the game from their store.
Update: It has finally been removed from Steam in the UK as I was typing this. They probably got fed up paying back Indemnity claims lol
Also as we speak Steamcommunity is down..
Perhaps to try and clean up most of the really bad negative posts on the forum.
Ahh well lesson learned by Valve, try out the game first before allowing it to be sold
But then again, Valve isn’t innocent of the make people buy the game and then force them to pay a $10 fee afterwards.
You seem to be leading your information to a conclusion rather than vice versa. The former moderator lost his gig after he clicked a questionable link and got hacked. That hacker then went in and deleted half of the forums. After it got sorted out he was told they were removing his mod status and he then posted what you quoted and got banned for it. He then went to any other site he could find and posted the allegations. Not long after he recounted the entire thing via youtube video and tried to remove all his allegations from other websites. Warz has its share of problems to be sure, but it isn’t as shady as people like to believe. I honestly believe the devs just don’t know what they’re doing because the experience they have comes from creating a shooter on small compressed maps. I’m sorry that your video producer got banned, has his been lifted? The devs have said they reviewed the bans and corrected the mistaken bans so maybe Josh got his lifted as well. It would be nice if you could update the article because the steam page has been corrected and an apology issued as well.
There is no reason to believe a hacker got access to his account, to be honest, Kwek/Kewk got angry that a game he was looking forward to being a part of, and promoting it, was getting so much negativity due to the lies and lack of support from the developers.
He went on a ban rage and deleted the threads. A hacker would have did the opposite and destroyed the positive threads about the game.
He knows he has done wrong and is trying to mitigate the fallout from it all. I don’t think Valve will be too eager to give him back moderator status anytime soon.
And he is off to Las Vegas as we speak, but his car broke down – must be karma. Guess he is off with all that hard earned money made from the lies of the devs.
Thankfully i was able to get a refund before they started with this no refund thing.. fuck warz and fuck Sergey Titov the mastermind behind big rigs(One of the worst games of all time)
They treat their community like garbage?
They should do a merger with Ubisoft.