GUComics & Horizons...

[Labyrrinth]

Apparently EI Interactive and Horizons is engaging is some... uhmm...questionable billing practices and Woody's a little pissed!

The comic (http://www.gucomics.com/)

The notice (http://www.gucomics.com/#important_notice)

[Fozzik]

Hm... geeze. Strong statement considering he isn't willing to explain what they are doing wrong. =(

Must be something pretty bad. He's a pretty mellow guy.

[Semini]

I think he was saying something about them double or even triple billing folks the last time he did one about them...

[Navid]

yeah its all really confusing

[Nólaquen]

Wow. As Fozzik said, Woody is a pretty mellow guy. EI must have been burning that fuse with a flamethrower to get this kind of reaction.

As a game developer/publisher, you can nerf people's characters, fundamentally change the game from the ground up, whatever and still manage to maintain some semblance of peace, but when you mess with people's billing, the line must be drawn. That is one line you would never want to cross, especially not in the way EI apparently has by trying to cover up the issues.

[Eburk]

I wouldn't call Woody mellow necessarily...I mean, he was pretty pissed at that guy that who commented on his hat at the Renessiance fair :P

But I like him a lot, and he has a good grasp on the gaming community...it's a bit discerning to hear about problems with billing. When people's credit cards are involved, it's not a good situation.

[Lord_Vyper]

Well, EII potentially exposed a large percentage of it's playerbase to identity/credit card theft by using a non-SSL page to collect player info for renewal purposes (name, address, credit card info, etc.). THey then dump this info into flat text file that can be accessed by ANYONE. Considering EII's site was written in Frontpage 4, I'm not surprised they haven't quite grasped the intricacies of a .htaccess file.
The alternative to this? Mail all the info in. Wait 3 weeks. Oh, and don't forget to include your credit card number, and CCV number along with all your other personal info.
For those that don't know, it's illegal to collect/retain both CC and CCV numbers.

The best part of all of this? They did respond to customer complaints... in a IRC room... by telling customers to go find another game.

Now they change the forums around to require approval to post, so apparently anyone that didn't know about all of the above issues will never find out.

Either EII's intentionally trying to screw HZ up as much as possible, or they're more inept then SoE/LucasArts. /boggle

[Spirit]

Wow. Just.. wow. I guess that's one way of telling your customers to.. how can I put this.. go away.

[Dillgaar]

I hopw they sell the rights to Horizons to a company that can actually handle the game... I think Mythic would be a good candidate for bringing life into horizons... heck even MS Games would be a good place... they want a product thats ready for launch and it seems that all they would have to do is integrate it into their .Net system for user billing and authentication... it could actually work... and they could probably get it cheap... Horizons gives me that good old homey feel that AC did back before the bots

[Lord_Vyper]

I'd love to see David Allan take it back, put it into an incubator for a year or 2, and release the game he was wanting to originally.

[Razorwire]

I'd love to see David Allan take it back, put it into an incubator for a year or 2, and release the game he was wanting to originally.
The original concept for Horizons was incredible and I wish that they had stuck to it. It's a shame that the game turned out like it did.

[Lord_Vyper]

The original concept for Horizons was incredible and I wish that they had stuck to it.
If they had, the game would probably have come out around the same time Vanguard will :P
But... the concepts and interplay between aspects of the game would blow every other game out of the water.

I guess the news about EII isn't that surprising considering the history of the game overall, but it's still disheartening to see such good ideas get discarded out of hand due to negligence, apathy, and good old fashioned greed.