The Story So Far….
It’s no doubt been a long couple weeks for both the players and developers of the ill-fated “Zombie MMO” The War Z. Despite showing a lot of promise during its alpha phase, problems with the open-world Zombie survival title, developed by Hammerpoint Interactive, have gone from bad to worse during the last few months ever since its closed beta in October.
Rampant hacking, corrupt forum moderators, fraud, seemingly random bans, these and other accusations have been flung by disgruntled players not only on the game’s official forums but also on the Steam forums after The War Z’s brief stay on Steam (The War Z was added to Steam on December 17th and then taken down two days later following numerous claims of misleading information on its store page).
Two individuals in particular have found themselves in the crosshairs of disgruntled players; The War Z’s executive producer Sergey Titov, and The War Z’s community manager, known simply as “Kewk”, who was in charge of moderating both the official War Z forums as well as the War Z Steam forums.
Titov’s credibility as both a game developer and as a human being in general has been plummeting quickly after he rather brazenly blamed the players not once but *twice*, first in an official interview with GameSpy and again on the War Z forums, for “misreading and misinterpreting” the game’s listed features (even though they were all in a section called “Key Features”).
After multiple accusations of power abuse for deleting and banning threads and users for rules he pretty much made up on the spot, Kewk had his moderating privileges revoked on the Steam War Z forums (many users expressed concern that he’d been given such power in the first place since he is employed by Hammerpoint and not by Valve). Kewk then went on to post a rather unclear and somewhat passive-aggressive announcement on the War Z forums in which he did little more than redirect players to Titov’s GameSpy interview and try to garner sympathy over his Christmas vacation woes.
For Every Action, A Reaction….
Titov’s and Kewk’s posts combined with the GameSpy interview have done little more than fan the already rampant flames of player hate and blame. Kewk’s post was re-posted on the Steam forums where many users questioned his rather shady decision to “go on vacation” the day after The War Z made its Steam debut and called his vacation struggles “karma.”
The few Steam posters who tried to defend Kewk were quickly shouted down by the mob, some of whom even expressed their hope that this whole debacle would cost Kewk far more than his job (a.k.a. his family or even his life). At the time of this writing, the War Z Steam forums are still clogged with threads about asking for refunds, bashing both War Z and Hammerpoint, and petitions to keep The War Z off of Steam for good, even more so now that Kewk isn’t around to delete them anymore.
Around In Circles…
While all the fan-outcry regarding The War Z’s broken promises and Hammerpoint’s failure to take responsibility are certainly justified, I’m left questioning whether the fans might have taken things a step too far. It’s one thing to be upset when you pay for something and don’t get what you were promised, it’s quite another to vent your anger by making death threats.
I know it may seem easy to just hop aboard the War Z hate train and start spewing filth but it is important to remember that over a medium as broad as the internet, Hammerpoint’s actions can very easily be mirrored by our *reactions.* Whether or not Titov and the rest of Hammerpoint meant to deceive players is irrelevant if those very same players portray themselves as a rabid mob that’s out for blood over a $15 game.
Breaking The Cycle
I’d like to share a brief story that oddly mirrors many of the issues I’ve seen in the War Z debacle: during my high-school years, I went to an alternative school where students who wanted to graduate had to write a formal thesis on why they believed they were ready for “the next step.” One year, a student was denied his chance to graduate not because he hadn’t written a thesis (he had) but because his family had been two days late in delivering his final tuition check (an arbitrary rule that in no significant way detracted from the fact that he’d worked hard to graduate).
The two people who effectively ran the school, rather than giving the student a break, decided to instead stick by the arbitrary technicality and adopted a rather childish “sucks to be you” attitude no matter how nicely the student and his family pleaded with them. Naturally other parents and students (myself included) where both confused and angered because we had known these two adults for years and had judged them to be decent, kind people, an assumption which we quickly learned was very off the mark.
Some talked about holding a rally for the student on the school’s property, an action that would no-doubt have gotten the authorities involved. My own brother (who had already graduated) ended up being banned from the school’s campus for trying to get current students to stand up to the manipulative and bullying attitude of the two adults (much like Kewk, they tried to make themselves look like the victims). In the end, we decided the best way to show our disdain was by suggesting and even starting alternative options for interested parents. The student in question managed to get a GED from a community college, and life went on.
My point for this whole story is that it’s natural to feel angry and betrayed when a person (or company) not only deceives you but then tries to *blame* you for the deception, or worse, tries to make themselves out as the victim. However, despite our anger, we didn’t resort to extreme measures; we didn’t boycott tuition or trespass on the school’s campus or try to get the two adults fired (though many of us certainly talked about doing these things), instead, we found a solution that, while not as satisfying as some of the more extreme proposals, still allowed us to put the issue to rest and move on.
So go ahead and be angry at Titov, at Kewk, at Valve, at whoever. But just remember the old saying “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Sure what Hammerpoint did with The War Z is fishy at best, downright deplorable at worst, but we shouldn’t let our anger carry us to the point where we look even *worse* by comparison.
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