IPLY Damage Control

[Sol Invictus]

Remember that Fallout 3 internal review post? Yeah, well, it got deleted just like the one on No Mutants Allowed. Just thought you guys would like to know why - as I believe our readers deserve to know as much as we do.

First off, no I was not responsible for the deletion - I wouldn't do that.

Here's what I just posted on the IPLY forum:

It all comes down to money. This is what's known as insider trading. You see, it's not just ol' dumb Fallout fans who visit the websites - it's also investors and industry people. When they find out that FO3 is getting canned it signals information into the state of the company (IPLY).

For the most part, it can signify the company's diminishing state (which it is). Companies hate leaks, because leaks mean unpredictable market fluctuations to the company in question. If they released the report themselves they'd be able to have some damage control and determine what exactly would happen. It's all about derogatives - chaos theory... when it works out.

IPLY stock went up a couple of cents today, probably because they made some announcement of their own to their investors and potential investors that the company was doing some 'progressive restructuring' with this latest review, and shed a good light on what was happening.

The way NMA and RPG Codex reported the news was directly opposite to what they had probably told their investors - that is to say, the way the news was reported cast IPLY under a bad light, signifying the weakening state of the company.

As such, they decided to run some damage control, probably through the use of Sammael (I can't tell if he's in on it 100% with IPLY or if he's just a muppet. Probably both.) and have Brios and Spazmo delete the posts on the news sites. Saint wouldn't have deleted it, which is why he went to Spazmo - if that doesn't spell 'sneaky' I don't know what does.

Needless to say, I don't like it.

 

[Visceris]

Its just sad.

 

[Psilon]

Shouldn't you guys vote on such matters? I don't know anything that happened beyond your post, Exitium, but I'd think you, Saint, Deathy, and Calis should have been consulted before caving like that. (If caving is indeed the proper term.)

I'm not sure how much you can say without effectively negating the earlier action, but feel free to chime in, Spazmo. So far this site has been pretty reasonable (and yet filled with righteous indignation), so I'd like to hear another view of the story.

 

[Visceris]

I view RPG COdex as one of the most inflexable, intolareable, opinionated, and tell it the way it is to the point of rudeness gaming sites. I mean that in a nice way by the way. The change that Spazm-boy seems extremely out of character for this site.

 

[Sol Invictus]

It's the kind of thing that I would term as "relatively spineless, homosexual behaviour".

 

[Otaku_Hanzo]

I joined this site almost immediately upon coming here simply because I was happy to find a group of mature gamers who didn't give a rat's ass about what others thought and voiced their opinions no matter what. Not only that, but alot of them were intelligent and well thought out opinions. I appreciate that.

This whole thing with IPLAY is just one big joke, IMO. Being a Fallout fan, I was hoping for FO3, but I also would have preferred it never happen at all if the game was gonna be crap. In a way, I understand why this incident occured, but in another way, I don't. You have to make a stand somewhere. There is freedom of speech. Let your voices be heard and to hell with what some corporate slime-ass is gonna think about it.

Just my two cents.

 

[Affe - Duke of Spam]

First of all, fuck you all.
Who gives a shit ?
if a game's cancelled in production, there's no telling if it was going to be good or not.
If interplay fucks up, there's nothing you can do about it so just be good kids and shut up okay ?
All im saying is that Exitium and his regalia of veritable butt-plugs are taking this way to serious, taking it down to Sammael's personal level which they are all free to do, but it's just boring pathetic bullshit.

Take it like men and not women who whine about their pms.
there's nothing any of you can do about it anyway.
Except moan like Gromnir when you fuck him in the ass.

 

[Otaku_Hanzo]

And to hell with what Affe thinks as well.

 

[Zhen Dil Oloth]

Forgive an ignirant fool who never saw the deleted posts on the IPlay forum, but.......

What were those posts about??

From what I could understand, you guys seems to say that Fallout 3/Van Buren has been cancelled??

How do you know?? Who wposted such revelation??

 

[Jiles]

First of all, fuck you all.
Who gives a shit ?
if a game's cancelled in production, there's no telling if it was going to be good or not.
If interplay fucks up, there's nothing you can do about it so just be good kids and shut up okay ?
All im saying is that Exitium and his regalia of veritable butt-plugs are taking this way to serious, taking it down to Sammael's personal level which they are all free to do, but it's just boring pathetic bullshit.

Take it like men and not women who whine about their pms.
there's nothing any of you can do about it anyway.
Except moan like Gromnir when you fuck him in the ass.

Congratulations AffE, you're making less sense than usual. I didn't think that was possible.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I'm surprised and dissapointed as to how quickly the news got deleted from rpgcodex records. What's up guys?

 

[Sol Invictus]

Spazmo got anxious and deleted Saint's post because Sammael told him to or bad things would happen to Fallout 3.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Well, here's the thing about this. IPLY are very paranoid twits right now. They have been ever since I posted about Feargus quitting and like to play WHO'S THE MOLE more than most companies which are actually worth a crap financially. They log everything going from an interplay computer on to the internet and vice versa, and then sift through it for weeks to find out who's leaking anything. That's the IPLY we're dealing with here.

Now, Spamzo doesn't know jack about my sources there. Neither does anyone involved in all this. Likewise, I don't know jack about Brios's sources, because everything is safer for everyone if no one knows a damned thing. However, anonymous type stuff like this can cause SNAFUs and that's why my news post was deleted.

Spazmo just err'ed on the side of caution, in case my source was compromisable. So, he deleted my post because some concern about this was raised to him through a few other people.

Most everyone knows about those news posts, including you guys and the Interplay people. So, really, there's not much point in continuing this or even reposting it. All I know is that by posting on this site as well as Brios posting it on NMA, we've probably buried Johnny Gisler(aka TechWiz) in enough log sifting to make his job completely suck ass for the next week or so. That's enough gratification for me.

 

[Briosafreak]

What Saint said. The funny thing is the only thing really new i heard in the last week was the fact the presentation was set up to yesterday, and not friday. That`s it. And that people left BIS in droves, but that`s on the Iplay boards, it`s no secret.

Still there`s a witch hunt of sorts, so we needed to step back a litle, but everyone had already saw it anyway...

Spazmo did the moral thing, he has my respect.

By the way i heard on the Iplay boards that the games that are ready to ship really sliped to next year. If that`s true it`s Interplay end, pure and simple.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Actually, this is all part of a marketing ploy by Interplay. They're releasing a highly anticipated game about espionage and secrecy. Called Bug Hunt, players have to find the leak inside Interplay before the share price drops too low.

My friend's a beta tester and I've played it. It's great stuff.

 

[Dhruin]

BG:DA2 has defiintely been pushed to January '04. Haven't heard about FO:BOS.

 

[Sammael]

<snip>

Thank you for clarifying the situation. I would have done it myself, but, as everyone knows, I am an IPLY muppet. Or was it a power broker? I can't remember.

 

[Spazmo]

I was told that if the thing stayed up, some poor IPLY schmuck might have gotten canned. Besides that, NMA also nuked the news item. If our official source for it was gone, should it have stayed up? Now, calling me a "coward" and "homosexual" is real cute there, Rex, but is it worth someone's job? I have admitted and admit again that I should have left it up to Saint, but then again, something needed to be done then and there. I made the call. It's done.

 

[Briosafreak]

I was told that if the thing stayed up, some poor IPLY schmuck might have gotten canned. Besides that, NMA also nuked the news item. If our official source for it was gone, should it have stayed up? Now, calling me a "coward" and "homosexual" is real cute there, Rex, but is it worth someone's job? I have admitted and admit again that I should have left it up to Saint, but then again, something needed to be done then and there. I made the call. It's done.

Yeah, it was the decent thing to do. Now call Rex some names, i know Sammuel is already around the Book of Vile Darkness picking ideas to perform acts of immense cruelty on him

Rex relax a bit, dude you get all stressed up, there`s no need for it, at least for now.

 

[Psilon]

Sounds reasonable, Spaz. Besides, your deletion has, while possibly preserving the mole's career, definitely ratcheted up the paranoia level in Irvine. Good work.

I agree that the newsposts have buried Gisler in weeks of log-sifting. Still, that's what a "Security Administrator" (snicker) gets paid to do, right? After all, it's not like John Doe is going to--shock of shocks--use a home computer or a Starbucks to email Saint et al., right?

 

[Sol Invictus]

I was told that if the thing stayed up, some poor IPLY schmuck might have gotten canned. Besides that, NMA also nuked the news item. If our official source for it was gone, should it have stayed up? Now, calling me a "coward" and "homosexual" is real cute there, Rex, but is it worth someone's job? I have admitted and admit again that I should have left it up to Saint, but then again, something needed to be done then and there. I made the call. It's done.

We verified the claims though Saint's sources, not through NMA's. To be easily fooled into thinking that someone would lose his job over this and get fired by an already crumbling company is pretty silly. Even if it he did get fired - so what? He'd have gotten fired in a week along with everybody else working on FO3 regardless of the facts. If not by a week, then by the end of the year.

You shouldn't go around 'making calls' for everything that goes on the site. You don't run the bloody place.

Why don't we delete every single bit of content on our site that's in any way offensive or says bad things about a company or a game? After all, the things we say cost sales and if sales are poor, some shmuck in marketing loses his job. Let's be a nice site and drop the whole 'hardcore journalism' thing we have going and be just like every other Gamespy website and say only good things about everybody and pretend everything is fine.

Face it, journalism is a heartless enterprise. If we wanted to say nice things about peopel we'd have run a bloody PR site and never post verified rumors if someone's liable to lose his job. That'd mean not posting rumors at all and being just another Gamespy. Are we all cool with that?

update: Also, why didn't the source who was liable to the firing approach Saint or Brios directly with the request. Why'd he have to go through a third party (Sammael) to relay the message? Yes, IPLY has loggers, but wouldn't his dialog with Sammael have been logged just the same? Use your brains.

If it had been as serious as it was made out to be I'm sure he would have done it in a more direct fashion, it being his job and all that's at stake.

It occurs to me that some of you are clueless, sympathetic people who'd probably get trampled on in the real world in matters such as this because of all of that heart you so proudly wear on your sleeves.

 

[Visceris]

At first I was fairly annoyed by it but since you put it that way I can see your point of view. This sort of thing isn't worth someone's job. SHould you left it up to Saint, probably, but in the end I think you did the right thing.

As for Exitium, you do also have a point there to. Fallout 3 just might be on the way to the Recycle Bin aong with its development staff so if the guy's job is in peril in the first place posting such news can't do a whole lot of harm, but there is no guarantee of that. One piece of advice I gotten a long time ago still holds true today.

When in doubt, don't.

 

[Sol Invictus]

I take risks. If you want to go along and play it safe, you'll won't get anything in life. There's always a risk you have to take when you want something sweet because nothing is ever free.

When you play sports, you run the risk of losing - but you take it, because the reward of winning is immensely better. The same holds true with everything else in life.

I can see why you are who you are, because of your philosophy.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

I was told that if the thing stayed up, some poor IPLY schmuck might have gotten canned. Besides that, NMA also nuked the news item. If our official source for it was gone, should it have stayed up? Now, calling me a "coward" and "homosexual" is real cute there, Rex, but is it worth someone's job? I have admitted and admit again that I should have left it up to Saint, but then again, something needed to be done then and there. I made the call. It's done.

What makes you think they are going to stop searching for the mole because you deleted the post? Since when did you even care about Interplay employees anyways? They canned FO3 to go into consoles more, and since when did this site care about consoles? Since FO3 got canned we have no use for Interplay, trash them all you want.

 

[Sammael]

Bravo, Exitium. You are obviously great at taking risks... for someone else.

RPG Codex is not legally viable for the inside info. The person who game the info is.