What happened to the Chronicles of Elyria furor?

MightyUnclean · May 2020

A few weeks ago, CoE outrage was in full fury on here, MOP, Reddit and Discord. Now, not a peep. What happened to the class action lawsuit and the Attorney General complaints? Is Caspian walking away unscathed?

Ancient_Exile · May 2020

Caspian is sailing away on the Dawn Treader.

Kyleran · May 2020

Not much more can really be said at this point. Government investigations or civil lawsuits drag on for msny years, not unlike COEs development cycle actually.

Time to drag down new prey....err, I mean, on to the next critique.

Iselin · May 2020

Ungood · May 2020

AFIK Caspian closed the doors, turned off the lights, Lawyered up and no longer deals with the public.

What do you want any of us to do? If you got taken for a ride by this guy, call a lawyer yourself.

Slapshot1188 · May 2020

MightyUnclean said:

A few weeks ago, CoE outrage was in full fury on here, MOP, Reddit and Discord. Now, not a peep. What happened to the class action lawsuit and the Attorney General complaints? Is Caspian walking away unscathed?

The Class Action Discord basically became the CoE Discord where the Chosen made a group of Admins and hide behind closed forums. They even instituted a former CoE moderator as a mod there and yup... as expected they started right up with their numbered rules etc...

Its kind of funny in a sad way to watch

In essence they haven’t gotten a lawyer to take their case because lawyers are smart and are looking for money. It’s doubtful that SBS has enough money to make it worthwhile. And they (the members) for some reason find the idea of looping in Kickstarter or Xsolla into the lawsuits as abhorrent. That’s the only thing that will interest a lawyer yet these guys remain paralyzed. They were discussing spending weeks sending out questionnaires to the members to consolidate thoughts and suggestions on how to respond to Caspien’s FAQ release. They have no leadership or direction. Their response should have been immediate and should have been sent to all the news media sites. Instead they did nothing. Once a sheep always a sheep I guess.

At least a few of them are apparently pursuing small claims court. That’s a good idea IMHO. Then there is the wildcard of the Attorney General but those folks move slow and you won’t know if they are even moving on this for a long time.

Wizardry · May 2020

It's not just that lawyers are looking for easy money,they also know there are not enough clear cut laws if ANY surrounding crowd funded gaming.

The law is VERY much well behind the times,too much in life is about money and if something is too complicated,nobody wants to deal with it.

What it would come down to,at least imo would be anyone wanting to file a lawsuit would need concrete EASY evidence for the lawyer to act,like a written document of promises,an email with promises.

All this looks like from the laws perspective is a donation type operation that failed.Where he could run into trouble is if he avoided taxes by claiming a non profit business,which he likely did but was actually storing money away in some hidden bank account.
However if any action was to be made about his finances and taxes,it would have to come in the form of an audit,which is highly unlikely.

Until laws are more concrete nobody should expect ANYTHING from a kickstater/CF game.

Where i stand on them and was my exact stance from day 1 is if you want the people to fund your game you better be offering up shares in the business.Not C shares or some meaningless shares but straight up full partnership.SO 51% to the developer and 49% to the supporters or some fraction of a similar %.The way KS'r and CF works right now,you might as well toss money out your car window and just hope some game pops up.

Amathe · May 2020

Caspian is driving away in his new jeep.

AnOldFart · May 2020

I contacted my CC for everything included ding Kickstarter.

Not hopeful on keeping kickstarter funds but they did suggest section 75 (UK) as a potential avenue.
More hopeful on the digital goods from the store. It's about $50 but it's worth a try.
If that's rejected then I'm leaving it because I had al ready written off the money.

People in the lawsuit discord just need to contact their cc and/or PayPal.

Those places have some guarantees. If you paid on a debit card without guarantees then it's your own fault.
Just like if you paid thousands on this game.

Yanocchi · May 2020

I can really empathize with people who backed the development of Chronicles of Elyria. The Kickstarter campaign was in May 2016. I had a slight itch to back CoE but at that time I was in exactly the same situation as CoE backers find themselves now. In May 2016 I was in a dispute with a company called Illfonic due to the cancellation of their game called Revival. Developers were communicating regularly with people, until suddenly and totally unexpectedly there was a brief announcement about cancellation of Revival. After that announcement there was never even a single message about Revival from the guy in charge.

I had backed Revival with $220 and eventually I managed to get all of that money back. Unfortunately, most people didn't. Getting money back wasn't easy because I had to dig into a lot of legal content.

Let me share with you one of my texts from May 2016 which helped to secure the full refund after cancellation of Revival. You'll understand what it took and what strategies had to be adopted to get the money back. As you can imagine, initial requests had absolutely no effect. Basically, getting a refund required finding different loopholes in laws, regulations and legislations and building a dispute on those grounds. It became increasingly necessary to invent ways to create a realistic legal threat to the company's commercial interests and jeopardise their partnership with other companies.

1) The transaction was in violation of PayPal Acceptable Use Policy on the receiver's end without awareness of the payer. The transaction was completed from a customer's PayPal account to Illfonic's PayPal account on February 22, 2015. In March 2015 the creative director of Revival / Illfonic CEO published a development blog detailing that Revival will include graphic sex and prostitution. This information wasn't made available to the consumer prior to the transaction. Under PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, customers and companies may not use the PayPal service for activities that relate to transactions involving: "... g) items that are considered obscene ... i) certain sexually oriented materials or services."

2) Development of the game, titled Revival, has stopped as per announcement by one of its lead developers. Consequently, the product cannot be delivered to the consumer as promised (rescission, termination of contract for deliverance of electronic goods and virtual property).

3) Illfonic sold digital goods and services related to Revival for identical prices both to its American and European customers, thus neglecting to comply with the significant changes that were introduced to the European VAT rules on sales of digital goods and services to retail consumers in Europe on January 1, 2015. It may be in Illfonic's best interest to rectify the problem through refunds to European customers because the company's distribution partner, Valve Corporation, has a prominent presence on the European market and still handles distribution of Illfonic's digital products via Steam.

If a refund is not paid in full, we will not wait anymore and will instead proceed with a case discussed with a local law and consumer agency.

Our primary strategy will be to cooperate with the BEUC or CI and tax authorities to pressure Valve Corporation to halt distribution of Illfonic games, Moving Hazard and Nexus, on the territory of the EU, until Illfonic's EU VAT violations regarding the sale of Revival houses have been addressed.

(Explanation about the situation in 2016: This would have been the only way for EU tax authorities to extract overdue VAT from an American based company like Illfonic. In 2016 Illfonic doesn't have presence in the EU but Valve Corporation does, and Valve is Illfonic's distribution partner. Valve will either have to abandon partnership with Illfonic or stream income from Illfonic games to the tax authorities in the EU until overdue VAT + penalties are paid in full).

We will also contact PayPal and request to investigate Illfonic's potential breach of PayPal's Acceptable Use of Policy. Illfonic started selling houses before they announced intent to have graphic sex and prostitution in their product.

So, if you can dig up anything substantial on Soulbound Studios and pose a realistic threat (as seen from the viewpoint of their lawyers), then you might have a chance to get an individual refund.

Kyleran · May 2020

That reminds me, thought I read a few years back the EU got wise to crowdfunding of digital goods / services changing the laws or regulations so that companies accepting such funds had to realize and pay the VAT at the time of receipt of funds and could no longer defer payment until the game released.

If so, they could come looking for Caspian as well if he was behind on paying his VAT.

Looking further it appears in 2015 a clarification or recommendation was made on how and when the VAT should be applied on the "four" types of crowd funding.

Here's what I found with regards to "Rewards" based, the category most of these likely fall under.

Though many crowd funded games have specifically stated these transactions should be considered "donations," perhaps because such are exempt from VAT and US taxes.

"In its response, the VAT Committee has said it unanimously agrees that reward-based crowdfunding, where the person giving funds to a crowdfunding campaign ("the contributor") receives in exchange for a contribution a non-financial reward in the form of goods or services from the person receiving funds from contributors through a crowdfunding campaign ("the entrepreneur"), shall constitute a taxable transaction for VAT purposes, provided that there is a direct link between the supply of goods or services and its corresponding consideration collected by way of crowdfunding, and that the entrepreneur is a taxable person acting as such.

Where reward-based crowdfunding constitutes a taxable transaction and accounting for the fact that a contribution is typically given by the contributor before any goods or services are supplied in exchange, the VAT Committee unanimously agreed that the contribution may be regarded as a payment made on account of those goods or services on which VAT will become chargeable upon receipt of the payment pursuant to Article 65 of the VAT Directive, provided that the goods or services to be supplied are precisely identified when the payment on account is made.

Given that transactions are subject to VAT pursuant to Article 2 of the VAT Directive if goods or services are supplied by a taxable person for consideration, and that that "consideration" has been defined by the Court of Justice of the European Union as being a subjective value and not the open market value, the VAT Committee unanimously agreed that although the open market value of the goods or services supplied by the entrepreneur to the contributor may be lower than the amount of the contribution received, such transactions will in principle fall within the scope of VAT."

https://www.tax-news.com/news/EU_States_Agree_VAT_Rules_For_Crowdfunding____69706.html

Slapshot1188 · May 2020

Yanocchi said:

I can really empathize with people who backed the development of Chronicles of Elyria. The Kickstarter campaign was in May 2016. I had a slight itch to back CoE but at that time I was in exactly the same situation as CoE backers find themselves now. In May 2016 I was in a dispute with a company called Illfonic due to the cancellation of their game called Revival. Developers were communicating regularly with people, until suddenly and totally unexpectedly there was a brief announcement about cancellation of Revival. After that announcement there was never even a single message about Revival from the guy in charge.

I had backed Revival with $220 and eventually I managed to get all of that money back. Unfortunately, most people didn't. Getting money back wasn't easy because I had to dig into a lot of legal content.

Let me share with you one of my texts from May 2016 which helped to secure the full refund after cancellation of Revival. You'll understand what it took and what strategies had to be adopted to get the money back. As you can imagine, initial requests had absolutely no effect. Basically, getting a refund required finding different loopholes in laws, regulations and legislations and building a dispute on those grounds. It became increasingly necessary to invent ways to create a realistic legal threat to the company's commercial interests and jeopardise their partnership with other companies.

1) The transaction was in violation of PayPal Acceptable Use Policy on the receiver's end without awareness of the payer. The transaction was completed from a customer's PayPal account to Illfonic's PayPal account on February 22, 2015. In March 2015 the creative director of Revival / Illfonic CEO published a development blog detailing that Revival will include graphic sex and prostitution. This information wasn't made available to the consumer prior to the transaction. Under PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, customers and companies may not use the PayPal service for activities that relate to transactions involving: "... g) items that are considered obscene ... i) certain sexually oriented materials or services."

2) Development of the game, titled Revival, has stopped as per announcement by one of its lead developers. Consequently, the product cannot be delivered to the consumer as promised (rescission, termination of contract for deliverance of electronic goods and virtual property).

3) Illfonic sold digital goods and services related to Revival for identical prices both to its American and European customers, thus neglecting to comply with the significant changes that were introduced to the European VAT rules on sales of digital goods and services to retail consumers in Europe on January 1, 2015. It may be in Illfonic's best interest to rectify the problem through refunds to European customers because the company's distribution partner, Valve Corporation, has a prominent presence on the European market and still handles distribution of Illfonic's digital products via Steam.

If a refund is not paid in full, we will not wait anymore and will instead proceed with a case discussed with a local law and consumer agency.
Our primary strategy will be to cooperate with the BEUC or CI and tax authorities to pressure Valve Corporation to halt distribution of Illfonic games, Moving Hazard and Nexus, on the territory of the EU, until Illfonic's EU VAT violations regarding the sale of Revival houses have been addressed.
(Explanation about the situation in 2016: This would have been the only way for EU tax authorities to extract overdue VAT from an American based company like Illfonic. In 2016 Illfonic doesn't have presence in the EU but Valve Corporation does, and Valve is Illfonic's distribution partner. Valve will either have to abandon partnership with Illfonic or stream income from Illfonic games to the tax authorities in the EU until overdue VAT + penalties are paid in full).

We will also contact PayPal and request to investigate Illfonic's potential breach of PayPal's Acceptable Use of Policy. Illfonic started selling houses before they announced intent to have graphic sex and prostitution in their product.

So, if you can dig up anything substantial on Soulbound Studios and pose a realistic threat (as seen from the viewpoint of their lawyers), then you might have a chance to get an individual refund.

Funny point... the lead designer of CoE was Adam Snipehunter Maxwell... who also was the designer of Revival. See a pattern?

Yanocchi · May 2020

Adam "Snipehunter" Maxwell was a subcontractor for Illfonic together with his old-time colleague Chris Holtorf. Illfonic had subcontracted their two-man company called Skyward Corp. Later Snipehunter joined Jeromy Walsh's team after Chronicles of Elyria had already got past Kickstarter and its initial crowdfunding rounds. I stopped paying close attention to CoE by the time Snipehunter came aboard, but I suspect he joined as a regular employee or subcontractor just like he did on the Revival project.

I believe Snipehunter was a victim too in these stories. Twice now. Skyward Corp got sacked from Illfonic immediately after Revival was cancelled. Then history repeated itself for him after Chronicles of Elyria got cancelled. To put it jokingly, nowadays poor old Snipehunter would be an excellent choice for dishonest or scammy developers in the indy industry. He comes from the "mainstream" gaming industry, but really knows how to theorise all manner of elaborate game systems that generate a lot of hype among backers. He tried pursuing some original and elaborate game design path in a commercial MMORPG project (Rift) but Trion World was strict with their commercial vision for the game. So, later he did his hype trick for Revival forum and then he repeated exactly the same trick for Chronicles of Elyria. There definitely were some people backing Revival and probably Chronicles of Elyria too just because they read some game system designs formulated by Snipehunter.

-------

I can sort of understand what happened with Revival. Illfonic lost their contract with Star Citizen and it hurt their funding. Then they got an interesting partnership opportunity from the creator of Friday 13th movies. Later in 2016 they had a succesful Kickstarter campaign for Friday 13th small-scale multiplayer game and a year or two later released the game as promised. However, it was still highly irresponsible of them to overhype and make a lot of promises for an MMORPG on a very small budget. In the end, they raised only 100-200k dollars from backers through the sales of virtual houses. They claimed that the rest of the money was coming from their own coffers.

--------------------------

As for European VAT and regulations that bind sellers of virtual goods and services, in 2016 the following two links were helpful to start understanding it more deeply.

http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/telecom/index_en.htm

http://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2014/05/15/european-vat-10-things-online-sellers-need-to-know-about-taxes-on-digital-goods-and-services/#1b0d98004290

OrangeBoy · May 2020

Ungood said:

AFIK Caspian closed the doors, turned off the lights, Lawyered up and no longer deals with the public.

What do you want any of us to do? If you got taken for a ride by this guy, call a lawyer yourself.

Still making 0 sense, nice.

Iselin · May 2020

Slapshot1188 said:

Yanocchi said:

I can really empathize with people who backed the development of Chronicles of Elyria. The Kickstarter campaign was in May 2016. I had a slight itch to back CoE but at that time I was in exactly the same situation as CoE backers find themselves now. In May 2016 I was in a dispute with a company called Illfonic due to the cancellation of their game called Revival. Developers were communicating regularly with people, until suddenly and totally unexpectedly there was a brief announcement about cancellation of Revival. After that announcement there was never even a single message about Revival from the guy in charge.

I had backed Revival with $220 and eventually I managed to get all of that money back. Unfortunately, most people didn't. Getting money back wasn't easy because I had to dig into a lot of legal content.

Let me share with you one of my texts from May 2016 which helped to secure the full refund after cancellation of Revival. You'll understand what it took and what strategies had to be adopted to get the money back. As you can imagine, initial requests had absolutely no effect. Basically, getting a refund required finding different loopholes in laws, regulations and legislations and building a dispute on those grounds. It became increasingly necessary to invent ways to create a realistic legal threat to the company's commercial interests and jeopardise their partnership with other companies.

1) The transaction was in violation of PayPal Acceptable Use Policy on the receiver's end without awareness of the payer. The transaction was completed from a customer's PayPal account to Illfonic's PayPal account on February 22, 2015. In March 2015 the creative director of Revival / Illfonic CEO published a development blog detailing that Revival will include graphic sex and prostitution. This information wasn't made available to the consumer prior to the transaction. Under PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, customers and companies may not use the PayPal service for activities that relate to transactions involving: "... g) items that are considered obscene ... i) certain sexually oriented materials or services."

2) Development of the game, titled Revival, has stopped as per announcement by one of its lead developers. Consequently, the product cannot be delivered to the consumer as promised (rescission, termination of contract for deliverance of electronic goods and virtual property).

3) Illfonic sold digital goods and services related to Revival for identical prices both to its American and European customers, thus neglecting to comply with the significant changes that were introduced to the European VAT rules on sales of digital goods and services to retail consumers in Europe on January 1, 2015. It may be in Illfonic's best interest to rectify the problem through refunds to European customers because the company's distribution partner, Valve Corporation, has a prominent presence on the European market and still handles distribution of Illfonic's digital products via Steam.

If a refund is not paid in full, we will not wait anymore and will instead proceed with a case discussed with a local law and consumer agency.
Our primary strategy will be to cooperate with the BEUC or CI and tax authorities to pressure Valve Corporation to halt distribution of Illfonic games, Moving Hazard and Nexus, on the territory of the EU, until Illfonic's EU VAT violations regarding the sale of Revival houses have been addressed.
(Explanation about the situation in 2016: This would have been the only way for EU tax authorities to extract overdue VAT from an American based company like Illfonic. In 2016 Illfonic doesn't have presence in the EU but Valve Corporation does, and Valve is Illfonic's distribution partner. Valve will either have to abandon partnership with Illfonic or stream income from Illfonic games to the tax authorities in the EU until overdue VAT + penalties are paid in full).

We will also contact PayPal and request to investigate Illfonic's potential breach of PayPal's Acceptable Use of Policy. Illfonic started selling houses before they announced intent to have graphic sex and prostitution in their product.

So, if you can dig up anything substantial on Soulbound Studios and pose a realistic threat (as seen from the viewpoint of their lawyers), then you might have a chance to get an individual refund.

Funny point... the lead designer of CoE was Adam Snipehunter Maxwell... who also was the designer of Revival. See a pattern?

Follow the ball for one more bounce. Ilfonic was funding Revival by selling digital mansions, a model they came up with after spending time as a sub-contactor for Star Citizen working on the FPS module.

I'm sure it's all just coincidence

OrangeBoy · May 2020

@Gdemami ;

I have little to no experience with you, and I certainly have nowhere close to the number of useless posts and borderline-on-the-spectrum LOLs as you but I'm genuinely curious: what has inspired you to be be such a buffoon?

Gdemami · May 2020

OrangeBoy said:

what has inspired you to be be such a buffoon?

...what's so puzzling?

You post stupid-funny posts, I laugh. Simple.

Vrika · May 2020

Gdemami said:

OrangeBoy said:

what has inspired you to be be such a buffoon?

...what's so puzzling?

You post stupid-funny posts, I laugh. Simple.

@Moderators

Is it possible to create some kind of petition to have Gdemami banned because of his LOL -spam?

Last time before this Gdemami made a post to CoE forums on April 4th. I did a quick count, and between that post and this one he managed to spam these forums with 31 LOL reactions. Some of the threads on CoE forums have Gdemami's LOL reaction on more than half of the posts, without any actual messages from him.

It's hard to report Gdemami when all he's done is using the LOL -reaction, but I think to people actually discussing stuff here this feels bad. It feels like the rest of us are trying to have a discussion here, and there's one guy standing by whose only purpose is to laugh every time people say something.

Slapshot1188 · May 2020

Nobody should ever be banned for clicking reaction buttons.

lahnmir · May 2020

Slapshot1188 said:

Nobody should ever be banned for clicking reaction buttons.

Agreed. Besides, he is fun. Simple, low hanging fruit, but still fun.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

Iselin · May 2020

lahnmir said:

Slapshot1188 said:

Nobody should ever be banned for clicking reaction buttons.

Agreed. Besides, he is fun. Simple, low hanging fruit, but still fun.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

It'd be funny as hell if they removed his ability to react and not even tell him. Just let him think it's a bug. I would totally do that if I were a mod. I'd make a shitty mod.

cheyane · May 2020

lahnmir said:

Slapshot1188 said:

Nobody should ever be banned for clicking reaction buttons.

Agreed. Besides, he is fun. Simple, low hanging fruit, but still fun.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

I get a lot of points from him on my way to legendary don't take that away please.

lahnmir · May 2020

Iselin said:

lahnmir said:

Slapshot1188 said:

Nobody should ever be banned for clicking reaction buttons.

Agreed. Besides, he is fun. Simple, low hanging fruit, but still fun.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

It'd be funny as hell if they removed his ability to react and not even tell him. Just let him think it's a bug. I would totally do that if I were a mod. I'd make a shitty mod.

cheyane said:

lahnmir said:

Slapshot1188 said:

Nobody should ever be banned for clicking reaction buttons.

Agreed. Besides, he is fun. Simple, low hanging fruit, but still fun.

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

I get a lot of points from him on my way to legendary don't take that away please.

See guys, every organism serves a function, even an amoeba.

Now lets get back OT and talk about CoE a bit more

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

GladDog · May 2020

@Gdemami hasn't lol'd many of my posts. Does that mean they are not funny, or stupid or worth his time?

ARGHH!!!!

I want more LOL's!!!!!!!

Slapshot1188 · May 2020

coretex666 said:

Slapshot1188 said:

Nobody should ever be banned for clicking reaction buttons.

Clicking reaction buttons is one thing, acting like a total dick is another. I think his behavior is annoying for quite a few people visiting this site. Afaic, this site would be better w/o him.

I don't think the site is better when people leave. Even my personal stalker. We have an ignore option. You can control your input which is much better than trying to control someone else's output.

Asm0deus · May 2020

GladDog said:

@Gdemami hasn't lol'd many of my posts. Does that mean they are not funny, or stupid or worth his time?

ARGHH!!!!

I want more LOL's!!!!!!!

You haven't earned the Gdemami seal of approval yet is all, don't worry you'll get there!

At least that's how I view it when he lol's me as well as seeing it as a free point.

I wonder how the average COE "fan" is taking all this?

I mean the one's that thought us peeps here at mmorpg.com were only a bunch of baddie trolls, normally I would just pop over to the coe forums and see what's being said there but they seem down with all this.

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What happened to the Chronicles of Elyria furor?

Comments

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!

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What happened to the Chronicles of Elyria furor?

Comments

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!