WarZscam

Sergey Titov promotes cheating group and gets caught lying

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 19:54:59 +0100

Sergey Titov wrote:

Artificial Aiming stopped selling WarZ cheat/hack

After anticheat update we’ve done last week, that resulted in number of bans Artificial Aiming decided to stop selling WarZ cheat.

Source: Sergey Titov’s post

Now not only does Sergey promote “Artificial Aiming” (a group that sells cheats/hacks for “War Z” and other online games) on the “War Z” forums, he also is flat out lying again by saying that they stopped selling their hacks for “War Z”.

Here is the truth:

“Artificial Aiming” never stopped selling their “War Z” hacks, they only deactivate some features temporarily and now already updated their hacks for the new anti-cheat engine that has been implemented. A cheat engine that will not stop most hacks.

Source.

P.S. In the past I always censored links/pictures that were leading to hack/cheat websites, but with Sergey now promoting their name on his own forum I don’t see a point in doing so anymore.

From Alpha to Release: "War Z" development lacks major features

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 16:01:00 +0100

To make clear just how slow the development of “War Z” is, I took a look at their official update notes. I went through all updates on their list and filtered out only the new features, and updates that significantly changed the gameplay. I left out bug fixes and engine optimization to get a clear view at the new features that came out.

What is left is a clear look at what happened since the first patch (25. October 2012) to the upcoming patch (8. January 2013) apart from bug fixes and optimization:

-“Faifight” anti-cheat system / 3/1/2013
-Added 3 new weapons including 2 .22cal rifles and the Colt Anaconda. / 12/21/2012
-Some more Christmas items were added. Try to find them in the Colorado / 12/20/2012
-After dying, you will get disconnected automatically in 60 seconds / 12/20/2012
-Hardcore mode now properly functions: if you die, your character dies permanently and will require deletion / 12/18/12
-Added several 100 player servers. We will be increasing the amount of servers with this threshhold over time. / 12/18/12
-Improved the weapon damage model. / 12/14/12
-Added third person crosshairs. / 12/14/12
-Added more zombies and more zombie spawns. / 12/14/12
-You can now create clans and have a clan chat in game. You can switch to the clan chat with F3. / 11/27/12
-The entire map is now available. / 10/30/12
-Zombies AI has been improved. They are also more dangerous now. / 10/30/12

Source: “War Z” Forum Patch Notes - Note: Have to be registered to view

That leaves us with the following “major” game changing updates:

- Basic clan system
- 100 player server
- Hardcore mode
- Bigger map
- Anti-Cheat engine

So apart from bugfixes/optimization the developers of “War Z” have archived to only implement 5 “major” features in 3 months going from Alpha over Beta to “Foundation Release”. And this is giving them much credit with counting Anti-Cheat engine and Hardcore mode as major feature, if you leave out those you are left with only 3 really game changing features. Also not to mention that the clan system for example is only in a very early stage and misses most promised features.

Ofcoure there was also alot more features promised for the same time span.

If you ever had hopes for a quick and fast implementation of new features, this should give you are clear look at just how slow the development is going.

"War Z" anti-hack system active ! For a while ?

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:33:59 +0100

Ofcourse the team around “War Z” failed to communicate this, but if you dig in some of their posts you can read that their “new” anti-hack/cheat system is active. And apparently has been for a while ?

The anticheat is in game and now you get a Katana to boot!

Link

When everything is in order, then I will update on the anticheat that has been active for awhile.

Link

According to community manager “Kewk” the system has been “active for awhile”, while producer Sergey Titov says the new anti-hack/cheat system is only being tested on “a few servers”.

The system that is being used is called “FairFight” and is made by a company called “Gameblocks”. Link to website.

Now here Sergey is trying to explain how “FairFight” works:

[…]

1) Most of the servers right now continue to use same in house anticheat engine we’ve been using.

2) We’re testing Gameblock’s system on a few servers.

[…]

While yes like all antihacks system is based on detecting certain patterns, not it doesn’t do anything if it’ll detect that you’ve killed 50 ppl and didn’t die . Yet it will probably trigger situation when you’ve killed like 10 ppl in a 10 seconds, and to kill each person you have to turn your head/body for mmore than X degrees. Ie - most likely you’ve used aimbot. Is it 100% certain - not it’s not. So system will trigger your account and will monitor your play over some period of time - normally days.

[…]

Link to source.

So from what one can understand this is essentially just a tool that looks at player behaviour data and tries to find evidence that points towards that someone is cheating.

However there is no word on if their own anti-hack/cheat system is being updated, because obviously this “FairFight” system cannot detect if someone is using wallhacks, radar or a sophisticated aimbot but just that there is something wrong if a player triggers the system by suspicious behaviour. So someone who uses a wallhack should have no fear of being detected by this system.

Let’s wait and see how this system will fight the hacking epidemic on “War Z” servers. And let’s not forget that Sergey once already claimed that they “basically eliminated all major game ruining hacks”, and that their system “detect roughly 99% of all hack attempts”. Link to interview.

"War Z" facebook page VERY popular in Thailand !

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:15:04 +0100

Congratulations to the creators of “War Z”, apparently their facebook page is very very very popular in Bangkok, Thailand !

Although Bangkok is not known as a popular gamers city yet, according to facebook statistic it is the most popular city for “War Z” facebook fans - Since there are so many “War Z” fans in Thailand, it is very strange that there yet is no dedicated server for the large fan base in South-East-Asia ?

Cheaters fix months old bug before "War Z" developers do

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:54:03 +0100

One of the most prominent bugs of “War Z” is the “fall damage” bug, a bug that can turn even small slopes, hills, rocks or stairs into deadly encounters. Basically it goes something like that: You walk down a little slope and suddenly you are instantly dead. End of game.

A really annoying bug, and one that has been reported by many players since months (since the launch of the alpha) to the developers.

If you do a quick search on the official forums you will find countless threads on this issue like here, here or here. Or here, and there, and here.

So far the developers have not been able to come up with a solution for this very basic, yet very annoying and deadly bug.

Now one of the most prominent “War Z” hacking/cheating community has released a fix for this bug, as they annoucend on their twitter account recently:

There has been confirmation now that this hack actually exists and works.

So while cheaters already enjoy the fix of this annoying bug, the rest of the players still wait for a word from the developers on when and how this bug will be fixed.

2 days of server issues for thousands of players

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:21:35 +0100

So since two days thousands of players from around the world are not able to connect to the servers of “War Z”, which itself is obviously very bad. But it being a “young” game one maybe could try to understand this problem if there was ANY good information to tell those people who are not able to play the game they paid for since two days what exactly is going on.

So after:
1326 comments on Facebook
567 replies on their forum and over 40,000 views on the thread concerning these “issues”

…this is all the customers get:

Last night we experienced issues with our servers that caused interruptions in forum and game servers. These have now been corrected but may take up to 24hrs to actually take hold.

Thanks for your patience!

Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?88270-Server-issues-12-30-1-1

Maybe some members of the developers team haven’t got Sergey’s letter yet, but wasn’t there supposed to be so much more communication now ?

Even if it’s just something like “someone spilled coffee over one of the servers” or “a dog at the server”, atleast try to tell your player base what is going on.

On top of that there is a fix made by players going around the forum that helps many people actually making a connection again. So in this situation other players are actually providing more help than the developers.

Dev vs dev: Sergey says skill system is being tested - RussianKaliber says that is not possible

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 05:55:00 +0100

On 18th December 2012 executive producer Sergey Titov announced on the “War Z” forums that:

We’ve launched our Skills test for a small group of players 1.5 weeks ago. We’ve hoped that we’ll be able to make skills available to all players this year, but I can tell you that it’s not going to happen. Our initial tests showed that we still have work to do, and we’re working with active War z players to make sure that skill trees alone will be huge part of the gameplay and character development and will create value for your characters.

Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?79026-December-18th-Development-Update-Foundation-Release-features-hackers-issues-etc

However just 4 days later developer “RussianKaliber” posted:

I cant have one version of the game, while others have different by the way.

If I load all the graphic options on, and we patch, everyone will have those options on. I dont think this will be a best idea for those with slower PCs.

You understand how open world graphics work right ?

Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?82289-regarding-faked-screenshots&highlight=fake+screenshot

So “RussianKaliber” clearly is saying that there is no such thing as a “test” client, yet Sergey claims that the skill system is right now being tested for weeks by a unnamed group of players.

Mysterious, huh ?

Sergey, why not just release some pictures of this skill system during test ? I mean, there are supposedly some players testing it for weeks, why not give a little preview of it ? And if there is such a test out there, wouldn’t be developers like “RussianKaliber” be one of the first persons to test such new secret features ? But he apparently even doesn’t know that something like this is possible ?

"War Z" launch in Russia features 100$ package of "pay to win" equipment

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 21:16:00 +0100

You remember what the official FAQ site of “War Z” said about “pay to win” ?

I want PAY FOR WIN! I have lots of money to spend!

Sorry pal, but this is the wrong game. Like in a real-world, post apocalyptic scenario, your money will mean much less than your natural survival skills, training and wits.

Source: http://www.thewarz.com/faq.html

Consider this to be another broken promise, because as “War Z” goes on sale with a localized Russian website they offer a package for 2999 rubles (= around 100$) called “executioner” that comes with: AK47, backpack, axe, armor, M9, 10 binoculars, 5 medic packs and some other stuff. I think that’s pretty much the definition of “pay to win”.

Source: http://thewarz.ru/buy

Another interesting point is that they advertise the game with winning “2012’s rising star”. Now, I am not aware of any other website than “mmorpg.com” handing out this prize, so the problem is: “War Z” didn’t win the “Rising Star” prize on their vote.

Source: MMORPG.com “rising star” vote

EDIT: Thanks to Sergej for pointing this out:

In their screenshot section they still advertise “War Z” with the old polished screenshots that obviously do not show actual ingame footage but set up pictures featuring things that are not in the actual game.

Source: Screenshot section on “TheWarZ.ru”

Thanks to Mathew for bringing up this story

"War Z" developer intimidating player to get names of alleged hackers

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 17:02:00 +0100

We all know that the “anti-cheat” measures of “War Z” are laughable and pretty much non-existing. It’s no surpise that the hackers/cheater community is getting bigger by the day because the creators of hacks are presented a open door by “War Z”/Hammerpoint interactive, making it possible to create hacks from 3D ingame radars to complex aimbots and wallhacks.

I guess everyone can understand that the developers are frustrated because apparently their company is overstrained with the tasks they face, because even through a working “anti-cheat” engine has been announced for months and executive producers Sergey Titov claimed that the game is unhackable, hacks/cheats are rampant.

But now one of the developers, Roman Stepanov aka RussianKaliber, has clearly gone too far in his try to find hackers. In a recorded live stream he pressured a player to snitch out names of fellow clanmates who might be hacking. You might remember RussianKaliber, as he was also the guy who openly spoke out against his company and then had his post deleted, and the guy who got caught cheating and talking about getting a “god mode” for himself to hunt bandits and the guy who is part of the “art team” of “War Z” that stole parts of their work from other sources.

So this guy was on the live internet stream of a dude called “ArtemisKnives”, and then following situation occured:

Link to video - Skip to 4 hours and 48 minutes for the action to begin, and listen to RussianKaliber aggressively intimidating “ArtemisKnives” into snitching out fellow clanmates who use hacks.

Link to Skype log between “RussianKaliber” and “ArtemisKnives”:

And following was a discussion between the two on the official “War Z” forums:

RussianKalibers posts:
http://i.imgur.com/A66DL.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/QrrAh.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/x3xdz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/zzBmP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/s5FVJ.jpg

The questions that really bug me after something like this are:
1.) RussianKaliber, why do you get into such a little dirty war over a bunch of hacker names when there are hundred or maybe thousands out there ? You would have gotten more hackers if you just would monitor some of the servers for a few hours.
2.) Why don’t you take all that energy and work into actually creating a anti-cheat engine ? You know, like your company promised to feature in this game. And like you also promised to feature in your other game “War Inc”. Without any results so far.
3.) You yourself have spawned and handed out guns to other players - Can’t we apply the same arguments against hacking as against the stuff you and your fellow developers do ?

Thanks for the emails for pointing out this story to me, and thanks to “Boss Blood” from the STEAM “War Z” forums for documenting all that.

More crocodile tears from Sergey Titov

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:12:00 +0100

Sergey Titov apologizes to the community… Again. Just like he did here before, and just like he did here before that also. The positive part is that Mr Titov apparently now has a ghost writer who wrote/spell checked his post.

Here are some of the funny parts of this “open letter”:

Along with that thanks, though, I need to admit that we failed to effectively communicate some of our plans and actions to both our existing players and to our new prospective players.

“Failed to effectively communicate” ? Really ? It’s called lying Mr Titov. The description of the game on STEAM, and the “War Z” page until very recently was nothing but a bunch of lies. There is nothing to miscommunicate or misread when you simply make up features to sell a product.

I’ve experienced a range of emotions, most of which centered on regret for not having addressed some of the issues differently than we did, but we can’t change the past.

Again the talk is of “issues”, why not call a spade a spade ? You and your company fucked up. You lied. You intentionally spread misinformation and then blamed some random people on your team.

Like the STEAM page description that was blamed on some never-mentioned “PR team”, or the artwork which was stolen from zombie cosplayers which also was the fault of some “Art team” member. Apparently you are just the executive producer, but not someone who has any responsibility for his company.

there wasn’t enough updates on development of UPCOMING features.

I think there was enough talk about “upcoming” features - The problem was and is that they remain “upcoming” and are never released on time, or not realeased at all.

Even when the percentage of players with negative comments is small, as the community grows, even a small percentage can add up to be a very significant absolute number.

Mr Titov, you are hilarious. What happened to your Metacritic page that you promote d ? Let’s see: 119 positive, 852 negative critics. What about all the anti-“War Z” petitions with thousands of people supporting them ? What about your own forums that are filled with people complaining ? What about the STEAM forums (which other than the official “War Z” forums have free speech and make citic possible) which are flooded with thousands of negative threads/posts ? You remember when “War Z” was taken off STEAM because of the bad feedback from thousands of people ? And you still have the guts to talk about a “vocal minority” ?

Instead of yet another apology, why doesn’t Mr Titov answer some of the really pressuring topics ?

What happened to the statement that there was gonna be a new system to combat hackers for mid-end of December ? Where is it ? Is it already in place ?

3. New Antihack
New antihack is coming. I think it’ll happen around mid-end of December - new system is relying on analyzing players patterns and reacting upon them. It’s pretty complex system running on separate server, and we hope it will let us to replace existing system - that still most of the time ( is wallhack or ESP is used ) rely on humans to ban cheaters - which can take day or two. Once again - we’ll become slightly more secure in our never ending fight with hackers.

Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?67660-Wipe-new-packages-new-features-roadmap-new-antihack-Steam-version-!

What happened to the old roadmap that was supposed to be in the “Foundation Release” (December 2012) with all the great new features ?

Foundation Release ( December 2012 )
- Clans
- Friends
- Leaderboards
- Server rentals
- New set of building blocks ( aka barricades and USABLE objects like hydroponics systems )
- Call for help functionality
- Accessing your inventory from Safe Settlement without loging out of the game
- Accessing Store from Safe Settlement without loging out of the game
- .22 cal guns - rifles, pistols
- More cool melee weapons
- Better use of ballistic helmets, armor vests.
- Flare guns ( okay we had it for a while, but just didn’t released it to you guys yet )
- Better weight system
- Option to turn on crosshairs in TPS

Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?67660-Wipe-new-packages-new-features-roadmap-new-antihack-Steam-version-!

What about the lost trademarks of “Arktos Entertainment Group” “The War Z”, and “War Inc: Battlefront” ?

What about the “new” duping glitch ?

What about the trademark problem ? Will the game be renamed or will you face the lawsuits from “Paramount Pictures” ? Why did you never mention this even through you were contact over a month ago about this ?

Why have there been so few updates since the “Foundation Release” ? Shouldn’t there be a massive amount of updates since Alpha ? To fix the most basic bugs like the sound system or the terrain “drop” that randomly kills players ? You know: Problems that usually only games in Alpha status have.

What happened to “War Inc” ? Why did you just leave this game unfinished and ceased to give any support ?

This all starts to sound like a violent husband who hits his wife, and everytime after he is done hitting his wife he breaks down in tears and says that it will never ever happen again.

Waiting for the next apology.

EXCLUSIVE: Company behind "The War Z" losing more trademarks

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 11:26:35 +0100

Quick summary:
1.) “Arktos Entertainment Group” lost trademark for company name in September 2011.
2.) “War Inc: Battlezone” (Predecessor of “War Z”) lost trademark for game name in August 2012.

It seems the guys behind “The War Z” really have no clue how the trademark application process in the US works. Now another story about more trademark “issues”, this time it’s the trademark of one of the companies behind “War Z” - “Arktos Entertainment Group” - And the game they were developing before “War Z”.

Althrough “Arktos” is making multi-millions in revenue they failed in completing a basic trademark registration.

They filed a application for trademarking “Arktos Entertainment Group” and “War Inc: Battlezone” in November 2009, but even through their trademarks were accepted they failed to respond to the “US Patent & Trademark Office” and their applications were abandonment in October 2010.

Check the application for yourself:

1.) Go to http://tsdr.uspto.gov/ (United States Patent & Trademark Office)
2.) Type in 77870733 for the file on “Arktos Entertainment Group”.
3.) Type in 85469302 for the file on “War Inc: Battlezone”.

Mr. Titov and “Arktos Entertainment Group ” - Does it really take a little blog to show your guys your simple yet big business mistakes ? Better call your lawyers again to get this sorted.

Big thank you to anonymous for pointing this story out to me, this is again the first blog/website to break this story !

New duping method destroys "War Z"'s economy

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:34:00 +0100

There is a new duping method which allows players to dupe their whole global inventory without even using a third party tool. This big exploit makes the in-game “cash-for-items” store pretty useless and destroys the basic point of the game.

So while the hacker/cheater problems is still not solved in any way, there is now another huge exploit that ruins the gameplay. Trading forums get flooded with (once) “rare” items. I set my timer to see how long it will take until this bug will be fixed. And ofcourse there are rumors already that the developers may decided to do another global wipe, meaning that all player inventories will be deleted to get rid of all the duped items.

I will not post the instructions and/or links to the source of this duping method because I do not wanna harm the player base just for the sake of reporting this.

UPDATE: EXCLUSIVE: "War Z" trademark SUSPENDED - Game will have to be renamed

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 17:51:00 +0100

***This is the first site to report this***
***Update at the bottom of the post***

There is something interesting showing up if you check the “United States Patent and Trademark Office” website for the “War Z” trademark that has been registered by OP Productions.

The trademark application by OP Productions for the name “War Z” has been SUSPENDED because the trademark office feels that the name is too similar to the name of Paramount Pictures upcoming movie “World War Z”.

See the suspension notice for yourself:

Source: http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85682663&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch

What does this mean ?
*The name will very likely have to be changed because it is too similar to “World War Z”.
*If the trademark attorney feels that the similarity is too big, it’s obvious that Paramount Pictures may legally forbid the use of “War Z”.
*The trademark was only filled in July 2012, further evidence pointing towards that this game has been in development for only 6 months.
*They have received the suspension letter on 15th November 2012 already, so they know for over a month now that their name has to be changed.
*Paramount is already developing their own video game based on “World War Z”.

Thanks to the anonymous mailer who sent me these information regarding the “War Z” trademark. It’s in the interest of the mailer to make customers aware that they can fill a complaint against Arktos Entertainment Group and OP Production for their actions regarding false information, lies about their Alpha/Beta status and missing features/false advertisement.

To do so follow: https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov/

And since it’s not easy to get information on these companies, here are the complete adresses of both:

Arktos Entertainment Group, Inc.
11400 Olympic Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90064
United States
Phone:
916-445-1254

OP PRODUCTIONS, LLC
11833 Mississippi Ave., Suite 100
Los Angeles
CALIFORNIA
90025
UNITED STATES
617-596-3208
617-812-2554

*************UPDATE*************
*************UPDATE*************
*************UPDATE*************

Sergey Titov has now answered to this obvious suspension of their trademark application, but the funny thing is: He apparently doesn’t know how the trademark system in the US works and thinks his trademark is issued. Once again he answers before simply checking the facts.

In his statement on the offical forums he writes the following:

guys,

this is getting to be ridiculous.

1) go to uspto.gov
2) Go to TESS - trademark search
3) search for War Z
4) Enjoy LIVE trademark !

Why spread lies ?
even more -I was sent this link like three already - and looks like people are not even reading this document.

It basically says that this application is suspended because there’s another application with regards to this trademark.

here’s real trademark
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield…002:756yk7.2.3

This is as stupid as saying that colorado map is only 3x3 km.

Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?83274-Sad-trademark-suspension-direct-proof&p=1286542&viewfull=1#post1286542

However this doesn’t mean anything - The “basic” search of the US “United States Patent and Trademark Office” ofcourse lists “The War Z” as “active” because OP Productions has 90 days of probation until the application expires. “Live” DOES NOT EQUAL “ISSUED”, Mr Titov.

What Sergey forgets to mention is that when you do the search as he says, and then in the overview click on “CHECK STATUS” -> TSDR (that stands for “Trademark Stauts and Document Retrieval” aka see what’s the status of the trademark right now) you WILL see the whole article about “The War Z“‘s trademark application under the tab PROSECUTION HISTORY that it indeed was SUSPENDED on 15th november.

But now for Mr. Titov and everyone else who is interested, here is a step by step guide on how to get the suspension notice on your screen:

Time to get in touch with your lawyer, Mr. Titov.

***UPDATE 12/27/2012***

Thanks for spreading this post and making more people aware of the bad business behind “The War Z”, here are some of the (gaming) news sites that have picked up our story:

Gamespy.com: The War Z Might Have to Change Its Name

Gamerfront.com: The War Z’s Trademark Has Been Suspended

Massively.Joystiq.com: The War Z’s trademark suspended, name change likely

Massively.Joystiq.com: The War Z’s creator disputes trademark suspension

Highdefdigest.com: Smell the Zombies: ‘The War Z’ Loses Its Name

Kotaku.com.au: War Z Creator Says His Game’s Trademark Wasn’t Suspended

Decryptedtech.com: War Z will have to change their name
Inquisitr.com: ‘The War Z’ Creators Face Trademark Suspension

Escapistmagazine.com: USPTO Suspends The War Z Trademark

Complex.com: ‘The War Z’ Needs a New Name, Since Its Trademark Was Suspended a Month Ago

Neoseeker.com: When it rains, it pours as The War Z will have to rebrand after its trademark is suspended

Gameranx.com: ‘The War Z’ Trademark Has Been Suspended Since November

Gamepolitics.com: Report: The War Z Was Released Even as the Game’s Trademark Was Suspended by the USPTO

Gamingbolt.com: The War Z trademark was suspended in November due to similarities with World War Z
Justpushstart.com: Trademark Issues For The War Z Name Change Probable

Gamersyndrome.com: War Z Trademark Issues: The Game Will Have To Be Renamed

Capsulecomputers.com.au: “The War Z” Trade Mark Name is Suspended for being too Similar to “World War Z”

gamerevolution.com: Karma Gets The War Z’s Trademark Suspended

More news stories regarding the trademark suspension of “The War Z” here.

The list of shame - "The War Z"

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 17:15:00 +0100

This list is regularly updated with the lastest developments/news. It’s not yet completed with all the facts/lies/misinformation around “The War Z”. Feel free to contact me with news, updates, corrections or anything else: MaxVonHammer@gmail.com

“War Z“‘s amateurish “anti hack system” bans hundred, possible thousands of innocent players

*Around 15th December 2012 “War Z” implemented a new “anti hack system” that was supposed to kill off the hacker/glitche epidemic.
*The “anti hack system” turns out to be “bait” items placed by developers at random locations that they thought were only accessable by people who cheat/glitch.
*It turns out that even regular playing players can pick up these items and get marked as “cheaters”.
*Sergey Titov says that:
“we’re 99.9% sure that we’re banning right people”.
”This part is 100% fail proof - ie there can’t be any false positives here.”
“This is almost 100% fail proof system, but I can give it like 0.5% or so to provide false positives.” Link to posts.
*3 days later community manager “Kewk” apologises for wrongfully banning alot of people. Link to post
*Until today there continues to be a lot of player complaining about being banned wronfully.
*It should be obvious that this kind of “anti hack” measures did nothing against the real problem, such as hackers using 3rd party tools like aimbots, radar hacks, wallhacks etc.

The development for “War Z” only took 6 months

*One of the most prominent lies/”misinformations” is that “War Z” has been in development for “couple of years”.
Evidence it only started 6 months before launching the game to the public:
*One of the people working on “War Z” asked people on another forum what they thought about the idea of a zombie game, stating that he would begin working on such a game in july 2012. Link to article.
*Website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube were only registered in july 2012.

“War Z” gets kicked off Steam

*Just a few days after being on sale on Steam, “War Z” got kicked off.
*The description of features was strongly misleading, advertising the game with features that were/are not in the game.
*Game description was changed after a day after being outed by the community as lies.
*Thousands of people complain about the game on Steam forums.
*Steam removes the game from their system and apologizes to its customers.
*Steam offers refund to everyone who purchased the game on their system.
*Sergey Titov blames the customers for “misreading” the features, when they are obviously lies.
*Sergey Titov clames that the game will be back on Steam at some time point.

Backfire on Metacritic.com

*Sergey Titov opens a sticky thread, asking people to vote for “The War Z” on Metacritic.com. Link to thread.
*A massive downvote happens pushing the score down to 1.1, making it one of the worst voted games on metacritic ever.
*Currenty it has 104 positive and 800 negative votes. Link to Metacritic.com.
*Sergey’s thread is locked and made unsticky, and with no further comment slowly disappers.

The never ending “fall damage” glitch/bug

*One of the most prominent bugs in “War Z” is the incredible bad fall damage calculation which often kills you when you are just slowly walking down a slight slope. This bug has been mentioned in the forum hundreds of times, it’s very obvious to everyone playing this game a few minutes trying to mess with a little hill. The first reports about this bug date back to 15th October 2012, until today the developers were not able to fix this bug. This is one of the most obvious showcases that show that the developers of “War Z” seem to be overstrained with the problems they face with this game engine.

“War Z” developers are cheating the game

*Developers have been recorded while they were handing out items they spawned to other players, capturing them talking about getting “god mode” and killing bandits. Link to thread.
*Even through Sergey Titov said they were looking into it, the developers continue to abuse the system for their own fun.
*There are even videos on the official forum showing developers cheating the game, spawning items for their own pleasure. Link to thread.

Sergey Titov: “We basically eliminated all major game ruining hacks.”

*Ever since the start of Alpha “War Z” had a very big problem with hackers, and a “anti hack system” that would only detect very basic tries of hacking/cheating. Until now this problem is big and there seems to be no solution in sight. So it’s funny to see a old interview with Sergey Titov that says that they “basically eliminated all major game ruining hacks”. Link to interview.

Misleading “screenshots” to promote “War Z”

*Ever since the website went online the game has been advertised with “screenshots” that obviously were no “screenshots” but set-up money-shots that showed gameplay, animations, models, graphics, vehicles etc that never made it into the (current) game. Link to article/pictures.

“Hammerpoint” never mentioned to their customers that their game isn’t finished

*Even during the never-really-communicated Alpha/Beta of “War Z” there never was a mention on it on their website and purchase-site. People that didn’t check the forums for certain posts couldn’t knew that they are buying a unfinished game because it simply never was mentioned on their page. Link to article.

“The War Z” faked its own Facebook page to fool people into believing the game has been development since 2011

*Get this: On Facebook you can edit your “founded in” date to show how long your product/company exists. For example Coca-Cola writes “Founded on May 8, 1886” on their page. This date can be freely edited to even show pre-Facebook/Internet dates. The clever folks over at “Hammerpoint” edited the page to show “founded in 2011” even through their site obviously was only created in July 2012. Obviously there never has been any kind of evidence that this game has been longer in development than for 6 months. Link to article.

“The War Z” does not only share the same engine with “War Inc”, it also shares alot of models, ingame UI, sounds and animation

*Something that “Hammerpoint” always tries to play down and simply says “it’s only the same engine”. It’s obvious that alot of models, menues, sounds and animations have been 1:1 ported over from “War Inc”.

Their previous game “War Inc” was left unfinished at the same time development for “War Z” started

*”War Inc” was the game the team that made “War Z” was making/supporting before they started working on “War Z”. It’s another piece of evidence that points towards the “6 months of development” for “War Z” since the support/updates for “War Inc” stopped with a last major update in July 2012, and a small minor update after that. Since then the game has been left to its own, the forums are overfilled with players asking for support and bascially burying the game.

“War Inc” was advertised with some of the same features as “War Z” is now

*Some of the “coming soon” features of “War Inc” included things like “Combat Vehicles, new maps, new skill system” - Sounds familiar ? Yes, those are exact the same features that are now promised “coming soon” for “War Z”. These features for “War Inc” never got into the game, and the “coming soon” has been now waiting for over 1 year for some of the features the developers annouced, and it’s obviously very unlikely that they will ever make it into the game. Link to “upcoming New Featues” on “War Inc”.

Is the “War Z” really a “MMO” ?

*One of the biggest advertising headlines for “War Z” was always the mention of it being “the first zombie MMO” = Massively multiplayer online game. There is no clear definition of what makes a MMO, but for most people names like World of Warcraft, Ultima Online, Everquest etc come into the mind: One huge world with thousands of players.
*The reality of “War Z” is that the “world” is one small map that is extremly overrun with 100 players. Even 10 year old games like “Battlefield 1942” support servers with 128 players. The only thing that would somehow point towards MMO is the global inventory, but apart from that there is no difference to any other online first person shooter out there.

UPDATE: Exclusive: "War Z" developer speaks out against own company

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 03:06:00 +0100

***See bottom of post for update***

“The War Z“‘s developer “RomanS” (Art Director) has openly spoken out against “Hammerpoint Interactive” on a third party forum saying:

“We (my art team) strongly disagrees with how the business and leadership is being handled with our company

[…]

A few people know that I have a strong disagreement with the ledership on what I consider Alpha, Beta, Release Candidate, and what features should be going in first. But my word seems to be not taken seriously.

[…]

I am however proud of my micro tiny art team of 4 people(including me), and we will continue on improving the art part of our game and adding more art features. That i can guarantee and willing to put my balls on the chopping block if I fail.”

Source: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?215207-New-Zombie-MMO-coming-out/page36

UPDATE: “RomanS” has contacted me and explained that he feels misinterpreted in my blog post, asking me to publish following eMail:

hello from a War Z Dev

Dear MaxVonHammer,

I saw your post today

Exclusive: “War Z” developer speaks out against own company

So I would like to make sure that we understand each other here. I had disagreements with a leader of our company and our project about features, and what we should be shipping with. However I never spoke against him, or against the company.

To me and to others your latest article sounds like Im against my own company, which my good friend I am not!

Its ok to have disagreements on the team, and in this business. But I am not speaking against the leader or my company.

If you can please take this post off, or if you cant, at least post my letter under it.

Thank you so much good sir.

It’s not in my interest to cause any problems for employees at companies related to “The War Z” and I apologize if people misread my post, however I still believe that his posts speak for themself.

"Anti Cheat" glitch bans players randomly... AGAIN.

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0100

Alot of players getting banned right now for what seems to be a glitch in the “Anti Cheat” engine. The system seems to randomly ban people again, but this time it seems to be a much higher number and also people who didn’t pick up one of the infamous “bait”-items.

However, don’t expect any fast reaction since the devs/community manager are on holiday right now.

Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?81224-Banned-for-hacking-72-Hour-account-freeze

http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?81228-Thanks-Hammerpoint

http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?81242-Banned-for-no-reason

http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?81265-Have-you-been-wrongfully-banned

http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?81278-Permanently-Banned-Bug

http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?81277-Perma-banned-for-nothing-PLEASE-REVEIW

"The War Z" not sold on Steam anymore...

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 20:53:00 +0100

Official Statement from Valve:

From time to time a mistake can be made and one was made by prematurely issuing a copy of The War Z for sale via Steam. We apologize for this and have temporary removed the sale offering of the title until we have time to work with the developer and have confidence in a new build. Those who purchase the game and wish to continue playing it via Steam may do so. Those who purchased the title via Steam and are unhappy with what they received may seek a refund by creating a ticket at our support site here: https://support.steampowered.com/newticket.php

It’s official now, after hundreds of negative threads on the Steam forum, hundreds of refund demands and negative press Steam has decided to not sell “The War Z” on Steam anymore.

Good riddance, and thanks to Steam for listening to its costumers. Take notice “Hammerpoint Interactive”, Steam/Valve shows you how a company should handle a mistake they have done.

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/app/226700/?snr=1_7_suggest__13

"War Z" to customers: IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT !

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 11:12:56 +0100

Here comes some more hilarious answers from Sergey Titov (Executive producer of “The War Z”) to the community. First he sets us straight on the “Steam page ISSUE” - You know, the thing about their Steam page were they lied, and advertised their game with features that are not in the game.

Now I was suprised to see a answer on this “issue” (aka LIE) on their forums and thought “Wow, maybe they are finally admitting the bullshit they have been doing ?”. But then I read the post, and noticed that instead of admitting that this was a downright lie and mistake they blame THEIR CUSTOMERS. But read for yourself:

“At the same time it was clear that there were a number of customers that felt that information about the game was presented in a way that could have allowed for multiple interpretations.

[…]

We also want to extend our apologies to all players who misread infromation about game features.”

Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?79251-Steam-purchase-page-issues

“Sergey Titov: I’m sure there’ll be people who will look into small details and will say “no I was mislead,” where in fact they imagined something to themselves without checking details first. I’m sure that Steam have it’s refund policies that should handle those situations.”
Source: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-war-z/1226980p1.html

It’s really just a slap in the face to see someone who was caught lying and spreading misinformation to make a quick dollar just turning this whole thing around: Instead of admiting his lies he points his finger at his OWN CUSTOMERS that he obviously lied to.

So you see, it’s obviously YOUR fault for believing their lies.

But this goes even further, because Sergey Titov once again shows that he obviously doesn’t care too much for the truth as he says in a interview with GameSpy, on the question why the misleading “Up to 100 players per server” feature was posted on “The War Z“‘s Steam page he answers:

“Sergey Titov: Max players — I’m not sure why this is even an issue. [The] text clearly stated “up to 100 players.” And 50 players [which] we have right now — is what our players — our community feels is comfortable level for them to play.”
Source: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-war-z/1226980p1.html

So by Sergey’s logic they could also write “up to 200 players” or “up to 1 million players” and it would make no difference, because 50 players is within that. Even when it’s only 50% of the promised player count. Good argument Sergey !

It’s like Porsche making a new car saying: Up to 800 horsepower ! And then the car turns out to only have 150 horsepower. But that is obviously within the “up to” range, right ? So be happy with it, dumb customer.

The GameSpy interview is very interesting because the interviewer confronts Sergey with the facts, and the fact that he is lying. The interviewer at GameSpy comes to this conclusion:

“Yes, we can all agree that happy players are the end goal of any game developer. But how you get there does matter, and this kind of behavior, whether it’s negligence and miscommunication/mistranslation or (less likely in this case, because if so, why would he even talk to us?) a scam — is completely unacceptable from game makers. What’s even worse, though, is that Hammerpoint has cast a shadow of doubt over the other Steam store pages. Are they really not policed at all? It would seem not. Again, we’ll let you know if we hear from Valve on that.”
Source: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-war-z/1226980p1.html

And now another lie from the “Hammerpoint Interactive” - Because they finally admitted yet another lie story they spread: The story about the never-error-making-unbeatable anti-hack system. You might remember Sergey Titov saying before the start of the big ban wave that:

“First of all - overall we’re 99.9% sure that we’re banning right people.”

”This part is 100% fail proof - ie there can’t be any false positives here.”

“This is almost 100% fail proof system, but I can give it like 0.5% or so to provide false positives.”
Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?76572-Hackers-and-Cheaters-bans

So after these bans started there was a huge shitstorm on their forums, because literally hundreds of people came on their forums saying they got banned for no reason. Because as it turned out that “Anti-Hack system” was a pile of garbage that wrongfully banned ALOT of people that didn’t hack or glitch at all. Some of these people didn’t even play the game much longer than a couple of minutes.

Now comes another apology from “Hammerpoint” and once again they admit their bullshit almost openly, because now “Kwek” (community manager) admitted on their forums:

After the ban wave we got a lot of complaints about false bannings so we did a thorough investigation of all accounts and found that roughly 5% of those users were improperly banned.
Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?78795-About-the-recent-bans

What ? So suddenly the quota of wrongfully banned people jumps from 0,1% to 5% ?! Didn’t you say that all bans were checked by humans ? Another lie from Sergey busted.

And even now it’s hard to believe that it’s only 5% that got wrongfully banned, which would equal to about 150 players. After all the lies and misleading info that “Hammerpoint” has spread in the past it should be obvious that this number shouldn’t be taken too serious, as the true count of people who have been banned for no reason properly was much higher.

But apparently we will never find out, because first of all “Hammerpoint” never makes mistakes, and when they do it’s the customers fault. It’s all your fault.

P.S. Sign this petition, with now over 1600 supporters to show Steam and other companies doing business with “Hammerpoint” that people are not happy with how this company (mis)handles its customers: http://www.change.org/petitions/hammerpoint-interactive-full-refund-of-retail-price-of-warz-for-everyone

UPDATED: "War Z" launched on Steam: Advertised with lies.

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 23:10:00 +0100

“The War Z” was launched today on Steam, it makes a few obvious errors by advertising the game with simple lies. Again it also doesn’t state anything about “War Z” being in Alpha or Beta, which add to the post I made a while ago about “War Z” skipping Alpha/Beta in favor for fooling players: Click here for the old article.

Here are some of the obvious lies on the Steam-Website of “War Z”:

-Screenshots are concept art and not ingame footage.

“you can also rent and create Public or Private Servers allocating spots for Friends or Clans.

[…]

Key Features:

[…]

Dedicated Public Servers as well as Private Servers”

“Up to 100 Players per Game Server”

”No Classes, No Levels, No Caps: Create your own survival campaign, gain experience points and spend it to learn dozen of available skills”

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/app/226700/

Everyone who plays the game knows that there are no private servers, that servers do not support up to 100 players and there are no “dozen of available skills” instead there are none. Zero. Null.

These are simply lies, and it’s sad to see that a company like Steam/Valve just blindly copies a feature list from the developers of this game without checking them.

This advertisment is flat out fraud.

!!!UPDATE!!!

Apparently pressure is mounting and “The War Z” has started to edit the Steam page. They have now added:

“Play with Friends: Hundreds of Servers to Play on and soon you will be able to create Public or Private Servers allocating spots for Friends or Clans”

They also removed the part where it said it had a skill system, and that there were a couple of maps available. They are still writing “Up to 100 Players” which turns out to be the half in reality… Let’s see “The War Z” backpaddle some more and remove ALL lies from their Steam description.

To see for yourself, here is the original description from Steam: http://www.abload.de/img/j9q3fdczu3.jpg

"War Z" bans randomly

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:15:00 +0100

Your properly heared the big announcement on “The War Z” forums, facebook, twitter and Co: We did another big ban wave today.

Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?76095-We-did-another-big-ban-wave-today

2000 players banned - Woha ! Did they finally introduce their anti-hack system they were advertising for so long now ? That one they were talking about, that is SO smart that it detects hackers with a clever algorithm and then marks them ?

Well… No. Here comes the joke of the month from “Hammerpoint Interactive” - The once advertised “smart Anti-Hack Engine” turns out to be trap items (like rare guns, money etc.) placed at glitchy parts of the map… Ok. Wait. Let’s get this straight.

First of all if you think now “great, finally playing without hackers” - Nope, there are still plently of hackers doing their business, and hacking site selling new cheats/hacks. The problem isn’t solved.

Secondly there is no “Anti-Cheat engine” but simply bait items that were placed by the devs to lure hackers/cheaters/glitchers into picking them up and thus marking them for banning. Now you could say: Well, atleast this does something about hackers ! But wait… Once again the developers did a huge error: Players that do not cheat/hack/glitch are able to pick up these items and already got banned for this.

There are now hundreds of posts on their forums (which get deleted after some time) from people that obviously have NOT cheated and are being banned. People that haven’t been even playing the game for more than a hour.

What is “Hammerpoint Interactives” answer ? “Oops, sorry, it’s a stupid system based on a amateurish try to combat hackers” ? Nope, they just act like nothing happened and instead say their system does not produce errors:

“First of all - overall we’re 99.9% sure that we’re banning right people. Means - if you’re hacking and you’ve been promised “100% undetectable” hack by whoever sold it to you - if you get ban - please save yourself time and don’t send us support emails “I haven’t done anything, I didn’t used hack”.”
Source: http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?76572-Hackers-and-Cheaters-bans

But again this is easily dismissed as bullshit with some VERY SIMPLE fact checking.

So Sergey Titov posts this on 15 December, saying that they banned 3000 accounts within 2 days…

“Tonight we’ll do another wave of bans, it’ll add around 1,000 accounts to around 2,000 we’ve banned yesterday.”

And this is the same posts in whiche he claims that their anti-cheat action doesn’t hit anyone that is innocent by saying:

“But just to give you idea - so far we’ve banned probably around 3,000 accounts. Out of those accounts ( and we’ve double checked themm all ) - there was only 8 cases when we banned innocent players.”

But this obviously doesn’t make any sense since it’s impossible to know on the same day if these bans were all rightful or not - “Only 8 cases of innocent players” - This post was made on the second day of banning, the majority of players that got banned at this time point didn’t even know they were banned so just how should they have been able to say “Wait, I am not hacking and I got evidence for it”.

It’s like arresting a bunch of people and then executing them instantly, and then saying “Our system never makes any errors, because you see those guys didn’t say they were innocent” - Well, might be because they are dead and didn’t even know what was happening.

Add to that they he claims that every ban is checked by a human - Checking 3000 players in 2 days ? Must have been long days…

But nevermind this is just the same bullshit being spread like usually. Because for those who remember Sergey Titov also once claimed that’s its pretty much impossible to hack “War Z”:

“As of today this detection system is able to detect roughly 99% of all hack attempts and either will ban users automatically and kick them from server, or will notify GMs about hack attempt.”
Source: http://www.gamersplatoon.net/home/index.php?site=news_comments&newsID=5

Which evidently also turned out to be… Bullshit.

P.S. There is now a petition to get a refund for “The War Z” with right now over 600 supporters: http://www.change.org/petitions/hammerpoint-interactive-full-refund-of-retail-price-of-warz-for-everyone