This is a followup on the article that appeared last week in the OC register bout K2....
I'm sure many of you wrote to the columnist and expressed your opinions and feelings just like I did.
I just received the following email from the columnist himself:
Hi, all --
Thanks for all your comments on K2 and Knight Online. The company says it
will respond to the criticisms in a follow-up meeting, but hasn't scheduled
it yet.
In the meantime, I wrote up your criticisms in my "Morning Eye" blog, which
is at blogs.ocregister.com/morningeye. You're all invited to add comments
there.
I still hope to do a follow-up article for the newspaper. In preparation
for that, could you folks please help me find Knight Online players who
live or work in Orange County, Calif.? (We're a regional newspaper, so I'd
want to include their comments in addition to some of yours for elsewhere
in the world.)
All the best,
Colin Stewart
Columnist
Marketplace Department
Orange County Register
625 North Grand Ave.
Santa Ana, CA 92701-4347
Further, I went ahead and checked the website and found the following:
November 17, 2006
Online cheating outrages Knight Online gamers
In the eyes of Irvine online game company K2 Network, "game players – and not game developers – are king," as I wrote in the article "Play for free, pay for extras" on Nov. 7.
But in the eyes of many K2 players, that statement is:
• "the funniest statement I have read in a long time";
• "false information";
• contradicted by "hundreds if not thousands of angry gamers that do not feel that they have been put first at all";
• hilariously inaccurate -- "I could not hold in the laughter."
Players' barrage of criticism focused primarily on complaints that K2 has spoiled their enjoyment of the Knight Online game by not controlling cheaters. Executives at K2 Network said they would like to meet with me to discuss their efforts to control cheating, but they did not have an immediate reply to the players' criticisms.
K2 customers' complaints have been serious enough that the Better Business Bureau has given the company an "F" rating.
That score means that BBB raters "strongly question the company’s reliability."
In Knight Online, a major problem is that the game is "overrun with cheaters," as one player describes the situation.
"I personally have reported people to customer service for violating the game's Terms of Service Contract, and nothing was done, even though proof was provided of wrong doing. The same thing is occuring with those that use 3rd party programs to gain an advantage in this game. Hundreds of screen shots and videos have been taken of people cheating, yet those that violate the TOS are still there week after week," says another.
A further problem that some players cited is that Knight Online is very popular in Turkey, which means that English-speaking players cannot communicate with many of the other people playing the game. Communication is important in Knight Online, because it is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
Hacking and cheating are problems that by no means are limited to K2 Networks.
In September, the operators of the multiplayer game Second Life reported that hackers had broken into their databases and gained access to 650,000 player names, addresses and passwords. In October, Blizzard Entertainment of Irvine said it banned 76,000 accounts for cheating in its popular World of Warcraft game.
Comments anyone?
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