Okay guys, I've been silently following this thread since it popped up, and I want to say a few things:
1. In the past, many servers have claimed to be legit, by obtaining some kind of mysterious license. Every time I read this, I instantly know it's a lie, and it makes laugh, because everyone can research the matter.
How do I know this?
a) Like other members in this forum, everyone can figure out who the rightful trademark and or publishing contractor or Runes of Magic is/are.
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View attachment 244216
Since Runewaker had enough troubles around this topic in the past, they created this website to end the fake claims. (In case anyone wants to argue about: "Maybe it's not on the website yet, they need some time to edit it" - I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but that's not how legit companies operate in the real world. Such important information would have been updated ASAP!)
b)I'm around the pserver scene for the past 12 years. (HOLY poop I`M GETTING OLD)In those years, I was involved in successful projects and in not so successful projects, in small projects and in extreme projects. In all these years, Runewaker was never willing to support me or any of my teams, because for them, runes of magic is a money grab. They don't care. They don't need to care. Furthermore, they found an equal moral corrupt company (Gameforge) and are milking the community ever since. Runewaker is simply not interested in Runes of Magic. If you followed the official websites and registry over the years (like me) you will have noticed that Runewaker focused on the mobile marked, after Emberguard (Guardinas of Ember) failed as a mmorpg on steam. They even had Runes of Magic removed from their websites for years, until Arcadia started making claims about their "license". Since then, Runewaker only wants to stop the bleeding. They don't want to hear about pservers or licenses anymore. They are happy with Gameforge.
c)In 2021, the Runes of Magic publishing contract between Runewaker and Gameforge4D (Eu&NA) was going to end. A lot of people (including me) hoped that they would not renew the contract. This would open the door for some developers to create actually new meaningful content around Runes of Magic, because then it would be community driven. Sadly, they renewed the contract and even expanded on their conditions. Gameforge used to have publishing only rights, which means, that they are not allowed to alter the code or make patches by themselves. This and other conditions were changed in order to guarantee Gameforge the opportunity to milk the community even longer. As part of these changes, you were able to enjoy the horrible (bugged and abused) new steam servers that they released a while ago, with these super nice rewards that definitely no one tried to abuse or glitch.
Since Gameforge showed Runewaker, that you can still milk players with this game, Runewaker additionally decided it's time to find a new publisher in asia (china) so they made a contract with TD22 (
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) in 2022.
(And after mupu released our base version of the 64bit code, we even forced them to collab against Runewaker and invest into a ram leak fix)
Now, after we have all the information we need, we can let the fake licensing stuff behind and focus on the details of this situation.
I want to go over some technical stuff, before I give my personal opinion.
2. Turkey's economy is in shambles right now. The Lira is fucked, let's be real here. Turkish players have complained about this fact forever. In the current state, it's quite simple to get a Turkish company registered. They are happy about every money that even could come in. This has been the state for some years now and has resulted in many (partly even national wide) fraud and scam scandals.
(Some example that dates back to 2018 so you guys can see that this is "normal"
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/ In case you want to see a German news report:
) As someone who has personal ties to Turkey, I can ensure you, a lot of scamming is happening over there.
The government is desperate in finding money income, so they don't ask too many questions. It's quite simple to have something verified over there. As
MentaL said: "Money rules the world."
3. It is quite interesting to know, that self claimed license holders need pserver forums in order to get their own thing running. I've seen the posts back then, and it was clear, that they are lacking all kind of basic knowledge about the code, the tools and (most likely) c++ dev skills. Now, knowing that some questions were asked on alts, makes this point even clearer to me. I've seen the outdated examples (like
Mageoski pointed out) but also newer examples (like
MentaL showed) and this ensures me, that they have no ties to Runewaker.
I want to let you in on some secret: Back when Runewaker had multiple publishers, there used to be a publicly available Runes of Magic wiki which you only had access too, if you had a verified Runewaker employee account or certified dev pass account for one of the publishers. This wiki was not like a game wiki you can find on fandom.com or rom-welten.com. This was an internal wiki with all the technical documentation about the code and sub programs that are involved in the Runes of Magic server and client structure.
Stuff like: how to make people vip, how to manage vip, how to manage the logview, how to enable events, how to properly merge databases, how to restart zones and services, which Visual Studio setup you need in order to compile the code etc. etc. etc.
This wiki still exists, but is hidden behind a VPN since domo attacked it way too often.
What I want to say is: if there would be an agreement between romdestan.com and Runewaker, they would have gotten access to this wiki, like TD22 did, and there would be no need to ask such simple questions.
4. Claims that Gameforge would cooperate with any pservers is the boldest lie I have heard this year. Gameforge is actively claiming other pservers. This started after Arcadia was able to get their first fake license verified and started claiming Gameforge content. You can follow this nonsense on the Lumen Database (international DMCA database) (
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).
If that would not be enough, let's check what happens if I open romdestan.com in my browser:
View attachment 244218
What is happening here?! Right, my anti-virus tool is blocking the site. (In case anyone wants to argue about GDATA:
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- educate yourself about the importance and meaning of this software)
This is not making a good look to me. Lets check Virustotal :
View attachment 244219
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Looks like a legit server with trademark and publishing rights and definitely ties to Gameforge and even the rarest of rare cases, Gameforge devs cooperating with them. KAPPA
(by the way, I used to make the same checks once I've heard about their server back then and had the same results)
5.At first, one might ask
romever : "Why making such a thread in the first place?" or "Why open up such drama in this forum?", but I totally support this action. I don't know
romever nor do I know the people involved in romdestan, but everyone should recognize that projects like this Runes of Magic Turkey Steam thing only survive because of fake claiming other projects. Greedy people want to destroy and suck out every available penny, they are not interested in building up a long living healthy community.
As I showed above, the problem of fake dmcaing is something that's not new to us, but this is the pinnacle of it (so far).
6.Now, as my post should have made clear that I do not support this project nor romdestan doing it, I want to make some clear statement as someone who originally was involved creating the 64bit sourcecode used in question:
The idea for the one for all release was to give back to people who made G4L what it was. To thank our players who saw the game changing for the first time ever since the original release in 2009. After the sad ending of G4L (at least mupu`s and my ending there) we wanted to give back to the players who supported us over the years and give them the opportunity to play Runes of Magic in a crash free and 64bit stable environment. We deliberately NOT included our reworked tools and programs which are needed to alter the game files. We did not want to support the rise of greedy devs who wants to make a quick buck, instead we wanted to help the people who are sad of all the scam server and just want to play the Ducking game. Ofc we had offers for buyouts, but that was never our intention. That's why it makes me truly sick seeing such obvious greed projects like you guys are trying to run. Taking our code and fake licensing it under your name, is the reason why I make this post!
Observing that you now also instantly abuse this shenanigans fake license to DMCA takedown content from others, makes it truly evil.
How dare you taking our code for this shenanigans!
Luckily, some people in the space know the security weaknesses of this codebase ( as I said, we released our base version, so people can play the god damn Ducking game) and as soon as you duck with the wrong servers, you will notice. So as long as you haven't invested HEAVILY into A BUNCH of SKILLED c++ devs, you will have a shitshow with steam about supporting the game. Good Luck with the customer support
_____
okay folks, I don't expect anyone to actually read all of this so if you did, you're a G and actually truly care about the health of a) Runes of Magic or b)Pserver publishing. Thanks and respect m8!