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[Mama Robotnik]

Bumped for good reason.

When Bruce Everiss highligted some truths about Evony on his blog, Evony's legal team aimed a C&D at him, then a full-blown libel lawsuit. They even took it to the Australian courts (rather than UK or US), to make it extra difficult for him to attend.

Bruce didn't back down as they expected/hoped he would, and Evony have abandoned legal action after some disastrous opening days.

Edge have the news here, with the more thorough Guardian article here. From the latter:

Everiss, a 30-year veteran of the UK games industry, has posted a series of blogposts on his bruceongames.com site since last summer in which he has said that Evony had previously been owned by a Chinese company, UMGE, and that it was linked to a Chinese "gold farming" business – which gets low-paid workers to earn virtual money in online games such as World of Warcraft, and then sells it, against the game's rules, to other players. He has also detailed connections between Evony's owners and a company being sued by Microsoft for alleged click fraud on search engine adverts.

Evony denied the claims at the time and launched a furious legal attack on Everiss – and then to the surprise of many chose to pursue its lawsuit in Australia, where neither Everiss lives nor the company was headquartered. It claimed that Everiss's blog had readers there, but was accused of "libel tourism" in return.

Evony's case began to break down during the second day when Gifford was cross-examined. He admitted that his claim to have BA and MBA degrees were not true. Everiss's lawyers, led by Damian Sturzacker of Marque Lawyers, also established links between Evony and two companies, Regan Mercantile of Hong Kong – owned by a mysterious woman named Lu Lu – and Regan Mercantile of New York.

Under Australian libel law, only companies with fewer than 10 employees can sue for libel. Sturzacker sought to demonstrate that Evony in effect employed more than 10. The court also heard that the company had 14 vacancies. Separately, Everiss has posted a series of photographs apparently from the company's Chinese development arm showing a huge development team at work in Guangzhou, China – though this was not presented as evidence in the case.

Bruce seems thrilled the whole thing is over on his blog, with a big thankyou statement. A shame Evony wasn't destroyed in court as I'd have hoped though.

Oh and...

Sources from the case suggested that Evony did not want the publicity to overshadow its launch of the next version of its game, Evony: Age II, which is due for release imminently.

Shit. How are they going to advertise this? Bigger tits?