1453 R, on 27 August 2014 - 01:37 PM, said:
Despite the fact that Founders were explicitly informed that the developer’s vision was exactly what they were buying? They were looking for funding to take a mighty swing at producing the MechWarrior game they wanted to play. They got that funding, they took that swing, and mostly missed. They’re trying – slowly, painfully, and in a somewhat clumsy and inept manner – to get back to that original vision as much as they can, but while I believe that Founders have a legitimate cause for ire in that Piranha missed the mark, I don’t believe they’re entitled to claim anything remotely like false advertising.
They knew, up front, in plain language, that the thing they were buying was conceptual, and that concepts can and do change, especially in the online gaming sphere. Piranha has an obligation to try and live up to those ideals, which it is in the process of doing – but you know what? If you shelled out cash for that vision (which I can see that you didn’t actually do, so I have no idea what your problem is), and then that vision failed to materialize because Piranha realized too late that they’d bitten off more than they can chew…you’ve got no right to claim fraud or false advertising so long as they made an honest good-faith effort to live up to their vision and are continuing to do so.
Don’t be swinging around legal bats like that unless you A.) have absolutely rock-solid evidence and reasoning to back it up, and B.) are prepared to watch the entire MechWarrior franchise die off entirely and never be resurrected again. Because it is fans like you, who would rather watch Piranha crash, burn, and die than let them work on fixing their errors, that will convince the rest of the games development industry that the BattleTech franchise’s fanbase is not a viable customer base, as they are entirely too prone to choking and killing the hand that feeds them.
Grey area
Make sure you know legalese before you venture into making statements regarding legal actions. I'm not condoning or condemning that topic, I'm pointing out that there are a LOT of factors when talking the legal aspect.
So lets break down a bit of that (keep in mind even this is an over simplification)
Intent: First thing you have to prove is intent. That measn you'd have to prove a company had the intent to defraud. Example:
Company A advertises feature B and gives deadlines for feature B.
A year later (and countless missed deadlines) the company president says they hadn't began working on the feature but now they're going to because they got a license extension.
An argument could be made for fraud in this case. Company A informed paying customers that they were hard at work on feature B. They then admitted they weren't working on it at all.
Then you have to prove the actual fraudulent claims. That means that a plaintiff would have to show where they paid for something and did not receive it. This is also commonly referred to (in this case anyhow) as a "bait and switch". A company offers customers one thing and then delivers something else.
Now keep in mind civil law does not have the same burden of proof as criminal law. There's no "reasonable doubt" requirement in civil law. Evidence rules are also more lenient.
Example
O.J. Simpson. Simpson was acquitted in his criminal case but was later found liable in a civil wrongful death case filed by the families of the victims. How can that happen? Well because civil cases have different requirements.
The other thing you cannot discount when talking about things like legal action are juries. There are firms that charge insanely large amounts of money to assist attorneys in jury selection. If I'm a middle-aged gamer suing a game developer, guess who I want loaded up in the jury box? You don't have to be "right" for a jury to agree with you.
Now you also have international laws involved if you're tlaking about PGI. That adds an entirely new level of complicated.
Now, honestly, in my opinion, nobody has a "case" for MWO, BUT I've seen much stranger things happen and I've seen companies sued for far less.
It's still a bit silly to talk about any kind of legal action like that here. First and foremost, the amounts of money spent would rarely amount to anything that wouldn't go before small claims court which involves no attorneys or juries.
4
This company doesn't know what the community wants.
