https://store.steampowered.com/app/2940620/Cards_of_Eternity_The_Wheel_of_Time/

Well, well, well.

For my 12 days of Christmas, I certainly wasn't wanting nor expecting to receive this.

Credit goes to SirViolentDeath[x.com] for alerting me to this. It appears my good chums over at Aether Games, who we've talked about at the back end of last year for offering users NFTs in exchange for positive Steam reviews for their still banned game Aether[steamdb.info], have came back onto Steam.

Now, I'm unsure if this was just a singular game ban in the case of Aether, or if the developers are actively circumventing an account ban from posting this. They aren't exactly hiding their involvement on the Steam page.

I still stand by that Valve should hold a zero tolerance policy for people that bribe reviewers to leave positive reviews, and the real ho humdinger here is the Aether team are attempting to rewrite history amongst their community, and they're also already getting up to some of their old tricks.

The Aether team have been in their Discord, answering questions with regards to why Aether was banned, and they claimed that if you wrote a review good or bad, then you'd be entered in a raffle[imgur.com], which is a blatant lie, they specifically said these had to be positive reviews[imgur.com], hence what the whole issue was. If they didn't specify these reviews had to be positive, we maybe wouldn't be here today.

As for Cards of Eternity, it's another "Not NFT" game. In other words, an NFT game that's been forced to strip out the NFT in-game functions for the Steam release. However, similar to Aether, there are some technicalities it seems if the Discord server is to be believed, as some staff discuss how all the NFT and crypto related stuff is done through the website, where you can open chests and then get access to the items inside the game via the wallet link, so there's a still a major big asterisk next to that "We're not an NFT game" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

It's funny how much that the game's developer and its community have twisted what actually happened, some users even branding Sentinels of the Store as a "Hate Club"[imgur.com] which is just so funny to me, because this isn't just about blindly going after people or just hating on a game for being bad, there's blatant rule violations that happened with Aether, and accountability is still a necessity, and I've not been convinced that these developers are acting in good faith with the fact that not only did review manipulation happen in the first place, but they're now lying about what happened. If they came out and said "yeah, we fucked up, sorry, it was a mistake please give us another chance" then maybe, just maybe, I'd be more sympathetic and understanding. But no, they're bullshitting their way out of bullshit with a bullshit spade. And frankly, that's quite bullshit.

Oh also, just another side note, I do find it funny that even before I made any comment about the game, I'd been blocked preemptively on X[x.com] on this new game's profile. Guess the team are still quite unforgiving about what happened with Aether.

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