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Friday, August 9, 2013

July 24th ~ August 7th

As we left off last time with the comments on Kickstarter, there was growing talk with taking legal action. The more recent comments return to this subject matter, citing the successful lawsuit by Neil Singh against a Kickstarter that failed to deliver. In the least, there is a case with Mr. Peake failing to deliver on pledge rewards, which is a requirement by Kickstarter. There are also other issues as well, such as Mr. Peake referring to his original build as a beta instead of the prototype or alpha it actually was. Also, Primer Labs doesn't seem to be a registered company with any sort of liability protection, at least Mr. Peake's anyway.

The recommended course of action though seems to be, for those who can, to file your own personal civil suit.

Moving on from that, an interesting comment was posted by njt that I thought was worth slipping in:
I'm sensing a pattern. See below ↓

From his biography on his now down site:
---
He created an online empire simulation game called Mage Princes using play-by-email turn files to bypass FirstClass BBS systems' lack of game support. Hundreds of players signed up to pay for the sequel which he planned to include more sophisticated military, economic and tradecraft RPG elements to allow players to cooperatively build nations.

When a BBS shutdown and a hard drive crash destroyed his 7th grade business, he dreamed bigger and decided to finish school to focus on developing the game.
---
Had an idea(rpg) - built a part of it - took money - something happened -- new idea(corsets) -- built a part of it - took money - something happened -- new idea(code hero) -- built a part of it.... etc etc
In each case something happens and he moves onto something "bigger and better".

Alex, it's not hard to get a site up. It's not hard to show progress. It is hard to admit defeat and face up to your failure. You will see criminal prosecution if you continue to... dare I say it, play games.

No more postponing, you've done that far too many times already. Either show concrete evidence of you actually doing things or finally come clean.

Also, don't tell us that these comments are the reason for you not being able to go on - or it wasn't good enough. I was there when you were releasing new alphas in irc. There was nothing but hope in those channels. I'm sure if you look for negativity you can find it, but there was hope too. The reason you're getting so much heat is because you fall into a pattern that has already been seen time and time again. Do something different this time - be it actually succeed or to face it like a man. Anything other than what you've shown us so far. Show us you can change, man.
For the last topic I want to touch on, remember how in the last post I did on the comments, I pointed out how Mr. Peake has several domains pointing all to the same site? Well, it seems that since at least July 31st, they've all been pointing to a webpage for the site CheckandRaisePoker.


From what I have gathered, the .com, .net, .info, .biz, and .us versions of it were all purchased by Douglas Bale of Las Vegas on July 4th of this year. Although his domain information is private on most of his domains, it is not on the .us one, where such privacy is not allowed.

From a Google search on the domain, I found that Mr. Bale also owns the .eu name (and may be preferring that as the main one). This matches what Majugi on Kickstarter found. Also, there is a bit of a description from a now gone post on Craig's List that gave some information on what it's supposed to be: a poker site that uses the internet currency Bit Coin.

Trying out each of the domain versions, I found the placeholder-like page for all of Mr. Peake's domains is also held currently by the .info, .biz, .us, and .eu versions of the CheckandRaisePoker domain name. The .info, .biz, and .us all change to the .eu name when entered. The page itself is of the IP 50.97.99.218, which is hosted at JacksHost (a possible subsidiary of SoftLayer?) as opposed to Linode, where Mr. Peake had hosted his domains. These pages link to port 8087 of the IP, which is what the .com is and where a seemingly functioning online poker beta is located. I haven't tried it myself though, but a screenshot is below.


I would like to also point out that Mr. Peake had more than just primerlabs.com, codehero.org, and alexpeake.com pointing to the same website. It seems he also owned unityversity.org, openprimer.com, and openprimer.org and did the same with them. They don't seem to have expired though, still being under his ownership.

It's not clear what's going on, especially with Mr. Peake remaining silent on the issue despite recent logins on Kickstarter. Were his domains hijacked? Is Mr. Peake working with Mr. Bale on this new Bit Coin poker? Was Mr. Peake moving from Linode to JacksHost and this happened on accident? We'll just have to wait and see what's said when Mr. Peake eventually does talk.

With the site down since apparently June 30th and over a month of silence from Mr. Peake, things don't seem to be looking good at all for Code Hero. Could Mr. Peake have finally given up?



Here are the comments from the Kickstarter, with dates listed where I thought was necessary or good to.

Tomimt (July 24):
It looks like every web address given in the Alex's bio is offline, so here's the archive links to all of them if anyone's interested:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130429175945/http://www.alexpeake.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20130614173810/http://primerlabs.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20120503020305/http://www.tacticalcorsets.com/
From the looks of it he is trying to get underground.
Dustin Deckard:
For those keeping an eye on other "failed" KS projects, there's a $122k board game project that just bit the dust today. At least the creator had the balls to give his backers a straight answer (project is cancelled) but people are still furious since he apparently has a year long history of misleading backers and making lots of claims that never panned out. Sound familiar, anyone? That project is here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forkingpath/the-doom-that-came-to-atlantic-city/comments
Schadrach:
@Deckard: There's another one for a video game called Rain that posted a similar post a few weeks ago. Relatively tiny project by the standards we're talking about here though.
Unfortunately I'm a backer on both of them as well as this one. At the same time, my KS experience has been mostly/generally positive, and most campaigns have done their thing successfully (though Japanime Games and Ouya should fire their shipping people, preferably out of a cannon).

I think the best case for all three of these would be to open up what exists. Open source Code Hero and Rain, and either get physical rewards sorted out or refund less however much the level for "a copy of the game" was. That way there's at least a chance it will see completion, eventually.

As for the one you mentioned, open sourcing would be a bit more complicated because it's a board game. At the same time, we've seen most of the game components in one form or another, so they must exist in some form. Which means a print-n-play version could theoretically be released, along with CAD models for the minis which would allow for 3d-printing if you really wanted the full experience.

Ultimately, some KS projects are going to fail, and it's probably for the best if they are up front about doing so and try to find a way to come to a mutually workable solution with their backers.
Peter S:
@Dustin, have you tried reaching out to Neil Singh? It appears that he's one of the first people to successfully pursue legal action against a failed KS project: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2013/01/8590-kickstarter-lawsuit-neil-singh/
Dustin Deckard:
@Peter- I have not reached out to him personally, but I've read everything I could find with his name, and it appears he simply filed a small claims suit against his project creator, which was easier since it was in the same state. I would personally encourage any backers reading this who live in California to pursue filing a smalls claims suit - it's much easier if you're in the state vs out of state.
Lawrence "Saker" Collins:
Criminal prosecution is the way to go with circumstances such as this.
njt:
I'm sensing a pattern. See below ↓

From his biography on his now down site:
---
He created an online empire simulation game called Mage Princes using play-by-email turn files to bypass FirstClass BBS systems' lack of game support. Hundreds of players signed up to pay for the sequel which he planned to include more sophisticated military, economic and tradecraft RPG elements to allow players to cooperatively build nations.

When a BBS shutdown and a hard drive crash destroyed his 7th grade business, he dreamed bigger and decided to finish school to focus on developing the game.
---
Had an idea(rpg) - built a part of it - took money - something happened -- new idea(corsets) -- built a part of it - took money - something happened -- new idea(code hero) -- built a part of it.... etc etc
In each case something happens and he moves onto something "bigger and better".

Alex, it's not hard to get a site up. It's not hard to show progress. It is hard to admit defeat and face up to your failure. You will see criminal prosecution if you continue to... dare I say it, play games.

No more postponing, you've done that far too many times already. Either show concrete evidence of you actually doing things or finally come clean.

Also, don't tell us that these comments are the reason for you not being able to go on - or it wasn't good enough. I was there when you were releasing new alphas in irc. There was nothing but hope in those channels. I'm sure if you look for negativity you can find it, but there was hope too. The reason you're getting so much heat is because you fall into a pattern that has already been seen time and time again. Do something different this time - be it actually succeed or to face it like a man. Anything other than what you've shown us so far. Show us you can change, man.
njt:
For good measure - here's how to keep users updated.

http://playstarbound.com/
Jason Hoeft:
If any backers are interested in downloading the game, you can do so here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130603114855/http://primerlabs.com/download

I just downloaded the windows version, and was surprised that the 451mb download went through!
Dustin Deckard (July 31):
So, uh... right now, primerlabs.com and alexpeake.com are pointed at an online gambling site. Consider me confused. Alex signs into Skype pretty regularly if anyone wants to find him on there...
Jonathan Jou:
Suffice it to say, I don't think it will be right for us to let anyone considering a future Peake venture go unawares of an unbroken, well-established pattern. While I think Alex deserves to try as many times as he wants, I imagine future contracts will entail more involved supervision, milestones instead of lump sums, and an actual contract enforcing deliverables.

How we want to maintain awareness is a different matter, but $200k is not to be spent lightly, even from crowd funding, and I'm worried for both Alex and whomever he might find audience with. There's a small chance he might want to go to business school and pick up a computer science degree to back his vision with some pedigree.
Dustin Deckard:
Yeah... unless Alex shows up at PAX with Code Hero in a few weeks (and even then, who knows if he'll update the Kickstarter) it's possible he's washes his hands of this whole mess. Either my first suspicion was right, and he forgot to pay his domain or hosting bill and lost control of his domains/DNS... or he's sold them off, or he's just pointed them at that gambling site to intentionally misdirect people. This could be the nail in the coffin for this thing.
Majugi (August 2):
Weird... I finally got around to checking primerlabs.com again, and it's not even a gambling site -- not a working one anyway. Look at the page source: it's super clean, and there's almost nothing happening on that page. The links are all placeholders and even the "online now" part has placeholder numbers (123 tables and 1234 players). Who would hack a webpage then slowly develop a gambling site in its place? "CheckandRaisePoker" apparently, but Google doesn't turn up any results for that brand, so it's apparently a brand new company (or one with terrible SEO).

checkandraisepoker.net was registered on July 5, 2013 according to domain-kb.com which was shortly before primerlabs.com went offline. checkandraisepoker.net is currently a GoDaddy holding page. My best guess at the moment is that Alex is behind the development of the placeholder site and it's possible that the poker site itself is his next project. If so, it would be a marked departure from his previous revolutionize-the-world efforts. To be clear, I'm not aware of any direct link between Alex and checkandraisepoker besides the hosting of the site, but whatever's happening is extraordinarily dodgy.
Majugi (August 2):
Also, both alexpeake.com and primerlabs.com contain the same material, but only those two sites currently show up in Google search results for "CheckandRaisePoker maintains the highest standard of security" (a phrase found at the bottom of the page) [screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/WHUJCZi.png].

It's technically possible that both sites were compromised at the same time and the attackers were satisfied in using both of those sites to host some placeholder webpage, but you'd think if they wanted multiple sites with the same content, they'd add it to some other compromised sites (unless this attacker has _only_ managed to hack Alex's sites). And again, if you've got unauthorized access to someone's domain, a WIP gambling website is pretty much the worst choice you could make for taking advantage of that.
Majugi (August 2):
The registrant of checkandraisepoker.net is Domains By Proxy, LLC... which tells us nothing other than whoever owns the domain doesn't want to be identified.
Majugi (August 2):
I see I was wrong about how long primerlabs.com has been offline: it's actually been since June 30 (before the registration of the poker domain). So someone first took down Alex's sites, then bought a domain, then decided to start working on their poker site on his domains anyway. Or possibly the sites went down on their own and a cybersquatter picked it up to start their business (why they'd ever want a gambling site on alexpeake.com, I don't know). Or maybe the sites are just really lazy fakes.
Alex, if you see this (and your last login was a few days ago, so you probably will), now would be a good time to defend yourself.
jack:
Alex, can you seriously not even take 2 minutes out of your day to type up a couple of sentences letting the people who gave you $170k know why the project site now points to an online casino?
jack:
Can we at least get credit equivalent to our pledges at your new casino?
PegasusOrgans:
I'd still be happy to wait for Code Hero and not ask for a refund if there was any evidence whatsoever that you hadn't given up on it. Just post a few lines telling us what's up! Doesn't even have to be an update, but don't do this. If you don't want your reputation ruined forever, you gotta do at least that. Remember, the internet NEVER forgets, but it does forgive, if you ask for it, that is.
Dustin Deckard (August 3):
I've had a few Code Hero buyers email me over the last few days asking what's up with Alex's website. Unfortunately, there are lots and lots of people who bought the game directly from his website, rather than Kickstarter. :( We know Alex made over $30k from those poor souls. They actually might have better legal standing than us backers, since we're the "idiots" who gave Alex our money as part of a crowd-funding campaign, and the direct sales were pretty obviously pre-orders that deserve refunds.
Tomimt:
Each day it's getting clearer that Alex is just hoping that we'd forget about this all. What makes me even sadder is, that he never did man up and come clean about the failure of the project.
PegasusOrgans:
Does anyone have more info on Alex? I mean, he wouldn't go and scam ppl if he used his real name, would he? Something like this could haunt him forever.
Majugi (August 4):
The site's been updated again: the placeholders for number of players and tables that I commented on yesterday have been changed to "xxxxx tables" and "xxxxx players". The "register" button now goes to a site that loads some flash-based poker thing at the IP address 50.97.99.218 (it's a Dallas-based IP that used to be associated with Primer Labs). Since we're now dealing with active content, I'm more reluctant to poke around, but it is possible to create accounts and there does seem to be a poker system of some sort in place (no money is involved at the moment and there still appears to be no real users).

There are also some adverts for checkandraisepoker.eu showing up around the site and that domain is hosting the same content as Alex's sites. The EU domain was registered on July 4, 2013 by Marcaria (a domain registration service).

What will happen next? Will this actually turn into a full-fledged gambling site? How many different domain registration services decided to register "checkandraisepoker" domains around July 4-5? Stay tuned to find out!

---

But getting back to Code Hero, in the best case, Alex is not responsible for this new turn of events which means that he's merely lost control of the websites and is continuing his policy of conspicuous silence.
Majugi (August 4):
The checkandraisepoker.com site is now redirecting to 50.97.99.218:8087. I think when I checked yesterday it wasn't in use. That domain is another one registered by Domains By Proxy on July 4th.

This continues to not make any sense. At this point, if Alex is behind the poker sites, he's spending a bit of cash on it (buying a minimum of three domains through proxies and putting some amount of development effort into the site). This seems excessive as a diversion. If he is NOT behind the sites, who on earth could be? They already have three themed domains, the only thing Peake's domains bring is notoriety and a lack of credibility as a legit poker site. It's worth pointing out again that the Peake sites are not re-directing to an established poker site: the main poker web app is on the Primer Labs IP address. The fact that the IP address has remained the same also implies that the hosting company (SoftLayer) hasn't changed since Peake controlled the site.
Nathan Lewis:
From the Kickstarter FAQ:
------------------
Is a creator legally obligated to fulfill the promises of their project?

Yes. Kickstarter's Terms of Use require creators to fulfill all rewards of their project or refund any backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill. (This is what creators see before they launch.) We crafted these terms to create a legal requirement for creators to follow through on their projects, and to give backers a recourse if they don't. We hope that backers will consider using this provision only in cases where they feel that a creator has not made a good faith effort to complete the project and fulfill.
--------------
So, what is our next step? I honestly just want my refund at this point.
Tomimt:
I think it's safe to assume we all would want a refund. I think US based backers could look into possible legal action, but us others can pretty much just hope for the best. Those who are entitled of physical rewards, or higher pledges, propably have better changes of getting refunded. But in all we are on rarely walked grounds here.
Peter S (August 2):
v Tomimt, I think the right step is for someone with the means/desire to start organizing...some kind of a legal prosecution where lots of us can get our money back all at once. That may be called a "class action", or maybe something else is better, I'm not sure.

Dustin suggested that CA backers try to get refunded through small claims court...but in my case, I contributed little enough, that I simply don't feel like it's worth the effort of dragging myself through the CA legal system to get it back. (Note, I'm not waiving any legal rights with that statement - I'm just saying that it's a tiring thing to do, leading me to not do anything about it just yet.)

That said, if someone (or several people) were to organize a class action (or something) so that lots of us could get our money back all at once...that would save lots of people time, and gets lots of people their refunds.

I think a good start would be to contact Neil Singh (http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2013/01/8590-kickstarter-lawsuit-neil-singh/), and get his advice - perhaps he could even help organize this class action, if that turns out to be a smart idea.

So...who wants the experience of organizing a "Kickstarter Class Action"? EG, if Neil Singh is able to successfully help us out, he could get a positive reputation as the "Kickstarter Lawyer" or something (not sure if he's actually a lawyer). Any lawyer/legal-types out there hoping to make a name for themselves?

All of that being said - as always Alex, if you'd like to start being transparent and have generous communication with us backers, the sooner the better.
Dustin Deckard (August 7):
Hate to be the bearer of bad news Peter, but while Neil may have some additional insight for you, it would only be because he is an attorney. He did not file a class action suit against his failed Kickstarter, he just did a small claims suit. If you want to try to find someone willing to take this case as class action, feel free, good luck, and let me know if I can help. But I have been trying for 6 months and the facts are: Alex spent all his money - he reportedly has enough left to live off of for a while, but he's also reportedly a trust fund kid so we can't assume where his living expenses are coming from. Also, $200k is not enough money for an attorney to go through all the hassle of a class action suit, certainly not for free. If someone wants to pony up around $10k for a retainer to get something off the ground... power to you. But I don't have that kind of money (spent it all on failed Kickstarters heh heh).

2 comments:

  1. Primerlabs.com came back up yesterday, though apparently the old database isn't being used.

    ReplyDelete