Evony drops lawsuit against game blogger detractor

If there is one game you have heard about it, it would probably be Evony. The ads for the game are about risque as they are prevalent, with cleavage being the one thing most of them have in common.

Evony has now dropped their lawsuit they launched against game blogger Bruce Everiss. Bruce Everiss is a British game journalist veteran, with over 30 years of experience in the gaming industry. Evony sued after not having much luck getting Everiss to stop his investigations into the company. Everiss' investigations turned up some rather questionable points of interest with the team behind the game that is by all appearances, an uncredited rip-off and simplification of Sid Meier's Civilization. In fact, Evony used to be called Civony.

Evony sued Bruce Everiss in Australia, even though neither the company nor the blogger are based their, in a move that was seen to be taking advantage of libel laws in that country. This maneuver is commonly referred to as 'libel tourism', and is an increasing problem for journalists and bloggers. 

The case was dropped in the second day of hearings in Australia's Supreme Court after one of Evony's employees, Benjamin Gifford, could not prove he had either an MA or a BA as he had claimed. Perhaps this could be seen as an indication that many of the claims made against Evony by Bruce Everiss also had some truth in them.

As for these claims, Bruce Everiss had posted a number of unflattering tidbits about the company behind Evony. For starters, Bruce talked about his investigations which led him to believe that a Chinese company called UMGE owned the game. UMGE is reportedly a big Chinese gold-farming business that pays slave wages to its employees to practice gold farming, which is against the terms of service agreements for virtually every MMORPG. The company claimed to be a small business with less than 10 employees, but Bruce Everiss had shown links to Regan Mercantile of Hong Kong, owned by a woman named Lu Lu, which caused trouble for the lawsuit proceedings, as in Australia, only companies with less than 10 employees can sue. The owners of Evony also reportedly had another company that was being sued by Microsoft for click fraud.