Earlier this month, much-maligned zombie MMO The War Z was taken offline after a series of hacks compromised the forum and many of the game’s accounts. Now, the developers have released the results of the security investigation into the breach.

The investigation reveals that the attack was primarily focused on the forums, and that hackers were able to access administrator accounts through “previously installed backdoors”. They then deleted the entire forum database, but not before grabbing access to some administrator accounts for the game as well and banning “up to several dozen” random players. Those players have now reportedly been unbanned.

OP Productions claim in their report that there is “no definitive evidence” that the hackers were able to gain access to the game databases beyond hijacking several administrator accounts, but advise all users to change their passwords if they have not already. No payment information was taken (and wasn’t there to begin with, apparently).

You can read the full update right here.

Source: The War Z (Thanks, William)

If you’re one of the seven people still playing The War Z then you’re advised to change your password now: OP Productions have issued an alert that all email addresses and passwords associated with the forum have been stolen.

“The data accessed included email addresses used to log-in to the forum, forum passwords which we encrypt, email addresses used to log-in to the game, encrypted game passwords as well as in-game character names and the IP addresses from which players log-in to the forum and to the game,” reads the announcement.

“If you posted other information to the forum it is likely that such data was accessed as well. We do not collect the names or addresses of our gamers so that information was not impacted unless you posted it on the forum. We are investigating whether additional information may have been obtained.”

Credit card and billing details were not compromised. While the passwords were encrypted that doesn’t mean they’re indecipherable: if you use the same password in The War Z as you do anywhere else, please go and change it now.

Source: Eurogamer

Late last year, Valve took the extraordinary step of removing The War Z from sale on Steam, as the game came under attack for continued, shall we say… exaggerations about its features and state of completion. Valve then took the further step of offering refunds to users who felt they had been deceived by these exaggerations. Now, for those deceived players, the honeymoon is over.

Steam’s news feed announced that “Valve and Hammerpoint Interactive collaborated to address community feedback, update the Steam store page, and make the title available for purchase worldwide. In addition, a patch has been released to update existing customers.”

“As such, the special refund offering extended for The War Z Steam customers who previously purchased the title has concluded.”

The War Z is now back on Steam for $15. We called it a boring, soul-less apocalypse where you could actively pay to win. Try it for yourself, if you’re keen.

Source: Steam (thanks, Spkypwnsuall)

Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall, the creator of DayZ, has used a Reddit thread to express his frustration at The War Z for both their business practices and how the similarity in their names has caused his own family to be angry at him.

“I am angry about the WarZ. I’m very angry,” said Hall on Reddit. “I’m quite hurt personally because anyone can see how similar the words are, and while the average gamer knows the difference individual people don’t. I’ve had family members/close friends mistake the difference and confront me about what they believed was unethical behavior they thought I was making.”

“I really don’t think anyone can understand just quite how exasperated that can make you feel when you’ve gambled everything on something, put your whole self and reputation on the line. So it hasn’t made my life very pleasant and I disagree entirely with the conduct and how consumers have been treated.”

Read the rest of the thread by clicking here.

Source: PCGamesN

Most of you will by now be familiar with the hilarious saga of The War Z, whose history so far has been plagued by controversies and flame wars. Now, in an open letter to the community, Executive Producer Sergey Titov has responded to players concerns and admits largely that the current situation is his own fault, due to what he calls “a perfect storm” brought about by his own arrogance.

Read the full letter below:

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The War Z is no longer available to purchase on Steam (although its product page remains), as the developers struggle to sort out their issues under a fresh cloud of allegations regarding unfair paid respawn times and claims that their promotional art is lifted almost directly from The Walking Dead TV series shots.

A recent patch for the game means that respawn times for your character, which used to take anywhere up to 60 minutes, have now been changed to four hours — unless you pay an instant respawn fee of 50 GC (gold coins), or about $0.40 USD. The change has seen many gamers up in arms, with forum threads complaining that the new change makes the game even more pay-to-win than ever.

Meanwhile, a thread on the Steam Community Forum points out that The War Z‘s banner image appears to be nothing more than stills from The Walking Dead, mirrored and then slightly altered in Photoshop. Click here to see a comparison of the two, taken from this forum thread.

This news follows the claims in October that The War Z wholesale copy-pasted its Terms and Conditions from League of Legends, forgetting to even remove “League of Legends” from their final document.

Valve has also been investigating claims of overzealous and unfair moderation, after many users found themselves banned for criticising the game.

If you haven’t yet, read yesterday’s amazing response from The War Z‘s executive producer in which he blames customers for the misleading information posted on the game’s official page.

Shortly after The War Z launched on Steam, people started to notice something. Specifically, that nearly everything listed on the Steam Store page for the game as a feature was actually incorrect, incomplete, missing or just plain untrue.

Now, in an extraordinary interview with Gamespy (which I highly recommend everyone read), Executive Producer Sergey Titov has shifted the blame to customers for misunderstanding the descriptions, or imagining things which weren’t there.

“I’m sure there’ll be people who will look into small details and will say “no I was mislead,” where in fact they imagined something to themselves without checking details first,” claimed Titov when Gamespy pointed out that the Steam Store page description was in fact completely inaccurate.

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The War Z, also known as “The Game That is Not DayZ”, or as we called it “a boring, soul-less apocalypse” is now available on Steam. Priced at $15 for just the game itself, The War Z is also available to be purchased with in-game currency, which bumps it up into bundles of $25 and $50 respectively. All options are on sale for 10% off during this introductory period.

This Steam launch is being labelled a “Foundation Release” by developers Hammerpoint, who claim that the game now has more than 600,000 registered accounts and a daily player count of 150,000. It’s not known whether “Foundation Release” means “beta” or “extended alpha” or “post-beta-but-not-quite-gold-either”. It’s all a mystery.

If you’ve previously purchase the game and would like it in Steam instead, Hammerpoint will be offering a conversion page where you can generate a Steam key for yourself.

We’re chatting about this in the forum right now. Maybe you should stop by?

Source: PC Gamer

The War Z sends word today that their game has official left alpha and is now in beta. What’s the difference? Well, there’s new playable characters, clan chat and tag support, additional purchaseable store items, and unlocking the remaining final section of the Colorado map.

Now that the alpha is over, the previous tiers of Survivor, Pioneer and Legend are no longer available for purchase. If you do want to get into The War Z, new packages exist at $15, $25 and $50 respectively.

What’s The War Z all about? Find out in our big ol’ preview.

Source: PC Gamer

With The War Z inviting comparisons against the infamous ArmA II mod Day Z, we sent veteran Cherno bandit Jamie Dalzell into this post-apocalyptic Colorado to see what was up. But even he felt robbed by the boring, soul-less apocalypse that The War Z had to offer.

There have been a lot of criticisms and observations that two upcoming zombie survival games, namely Day Z and The War Z are more than a little similar. The War Z‘s executive producer has sat down with VG247 to say that they don’t mind being compared to Day Z at all. “In fact we are fans of the mod,” says executive producer Sergey Titov.

“Ultimately, we hope that gamers will end up playing both The War Z and the Day Z standalone. It’s difficult to compare at the moment, but, though there are similarities, we tried to create a game that was a little bit easier to access and play, and that would allow players to be creative and create their own scenarios.”

“We aren’t looking to be better than or displace Day Z at all – there is definitely room for two great games in the same genre and we think that the gaming audience will agree.”

Source: VG247

Reader Bradley writes in to let us know that The War Z, often accused (rightly or wrongly) of copying DayZ, has now been caught out actually copying League of Legends.

Alpha players who have purchased access to the early game report that the Terms and Conditions actually show an explicit reference to the League of Legends Terms and Conditions in the second section of the agreement, under ‘Requirements’.

The duplication was spotted by Redditor sesquip, whose Reddit thread has since reached astronomical proportions. The War Z developers — or Riot, for that matter — have yet to issue a response.

In a related story, you can now download The War Z‘s alpha client files from the games.on.net file library by clicking right here.