Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted

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In continuation of this Public Relations nightmare, Dr. Raymond C. Rask, President & CTO of EI Interactive responded on August 10th in a forum post that was subsequently deleted but copied and pasted in other forums, informing players that the former method of accepting payments would once again enabled and alleged that uncooperative Tulga employees were delaying the process.

To add to the drama, a death threat was received by the Lead Moderator of the Community Forums. A player claimed responsibility for this threat on GUComics Forums and instead of expressions of outrage for his action, the community was quiet apart from a few general hand-slaps for taking such a drastic measure to have his account banned as he was unable to cancel it.

"I decided (obviously inappropriately) to take matters into my own hands and force the banning of my account."

"I am starting this thread on behalf of EI in an effort to cultivate a constructive dialogue about the future of Horizons... We have definitely had some problems along the way, and recognize that we have made some missteps in the past couple of weeks that have added some frustrations for all of us."

"Some of the comments being tossed around about EI were, by any standards, out of line. However, we recognize that our silence was only contributing to the general anxiety and many of the calls for communication were valid."

"We will be handling complaints on a case by case basis. Customers who were billed incorrectly or who were unable to cancel their accounts will be fairly reimbursed, credited, or otherwise compensated for their inconvenience."

Their troubles were not at an end, however, as Kelly Heckman, owner of GamersInfo.net provided notice to EI publicly on the forms on August 18th, that she still owned the licenses to various pieces of software that ran on www.istaria.com. In the post, she alleged that notice to have the licenses transferred had been ignored by EI. That thread has since been deleted and acknowledgement posted that such action was taken when another player brought the issue up again (Editor's Note: This post has since been removed by EI Moderators).

MMORPG.com's initial calls to EI Interactive for comment were not returned, however, on August 24th, Dr. Raymond Rask posted a new thread:

In it he explained what the buy-out of Horizons encompassed:

"E I Communications Corp. purchased all of the game related assets to operate and continue development of Horizons and those assets included hardware, software, etc. As part of that purchase, we also purchased all websites, and all related systems, including the forums, IRC chat, content management systems, trouble ticketing systems, etc. That asset purchase included all needed software and software licenses."

"Tulga management has in writing, on more than two occasions, informed all current and former vendors of software and software licenses that those assets and related licenses were to be transferred to E I Communication Corp."

"Specifically, as it relates to these forums, David Bowman personally handled the transfer of the vBulletin license to E I Communications Corp."