Last week was pretty big for Evony, but probably not in the way its developers hoped. Though Evony Age II saw its final launch, the game gained much more public attention because of the lawsuit it was embroiled in with a critical blogger. Ars Technica's own feature about Evony generated a lot of responses: the general consensus among readers who commented or sent in e-mail responses was that both the game and the various companies associated with it were definitely behaving in shady ways.

One somewhat unexpected result from our original story was that vice director of development for Evony, LLC and an executive from associated-corporation, Regan Mercantile, sat down for a phone interview with Ars that was courteous and civil.

A few hours after the initial article ran, we were contacted by a representative from a US-based PR firm that had been recently hired to represent Evony. While we were working on the first article, we attempted on more than one occasion to get an interview with someone from the game's development team about the accusations we mentioned. We had no luck. Once the article was live, though, we were informed that the vice director of development for Evony, LLC was now eager to talk to us.

When the interview took place, we spoke with Benjamin Gifford of Evony, LLC, and Walt Yarbrough, the vice president of operations on the East Coast for Regan Mercantile. Both men made a point of stating that they were happy to answer any questions we had, and politely addressed a few concerns they had about the first article we ran.

While you might not have heard of Gifford before now, Yarbrough is a familiar name to the MMO industry. He originally started working as a developer for Mythic Entertainment on Dark Age of Camelot, and gradually moved through the ranks over the past decade. Since his start, he has served as a producer at Electronic Arts, an executive producer at Turbine, Director of Quality Assurance and Customer Service at Quick Hit, and now holds his current position with Regan Mercantile. His involvement with Evony makes the game seem less dubious than we had initially been led to believe.

Concerns about the initial article

The major clarification Gifford and Yarbrough wanted to make was that the game is free to play, despite concerns and accusations that enjoying the game's full content is impossible unless you're willing to shell out some cold hard cash. According to Yarbrough, this perception is inaccurate; he used his own experience with the game as an example. Before he came to work for Regan Mercantile, Yarbrough was an active Evony player and has never spent a dime on the game; he is a member of the top-ranked alliance on the server he plays on and was so before he joined the ranks of Regan Mercantile.

"In Evony, you can do everything in the game without ever paying. Much of that is based off of the random nature of the game," said Yarbrough. "In many battles, you get awarded random items which are things you would normally pay for—or that you would pay for from a convenience perspective—but many of our highest-level players have never paid for the game... you can take any aspect of our game... and say, 'well, this is what I want to do, but I haven't gotten that item randomly yet, so the game is forcing me to pay for it,' and that's just not accurate... there's nothing that you have to do that you have to pay for."

That said, Yarbrough also admitted that items and abilities in the game are purchased by players for the sake of convenience; "we're selling that convenience," he candidly stated.

Yarbrough and Gifford also took time to say that Evony is not and does not contain malware. While we never claimed this was the case, we did link to a blog post indicating it might be a possibility. Since the article ran last Monday, Evony's website has been updated for the launch of Evony Age II to include a Google certification that the site contains absolutely no malware and has never been documented as acting as an intermediary for such software.

Yarbrough and Gifford also addressed the rumors surrounding iEvony, particularly with how it was perceived as a source of spam across the Web. According to Gifford: "I took a keen interest in it... we said and gave a warning to everyone that if they were going to abuse the system, not only would they be blocked out of the iEvony client... but they would be blocked out of the game as well... When I did receive emails from a few companies saying that people were spamming their websites and blogs, I worked with them to identify who that person was and dealt with it through administration to get rid of it as fast as possible."

The story behind those horrible ads, and other things

As mentioned previously, Evony has become infamous for its borderline-pornographic banner ads. Those advertisements are actually going away in the near future, because, according to Yarbrough, "What we've seen is that our return on investment on strategic ads is better... than the earlier ad campaigns, so we're shifting to that for the near term. It's not a spigot: you can't turn it off immediately, as there that are things already in the channel. As we move forward, particularly with Age 2, we'll get away from those ads."

When asked about the nonexistent lover that potential players were encouraged to save, Yarbrough explained that there are quests in Age 2 that make those ads relevant, but he somewhat defended using them for the past couple of years, too. "[The campaign] has been very effective: we have over 16 million customers."

Yarbrough also stated that Regan Mercantile was a much smaller company at the time the controversial ad campaign began, and had actually contracted someone else to create the banners: "[We were] dealing with an outsourced ad campaign; you're going with somebody else who is creating the ad on a spec and then you're approving it and tracking the effectiveness afterwards. There are lots of ads that are out there that proved ineffectual, but are still out there."

When asked which company created the infamous advertisements, Yarbrough stated that he wasn't sure because it happened before his time at the company.

We also discussed some of the other notable points in the article, particularly accusations of plagiarized art assets, the game's relationship with Universal Multiplayer Game Entertainment (UMGE), and the recently-dropped defamation lawsuit against Bruce Everiss.