Killing Ifrit - a Final Fantasy community: Vigilous - Viewing Profile - Killing Ifrit - a Final Fantasy community

First, upon googling the phone number Eli Schwartz provided me last night via his gmail account (Note: Despite working with David Kotkin on The Avenger controller, he does not have an avengercontroller.com email address such as david@avengercontroller.com for Kotkin or Info@avengercontroller.com as utilized by Christoforo) to contact David, I discovered that on Amazon David Kotkin was on a bit of uneven footing not that long ago on 11.24.11, prior to yesterday's events with Paul Christoforo and Ocean Marketing. Scrolling down beyond the 1-star review reveals comments from David Kotkin's Gaming Pro Amazon user profile to other users. Notably, according to user C. K. Ahlstrom, "There's a review on your account saying that you bought one of these things (and loved it). Now your posting with an email account from avengercontroller.com and offering support for it? You also posted the same negative review for three of your competitors products. I wonder if amazon will want to know you post reviews for your own product while posing as a customer." Looking deeper into the Gaming Pro user, thanks to cached reviews shows that David Kotkin's Gaming Pro user profile does indeed try to derail his competition while lauding his own Avenger product, but this appears to be the tip of the iceberg.

Stealth edit: Thanks to Dan for discovering the reviews and sending them my way.

Delving into the credibility of Eli Schwartz came back a bit suspiciously as his Twitter account has only been in service since May 16th of this year and seems to only have been created solely as a shell account to push The Avenger product. Additionally, at further glance of Eli's Facebook and Google+ accounts neither of which show a picture of Eli and smacking of poor grammatical and syntax uses that would be common to a high school age kid (which his Facebook lists him as attending East Longmeadow High School in Massachusetts), it's also been made apparent in the last day or so that Paul Christoforo also lacks a solid command of written language as well evidenced by his online postings. As far as location data, that can be added in a status update bar and can be easily faked if need be via the Facebook web interface. Furthermore, Schwartz lists his profession as DJ, which raises questions why exactly David Kotkin would allow a high school age DJ to work damage control PR for his product in the wake of Ocean Marketing, especially when having Eli send out PR releases from a gmail account as opposed to a avengercontroller.com account would only weaken his position. Finally, adding insult to injury, even Eli Schwartz's 5 star Amazon review for The Avenger on Nov 29, 2011 smacks of other reviews illustrating Ocean Marketing's signature touch.

While I'm sure David Kotkin may have great intentions when creating The Avenger initially, there is just too many fishy things that are slowly adding up since the Ocean Marketing fiasco came to light yesterday. In the meantime, I'll be patiently waiting for a press release to come directly from David Kotkin, who should really step up to the plate following what may be slowly transitioning from a marketing disaster solely for Ocean Marketing and into one overall for The Avenger as well. Wishing to abstain from accusations, I'll leave the evidence for readers to judge. Simply said though, there's nothing difficult about transparency, especially when it can only help smooth over what appears to be a decidedly odd situation.

Yoichi Wada acknowledges state of Final Fantasy XIV Online has hurt the company's flagship franchise, pledges to continue rebuilding all aspects of the game.

When Final Fantasy XIV Online launched on the PC last year, it did so to heaping critical scorn, so much so that within months Square Enix ousted the game's management team and delayed the planned PlayStation 3 version. At the time, the publisher publicly apologized for the state of the game, but it still hasn't managed to put the fiasco behind it.

According to an Andriasang translation of a Sponichi report, Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada provided an update on the game at a Tokyo press conference today. Wada reportedly discussed ongoing problems with the game, acknowledging, "The Final Fantasy brand has been greatly damaged." He went on to say that Square Enix is continuing to work on Final Fantasy XIV, "which basically amounts to fully redoing the game."

Last December, when Square Enix implemented the management changes and delayed the PS3 edition, it said Final Fantasy XIV game would not hit Sony's platform until the company was "confident that the game has reached the level of enjoyability and service befitting the Final Fantasy name." The game has not yet been released for the PS3 and has no current release window.