Stupid Evil Bastard: The folks at GamePal aren’t happy with me.

The folks at GamePal aren’t happy with me.

Posted by Les on Thursday, August 16, 2007 at 12:03 AM. Read 1650 times. Tags: email, gamepal, rants

I was just about to shut down my PC for the night and go to bed when I decided to double check my email and found the following missive in my in-box:

From: Eric Smith
Subject: Remove Post

Hello,

This is regarding the link below

http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/gamepal_offers_mmorpg_character_rentals/

I would like to ask if you could remove this post from your website. Please let us know if this is okay, thank you.

Best regards,

Eric Smith

I wrote that entry back in June of 2005 and every now and then someone will come along and leave a comment on it. Sometimes it’s a positive comment, but often it’s a negative one as there appear to be a fair number of unhappy GamePal customers out there. The entry itself is rather neutral other than to say I don’t really understand why anyone would pay someone else to level their character up for them so I can only assume Mr. Smith isn’t happy with the negative reviews his company has garnered. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard from the GamePal folks, about a year ago they sent me an email asking for a particular comment to be removed because the person who posted it went so far as to include personal phone numbers of GamePal employees that he had managed to track down. I agreed that was over the line and I removed it, but I’m not at all convinced there’s much of anything actionable in the current thread. So here’s the reply I sent back:

On what basis are you making your request? I just reviewed the entry in question and I can’t see anything actionable in it. No trade secrets have been revealed or copyrighted material posted. It’s just a bunch of people expressing their views on your service. You’re not trying to suppress the fact that some folks are less than happy with your company, are you?

Sincerely,

Les Jenkins

If they were unhappy with my old entry, they’ll probably be even more unhappy with this one, but I’m not inclined to censor folks who are expressing their honest opinions about a company just because the company doesn’t like it.

Permalink · 7 Comments · · · · · · · · · ·

Comments:

Page 1 of 1 pages

K. Engels

Posted on 08/16/2007 at 01:02 AM

Hello Mr. Evil Bastard,

This is regarding the link below

http://stupidevilbastard.com

I would like to ask you to please change the color of your website. The color blue offends me deeply. I’m thinking that baby poop green would be much more ascetically pleasing. If you do not comply with my request I will cry, and it will be all your fault.

Best regards,

Nutty Reader Person

Guido

Posted on 08/16/2007 at 02:36 AM

Poor GamePal. There they were, quietly and happily screwing people who trusted them with their less-than-completely-legal requests, and along comes a stupid evil bastard and destroys their filthy business. What a sad story.

Not.

Paul

Posted on 08/16/2007 at 04:39 AM

I would like to ask if you could remove this post from your website. Please let us know if this is okay, thank you.

I would have a standard reply post for people like this. Something plain and simple that references a balance of feelings and information so that the message is clearly understood.

“ BLOW ME “

Les

Posted on 08/16/2007 at 07:20 AM

In all fairness I should point out that I have nothing for or against GamePal myself, but I’m not comfortable with being asked to remove a post because some folks complained about the company. If I were considering their services I’d want to know if people were unhappy and, more importantly, I’d want to know how GamePal handled those complaints.

I received a follow up email this morning from Mr. Smith which makes it clear that he’s just trying to protect his company’s reputation and he’s not implying legal action of any kind. He has a point that not all claims made against a company are necessarily legitimate as some could be from people working for a rival company (and there are others out there offering similar services) and some come from disgruntled ex-employees. Still with no easy way to know for sure which is which I’m more comfortable with letting folks have their say on the issue. He’s perfectly free to respond in the comments himself if he should so choose and I’ve invited him to do so.

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Webs

Posted on 08/16/2007 at 09:09 AM

And we will likely never see him since it sounds as though his company never took the time to deal with customers in the first place.

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Bryan

Posted on 10/04/2007 at 11:56 PM

Eric Smith is a greedy bastard. I am an ex-employee. He orders us to keep people’s money even when we haven’t delivered the service. I was against this idea but I had to keep my job at least until I found a new one.

He is an inconsiderate assh0le. He never cared, not even a bit, for the company’s customers. All he ever cared about was getting their money. And even with all that money he was stealing, he didn’t even give fair salaries to his employees.

Brad

Posted on 11/28/2007 at 06:19 AM