Carissa

A week after a report revealed a site called Spy.pet that claimed to have scraped billions of public messages posted to Discord and was offering them for sale, Discord has banned multiple accounts connected to the site, which has now gone offline.

Discord said when Spy.pet was first reported that it was “investigating the matter,” adding that “if we determine that violations of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines have occurred, we will take appropriate steps to enforce our policies.” And so it has: A new 404 Media report says Spy.pet was at one point scraping as many as 14,000 Discord servers, but that number had trailed down to 0 by April 25. The site itself is now offline.

“Our Safety team has been diligently investigating this activity, and we identified certain…

Daedalic’s catastrophic Lord of the Rings: Gollum saga may finally be grinding to a conclusion. The patch notes for a beefy “major update” that dropped last week conclude with a note that, to my reading, pretty strongly suggests that the studio is putting a bow on it and calling it done.

Gollum was on unsure footing almost from the start, as gamers questioned (rightly, I would say) why anyone would want to assume the role of Tolkien’s tragic, clammy villain in the first place. A planned 2021 release gave way to 2022 and then 2023, pointing to some serious problems in development, and while I held out hope that the game would surprise us all as a sleeper hit (or even just with basic competence), it was not to be. It bombed badly: We scored it a relatively high 64% in our review, sa…