Illian Slade Villena, also known as RogueStar, is a fraud who has used GamerGate to scam thousands of dollars out of people who wanted nothing more than to support an independent game developer that wasn’t a a crook. Unfortunately, Rogue has always been a crook. I overlooked this myself, due to being friends with him. I even wrote about him here on this site in a positive way, several times. I’m here to tell you that like those backers, I made a grave mistake. The guy is a fraud and always has been. Even if he puts out FleetCOMM, the “game” he used to steal thousands of dollars from unsuspecting customers, it will be too little and much too late.

Pasted image at 2016_02_06 03_37 PM
From FleetCOMM’s Kickstarter page

He recently missed another deadline (January 15th) and instead of finishing his game, he spends his days trolling people on Twitter. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that endeavor, but when you owe people a game that they already paid money for, you would think that takes precedent. Then again, this guy is a conman who has run multiple crowdfunding ventures over the years for this same game. How can it possibly take this long to make a shitty Asteroids clone? Perhaps he never had any intention of finishing it in the first place, I’m not sure.

This is an article by William Usher from 4 years ago

After just barely meeting their goal on Kickstarter, Mercenary Games’ FleetCOMM: Operation Vigrior still didn’t quite get the exposure it needed to make the headway the developers wanted. Mercenary Games has now taken to IndieGoGo to raise funds to finish the game, market it and get it out to the public…

It’s a difficult thing for me to grasp, but then again I’ve never really been much of a space-simulator strategist, so I’m guessing I’m just the wrong target audience.

(His current Kickstarter is crowdfund #3 by my count, all for a game that should have been done in 6 months, tops. Rogue also got alpha-funding on Desura, so that’s 4 different funding ops, total.)

No, you were right. It always looked like shit. I knew it looked like trash when I funded it to the tune of $2. I still remember Slade bitching at me over only throwing that measly amount on it. Well, it looked like a bad game, Rogue, what can I say? I didn’t realize you would scam all your backers, though. I even wrote about it positively here on this site. That was a mistake, and I’m announcing that I’m pulling all articles where I mentioned this game in any positive way. I don’t want to contribute to your fraudulent ways any longer. Not only were you an embarrassment to our cause when you gave Zoe Quinn talking points by musing about driving her to suicide in a public IRC channel, but you’re also a shyster. (He also talked about using “black hat” tactics against Quinn. He said all this in public, like an imbecile.)

Also, never forget that Villena was shilled by the likes of Polygon back in the day. I’m not sure why he has such a problem with them now. Perhaps they refused to play along with his fraud this time around?

2016-02-06_17-16-02
http://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012/4/30/2989891/former-zynga-engineer-kickstarts-sci-fi-military-game

If the game comes out, that’s great. At this point, I highly doubt it ever will. The clown is too busy talking shit on Twitter to ever get any game developing done. He failed his latest deadline with flying colors, and I don’t expect the future to bring returns that are any better. If you want to talk about GamerGate being about ethics, then this would be a good place to start raising hell. One of our own scammed gamers for $34,000+ dollars (at least) and is continuing the con as we speak. People within our ranks should call out behavior like this at every turn, even if it’s coming from a GG supporter.

 

PS: Here’s a screen proving I backed Rogue’s failed PS4 Kickstarter. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that it was the worst decision I’ve made during my time associated with GamerGate. 2016-02-06_17-36-37

Keep this in mind as well: During all this, Rogue tried to launch ANOTHER Kickstarter for ANOTHER game, despite having never finished FleetCOMM. People, this is the diagram of a scam artist, in case you hadn’t realized that yet…

2016-02-06_17-52-37
https://www.reddit.com/r/kickstarter/comments/211t7k/
2016-02-06_17-52-49
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/roguestargames/rogue-piratesvsprivateers-featuring-thealgorithm