Discussion Kobatochan's Malicious Attack on Meteor Strike Media

From what I understand...

On Sept 14th, 2019, someone made a forum post slandering the cover art and title translation for World's Greatest Militia licensed by Meteor-Strike Media.
On the same day, Kobato wrote on his server:

"I saw 100WS now meteor strike talked about the new novel they got.
A novel that's not great as i've already read and dropped
I dunno why they make a new cover page that looks ugly as fuck
And they already managed to translate the name wrong
And the name of novel should be History's Strongest Warlord (like History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi)
군벌 is warlord and they make it Militia (which is not the same thing at all)
And their cover looks like Big Daddy from Bioshock but in a fucking space
While the original cover is (probably) a F-18 flying over sea"

Given the original post and what Kobato said, it looks like speaker here are the same.
Hence, Meteor-strike media decided to make this announcement based on

"I want to make it clear that we are not making this post because of a "bad review". Anyone can say whatever they want about our novels. We are making this post because someone (kobato) went out of their way to directly contact our contracted author, spreading lies about our company. If this continues, we will have to deal with each and every one of our Korean partners being spammed/harassed by an internet troll who has nothing better to do than try and ruin our reputation."

 

I don't know man, this isn't your first conflict with each other and if i am not wrong you guys also did some bad things and then said we are innocent. I can't really remember the issue as it has been a few months and I was following it via your discord channel and NUF. I am not saying they didn't do it but I am not saying they did as well.

 

One other thing I forgot to mention before posting this. The commenter that we believe to be Kobato says “Like translating a game illegally and making money off it to buy licenses.” We have never once translated a game, so I was initially pretty confused by this comment. However, one of our translators who goes by Hacob/Neria DID translations for a Korean video game. He did this before joining our company, but he has told me that the only people who knew about this are: him, Kobato, and a few members of Meteor Strike Media. I find it very odd that a random commenter would happen to know something like this, and would connect it to MSM. Hacob was a member of Kobato’s group before he left, so Kobato seems to assume we made money off of game translations.

This is why I don't think it's a random third party trying to rile us up. The Korean poster knows way too much, and their post is basically a copy of Kobato's own post at nearly the same time in his own server.

 

Reports wujigege for indirect offense on France and the Motherland.

 

Hmmm... I'm not a lawyer, but this kind of legal action is just wasting your time and money...

 

Out of curiosity, I decided to look further into the topic at hand and checked the timeline of events.


Today at 12:31AM Pacific Time Zone, Kobato made this statement in his discord server.


Converting that to Korea time, it's 4:31PM September 14th.


Checking the source URL, I saw that the post was made on 6:01PM Korea Time [1 hour 30 mins after Kobato made the statement on his discord server]

The topics of the post, if the translation is accurate, were very similar to what Kobato said on discord:


[Discord] I saw 100WS now meteor strike talked about the new novel they got.
[Forum] I... found the once renowned meteor-strike (originally an illegal translation group called 100 White Salt)

[Discord] A novel that's not great as i've already read and dropped
[Forum] Is this really the novel I read? (I did drop it midway)

[Discord] I dunno why they make a new cover page that looks ugly as fuck
[Forum] the cover art they made looks really weird

[Discord] The name of novel should be History's Strongest Warlord
[Forum] Starting off with the title, it should accurately be ‘History’s Strongest Warlord.’

[Discord] And their cover looks like Big Daddy from Bioshock but in a fucking space
[Forum] If so, why is it like some kind of comic horror + space bioshock? ROLF


I am personally not certain if Kobato was the one who made the forum post in Korean, but it certainly doesn't look good on his end.
Ultimately, this is my rundown on how things happened.

 

Gonna need to get both sides of this

 

https://forum.novelupdates.com/threads/kobatos-defense.92833/

 

My first thought to the latest shenanigans...

Was there a need to drag the community into this?

But hey more exposure to you guys, I'm part of the background crowd that thinks.


------------

 

idk, I'm having trouble figuring out what those numbers behind the username are, and also it's just a copypasta. I would like to see a screenshot, since I can't exactly believe someone just because they SAY that was what was said. Those numbers at the end to me look similar to user ID's, so why are there 3 Kobato's with 3 different ID's? Or are those numbers something else? They're clearly not time related, as there are 6 comments with 3 different numbers, what the heck does it mean lol?

 

There's a link at the top of the doc, though you'd have to translate the comments yourself, as they are in Korean.

 

Yeah I'm reading them now. I know you have that whole red text disclaimer, but you realize that listing the comments down as being from a User called Kobato is disingenuous right? Whether there's a disclaimer or not, people are automatically going to perceive it as being Kobato, instead of coming up with their own logical conclusions. (Which you can see in this thread, there was already someone in here saying that it was a person using the exact same username)

Also, what do those numbers mean?? 162.243 etc

 

The numbers should be a user ID.

 

So to understand the claim fully, you are saying that Kobato has, or created 3 different user accounts and used all of them to defame you in the comment thread of the author of the novel you just picked up, correct? Out of curiosity though, since no one has asked yet, are any of their claims there wrong? Did you translate the title incorrectly? Do you rewrite parts of novels? etc

 

1. The title is not incorrect. This is all a complete misunderstanding of the word entirely. The word 군벌 doesn't refer to a specific person, so despite what a quick translation may indicate, it doesn't refer to a Warlord. It ultimately refers to a military force. Contextually, warlord COULD be used, but as I said, that would also be incorrect because that word has been made obsolete in modern parlance unless you're referring to something akin to a warlord, which isn't the case of this story. Just read the Korean definition instead of trying to use the Korean reference.

군벌 (軍閥) [군벌]

[명사]
1. 군인의 파벌.
2. 군부를 중심으로 한 정치 세력.
3. <역사> 중국에서, 독군(督軍)이 사병(私兵)을 조직하여 지방에 수립하던 지배 기구. 특히 청나라 말기

2. The novels are rewritten to an extent, to ensure the westernization/localization of anything which does not transfer over well for English readers from the original text. We work directly with the authors/publishers of the novel when doing so, so it's not as if we're simply changing whatever we want willy-nilly. Our Korean partners are happy with our rewriting services, and it's one of the reasons they chose to contract with us in the first place.

3. "It seems like they can’t get authors who are backed up by the management team." This is false. We work both with independent Korean authors and Korean publishers. We're not exploiting Korean authors and scamming them as these comments would suggest.

 

For me your evidence lose -77% credibility at the moment you replaced ㅇㅇ with kobato 's name and why is that source thread looks so dead ? Only 2 new comments after 15 hr?

 

You insist that anyone who would read it would concur that the three anonymous users are KCDS, and that all three are defamatory. However, 68.183 seems to just be someone who took 83.77's post too seriously in its statement of illegality, as KCDS would likely have known he was talking about NovelUpdates and not Reddit. 162.243 sounds more to be someone who had heard of what had gone on between MeteorStrike and KCDS in passing and had seen your side very unfavourably, not someone directly involved in said occurrence. Lastly, as for 83.77, the one that seems to have either been KCDS or copied KCDS' Discord post, the only thing that seems even possibly defamatory is that 100 White Salts was illegal. While negative, few of the other statements seem provably false, so would not be defamatory. After reading your analysis of the posts, I am disinclined to believe the assertion that KCDS defamed MeteorStrike, and disinclined to support MeteorStrike, as your handling of this issue seems quite unprofessional. Attempting to build and protect a reputation is a laudable endeavour, but the manner in which you handled this appears, to me at least, to be dragging your own name through the mud. If you wish to have a good reputation, then don't ruin your face by handling this so poorly. Also, as Orororos had said, replacing ○○ with Kobato's name does ruin your credibility.

 

Reading the disclaimer, it says that:

"*Disclaimer: User names are hidden and displayed as Anonymous, but given the context of the comment, it’s fairly easy to deduce who the speaker is. Three separate accounts were used here. While it’s difficult to determine if all three were being used by Kobato, we can safely assume at least 1 was."

While it was bold for Meteor Strike to say that Kobato was one of the three users who defamed them, they do have a reason to believe why [based on my previous post]

It seems far too coincidental for it to be a case that Kobato was not involved in this matter even though he can fluently speak Korean and translate. However, these are just circumstantial evidences, not a direct evidence.

Ultimately, I think Meteor Strike is having an issue with the matter because one of their author for the novel brought these comments to their attention.

Such as scamming authors with no management team, mistranslation of the novel title, and rewriting? process.

Whether it be circumstantial evidence or not, Kobato did incite the entire drama and I can only be inclined to Meteor Strike's side given Kobato's past incident with Green Skin other translators.

 

Brushing aside the mountain of coincidences mentioned by MSM in post is disingenuous in of itself. 2 comments above yours there is a post proving some statements false. To slyly pretend as if comments such as that arent there is making me less inclined to trust your objectivity.

Let us be fair. It is very strange for everyone to believe that 2 separate individuals who are all fluent in Korean all know so much about this translation group, and that they happened to appear in the same exact thread. A thread which was barely viewed by anyone on the KR forums. Comments like "The responses doesn’t look favorable. Are you okay with that?" are very aggressively inflammatory. It makes me think that the user was looking for negative response from author on purpose. I remember hearing of old drama caused by kobato, and while may not be relevant here, it makes me more likely to believe these are things he would take the effort of doing.

I am on MSM side for now, because Kobato has lied to all of NU before (remember when he post incomplete chat logs to trick us?)

 

I feel that the large size and bright color of disclaimer made it very visible. They were clear on what the naming meant, and to not understand that shows a lack of comprehension in your reading. I remember time back when kobato posted edited chat logs and most people I see attacking MSM here did not complain. Why the double standard of judging? (not that I am blaming you for this part, but I see people from post long time back here too.)