f13.net

http://www.alganon.com/forums/index.php?/topic/4607-quest-online-announces-leadership-change/page__p__39830&#entry39830

I love this man. I love him so much I'm not even spoilering this. Full post is in regular text unspoiled.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39720/f13/derek_smart_QOL_bvrbandit.jpg)

:heart:

/boggle


well, good for him tossing out all the WoW assets.


but I will be surprised if he hasn't left by this time next year.  If not earlier.   

Just so so beautiful. The lulz of talking about team effort and best practices management while you shit on former employees in public is of course very special, but I think the very best moment is the "we're throwing out our entire art style and coming up with something different" schtick, roughly at about the plausibility level of saying that you're going to be healing lepers with a magic touch.

(http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/6509/potkettleblack.jpg)

 :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:

There are not enough  :heart: in the internets to express my joy at this post.

Dr. Smart brings to Alganon years of experience at hauling his gargantuan cranium about (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=varaAADgC84).

Please please please let someone over at that forum poke at him a bit.  :popcorn:

You aren't up on your Dr. Smart PhD history. You won't get his best stuff poking fun in his own forums, he'll just *plonk* you (ban you). The real trick is to get him to respond in a third-party forum like this one*, where he can't just silence his attackers. That's where it gets delicious.

* - but not ACTUALLY this one, as any forum he joins will instantly be overwhelmed by Derek Drama

I like how in the spoiler quote, the name was modified...


So, for those of you counting, this thread so far contains a single Beetlejuice.



r u serious?

Well my day is made. Might as well just take a nap now.

Ahh yes, the sweet deliciousness of getting him to play on your turf--I still remember arguing him to at least an "agree to disagree, with respect" position after about 50 posts over 3 days.

He couldn't ban, and I wouldn't--so he had to actually support his positions!

I wonder who would win a forum war:  Derek 5mart or Curt Schi11ing?

Everyone.

You ever see Wargames?

"Strange game. The only way to win is not to play."

Fun to watch, though, from a safe distance.

Can't stop giggling.

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;attach=5174;type=avatar)

How bad must you be at creating games to make your vulture venture capitalists call in D*r*k FUCKING Sm*rt as some sort of improvement?
ETA on Dave Allen popping up and promising the earth on his next, next new mmo that will really revolutionise the world, this time for sure?  :awesome_for_real:

(http://binfuser.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/paul_chopped.jpg)

You're doin it wrong.

This was a battle of two Wanna-be Game Developer Rockstars.

 :headscratch:

Wow... that was some entry.

(http://www.idiologic.com/journal/img/alice2_gallery__270x400.jpg)

If I can play a MMO where I battle Serek Dmart in the art of building a computer game, I would pay money for that.

Damnit, Schild.  I can't stop laughing and I blame you!

I particularly enjoyed his jabs at the "average" gamer being finicky like a "hummingbird on acid".  Nothing more professional than offhand remarks about illegal drug use, too.  But that's because we average gamers have "a very short attention span".  What a fucking prick. 

I thought it was an accurate assessment of a gamer.

True, but even if the guy writing your check is a douche, you don't let him know he's a douche or he might stop writing your checks.

The people who the post was aimed at (the ones actually playing the game) will take it to mean "those other sheeple WoW playing gamers, obviously not us Algalon true believers" most likely.

Hmmmmmm..........I betcha Dr. Smart's interest in Alganon and QOL is based on his desire to develop his oft-mentioned yet vapourous Battlecruiset MMO.  He kind of hints at it at the end of his post.

I looked through the posts over at the Alganon forums after Serek Dmart's. Looks like the fans are very pleased with his approach.

Good post, Derek!

And poking around their website for the first time, they've actually done a pretty decent job at aping the WOW art style. So... great job artists, but you know what, nevermind, not really?

Heh! I wasn't about to try this game. Now I must.

Huh, this announcement was three weeks early.

What's really special, if I read it right: you can keep playing the game while they completely redo the art assets? How's that work? "Hey, look, that night elf just became a vampire?"

I'd play that.

nice ff6 avatar holmes.

No.  Coke machines and usenet posts obviously.

This is the best PR move Alganon could have made. Everyone's talking about the game now!

So they launched in December, went some sort of bizarro free to play a week or so ago and will launch it again in April.  Is that right or have I accidentally made that up?   I had a beta invite for this game that I didn't bother with after seeing who was making it.  Now, based on who is finishing it, I can't imagine buying it.  I might peek at the trial just for a laugh.  From what I've read the free trial is on it's own sever which is very lonely... lonely... lonely....

WTF? Serek Dmart got grey hairs and is all still in the gaming industry? I had blissfully forgotten about him, aside from a few jokes almost as old as "All Your Base", until now.

My interest meter is not moving...

That is a ton of assets and animations that need to be redone. Art and animations touch so many parts of a game, thats rather scary. Just one single combat animation can ruin a combat system, or at the very least invalidate the work done on it to this point. I don't envy that team of artists. Poor guys, the "like wow" I bet, was not even there idea.

That post is like some great national or religious treasure. It's the fucking Shroud of Turin of internet artifacts. If you look close enough you can even see the faint outline of professionalism.

National Treasure: The Search for Narcissism.

So the sequel will be a 30 second short?

A 2-hour dramatic reading of his forum post by an Elcor actually.

He seems to indicate the game UI and web UI specifically, not the assets.

Then he missed the point of most peoples comparisons. But you are right, I assumed more from that, but yes, it reads as if constrained to just the GUI.

The art, animation, and even playstyle you could defend as "inspired" by WoW. The UI was simply not defensible. It was a nearly exact clone.

I'm looking forward to Derek's first post in a forum he doesn't control. That's the next step on the golden path towards total lulzlightenment.

I also read him as saying that all of the art assets would need to be changed so the game wasn't a WoW clone. It's really not just the UI, if you've seen it.

Unless I read this wrong:


Your night elf is still a night elf. Although I would prefer a vampire. Or a wolfman.

I was picking up on the "throw it all out" phrase.

So it'll be a game with almost-WoW graphics but a really distinctive UI. Awesome.

If there is any doubt where the WoW clone allegation came from please see this blog post from October just after the NDA lifted clearly showing plagiarism.
http://blog.eldergoth.com/2009/10/alganon-nda-lifted-here-are-my-thoughts.html

Now this was fixed when I tried the free trial in January. It was probably fixed before the launch (now described as a soft launch).

In October the game was visually very like WoW. Possibly to the extent of "passing off" (a copyright offence). Passing off is where you make your commercial product look like someone else's with the intent to deceive consumers. For instance a Scottish man called MacDonald was found to be passing off when he opened a hamburger restaurant with the distinctive red and yellow style and similar lettering to the McDonald's hamburger chain called MacDonald's even though it was his name.

In particular there was a non-functioning key ring down by the bags that mimicked the key ring in the WoW UI. Why would they include an element in their UI that didn't work that was identical to a WoW UI feature unless the intention was to deceive consumers? What was that keyring doing there? - it certainly wasn't being storage space for keys.

As I said though this degree of similarity has already been removed from the game. It still looks pretty generic WoW/Champions/Runes of Magic but it doesn't have the degree of cosmetic similarity that it did when Eldergoth reviewed it.

In fact they've already done the cosmetic tidying up that Mr Smart is taking credit in advance for.

All-in-all it's wonderful games industry soap opera without being a game that is actually worth playing. One of the few neat features - the skill queue they ripped from Eve - can be bypassed by buying training time in the shop. Which kills the beauty of that feature. I honestly don't think Alganon can be rescued.

Well, at least the familiar UI made it easy to play for the half hour before I was distracted by an exciting mark on the wall above the door frame which turned out to actually be a shadow.

You're lucky it wasn't a spider.

It's so ... strange, thinking about this. Like, I don't need to know anything about this game other than

1. It's called Alganon

2. Voldemort is making it

and I already have this absolutely crystal-clear, PERFECT understanding of the game in my head. Like, I already know everything about it. I can touch the future, see a thousand quantum outcomes. I can know what it would be to play the game on release. I see myself, plodding through five hours worth of derivative, milquetoast content. The bugs, I see them too. I fell through the world, can't get a GM. It crashed to desktop. Now I am growing bored. I am .. yes, I'm uninstalling. Now I'm bitching about it in F13 and drawing a comic about he who must not be named. He throws a coke machine on my head. I have lived all these lives, and more. It's .. it's beautiful.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b5/Paulatreides.JPG/170px-Paulatreides.JPG)

Precient game review!

I played it in beta. Yeah, it's not just a WoW-lookalike. It might as well have been called "World of Warcraft's Mentally Retarded Red-Head Step Cousin that We Locked in a Mental Hospital and Don't Talk About."

I always wondered how fucking bad a game would have to be to call in a complete egomaniacal sociopathic assbag to fix it.

"This game is essentially what WoW would be if Blizzard were a company that was mismanaged to a malevolent degree by a revolving door of the questionably sane, who were trying to copy it whole-cloth as a much more successful game, but then had to spend the latter half of the design implementation timeframe covering up their earlier plagiarism with even less inspired genericism. Then, when the end product ends up being a piece of shit without even so much as a breath of compelling gameplay that rises out of the mire of second-rate, derivative MMO hackwork, they push it out anyway, preferring to let it die as a morbid, mewling accident on the delivery room floor rather than give it the decency of a quiet, dignified stillbirth."

*cokemachine'd*

*applause*

Truly, I didn't know jack about this game before, and now I know that it's a WoW ripoff with Serek Dmart somewhere posting about it on message boards. I think Blizzzard's subscription base is safe.

 :awesome_for_real:

I love shitty MMO's.  Even this missed my radar.  The name that must not be spoken makes it soooo much better!

If there is PvP and a free trial, I will give it a try.  :awesome_for_real:

It's going to be free to play apparently and while PvP may not necessarily be in, we know that there will certainly be PvD.

Say PvPhD, rather. Nice ring to it.

Wait, how does impact on the release of the Battlecruiser MMO? Does this mean it will launch before or after Jumpgate Evolution?

 :grin:

It'll be the first expansion. ELVES...IIIIIN...SPAAAAAAACE!

Alganon is Battlecruiser MMO. The artists just need to get done with reworking these assets.

You're going to make us wait, aren't you.

Exactly!

 :ye_gods:

Awwwww come on man, they weren't all in a row...

I feel like I'm missing some context for the last couple posts.

The first post by me originally was about how great it would be to have some game people from the "rock star" days of the late 90's to show up here along with a short list of examples. I had also written Voldesmart's full name three times, two of which were consecutive. I mean it's not like he would search for instances of his name being mentioned three times in a row, right? Right?

Oh I see, the edit was from Schild. It all makes sense now.

Are you saying Schild edited out the V word to save the F13 forums from an unspeakable doom?

That's very... meta...

We all know the old wives' tale. It is widely known that you need only speak his name thrice and spin about three times widdershins, but in truth that is most unlikely to work. Knowledge of the sinister one is widely disseminated these days, and fools attempt to bring him forth quite often, foolishly attempting to utilize His power for their own ends. He only possesses six hundred and sixty-six mouths and roughly three thousand forkéd tongues to deliver the Speech that Loosens Bowels and must prioritize His attentions. As was written in pages flayed from human skin in the Necronomicon, one need but speak the full invocation thrice and he will appear. It is as follows.

Fhtagn <Name the Beast that must not be spoken>!

Ph'd glui mglw'nafh ta'ko <Name the Beast that must not be spoken> B'yl huf'maln fhtagn!

iä! iä!

(Repeat twice more. But you should really reconsider.)

Well, if by "V word" you mean the words 'edit' and 'edit', then yes.


<Don't make Schild angrier>

There's an amazing "V-Card" joke I can make here concerning Derek, tying in with that list from the funny pictures thread.  I'm just to drunk to think of it.

I still run Serek Dmart's Desktop Commander.

Sry guys, I am late.

Fueled by the souls of the damned!

Heh

Reading through THAT GUY's replies to the Gamasutra article (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27688/Quest_Online_Fires_President_Hires_Derek_Smart.php) linked in the Alganon thread, there was this:


He's also kept up the "I'm not going to talk about how bad David Allen is, but here's how bad David Allen is" routine.

It's picking up, a guy from other side of the fence showed up in that thread now...

Even for Derek, badtalking former employees in a public forum like that is remarkably stupid. He actually warned other dev houses not to hire them in public, destroying their careers! He implied they were criminals, invoking the FBI! That's all legally actionable!

Unlike Derek's usual parade of "I'm gonna sue you for bringing up my alleged soda machine beatdown" bogus threats this is for real, and the size of that liability is very possibly sufficient to sink their business.

I work in the real world, and when I fire somebody and subsequently am contacted as a reference, I simply don't take the call. I never provide a bad reference for precisely this reason-- they can and probably will sue your ass.

It's downright astonishing that anyone would be so naive as to sit Derek in a position where he could do so much damage. I would love to follow that thought process.

That's a good point. As far as I know, over here former employers are legally prohibited from giving bad references, but they can simply refuse to give a reference for someone, which carries as much weight.

How can people really say something like what I bolded while keep a straight face and NOT realize the irony?

<Insert picture of owl here.>

I thought that was odd too. "I am not at liberty to say anymore, here is more about it"


EDIT: Holy shit, is this guy out to personally destroy peoples careers? Quoting, and linking a linkedin recommendation like that and the publicly disputing it? On a highly visible GAMING and DEVLOPMENT site?

Huge fucking shit bag. That has got to be one of the most unprofessional moves I have ever seen. Especially considering (opinion not withstanding) they created something more complicated than he ever has. Even if you think it failed as a game, the man hours, talent, and work that went into the tech behind it puts his battlecruiser, and subsequent titles, to shame. The game, for the most part failed due to public opinion, not because it wasn't real. "this is the sort of thing we have to deal with : (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27688/Quest_Online_Fires_President_Hires_Derek_Smart.php#comment46188) " <--- What? It is not your job to dispute what he said on a personal site or, for all intents, resume, in public. Your involvement ended when you let them go. Dick.

You know what is the only thing that could make this drama even better than it's already high, high level?  Lawsuits, c'mon guys don't fail me now!

At this point the only possible scenario I can see in which Allen and co. won't sue is if (as Derek says) they embezzled from the company coffers, the forensic trail is solid and sure to hold up in court, and both sides agree to a deal. Otherwise, they're going to rake the company over the coals for Derek's inability to act like an adult by putting on a smile and "wishing them the best of luck in their future endeavors".

Oh, I am sure he will provide all the rope required himself, again.

Will? I'd assume he already has, in ample amounts.

I'm awaiting the fallout myself.:popcorn:

I'm assuming that when DS calls himself a "Magnet for controversy" he means "Drooling shitbag".

I am sure he is just so put on.

Mother of god, he posted again, with even more words. (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27688/Quest_Online_Fires_President_Hires_Derek_Smart.php#comment46259)

Holy shit. (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27688/Quest_Online_Fires_President_Hires_Derek_Smart.php#comment46259)

He's funny. He manages to post things like this:


and then he posts stuff like this:


Some stats. 6 pages when pasted directly into word. 3127 words.

"haven't got time" and "so much work to do" indeed.

:popcorn:

I read the first post, but screw that, its way too fucking long to consider this time.

Serek Dmart: he can see right through his eyelids. Blindfolded. In the dark.

It's totally worth the effort. Trust me.

Damnit. I was going to quote that, but there's so much more hilarity in that paragraph:


He does go into very specific details on what they did, so either he's ranting, or what he's saying is true. I don't know if the way he went about airing this dirty laundry is going to be without repercussions, even if it is true.

Edit:
He's experienced like he's a PhD?</rimshot>

Its still, IMO, not a classy thing to do, but completely in keeping with anything I have ever seen him do/post. He clearly cares about the drama, more than the the game, or development of any kind.

I feel sorry for those that have to work for him. Knowing, everyone but him will always be the fall guy. I can't imagine the atmosphere this creates in the office.

You really, really have to wonder if Mr. Smartypants was simply brought on to the team in the capacity as professional troll.

The stupid game was completely off everyones radar until this messy wet explosion and so for that reason alone his CEO-ship is a massive success.

That long post was worth it. He pretty much turns his company into a reality tv show. Complete with convoluted dumbass obvious drama, betrayal, and petty revenge.

Because of a linked in recommendation, that talked nothing about the incident, or anything internal other than "This guy is great to work for and is a task master".

:awesome_for_real:

on a more serious note if even half of what he says in that long post is true... wow, just wow.

To be honest I'm starting to honestly think that Mr Agent99 was brought in as a marketing ploy. Its brilliant. were all chattering about a game I'd never heard of till last week.

The problem is that it seems to have been like bringing dynamite to light a candle.  :awesome_for_real:

Only true if the chatter turns into more money.  I am guessing this goes the opposite direction.

If they're crooks and team derek can prove it in court, he'll probably get away with those crazy posts. If they can't build a court case, David Allen and crew is going to put quest online out of business. Easiest case ever, he literally told other studios not to hire them. The only way I could see it being an easier case is if he accused them of diddling then roasting and eating white babies in a full-page advertisement in the new york times.

If the claims are true and you have the proof you get your litigation going.  You also shut up about it outside those who absolutely need to know.  What you should not do is go ranting and raving in very public places.  Doing that can only damage your case.  Nothing good for the company can come from what he is doing.  There is no upside, no benefit.

Its also a dick move.

Umm, I don't think anyone disputes that he's acting childishly. He's a world-class crazy person, widely known for his pathological behavior since the early 90s. He's a true internet legend.

Why is this week's wrinkle so special? Well, it's the first time he was placed in a position to harm anyone other than himself. This is truly a historic moment, an actual evolution in the flame war to end all flame wars, something to make those of us that have followed him for twenty years look up and go "hey, that's new". Thus the title of this thread.

Not only the fact that he posted it, but the fact that he posted that on Gamasutra brings it to a whole new level.

I don't really care what this lot say to each other from any standpoint other than amusement.  It's just kind of funny to watch them bicker from the comfort of my own comfy chair.  I can't seem to care if it's not classy or unethical or whatever.  They all seem like nutters to me.  Who do I root for?

The lawyers.

The only good guys are the nameless faceless employees furtively reading the embarrassing laundry their boss is airing from the depths of their cubes while posting their CVs to monster.com with their fingers primed to alt-tab back to maya if anyone happens to walk by their cube.

I feel bad for those dudes. Everybody else is scum.

At this point I don't think anyone's alt tabbing back unless the good doctor walks around. I'm pretty sure the team leads are looking, too.

Smart uses forum posts like WMD's and he's crossing the Fulda Gap in 1985.  I can't imagine enjoying a workplace he's located at.

Though I think if he made a MMOG where the players have to complete in building a MMOG it might just work.

well I've read all of the Gamasutra feedback, almost.

It brings back uncomfortable memories of my first software job in a small company that was partially paid-for with government grants and partially by a university, and was run by profs.  Nothing "illega"l happened, but certainly several lies to get more money by the management.  They secured their salaries and what was left was stuff for the staff and expenses like hardware.  If some of these anecdoates are true than I can see why DS is raging.  They used him well before he came on board and set him up to take on a shell with several legal complications pending.  If true I can sympathesize.  We can argue about the sheer impropriety of revealing this on a public forum, but the collection of insanities he mentions seem plausible to me.  It's just that there are so many, and he's DS that it seems unreal.  But I can see this all happening.

Yes. I sat there eating my lunch, enraptured by his trainwreck epic post. That post was by itself, a billion times more and engrossing than the game.

Come on, Mr. PhD, there has to be some nude photos floating around that you can post, or at least a cybersex chat transcript! I demand to be entertained!

I like the thread title.  All I keep hearing in my head while reading it is "I didn't go to six years of evil computer science graduate school to be called Mr. Smart, thank you very much". 

That's so meta.  They'd be in beta before he is.

It's almost like I want to believe he can't be that stupid.  Almost.

Well, they do give those out to anyone with $15.

(http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/1324/dsen.jpg) (http://img509.imageshack.us/i/dsen.jpg/)

More posts in the gamasutra thread, amazing. Now he's quoting termination notices.

When you going to fix Neocron?

We are kind of busy at the moment. Unfortunately our dream candidate for the "Fix NC" project just took another job.  :why_so_serious:

And just so you know, we had already decided to fire you right off the bat. You just made it happen quicker when you ...The plan all along was to fire you after the April launch. So don't kid yourself. (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27688/Quest_Online_Fires_President_Hires_Derek_Smart.php#comment46350)

This should be made into a television show. D-Smart: CONTROLling your game, fighting the forces of chaotic game scheduling, traitors and scapegoats.  

This drama is filling the hole in my heart I've had since all the Vanguard stuff.  :heart:

I was really hoping Schilling was going to go up to bat for this level of drama, but really, this is going to turn out more entertaining in the long run.

I'm seeing a lot of self-described winners trying to write history.

Maybe Schilling can hire Serek Dmart when he's done over there.

Oh dear, we just got mentioned in the comments.

Hastur
Hastur
Hastur

Superstitions are stupid.

I admire what Derek is trying to do (up until it started going into legally ambiguous areas given what was described) but I view it as a futile effort given what limited knowledge I have about people.

Can we at least give the guy credit that he's able to produce games, get investors to give millions of dollars to people, and still do this despite having what appears to be a negative reputation by gamers? He's like a Renegade Shepard.

Uh, no.

Wouldn't Renegade Conrad be a closer fit?

The thing that kind of amazes me is that even if all of these accusations are true, and the three guys he fired/quit/whatever really are evil embezzlers or real life versions of the Soda Poppers or whatever the latest accusation is, with the way he's managed the entire situation they will still come out of it looking better than him. Masterful, really.

His last post is unbelievable.  We need to get this whole thing transcribed to the wiki somewhere before it gets evaporated.

It's one thing being the guy that digs up shit and tries to fix it, but going public like this, in 3200 word posts, just to "win an internet argument" where you basically try to destroy someone's career? I'd be inclined to call that douchebaggery of epic proportions.

I'm not going to congratulate or respect him for that, no matter what. An asshole that might in some cases get things done, is still an asshole.

Give me a list of links and I will start documenting it.

Original thread, now closed. (http://www.alganon.com/forums/index.php?/topic/4607-quest-online-announces-leadership-change/page__st__80)

Gamasutra article going bad places. (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27688/Quest_Online_Fires_President_Hires_Derek_Smart.php#comment46259)

That's all I know of.

He's added more.

:popcorn:

Other people seem to be able to accomplish those things without being a jet powered retard.

That is a serious OMG post, that last one.

On cell phone. NiX, document the hell out of it. Ill need reading material in a few hours.

Also, would you kindly grab the Firefox extension that grabs screenshots of entire pages and mail those to me.

He's really living up to all his hype!   :awesome_for_real:

Anyone who buys this game because of this hype deserves the azz raping they receive, and I highly doubt this is likely to help investor confidence with selling a game.

PS Anyone who downloads this game after reading this mess, you are part of the problem.

edit to add Fireshots
edited again to fix upload
ok should work now, are really big and best saved and viewed so I don't know if these would help Schild mobile, viewing via my test they blurred zooming but when on PC are fine.
Gamesutra (http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f27/taolurker/FireShot-Gamasutra.jpg)
Qol forums (http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f27/taolurker/FireShot-QuestOnline.jpg)

Oooh, f13 gets mentioned in the comments of the Gama Sutra article.

If I were his community manager he wouldn't even remember what a keyboard looked like by now. He'd have to communicate via crayon and post-it.

Before all of this drama flared up, I didn't even know that Alganon existed.

And there's a thread for it in this very forum, dating back to October, so I must at least have read the name in passing.

And I had no idea David Allen was involved. I thought he'd Peter-Principled out of the gaming industry after ... whatever the hell he tried to do after he got kicked off of Horizons.

All this time, I'd been under the impression that he was just another miserable failure as a MMOG creator, when it turns out that on top of that, he's also been soaking his ongoing parade of suckers investors.

Thank you, internet. Just when I start to doubt your existence, you perform another miracle.

Anyone who buys this game after seeing this level of OMG deserve the azz raping they get giving DS money, and I really can't see any of this inspiring the investors that they will actually profit from this.

Also, anyone who reads this and is going to try this game (or has) you are part of the problem and shouldn't help pad the numbers for any crap the MMO Antichrist is involved with.

This really is epic. Those gamasutra posts are awesome!  :why_so_serious:

These guys could turn it around for Vanguard, HIRE THEM NOW, Smedly. :why_so_serious:

Now, if only QOL hires on McQuaid and Jacobs, maybe Barnett...

EDIT: Slightly more seriously, has anyone looked at all the legal documents that D-Sma is referencing? Or even to determine if they exist?

That would create a cosmic singularity that I fear to behold.

While it sounds like the legal consequences for him and his company may be a problem, as long as what he's saying is true, I pretty much agree with what he's saying and heartily approve of such things being said.  Indeed, I wish it was more common for these sort of things to be said whenever people do these kinds of things.  This is all contingent of course on everything he's saying being entirely true.

 :uhrr:

taolurker your screenshots don't work for me, they're really small.

Yea, they're compressed for whatever reason.

Ok, so, I can't grab the Gamasutra article. Seems too big, Firefox is locking up. If someone else wants to try, by all means. I was using Screengrab 0.62.2.

As for QoL/Alganon:

• PR (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39720/f13/derek%20smart/QoL%20-%20Derek%20Smart%20-%20PR.jpg)
• Thread - Page 1 (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39720/f13/derek%20smart/QoL%20-%20Derek%20Smart%20-%20Page%201.jpg)
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They had to lock a thread because the CEO was being an ass on the forums? Why would anyone believe in this guy? Who in their right mind would hire him?  :uhrr:

Yes.  We all like to be entertained.

At some point the venture capitalists will be asked by a senior to explain why the money invested in this game was wasted. If what Derek says is true then

- they incompetently appointed a guy who hired his mates and embezzled money while making a game that was almost a cut and paste of WoW and still couldn't meet deadlines.
- they failed to adequately supervise the company.
- they replaced the first guy with a guy notorious for flame wars who promptly and predictably spouted his mouth off possibly incurring liability for libel, constructive dismissal and other breaches of employment law. He also refunded money to customers who had previously been satisfied, money that on the face of it this product may be unlikely to earn back any time soon.

Do you not think this is extremely bad news for the games industry, an industry which needs venture capital? And that's in the best case scenario that everything alleged by Derek is completely and provably true.

Even if QOL turn this release around completely and it becomes a compelling MMO growing steadily by word of mouth the damage has still been done. The paymasters have very clearly failed to supervise their investment properly and thrown good money after bad. If they save their careers they will be investing in rivet manufacture and orange grove plantations in the future, not games.

Well, those are some good points.  My initial reaction simply tends to be, if people pull shit, they should get called on it.  I like things being public partly for the entertainment value, and this is quite entertaining, and because I generally prefer for things to be out in the open.

I suppose one can also hope that the lesson learned would be 'supervise your investments' and doubleplus especially, 'hire good management'.  Ok, a little hopeful perhaps, but those would be good lessons to take out of this, and lessons that numerous games in this industry seem to need to learn.

Let's not forget "Don't hire he who must not be named".

If what he's saying is true, then yes, shit did need to happen. However, there's the right way to do it (fire people, give no recommendation), and there's the shub-niggurath way to do it (i.e. tons of public flaming and sharing of dirty laundry). I tend to levitate towards the right way. You tend to be less likely to shoot your own fucking foot off.

How could this be bad news, regarding the need for VC? If I somehow came into a giant pile of money and decided to be an Angel investor for a MMO, I certainly would have avoided David Allen. I'd rather give money to someone I'd never heard of. And that was before DS made these public allegations about embezzlement.

If VC dries up, and games like Alganon don't get made, how is that bad for the industry? It's not like Alganon is going to provide competition for anyone. Or even recoup its investment money, DS or no DS.

I guess the indirect effect would be that all of the developers who work on Alganon don't gain experience, and are therefore less likely to get hired to work on a real game, later on down the road. I don't know if that justifies embezzlement on the part of the game's producers, however.

This should be a shining example of what the fuck not to do and bolster the argument that developers should have PR people to deal with the target public audience.

And I am correct in assuming this is the type of guy to refer to himself in third person when speaking? I get that vibe - even though his posts do indeed use first person pronouns, it feels like he HAD to go back and put them in.

"EXPERIENCED developers don't go out and re-invent the wheel. They license middleware. "

That is fantastic, because I believe all of this games are home brew engines, they sure play like one. It also doesn't parse from his early post that there is no tech, its all middle ware.

"Heck, half the stuff in this "technology" is licensed middleware."

 :uhrr:

How do you spell tool?

It's bad news because venture capital generally does not come from knowledgeable industry people deciding to be angels.

Venture capital is usually owned by people with pension funds or other savings and managed for them by financial organisations. The staff at these financial organisations will make decisions based on the following:

- will this make money?
- if it goes wrong will I look like an idiot?
- do other people doing my job do well investing in this area?

Using those criteria they then pick between, say, an orange grove planatation, a small manufacturer of rivets and a MMO game company. Traditionally venture capital is used for high risk high gain ventures like start-ups.

At some point in the past these guys decided that QOL was a better risk than other possible ventures.

This fiasco makes deciding in favour of the game company less likely next time these guys or other financial professionals who have followed this story make a decision.

If the fiasco deepens (for example QOL is sued for libel and for breaches of employment law and either loses or settles at significant cost while the game fails to make money) it's even more reason to not invest in games.

I liked Derek's first posts a lot - we all love straight talking - but I think he crossed the line when he said things that are very likely to get the company sued. He's backed Allen and co into a corner where they pretty much must take legal action if they ever want to work in the industry again. It's really not helpful to QOL if in addition to having a faltering game they then have to cope with substantial legal costs.

I also think that while this is generating substantial publicity very little of our fascinated interest will convert to revenue for QOL.

Yes, this is one of the lollol moments (there are many) in the Gamasutra posts, because this is Serek Dmart resisted doing so fiercely in the development of Failboat 3000, if I remember right--that using middleware was for sissies and compromisers who lacked his mad skillz.

My god, it's full of... something.

Was one of the fired people either an HR standin or legal counsel? Because I'm a little surprised nobody's sad down with the good doctor and discussed why you don't slag on ex employees, even if you feel they richly deserve it.

If this fiasco causes MMO startups to be thought of as bad risks, because:
- the people begging for the money are just going to steal it, and fail to finish the game to boot
- the (snerk) high-profile "experienced" game dev that you hired to clean up the mess turned out to be a raging (potential) libel machine

Well, then, I don't know that the industry deserves to have more VC thrown at it, if this is going to be the result.

Would you rather that all of the criminal allegations be kept hush-hush, so that future VC prospects will approach without caution? Which is more important, that a crappy MMO gets started and the owner runs off with the bag of money, or that the VC people have some reasonable expectation that they're investing in an honest business, even one that fails?

I guess I don't know much about VC. Again, if I had the money, I'd want to watch out for fraud and embezzlement, whether I invested in a MMO or in an orange grove.

Yeah, he's shitting away any potential they had for defending themselves against any angry employees. Not sure how similar labour disputes like this are treated in the US, but they could walk away with damages based on him making statements without fact that could prevent them from making a living. :uhrr:

Definitely hope someone writes up a cliff's notes version highlighting this entire interaction and saves the whole thread off-site.

I just discovered the Gamasutra stuff.

Oh wow.  :heart:

OH LOOK

I really do want to know if the current employee giving outside access credentials to a terminated employee thing is true though. Because that's shit that just does not happen, because if you get caught no sane person will hire you after that lawsuit.

Being pissy and making mean comments about your prior job? Okay, whatever. Happens. Actively logging into your ex employer's system? Nothing good can come of this! Do not!

my favorite Dsmurt quote

If there were criminal allegations, then surely there'd be paper trails to follow and check up on.

If I were a VC, then I'd ask for a list of people to ask for recommendations, and I'd ask them. If a majority of them isn't giving me a good review, then chances are something is amiss and I should probably look elsewhere. I'd probably also ask them directly if there's anything less than optimal in their past they'd like to share before I find out about it on my own, and if I then found something very serious they hadn't mentioned, there'd be some 'splainin to do.

None of this involves one guy going on a one-man crusade and ruining their reputations, careers and possibly lives. That, no matter how idiotic/illoyal they've been, is uncalled for. It isn't his job to make sure the world knows about them, it's the VC's job to make sure THEY find out before they throw money at people. It's what VCs get paid to do, they look at what the risks might be vs rewards, and if they do a shitty job of evaluating what the risks are, then sucks to be them.

I think that photobucket was compressing them, and was why I tried uploading them twice. The ones stored on my computer are fine, and I assumed it was only viewing through firefox that was compressing them (making them not viewable). I linked them to a remote site (a local restaurant by me), but I do want to take these down at some point, if someone can transfer them to another website.
Gamesutra (http://pierosrestaurant.com/Mailings/FireShot%20-%20%27Gamasutra.jpg)
QoL (http://pierosrestaurant.com/Mailings/FireShot%20-%20Quest%20Online.jpg)

I can't even choose a favorite...but that's in my top 5.

On the VC question, I don't think this is bad for the industry -- I think it's bad for the VC's in this particular case.

They clearly funded something they didn't understand, made some bad decisions about whom to empower with their money, and are now reaping the benefits. Part of being a venture capitalist is actually learning something about what you are about to invest in before you give over the money. While I don't expect a VC to come to F13 for recommendations on where to put their money, anyone here -- or anyone relatively well versed in the gaming industry of the last ten years could have said "These may not be the best choices."

Anyone looking to dump millions into a project in this industry should do the diligence to find this kind of stuff out.

While this mess is full of  :popcorn: for us on the MMO side of things, I'd bet in the VC world the :popcorn: is being passed around by guys going "Can you believe that they funded this?" and questioning the VC's not the people in the MMO company. Other VC's who are looking at this industry shouldn't be put off by the melt down -- sure, they won't fund the people involved, but if they are doing their homework they can not only see the potential profit, but rational people who are worth the investment.

Also, if you are one of those VC types, please call me. I'm certain I can top this or at least fail professionally.  :drill:

All the HR people were consumed by the 17th mouth of the good doctor there.

EDIT: As for the VC people, I can only believe that they are somehow the trust fund down syndrome babies of some deeply inbred incestuous royal family for some flyspeck shithole in Uzbekistan that still believes in the monarchy. There is no other explanation for it. Who else would not only give millions of dollars to DAVID FUCKING ALLEN to build an MMO, then turn around and hire DR. THE EARTH SHALL TREMBLE BEFORE MY MIGHTY VOICE to unfuck the inevitable conclusion of the first investment.

To comment on this because no one else did.  This is not superstition.  He actually does show up damn near any time his name is mentioned.  He's been doing it since the usenet days.  It's more annoying than fun.

How'd you get the whole site pictures? Put them together yourself?

gotta get some lunch to bring back to ma desk to read the latest


my theory is that aside from ego and maybe insanity there is something else promoting DS' scorched earth posting.  The comments about bringing him early, the networking deal, and then his own company paying for people's salaries makes me think that aside from lying to him the cabal tricked him into the QOL deal with more liability than he realized.  The fact he got hoodwinked and responsible for something maybe hurts more than the loss of cash?


Edit:

Yeah that makes more sense, plus the other stuff in that comment. 

Fireshot Firefox addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5648)

I do need someone to move those to something more permanent hosting wise though for them to survive (and photobucket was the issue compressing them).

I think at this point if failure and misrepresentation was going to discourage VCs from investing in MMOs, they'd already be seriously discouraged. And maybe they in fact are. One more case isn't going to swing it one way or the other.

If the road of failure and shame that is the entire history of MMOG's isn't enough to discourage VC's from investing in MMOG's, nothing short of crotch-gnawing badgers hidden in the company P&L statement will keep them from tossing good money before bad.

Why is everyone involved in the game industry either soulless or literally bat fuck insane?

Have you read any gaming forums?

Well I at least sort of considered Video Games to be in the same sort of arena as most media/entertainment, but you don't see this sort of insanity anywhere else. Hollywood is so full of self-absorbed egos there should be an inescapable event horizon surrounding the entire state of California but you just don't see Derek Smarts in the movie industry. It'd be like George Lucas calling a press conference to say that J.J. Abrams is a donkey rapist because of how he directed the Star Trek reboot.

How many others in the gaming industry have you seen that are this bad? About the only other one I can think of offhand is John Romero.

I'd say that if people like David Allen and [redacted] can get put at the head of projects, there is still plenty of venture capitol to go around.

Here (http://imgs.cloudandtree.com/FireShot%20-%20%27Gamasutra.jpg) they are (http://imgs.cloudandtree.com/FireShot%20-%20Quest%20Online.jpg) if anyone wants them, I've got bandwidth to spare. I do tend to periodically fuck up some configuration and render my website inaccessible, but they should be safe there for now.

Uwe Boll.

The other people arguing with that which should not be are probably equally intellectually stunted.

Uwe Boll and Michael Bay are pretty retarded in their own way too, with the exception that they don't stalk themselves online.

And here we are. Caution: Images Obviously Huge.

• PR (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39720/f13/derek%20smart/QoL%20-%20Derek%20Smart%20-%20PR.jpg)
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• Gamasutra Article + Comments (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39720/f13/derek%20smart/Gamasutra_Derek_Smart.jpg)

To be fair, some of us are both.

Except that Romero learned his lesson from the Ion Storm debacle. He's been working on an MMO for years, quietly.

Wait..wait...wait! I didn't see this mentioned yet...

The new CEO of this company, Mr Serek Dmart, is using the forum name BVRBandit? As in, Beaver Bandit?

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/21/romero-remains-head-of-slipgate-ironworks-following-layoffs/


Does a facebook game count as an MMOG? You decide.

schild, I have a better screenshot for Gamasutra Article + Comments  :pedobear:

http://www.mmogcn.net/download/Snap1.jpg

Seriously cracked me the fuck up the first time I read it.

I'm afraid I don't get the allusion.

I sincerely hope it's not some furry sex thing.

Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu don't get out much, do you?

The man is all class.

Let me help: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=beaver%20bandit

I must admit, I didn't notice his username. I just assumed it'd be first letter + full last name, like he usually does. That's a hilarious username.

The thing is that it is hilarious. But is it the screen name you want your CEO or whatever he is using?

I feel like asking this question is missing the entire point about how amazing this whole situation is - it's just a little too on the nose.

The answer, of course is - NO, NO YOU DON'T.

I'm thinking you can change that question into "do you want <he who must not be named> as a CEO, full stop".

Alganon has given me more hours of enjoyment than many other mmos, and that's without ever having downloaded the client!
I look forward to many more enjoyable hours. I look forward to when he's canned and turns his frothing at the VCs.

As entertaining as that might be, I think I might find it even more amusing if he somehow manages to make this all work out for the best, as he would then continue to interact with players on the forums.

Is Alganon the expansion to Forumwarz I keep hearing about?

Oh. I get it. I just think it's even more lolz piled onto the situation. My personal theory is that one of the IT guys was told to make him a forum account and Mr. PhD hasn't caught on to what his forum handle is.

Yeah, it seems a little out of character. It's not the specific kind of idiocy I expect him to display. However, that just makes it so potentially juicy.

Edit:
Less detergent, more spelling.

So I guess insubordination only applies to investors and direct superiors? And to circumvent all that, you are best served to avoid that nasty tag line by being hired in at the top?

Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying this thread as its development... just trying to figure out if this is part of the whole since it seems to me that Dr. BVR is falling in line with that definition or will really soon.

Kids keep taking his cane, otherwise he'd totally be out getting some strange right now.

The fun keeps on going. The latest from the man himself:

"This is not about me, but I could care less. As I said before, I've been libeled, attacked, defamed etc before - going back to my industry beginnings. And the people who do it still haven't learned the valuable lesson all these years : attacking me is a lesson in abject futility and the behavior borders on madness because doing the same thing over and over yet expecting different results is the pure definition of same."

lol "pure definition of same" ?

New interview up with "He who cannot be named"


http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=21889&storypage=1

Before anyone asks, this is a man I'd actively try to AVOID interviewing.

Again, much of that does not line up with previous statements. But, ok.

I may be stating the obvious, buuuut... I don't think anyone attacking him want to get different results. In fact, I am quite sure they are doing exactly what they are hoping to get out of it.

To which, I am quite entertained. More please.

Look, with some of what he's talking about, it's either genuine and as he says it, in which there will be legal action. But if there is going to be legal action, the lawyers would already have long since told him that he has to shut up RIGHT NOW, non-negotiable. Which tends to suggest that no, there will not be legal action, in which case it's pretty clear that at least some of what he's alleging didn't go down in quite that way or that isn't that clear.

Not necessarily; can't really envision good doctor manage to hold back his tongue just because a lawyer tells him so...

What I am most confused about is he implies the tech people he fired are not very good and the tools they created are also not that good but somehow he is going to rerelease a good game in a month or two with their technology?

There will be many threats of smashing things with his gargantuan cranium, and threats of long-winded flamewars, and the technology will not dare do anything other than work.

I was wondering the same thing;  over the last week, the unnameable has been hinting about his own mmo projects in relation to QOL, but can't say anything about it.  But the unnameable being the unnameable just can't keep his mouth shut and miss an opportunity to tell the world how great he his.  This recent interview definitely is  extremely telling as to what his aspirations were and are for the future.  Once of the recent Anon posts at Gamasutra which is likely from a former QOL employee sheds some light on it:


Yes, Alganon is derivative and insipid;  but the tech surely could be used to create something else;  perhaps even the mighty Ur' Quan Masters  brainchild.

The idea of David Allen looking for help and turning to D-Sma is staggering. STAGGERING.

Favourite quote from that article:


and also that D-Sma is in charge of not one, not two but three MMOs is also something special.

Roman Polanski
Woody Allen

...

The Gamasutra thread has devolved into pretty transparent sockpuppets baiting each other.

Yes, wherever Derek posts Bill Huffman and co aren't far behind. So far he hasn't taken the bait, to his (minor) credit.

Oh good lord. I'd forgotten about huffman. It must be time to flame AOLers in effigy.

Please God don't let this thread end. It's so full of LULZ.

Someone needs to break into Richard Garriot's castle and ask him what his thoughts are on the matter.

there is no tort

there is no tort

the cake is a lie

I knew it!

's kinda fun how he keeps referring to himself in third person.

A nice thought, but it only dooms one to death by killer whale.

Okay. I (foolishly) said I was walking away from the Gamasutra posting so I can't post there and still be a man of my word. Sigh. (I never should have said that. Add another mistake to my list of things to learn from.)

But the above post is the most truth I've seen in this discussion (outside my own posts, of course.) One theme you'll notice I harked on in those posts in wanting Derek to declare the budget for Alganon. I didn't start there until April of 2008, and by that time a lot of the money had been spent on prototypes and art assets and even the "Are you serious?" user interface. However, there were tons of design elements (see the list of "David Allen's broken promises" for examples) that were exciting. I knew there was NO WAY to redo art assets and get all those features in.

From the moment I walked in the door, it was "if you want something in the design, you have to take something away because the budget is WAY too small to do even what we've planned already."

Well, I wanted things like: Offline advancement that provided alternate paths. If you don't want to do GAMEPLAYX a million times, you shouldn't have to, you shouldn't have to do it even once. If you don't want to do GAMEPLAYX, let's give you a study that will allow you to just "wait it out" - the same time your guild finished raiding THERAIDIHATE enough times to get their Tier 27 loot, your study will complete and you can craft BoP Tier 27 loot, or do a quest chain to earn it, or get some dailies that will give you tokens for it, etc. etc.  So you never have to run THERAIDIHATE.  

Thus, we wrapped the study system into every single data element in the game - items that require studies to equip, skills and actions that take studies to learn, quests that require studies to get, NPCs that require studies to talk to... EVERYTHING. That's a lot of work, we had to sacrifice: like hiring a server programmer instead of more artists. (There was no UI artist on the team. David Allen himself did "grunt-artist" things like putting text on the maps or file conversions. Not many deceptive embezzlers sit in front of photoshop for several hours putting text on world maps, just so we can afford another mob-mesh or dance emote.)

I wanted things like: Starter guilds based on play style so that the moment I walk in the door I can chat with people who are as excited about exploring the world, or PvP, or leveling, or crafting, as I am, and not end up with:

Me: Hey guys, I found a beautiful waterfall.  
Leeroy: STFU no one cares abt waterfalls.  
OtherGuy: I care.  
ChukNorris: STFU ur only level 5, I have 10 alts better thn u.  
Otherguy: Alts don't matter... etc. etc.

Play Alganon (back when there were others) and go to family chat and talk about that style of play, and everyone there is excited and helpful. (It's part of why we had the rep of a great community, families and MyAlganon social networking mechanics made us the eHarmony of MMOs. We sorted people so potential friends would get together and not have to see the people they hate.)  It worked great, but we worried people would just pick a family and it wouldn't matter -- so we worked families into every single element of the game. Family items, family quests, special dialogs, special art for family stuff, that system is everywhere... but that was expensive. Another feature would have to be cut.

I wanted things like: Build on Guild loot, so if the guild is running FUNRAID19, and you don't have the gear for it, they can loan you the bare-minimum for one run and you can have fun. That cost us. Snip. snip.

I wanted things like: The Dual Role system - where your class (including the insanely simple class names) made it easy to find who you need. If you are losing the fight because you don't regain HP fast enough, you know to call in a healer. Always. You don't know that in other MMOs. You'd assume you'd want a priest or paladin in WoW, but WTF, they are all shadow and retribution! In other games, you can spend hours wondering if you need a "Scythewalker, Flamecaller, Runeweaver, or Shadowscourge"  Uh, which one is the healer? So, we gave them simple names and a primary role -- but one role per character is boring. So we made it so you have 2 roles - the first, "fits the name" role, you get just by leveling (level and the skills/actions/attributes are unlocked) and the second is a choice - not just a "pick one at level 3" but a "choose one skill at a time to make your own role!" choice. To do this AND balance AND balance to fit those studies and families... that is not cheap - chop, chop.

<He who must not be named> is right about some things - here they are:
1) I was inexperienced. I chopped some of the wrong things. I should have chopped Bind on Guild and got a UI programmer to change the UI dramatically. I should have chopped families and most of myAlganon and had them redo most of the art, especially at the starting levels.
2) Alganon failed. We didn't make anywhere near as much as we hoped, and we failed because of mistakes David and I made. I can't play the game any more without recreating the end of Schindler's List... "The Hogsnout mobs... I could have cut them and hired a UI artist. Bind on Guild... that could have been 10 dynamic quests at level 1. I took at least three weekends off in those two years, I could have redone the starter zones...  I went to my best friend's wedding for Christ's sake... that was almost a week I could have used! Why didn't I see how important it was?"

<He who must be named> is 100% wrong about the other things:
1) No one sat around wasting money or living high-on-the-hog. When you include that I got benefits and didn't have to pay self-employment taxes there, I made more as a low level content designer (Writer) at CME than as Director of Design at QOL. Seriously. And that, too, was well below the industry average in the Gamasutra surveys.  

2) We knew from the beginning that a company is not its product, and vice versa. Honda can make a failure of a car, barely make any money from it, but use that money+the factory they built for the first car, to make a better car - so, we built the tools to be expansible to other games. My dream was not to "get rich off of Alganon" -- my dream was to make "just enough to make Alganon + a little bit more" and we could sell that to make just enough to afford to make "Alganon + a little bit more + a little more" and we could sell THAT just enough to afford to make "MMO that _doesn't_ make baby Jesus cry" - and ten years from now, I could make my dream "MMO that beats 'baseball' in the number of fans."  But that game will take a lot more than Alganon's budget to make, and the folks who have enough to make it would never give me the chance to make it, or even to slowly crawl my way up to that level... but QOL did. I just slipped on the first step.

3) The Alganon tech is VERY valuable. Because of the low budget and the knowledge of #2, we made sure the technology could be expanded to other games. Everything is data driven. The UI is as easy to reskin as WoW. The models and animations aren't hard coded into the game - fire up Maya, make a photo-real model Battle mech and they can import it and drop it in the game by tomorrow. Fire up photoshop and the terrain can be made brown and gritty. The particle editor can make lasers as and missiles well as it makes fireballs and arrows. Sounds will take longer to record and save than to swap out. Actions are scipts, and our scripting programmer (Jeff Tench) is genius who threw them together in days, not months or years. It will still be a DIKU MMO, but it could be a Battletech DIKU by summer.... better still, most of those "broken promises" have the infrastructure already in place. The server programmers (Brian Huges, Jon Hoy and Zach Lute are still there) have already implemented much of the basics needed to get them in. Many of them - like the ability to create dynamic quests - are already in there, we just knew that with a budget that only allowed us to peak at 5 designers total (for everything - quests, items, classes, mobs, game balance, crafting, the economy, studies... evertyhing), we couldn't afford to make "content people don't see because they made a different choice" yet. That would have to wait.

That tech is superb. (We made 30+ quests per designer per week. That's "here's the models and the painted terrain - write the quest, make the quest giver, make the mobs, balance them for the level, create the items needed and any rewards, place them in the world, adjust the terrain/world as needed, write all the dialogs, hook it all up and play it once to make sure it works."  -- thirty of those per 60 man hours because of the efficient tool workflow. Those tools HAVE to be worth _something_.)

In fact, with a standard $20 million AAA game budget, I could:
1) buy the Alganon tech for more than it cost to make
2) put $10 million into outsourced artists, and make it look 0% like WoW
3) put $2 million into a data and scripting team for a year

... and with that make a dark, gritty, horror genre game, set in a gritty turn-of-the-century/Industrial revolution-era Europe, with a Bioware-like "choices change the story" dynamic narrative,  entirely skill-based (no classes), multiplayer online game (not nec. an MMO, but many players can join and leave as they wish, with short-term persistence so there is a beginning, middle, end to the story, and you can replay and get an entirely different story hundreds of times)...

4) ... and STILL have $3 million or more for marketing.

... And do it WITHOUT opening the source code (unless you count that our action scripts are C++ instead of Python or Lua or anything like that. I'm always fuzzy as to whether writing a script counts as a code change or a data change, especially when it is compiled C++.)

A great man once said: "Yes, Alganon is derivative and insipid;  but the tech surely could be used to create something else;"  :awesome_for_real:  :heart:  :heart:  :heartbreak:



I want, more than anything, for someone out there to realize how valuable the work we did is, how valuable the assets that QOL owns are, and how talented the entire QOL team is. I want someone to pay the QOL investors - people who gave me the chance to create something as valuable as that technology is - lots and lots of money. I'm on the fence about <He who must not be named> getting paid - I respect that he made his games in the past, and if he's rewarded for the value this team created, that's still a good thing. Additional people being rewarded for the work we did and the risk the investors took is a very good thing, no matter who they are or what they think of us. Happiness is not zero-sum.

The sadness comes when it looks like he is trying to destroy that value, so he can buy it up cheap. It's the business equivalent of bringing a dead roach to the restaurant so you can put it in your leftovers, call the TV news, and then sue them to take over the restaurant. Except with Alganon's budget, and David Allen's reputation, it's like doing that to the ex-con with the hot-dog stand who is trying to put his life back together.


Well, I've learned my lesson about saying "I'm not going to post here any more" so I'll say it like this:  "I'm going to TRY not to post here any more, because I'm afraid it will make the situation worse for everyone who worked hard on making QOL (the company.)"  My silence simply means "I don't know what to say that won't be misread and make things worse."  

Also - I'm usually just a lurker. I rarely post anything, anywhere. Any hints on how to let people know that I don't post anonymously? All anonymous posts piss me off to no end. Does anyone know if Gama records IPs? I'd love to have them check them and see what they can find! I just don't know how to say "that's not me" without him just saying "is, too!" and us getting into a loop until one of us (the less-crazy one) stops and the other says "See, I told you so!"

- Matthew "Hue" Henry

(edit - forgot to sign it! Doh! Who makes a post saying "I don't post anonymously" and then forgets to sign it? /facepalm.)

Uh oh.  :awesome_for_real:

Anyway, from what I had seen of the editor, its nice, looked logical and seemed to run nicely. But I never get to play with such things.  :heartbreak:

A good set of tools is always something to be commended on. 

I'll read the rest of this later, however, let me assure you that there is no winning against the guy.  Not posting more is the best course of action.  Don't feel bad for walking away from that conversation, even if it feels like giving him the last word.

While he digs himself deeper, you came off with a reasonable post.  It's a good place to stop.

As someone who had the unique pleasure of watching 2 projects fail from a leadership role, I can sympathize.

Scope creep is constant (I wrote a bit about it (http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/3982/Legendary-Failures-of-Legend-Part-Two.html)) and there will always be pressures regarding scope creep. It's the role of the leads (and especially the producer) to fight against scope creep. Part of your job as lead designer is saying from the start, no, we can't have an eHarmony-for-guilds until we have a working quest system.

C++ is not a scripting language. (twitch) What kind of sandboxing did you do to keep rogue "scripts" from eating memory or other bad things? That alone makes AlganonTech or whatever it'll be called unsuitable as MMO middleware. There's a lot of people with experience in Lua (both in scripting it and in wrapping it in a sandbox to expose it to other systems) and reinventing the wheel isn't a good idea here.

Reading your post, the impression I get above all is that you were speaking WoW grammar. Everything you describe is in terms of World of Warcraft. If I read a design doc that has the words "...like in World of Warcraft" and isn't intended for an executive (who scans for the "like thing that makes lots of money" keywords) I want to throw it at someone. As long as you speak in WoW grammar you will develop a WoW clone and it will be a poor WoW clone because you dont' have WoW's budget. That's not saying that something has to be different from WoW for the sake of difference, but taking 4 or 5 steps back and looking at a system outside of the WoW continuum might give you some room to look at things with a new perspective, and introduce gameplay that differs from WoW in a good way (and systems are a very cost-effective way to differentiate yourself).

I have to say I have been immensely entertained by this whole affair.  And it's certainly far from over, I hope.

I had a thought, after reading the interview with DS where he claims that David Allen was responsible for bringing DS into the mix.  This may be too clever, but maybe, just maybe, DA was crazy...like a fox.  He saw the end of the line coming, and wanted out, but needed a distraction.  Someone else to take the fall.  Someone that everyone knows is totally insane and whose very presence will shift the blame (or at least, the attention) away from himself.  Let's face it, there isn't anyone else in this crazy industry that could have done that so well, and so predictably.

I know, it's extremely unlikely.  But...isn't it just a little plausible?

In any case there really needs to be a B-grade TV movie made about this.  Syfy, I'm looking at you!

This.

Forget "grammar", all that chatter about differentiating the game from WoW is rendered absurd by simply looking at a screenshot. Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt you guys talked about it very seriously over vanilla lattes and stayed up past Conan sketching pie in the sky design docs, but the fact of the matter is that you don't end up with a game so laughably rubber-stamp identical to WoW to every last superficial cosmetic degree without purposefully trying to clone it, and that's a silly idea that generates silly screenshots.

Also, please believe me when I say the tech quality is a non-issue. Nobody cares. To be blunt, nobody cares about Alganon either. We're just tickled pink by the ongoing antics of Dr. Smart.

Please don't let yourself get pulled deeper into his black hole of internet jibber-jabber. Don't respond to him in any public forum. It's unprofessional. Just move on with your life and focus on continuing to pay your rent.

I sincerely hope the powers that be block him from posting here, as he's sure to attempt to do so now.

Also, a hell of a username there, Hyuu.  :ye_gods:

Heh, that was my exact thought when I saw the poster name as well.

Oh crap. Someone explain why to me, please. I've used it since opening day of Star Wars Galaxies when I wanted my name (Hue Henry) to look "Star-Warsy" (Hyuu Hyenrii). If I've been using something horrible for this long, and no one has told me...

Oh god, I'm even afraid to google it now.

Hyu was one of the more famously idiotic posters in this community. As f13 has aged, there are surely more posters who have no clue who the guy is, but the people dating back to LtM, et. al. know all about him. I'm pretty sure he's just instantly banned whenever one "diaspora" forum closes and a new one opens.

Its already making history! (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Derek_Smart)

Welcome to f13. Enjoy your stay. Here's to hoping Mr. Dmart doesn't show up in tow.


He was not instantly banned here. He earned that, like everyone. Also, the words "just" and "whenever" imply it could happen again. Nay, says the not-broken-person-who-happens-to-own-the-place.

Oh I know. I guess I was speaking in more of a past-present tense or somesuch. Let's put it this way, if someone else started anything resembling a decent online community, he'd be found and banned in short form. That's more due to Huy being Huy than anything else.

I'm not doomcasting, nor harshing your marshmallow or whatever, brocephus.

Besides, that silly line aside, I'm a lot less broken than most.

Is Brocephus the lesser god of Bros?

Your game might suck ass, and the tools may be worthless, but look yourself up on Encyclopedia Dramatica.  You can comfort yourself knowing, hey, at least you're not that guy.  Also, I haven't seen you try to use 'missive,' or misuse the word 'simply.'  So you get points for that.

I was going for a Hank Williams, Jr. reference, but I like yours better.

After working in a hippie grocery retailer for two years, I find it amusing to find new and stupider ways to say "bro." Now that I'm back in the legal arena it's my version of counting prime numbers while I wait for my line number to be called.

Well formed. Well played. A small slash to the face, which I probably deserve (about the game)... followed by a thrust deep into my heart (about the tools).... followed by kind words over the body. The Samurai lives up to his forum avatar.

I tell you, this board here... THIS is how forums are meant to be played. Not a circus of clowns and flames, but a mighty battle between heroic titans.... with the occasional penis joke.




... and you made me post again.... son-of-a... I am so bad at this game.

Is there an easy mode somewhere I can cut my chops on? Like a forum where mentally retarded sex offenders argue over what to do with their spare time... Oh wait... THIS IS THAT FORUM! Zing! (Right? Can I say Zing? Does someone have to say zing for me? When do I start insulting Lum? Now? Or in my next post? If I say that my favorite penis joke here is Curt Shilling, will he go all crazy on me or will he understand that I joke because I'm jealous of their budget and talent over there? Or maybe both? I'll get it figured out eventually... give me some time. You'd think by now someone would make a forum with a tutorial for new players, f**king lazy forum designers.)

we need a new emoticon for this.  "epic"

Curt only reads his own thread, so you're safe on that count.  :oh_i_see:

Dammit, beaten to it by Ingmar.  :x

Dude.  Take a deep breath.  I don't think anyone actually believes the embezzlement story.  Plus, you've already beaten Schilling at forums by posting in two threads, and you so far haven't made an ass of yourself.  Although your post in the other thread was kind of long.  I'm a gamer.  Don't you know about my attention span?

Anyway.  It looks like you could use some space between you and this mess.  You would probably be well served by extricating yourself from this thread.  Not trying to chase you off.  There's plenty of other shit on this forum to talk about, and I'm sure you're welcome.  But we already know the dude is a first class fuck face.  And if we didn't know, we do now.  You don't have to defend yourself to us.  Like you're the only guy to flop an MMO in the past ten years, right?  It's cool, bro.

If it's any consolation, you're now on a list of 3 people who have admitted to flopping an MMOG and at least recognizing why (which is a list of two people, one of the others got it totally wrong).

Look on the bright side, at least we don't have to worry about him causing a zerg swarm due to posting here.

I keep thinking about wormsign.

Wasn't sure if anyone did notice, but the original Gamasutra posts of Dmart are now *gone*... good thing we were diligent in archiving them.

I could almost envision the drama amplifying over this, and the possibility of him eating those words or them being his undoing is making me grin wickedly.

Aww.  Who told the lawyers?

Please, shut the fuck up. No one wants to hear about your super hot game design. I played your game. It sucked. I'd rather play Warhammer again, and I'll never do that. Go back to trolling the Insane Doctor, it's much more entertaining.

Hyuu
Hyu
HYU

*Twitch*

Come on, how could you think it was the same guy? He didn't mention AC Darktide once.

I saw the name and almost fell out of my chair before reading a single word. After reading the post I realized it wasnt him. Besides no mention of AC, there was also no mention of asian women.

As gamers we love public admissions of guilt; if for no other reason than to vindicate our bitching on internet forums. As professionals we realise the futility of holding our breath while waiting for public pillories. Most companies with even a modicum of professionalism wash their linen in-house.

MMO developers are a bit of a special case, though, in that they spare no effort in hoisting their special needs flags. Even the experienced houses seem remarkably reluctant to learn from past mistakes. We have companies like Funcom (Godager) launching one title after another in an abject technical state. We have Mythic (Jacobs) pioneering RvR in an MMO space, then releasing a similar title and completely failing to grasp what made the first game good to begin with. We have the wonderful folks at NCsoft Korea releasing soulless DikuMUDs with shiny new graphics, tempting us with the enticing thought of grinding yet another metric fuckton of the same rat tails we didn't want to be bothered with ten years ago.

Some companies (I'm looking at you, Cryptic) have dispensed all pretence of designing triple-A titles with any semblance of depth, and moved to a business model where they release a "new" game every year, betting on first week box sales while laughing all the way to the bank.

No wonder some of the old guard are ready to slit their wrists and give up on virtual game worlds altogether. Just read Koster's blog. If poor Raph is to be believed, all core gamers should just give up right now, lie down and let Zynga pour its special brand of FarmVille-manure all over us.

Which brings me to my point, finally: As entertaining as this whole Alganon debacle continues to be, as a gamer and a fan of virtual worlds I'm crying bittersweet tears. If ever there was an industry in desperate need of new start-ups and innovative ideas, it's this one. Granted, Alganon isn't good enough to stand on its own and fully deserves to go the way of the dodo. But somewhere amidst all this mess there just might be people who could go on to make good games down the line. From where I'm standing (as a consumer choking on derivative Dikus) the MMO industry can't afford to alienate any talent with the kind of douchebaggy PR shenanigans Dmart so dearly loves.

Or maybe I'm just a big softie.

What I'd like to see next is for QOL to explore the one design feature that is both excellent and unusual: game master run events.

I remember hearing of an absolutely awesome event in SWG where Boba Fett showed up in town. Some player tried to push him and Boba shot him and killed him instantly (back in the days when death was kind of a big deal).

I didn't encounter an event in Alganon when I tried it but I did play one in Horizons which was basically an escort quest with half the server turning out to bodyguard a demigod GM on a pilgrimage somewhere. It was quite interesting to participate in but lacked drama.

Now suppose a bunch of GMs appear in Alganon trying to get help to perform a ritual to protect the world from the Ultimate Evil. Another person at QOL (I think Derek would be ideal) plays said Evil, a being who's only actual power is to whisper players. He whispers people trying to persuade them to sabotage the ritual while the other QOL staff ham it up with "oh noes, the main power crystals been sabotaged" virtual drama.

Time that to coincide with Steam and D2D offering a discount on box sales and Alganon should shift some copies. Some people would probably buy it just for the chance to argue with Derek in game for one afternoon which suits the Subscription Free business model perfectly.

Afterwards various blogs would post outrageous instances of chatlogs, some faked with photoshop and the game would stay on everyone's radar but this time with people actually playing it.

Also it would change the perception of the game from "bad wow-clone" to "the game with you interact with maniac GMs in" which is perhaps a much more saleable commodity.

Alternatively they could just borrow yet another idea from Blizzard and add a Secret Beaver Level in which masked beaver bandits pose word-games of great lexical sophistication which can only be defeated by the most cunning of linguists.

I wish I had a link handy re: GM events for you to read but I don't.  Do a search it has been discussed several times in the past and the trouble is they don't work for what they cost.  You piss off people, or you crash the server or you spend way too much money on the staff who, although they're doing 2-3 events a day, gets nothing but complaints from players about how there's never any events when THEY play.

Smaller games can do it without as many problems but how many devs are going for smaller?

The spice must flow (http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=21889&storypage=1). (a three-page "in-depth interview with Serek Dmart")

And now he's put the posts back again.  :uhrr:
Anyone care to check if he's edited them? I just don't have the strength.

They looked about the same at a glance. There may be one or two posts missing but not sure it it's just my memory being fuzzy.

From the Alganon Forums. 

Stunned by his lack of conviction in avoiding further public idiocy.

The returned posts seem identical at a glance, they are simply in a different order.  I wonder why he pulled them in the first place.

Why? He's an attention whore. That's why he does this, it's not like he could excel in any other field and really, he doesn't excel in this one, he just fails spectacularly and upwards, which I suppose - I don't know - makes his parents happy or something. /shrug


I'm not pointing at Raph with this statement as his entire platform was probably better for Facebook in the long run than what he was trying to do and it was never going to appeal to core gamers anyway. The old guard is not ready to slit their wrists. They're alive and well making the same mistakes they've made over and over again. That won't stop until investors actually take a meaningful interest in how they're spending their money rather than just trying to hop aboard the money train.

I'm sure some folks noticed yesterday but I didn't see it explicitly mentioned here yet.  He re-opened that original alganon thread that a CM locked.
http://www.alganon.com/forums/index.php?/topic/4607-quest-online-announces-leadership-change/page__st__80__p__39970&#entry39970

I suggest "Nero burning Rome".

Oh, I agree. Even as an outsider looking in, I'm sure there is remarkable room for improvement in how diligently potential investors commit to research before signing on the dotted line. Still, judging from how strongly the Diku-train keeps chugging along in current and upcoming MMORPG releases, it sure seems like "WoW but better" is still the favourite sales pitch tossed around board rooms across the globe.

Thus, plenty of Alganon-like abortions on the horizon before the industry sheds its growing pains. Sadly, not every fledgling MMOG can hope to have a star athlete like Dmart to fan the flames, and help them go out with a bang. Or was it a whimper?

Man I just read Raph's blog and that Lum thing, and all I can think is... who gives a fuck? The people who play Farmville aren't the people who play real games anyway. It's an alternate market, a parallel universe. Whether the hot new thing all those casual/non-gamer people are into is playing Facebook crap, or having orgies, or knitting doilies makes no difference to me. Basically what Lum said.

"Oh noes big budget virtual world fantasy games are dead!"

Shut up Raph, Blizzard can't hear you because they have money coming out of their ears. Yeah yeah, Blizzard is an outlier because they actually release complete professional-quality games, and none of you "old guard" MMO faggots can do that so Blizzard doesn't count. Whatever.

Amen brother, but this thread?

This thread is actually a Honeypot to entrap he who shall not be named.  There's no better place to namedrop than here.

I'd have thought he'd be banned from here, if he was such a descending troll. Instead, he gets mentioned here every few months, and I've never seen him appear.

The people who fund the real games and the people who might jump on the farmville-clone train in hope it takes them to the nearest moneyhats store, on the other hand...

When will you be famous?  :oh_i_see:

You're allowed to post here. Don't try too hard (like in that last paragraph), don't be a douche. Talk about games and shit, at a certain point you'll feel comfortable enough to tell people to fuck off or stop being a cunt or whatever.

...should probably have learned to be more selective a long god damn time ago anyway? I mean you just know McQuaid is going to go through rehab or whatever and pop up a couple years from now with his hand out looking for venture capital to fund his new super great MMO idea. If the world he finds himself in is one where people have other things to do with their millions of dollars besides humor him, it will be a better world indeed.

Bring on the Farmvilles. Compete for your dollars, you fucking hacks.

There's a few gravestones out there waiting on inscription and yes, this is appropriate. Not saying it's Raph's - or anyone else's - but yeah, polished market ready games still have an audience. Who knew?

Yeah, I posted a rather... ahem... abrasive comment to this effect on Raph's blog, but I'm tired of hearing "Baww it's not our fault, Blizzard has a budget nobody else can touch!" used as an excuse. Tabula Rasa cost HOW much? Warhammer cost HOW much? It ain't just the budget.

The only abrasive thing I can think of to say is this: 99% of the people talking about social games right now know absolutely nothing about social games.

And I wish they'd stop.

I seem to recall that he did a brief stint a few years ago.

I do think that the concept of a sandbox virtual world is pretty well in its grave. Not because it simply can't work, but because people with $$$ have been sold a bill of goods that it can't work and because people who do design have decided it either won't work or it's too hard to manage even if it does work. Maybe someday

None of which means that full-fledged persistent MMO games aren't viable and everyone's just got to go Jynga. Or even that the only game that will succeed is a Diku-style MMO built with the same level of investment that Blizzard put into WoW.

It's really quite simple. You can't make WOW better than blizzard can. This is why AOC and WAR both crashed so spectacularly. Both games had interesting early concepts and game design that were later thrown out in lieu of 'be more like WOW'. Gamers picked up those games because they wanted to try something new. Gamers left those games because they got an inferior version of something they already had.

It's comforting to point at Blizzard's pocketbook and proclaim that WoW is untouchable becaue of their deep pockets. But Blizz didn't always have that money. They certainly didn't have WoW money before WoW launched.
I think that even if money was no concern for Mythic, that WAR would have still turned out about like it did.

Now, if we're talking about Blizz's assets and people, then yeah, WoW is untouchable.  :grin:

Blizzard have the advantage that millions will buy their product just because its Blizzard. Same as millions bought Halo III, a run of the mill whatever shooter, because it was Halo. You can rabbit all you want about blizzard releasing polished games but at its start WOW was just an Everquest clone. And that's a fact. Millions clogged their servers at launch because it was blizzard, kept playing because it was blizzard, and then Everquest self destructed, those players went to WOW, and WOW was left sucking all the money there was out of the system. That's putting it very simply, but if WOW launched today under another company name everyone would be lining up to say how bland it is.

And yes I played WOW for a week and left as it bored me to tears.

If it launched today as it was then... it'd still be a hit because almost none of the lessons it taught have been learned by anyone else.

It's very simple.  If you're trying to be like WoW, you've already failed.  Not because you can't match their money or vision, but because trying to be (or not be) like WoW is learning the wrong thing.  EVE might be the closest to getting it right, which is refine and build for your audience.  Chasing shadows is doomed to failure since you'll be ignoring what makes your game desirable.

That's ridiculous.  Why do people flock all over Blizzard games?  Because they know what they're going to get.  Not because 'it's Blizzard.'  That's not a reason.  The name represents something.  And when you say what you said with what that represents in mind, it doesn't sound surprising at all.  I'll demonstrate:


Raph is trying to say that those things can't be done because Blizzard has money.  But none of those things cost money.  It's dumb.

The years of hard work thing costs an IMMENSE amount of money, actually.

The fuck it does.  The act of working harder than someone else doesn't cost money.  It's a matter of will.  I'm pretty sure you understood me. 

It does. But the question is: What is that money buying you?

Immaterial things.  Processes, culture, know-how.

Working harder doesn't mean much if you don't work smart.

Funny how this entire thread – or rather, the cause of this thread – underlines how early days it really is for the interactive entertainment industry. Somehow even mentioning corporate culture and the games industry in the same sentence makes my face twitch.

There are undoubtedly many passionate and talented people working on all levels of the industry, but there's painfully little experienced talent management, and even less experienced project management. What little culture there is is still in its infancy, and that's excluding any exploitative slave galleys run by Activision or EA.

Imagine a CEO of an automotive company logging on to an enthusiast motor sport site, and lambasting one of his former employees in public. It just isn't done.

Which is odd when you consider that video gaming has been a pretty large industry for 30 years.

I like that his user title is listed as "Beggar" in this one.

There's a lot more too it than that, and WoW started off pretty small. Before WoW Blizzard was a company with a few good games to their name; but their name was no bigger than a dozen other companies making good games. As Lant said, WoW works because it does what it does better than anyone else, better than any imitator. I don't think you can ascribe much success to name recognition; Blizzard's name is big because of WoW, not vice-versa.

Oh man. Oh man, check this out. I can type in this box and then stuff shows up!
So this one time I rode a jet into a tsunami, and then a giant squid saved me but I was like "noooo you don't" and I shot him with a Cadillac in the face and he died. And that's how 1993's Blue Force was developed.

I'm sorry.
Also you're wrong. Can we stop talking about BlizzaWoW and get back to making fun of Dr. Prattlecruiser? Oh fuck it.

K9 nailed it; before WoW launched, Blizzard was well known, but Square Enix was also. Yet WoW made money hats and FFXI didn't.  :oh_i_see:

Remember that time when he posted something stupid on a message board?

What does ITT mean in the subject anyway?

The act of committing a large team to work as long as required does in fact cost a great deal of money.

"Well, they should just WORK HARDER" is silly to the point of obscenity in an industry where "crunch time" is the norm.

In The Thread, unless I'm horribly mistaken.


Well we see why you didn't make it as a manager, now.  Nowadays the line seems to be "work more hours and be happy you have a job, or I'll find someone else who will."   People are replaceable money isn't and we all know which is more important.

Dude.  Come on.  That's not even what I meant.  Don't get all salty.  I'm sure you work hard.  Did you read what WUA wrote?  Do you disagree?  I don't think you do.  It's not even about working hard.  The working hard part was just there to describe the goodwill that makes Blizzard stand for what it does.  Keep in mind the context of the ludicrous assertion that ten million people went to Best Buy asking for the latest Blizzard game just because it was Blizzard.

Working hard doesn't cost extra money, it's just a hallmark of properly motivated people in a well run organization.

I think you're taking the "Blizzard" name and applying it across the entire industry of video games. But you can only do that when you include that huge catalog of console titles they've made.

Oh. Wait.

Blizzard is moneyhats in the PC games space, which has been almost their entire focus since Warcraft I. They're one of the few companies that get primo retail space at all, space usually given to console games. They generate the foot traffic retailers want, because there's still enough core PC gamers left to really want the games Blizzard makes.

As to "WoW starting small"? Again, only a valid statement if you compare it to something like MW2 or any other huge console launch. It broke like five records in the first two months. Before it hit the rest of the global markets the subsequent year.

WoW works because it does what it does well. But it did that in large part because of the budget, time, process and people that launched it, none of which would have been half or 1/3 of that if there wasn't a great deal of faith in the outcome. This isn't to say the name was the most important thing. The factors for WoW's success have been discussed to death. But the value of the Blizzard name is huge. You don't give that kind of development budget to just anyone. And they didn't created "ActiBlizzard" because they liked the sound of it :-)

Blizzard got to where it is through a lot of respectable factors, but luck plays a huge role in that as well.

It's also a hallmark of people who know what the fuck they're doing and are familiar with the work they're assigned.  Which is why people aren't actually replaceable and coding has diseconomies of scale which causes developers to vastly under hire for the work they want done and either miss deadlines, purge features, or work in a near permanent crunch-time state.

You can't speak like Blizzard just spontaneously existed as a monolith.  They were small.  They did shit right.  They made money.  In that order.  I remember Rock n Roll Racing.  That fucking game was awesome.  I'm sure you remember it too.  Now that doesn't mean that everyone else is completely wrong.  They're just being too ambitious.  

It's not impossible for others to make a company like Blizzard.  It's hard.  But with the talent that's floating around out there failing on MMO's every six months, it's definitely not impossible.  I think people just have to lower the bar when they make new companies.  I don't think you can found a company on a huge MMO, unless you're rich like Curt Schilling, in which case your chances go up from zero to like 20%.  And that's probably generous.  Before trying to kill WoW - before even trying to compete, you have to knock out a few Rock n Roll Racings first.  Then work your way up to a Warcraft I.  Etc.  You can point to a dozen companies out there who did just that, were you can point to a dozen more who bit off more than they could chew that now look like QoL minus the retard (in some cases).  It's not rocket science.

fakeedit:
Sheep:  Tru dat homey.

I'll tolerate arguments about Blizzard's name recognition when one of these other companies turns out a Blizzard quality game that is nevertheless sadly overlooked due to lack of that recognition. Until then STFU because I'm just not seeing it. Mythic spent a Blizzard-sized budget on Warhammer, generated enough hype to sell a huge number of boxes, then took it in the ass because their game was just plain shitty and no one wanted to play it after a month.

Just.
Plain.
Shitty.

In spite of the massive budget. Speculating upon the extent to which the lack of a huge brand name might have held them back if their game wasn't total garbage in the first place is missing the point utterly. It isn't just Blizzard's budget, because others have spent as much. It isn't just Blizzard's name, because no one else is even coming close enough to quality for that to matter. They're just better at their jobs. They're a real game company in a field full of incompetent hacks and text MUD dinosaurs.

If Nintendo decided to make an MMO (pokemon omg moneyhats) it would be the exact same thing. Some bumblefuck company like Funcom/Mythic/whatever would never be able to compete with them, no matter how much money you gave them. They just don't have the chops.

I'm just waiting for Valve to announce that they've been working on an MMOFPS.

I'd play that if I could have multiple snark pets.

This.  Many, many times this.

I forget exactly when Blizzard became a big name PC developer (Warcraft II? Diablo?) but one point to remember is that it very hard for such studios to remain operating over several years regardless of the quality of their output. Plus it hasn't exactly always been smooth sailing, with Blizzard North disappearing after Vivendi took over. There have been other studios that have risen to the same (and higher) levels of Blizzard pre-WoW, only to have collapsed / sold out / gone into a death spiral / been torn apart by their publisher.

However, Blizzard has established a rep for building genre titles that grab players like few other studios can manage. Part of it is polish. Part of it is the perfection in which they grab onto the reward centres of the brain, or are generally well-balanced-yet-different for competitive players. Part of it is that Blizzard 'got' the internet before a lot of other game developers did. Part of it is the name, but that isn't a big reason that 11m players log in to WoW.

It will be interesting to see what Blizzard's second MMO is like. To date, I don't there has been a second MMO from a studio that has exceeded the quality / appeal of their first title.

Also: 38 Studios is trying to go the Blizzard route by releasing a single player title before they put out the MMO. I think we all laughed / rolled our eyes at that strategy, because imo you are just increasing the paths you can fail to make your investment back.

Everquest2 (well post-release, admittedly) and LOTRO come to mind. Also a bunch of asian grinds, but I don't count 'em. Aion is borderline there.

They are not doing this because Blizzard did.

It's not just that either, when you consider the fate of Flagship and Red 5 amongst others. Whatever that supposedly magical 'it' in the Blizzard staff is supposed to be, they seem to have awful trouble retaining it once on their own.

To pick a nit, LotRO was not Turbine's second MMO (or even their third). Turbine's second MMO died, not quite as spectacularly as the original topic of this thread is likely to, but die it did.

Having said that, I agree that LotRO does exceed the quality and appeal of AC1. And the rest of the Turbine games that came before it, for that matter.  :-)

It is much more plausible to do something small before something big.  But what they're doing seems to be trying to do both at the same time before they've done either on their own.  That's not the Blizzard route.  That's why people are laughing.  It's probably a better idea that they try to release that console thingey first, no doubt.  But I don't think that's going to be nearly enough.  On the other hand, it's more than most people have done.  So we'll see, I guess.

Must have been right at the start, because I've been here 5 years now...

Not entirely accurate. The Blizzard name wasn't quite as good then as it is now. A lot of (initial) people tried it because they wanted a better EQ1 without the constant dickpunching, not simply because of I LUV BLIZZARD. With EQ2 being a fucking mess at launch that could barely run on most people's machines, most of their players went and tried WoW as well.

WoW was a bit of a lightning in a bottle moment. I don't know if even Blizzard could top WoW's success.

Blizzard is really fairly irrelevant. There's a huge number of players who have quit or are bored of WoW and looking for something else to play. That's why AoC and Warhammer moved a million boxes.

But I can't name a post WoW MMO that hasn't been fundamentally fucked up in one or more ways. That's why AoC, Warhammer and the rest of them don't still have those million plus people they sold boxes to.

Blizzard's success is organizational and not dependent on one or two or three prodigals. Which, I think, is the really rare thing in games development and especially MMO development, that they've managed to institutionalize a certain kind of professionalism so that it carries over even as people cycle in and out of the development team. 

WTF is wrong with you people?

Did the "how blizzard do it" really need to happen again, in another thread?

FFS.

THIS BE DRAMA THREAD.

Oh, well, as far as that goes, I can only recommend that people catch up on the Gamasutra thread, which is still going, though Dr. Dmart's last contribution was Saturday.

The Gamasutra thread is moving too fast. Well maybe not exactly fast but they use lot of words. :uhrr:

edit: technically, his last post was on SUnday at 3.30 am :grin:

Well, yes, but if you don't read it, you'd miss this gem:

"Heck, I'm following Curt Schilling on Tweeter and just started following Serek Dmart yesterday and they Tweeted back and forth."

Somebody find that, stat.

google to teh rescue (http://twitter.com/gehrig38)

The Good Doctor has Obliged Us with Another Interview (http://www.massively.com/2010/03/22/massively-interviews-alganons-derek-smart/)

I can't believe people are celebrating how Serek is being 'truthful' about everything that was wrong with Alganon. Blaming other people really isn't hard.

It's like watching a syphilitic donkey drive a sewage disposal truck into a burning whorehouse.

I eagerly anticipate seeing Dmart introduce substantial system and content changes into a live MMO environment - in his usual cool and collected manner, of course. It's been a few years since SWG NGE.

Go, go, go!  :popcorn:

Though with SWG, there was a core game that some people actually liked. Not sure that's a problem with Alganon.

Its the Internets, half of them think he will just need to change a spreadsheet entry. Makeing games is easy after all.

I think you're vastly overestimating both the percentage, and the depth of knowledge, of these people.  Probably closer to 75%, and they think he'll just flip a switch.  Probably the same switch that controls the internets.

No, I don't think I do understand you. You toss it out there as if anyone can do it, but they can't. They run out of money before they get to "years". Blizzard has the resources lying around to work for 5+ years on Starcraft: Ghost, and just decide it sucks and chalk it up as a learning experience. Nobody else in the MMO industry can do that kind of thing. It isn't free, it isn't even close to free.

I'm enjoying Doctor Strangesmart's circumlocutions when his various interviewers ask him, "So, um, wait, what is it about Alganon that you see as an asset you can build something out of"?

So far, his answers:

1. The really great core team. [Who will no doubt be the people he blames when he is unable to save the game.]
2. The very deep lore, which is somehow miraculously separate from the art assets and game mechanics that just imitate WoW. Because we all know that deep lore is something that really helps an MMO succeed.
3. ???

So I have a question, did any of you ever actually play the Battlecruiser game? Was it any good at all?

I nominate Ingmar to take the bullet and report back:

http://www.3000ad.com/download/

I tried it once, though it went through so many iterations that I don't even recall which exactly. Millennium, maybe? It wasn't terrible by that point. If you subtracted all the bombast and insanity and hype and bullshit claims, you might have ended up regarding it as a kind of Dwarf Fortress sort of thing, a homebrew project that had big ambitions and many forgiveable shortcomings. Wasn't enough to make me really want to play it.

Yes. No.

Also, I find it hilarious that the Good Doctor Dillhole calls Alganon utter rubbish and just scant lines later says the backstory and lore is so great that the game will be great in the future.

The game is rubbish without the bold leadership of the Doctor.

Look at this list of games. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_%26_Synapse)  Look at what they were doing in the early 90's.  They made enough money to survive, basically.  They weren't some super-giant, and speaking as someone who was heavily involved in playing games at the time, I can say that nobody had ever even heard of them until like 1995.

The reason these other guys run out of money after a year is because they put the horse before the apple cart.  You've got to develop a revenue stream.  It's like, in the idot's guide to business.  So yea, anyone can do it, if they're relatively not retarded.  But you can't just start up a company, promise investors the Golden Fleece, shit out a semi-profitable MMO, and hope your company survives like these guys are trying to do.  It doesn't work that way.  Because after you release your semi-profitable MMO, you have to make enough money to be able to keep it afloat through an inevitably rough launch, patching process, and then expansions.  And if you don't have a solid business to drive that, then your company was fucked before you started.  What if the MMO doesn't make enough to keep itself going?  You can count the number of times that's worked out for companies on one hand.  Hi Curt Schilling.

So what you and others are saying is nobody can make an MMO like that.  And that's correct, likely nobody can.  Because it's impossible, not because Blizzard has money.  Blizzard didn't do that either.  What I'm saying is that it is possible is for people to build a business like Blizzard did, and then make an MMO if they choose.

Dam it, one more time.

THIS BE DRAMA THREAD.

If we don't get back to the Drama, then DSma is never going to show up in this thread.

And we wouldn't want that, would we?

Curt Schilling sounds like a WWE wrestler name.

Then post some of it.  I got tired of digging for the link in the middle of page three to read more of his insane scribblings.

Here's a gem. I swear I did not make it up.

Yessssssssssss.   :why_so_serious:

(http://www.headinjurytheater.com/images/d&d%20beasts%20giant%20space%20hamster.jpg)

I actually downloaded and played a version of it. I couldn't tell you which, I didn't pay for it, maybe it was a demo?

It was atroctious. It played like a fan's hack of Wing Commander minus the fun parts.

Haha, so aside from the GUI what was holding Alganon back was a planned and coherent game lore?

And lack of hamsters.

soooooo, who are the other two?  I recall some close calls.  Raph for example admitted SWG failed to reach the suits expectations or some such, but I don't recall him acknowledging that HE flopped it. 

Jacobs, and McQuaid?

Pfft, I thought they were going to stop imitating WoW.

What I remember from Mark and schild's little WAR slap fight, I thought Jacobs pretty adamantly refused to get it. At all.

Though I just lurked back then, so I could be way off.

Bingo.

McQuaid only because I ambushed him. And only then, it was a bunch of half-hazy-truths.

Jacobs basically admitted to the wrong worldview on his blog.

So after I posted my mini-rant about how every MMO company except Blizzard are incompetent wankers on Raph's blog, Bartle comes up and basically goes "Well Bioware makes high-quality games, and they're doing an MMO!" Somewhere far away, Schild suddenly facepalmed without knowing why.

If I hadn't read it 2 days ago, I probably would have.

Isn't it Bioware Austin which is made up of random guys laid off from other studios in Austin? I'm pretty sure it will be the standard disappointing Austin MMO.

Not to mention working closely with Mythic...

Well, because teh drama isn't really over, there is even more Gamasutra comments (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27688/Quest_Online_Fires_President_Hires_Derek_Smart.php#comment46915) today and quite a bit of trolling in the Massively comments (http://www.massively.com/2010/03/22/massively-interviews-alganons-derek-smart/) for their article (and The MMO Antichrist appeared in page 2 of comments (http://www.massively.com/2010/03/22/massively-interviews-alganons-derek-smart/2#comments))

I think we have a winner:

I wonder if the Alganon investment guys feel like a Cthulu cult that's just managed to summon up one of the Old Ones and realise just what it is they've done and that they're probably not going to be getting their magical pony.

If the Alganon investment guys were the types to read Gamasutra and Massively, they might not have gotten themselves into this fix in the first place  :awesome_for_real:

Massively is a media whore, much like the old vaultnetwork before the IGN assimilation. And after, actually. It's cut/paste regurgitation wrapped around commentary by lopheaded mongoloids. Their WOW-specific site is even worse, if you can believe it, consisting of totally inane "bloggers" expected to post X articles per day for their meagre crust of bread, stretching the slightest bit of news into dozens of posts. I wouldn't expect anything remotely insightful out of those filthy hookers.

About to hire some fuckstick? It's 2010. Google his name.

Awesome. Posting this here in spoilers in case it gets deleted. I'm curious if Mr Serek Dmart can avoid the email challenge.

The Call out:
 

Avoidance:
 

Challenge!
 

Hey look, I'm an Internet detective.   :awesome_for_real:

In all his recent interviews Dr. Unnameable keeps saying that David Allen approached him  to talk to the investors at QOL on his behalf and prior to this he had never heard of QOL and Alganon.  However when I was browsing his forums at 3000ADd he is telling another story.


http://www.3000ad.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=50026988

What he says here really substantiates the view that it was Dr. Unnameable's intention all along was to usurp control of the tech/resources for his own game.  How convenient.

I could have sworn he did, and it was.  As I recall, it was maybe like a couple weeks after the watershed split and he showed up to trade a few barbs with Rich Kyanka over the Desktop Commander article.  Shit I've been lurking here for a looooooooong time.

At this point it seems reasonably likely that Alganon is not recoverable and that the reason this venture is still consuming capital is that Derek is going to "give it his best shot" before admitting defeat and suggesting (or better yet manoeuvring someone else to suggest) that the network, servers and staff might be better used making BC3K Online.

Half the game-playing internet knows this but not, apparently, whoever is supervising the guys who have spent a couple of hundred mill on this and appear to be perfectly happy to continue.

According to Derek (from page 2 of the latest Massively comments)
Note that there's no suggestion that the game might at some stage be financed by paying customers rather than investors yet he is still confident they can go a long way.

For me the most fascinating aspect of this is despite the contradictions and inconsistencies, and the high probability that the motivation is self-serving duplicity rather than a genuine desire to make Alganon work people are impressed by the great man's honesty. There are many comments applauding his out-spoken honesty.

It's as if being rude about other professionals, airing dirty laundry in public engages an automatic reflex to consider a person honest quite divorced from any analysis of the facts. Click, whirr as Cialdini would say.

IF I WERE A MADMAN, I WOULD SO CALL OUT THE ALL-SEEING EYE ON HIS SHIT IN MY OWN PERSONAL BLOG.

I'm feeling like it's time I interviewed Mister Smart. What say you, peoples?

This should be fun.  :oh_i_see:

What's the worst that could happen?


No, seriously. What do you all think is the worst that could happen because of this?

Do it.

As consumers we are so inured to the oily sheen of non-committal corporate PR that the appearance of a character such as our good Dr. Dingleberry, who at a cursory glance appears to go against the grain and shoot from the hip, can at first seem like a breath of fresh air. "Good," we might think to ourselves. "Finally someone who speaks their mind."

Look past the shock and awe approach, and any goodwill generated by the feigned honesty quickly evaporates, exposing the sideshow antics within. Dr. Dmart is like the town drunk, ranting and raving at society and hurling abuse at random passers-by, while at the same time asking for handouts to fund his brave expedition to the liquor store.

Read any of his longer posts or the latest interview on Massively, and the sheer amount of self-contradiction, circumlocution and ardent back-pedalling is simply mind-boggling. None of this is really about Alganon; any and all corporate intrigue could have easily been kept in-house where it arguably belongs. Instead, we are witnessing another episode in the Serek Dmart Saga, the good doctor's self-authored legend of Bumble the Boy Wonder, who fights the evil corporate machine to protect the everyman and bring good games to the eagerly awaiting masses. I bet he believes it too.

And no, the irony of calling him immature while making fun of his name on a gaming forum is not lost on me. This is, after all, how the internet is played.  ;D

I think he gets enough attention. But do as you will. I'll read it if you get him to do it.  :grin:

This would be why my previous statements were specifically contingent on everything he said at the time being true.  The increasing number of contradictions make me suspect otherwise at this point, which evaporates anything good I might have thought about it.  It's merely replacing one kind of BS for another, worse kind.

The only way an interview would be awesome is if you can do it via Skype so you can hear the ego in his voice.

On the contrary, he comes off much more reasonably in person and on the phone. Less confrontational and pompous. He's the product of decades of usenet flamewars, after all.

Ah, but if you can get him to sound like he does on the internet, it will become epic.  Another internet rant at this point is redundant.

Can you get the other guys, too? That would be  :why_so_serious:

1. They didn't spend a couple hundred mill on this.

2. Serek is one of those investors. That is how he got involved.

Incidentally, where does Monsieur Dmart keep getting the funding for all these weird ideas?

It'd be kind of a step down for you, I think.

I mean, Vanguard and WAR aren't shining paragons of MMOG development success, but McQuaid and Jacobs were both taken seriously at some point in their careers. The same has never been true of DS. He's an epic joke. No good can come of this.

a round table post mortem with David Allen, and S-mart would pique my interest.  They could duke it out on pay-per-view.

I don't care about that, I want an interview with the guy responsible for hiring Dmart.  Did he lose a bet?  Was it grief hire?  WTF.

Well, depending on the time of day that you read the thread, Allen himself brought S-mart in to help w/ Alganon.  On odd numbered hours, though, it was the investors that brought S-mart in to fix the mess Allen made.

I have no doubt that guys like Smart and McQuaid are really cool in person. They probably give off an energetic and driven vibe, and know how to talk to investors. It's a skill, and a useful one if you're starting a business. That kinda charmy chit chat that got portrayed in Tommy Boy.

After they get the money? That's when Dr Jekyll disappears.

Just my impression, of course.

well this is history in the making.  Push it to +1

It'd be worth it for the goof factor alone.

Only took five days.

I know, right. It's hard to want to actively take part in exorcising a demon. I had to warm up to the idea.

I believe that the Video Game Industry does the same thing the National Football League does in regard to coaches.  Its easier to hire someone who has been a complete failure in the bussiness for years rather than take a gamble on an unknown commodity like someone new.

DING!

For whatever it is worth, D-Sma has been around, independently producing games for quite a while now. Time gives credibility to whores, politicians and ugly buildings... and independent game developers.

It's the same with corporation top-heads. No matter how many companies some of them drive into the ground, there seems to always be another corporation ready to throw money and positions of power their way.

Lol, sounds good.  I look forward to reading it.

My dad has a good friend that literally makes his money by getting investment for and starting businesses, plowing in most of the initial cash and then spending the rest on fun stuff. Known him for about 13-15 years and he's started 5 or 6 companies in that time and spends the last year or so of business living very low key. But he manages to get investors and loans every time although it helps that his ideas tend to be pretty good. I guess Dmart's even more charming.

I know people who have done 5 or 6 start ups.  After a while even failing starts to build up to a respectable pedigree and people are then willing to bet that you will get it right next time.  Even in failing you learn a lot of skills and gain a lot of contacts.

Remember that VC money is gambling and they expect to mostly lose.

Uhh, he's playing to the home crowd. You're basically SirBrusing his words because he didn't have "So when David Allen approached me, " before "That was the whole reason that I was in touch with QOL to begin with".

Sure, he might have an ulterior motive, but a smoking gun of that that post is not.

It's gambling like poker, not gambling like blackjack. With due diligence and sufficient diversification a significant amount of that risk can be mitigated. These guys just didn't do their homework.

I wasn't defending Dmart or the VC choice in him.

I was replying to NowhereMan's incredulity at this dads friends ability to get VC funding.

Question, what does VC actually stand for?

Venture Capitalist.  Investor.

That said, most folks never win. Much like fat, it's easier to get fat when you already have fat. You're also more likely to lose once you start losing and more likely to win once you start winning.

Also, most folks are just failures. Period. There's no amount of further failure that will make them stop being a failure. Fail once, ok, maybe it was a fluke. Fail twice - completely - you didn't learn anything from the first time around.

Uh, not turning a profit in a start-up does not mean total abject failure or that the succeeding attempts weren't improved over the initial.

I know people who recently attempted an ultra-low power supercomputer.  They sold a few of them but the market wasn't large enough at this moment, if things had gone slightly different, like say if the power issues of a couple of years ago had maintained, well they would be in the money hats.  But yet still they learned VAST amounts about working in the semiconductor industry and I am sure that when/if they start their next project there will be no shortage of VC funding even though this wasn't their first failed start-up.

But hey, you got a message board, you must be right.

Entrepreneur Robert Maxwell failed so many times with his early businesses that he was nicknamed the "Bouncing Czech" because of all his bankruptcies. He went on to become one of Britain's highest profile billionaires.

(After his death it emerged that not only did he not really have any money but that he had borrowed millions from his employees' pension funds. Still that was after his death, he was certainly a business success in his lifetime).

So not only does it pay to be a fraud, all it really takes to be considered a success is to maintain a socially believable façade of competence while disguising the rotten practices within? My god, I think you've just explained the MMOG industry. :rimshot:

Or America's business class, or...

Like Jesus turning water to wine I have labored to turn cynicism to truth.

David Allen Personal Website, Quest Online & Alganon Update: (http://www.requnix.com/?p=208)

Holy poop on a stick, the lawyers gave the go ahead. Buckle up kids, all dignity is about to fly out the window.  :awesome_for_real:

Ha ha!  Awesome.  I called it.  This is the best ARG MMO, ever.

He's already done a fantastic job!

I just finished reading the whole complaint. Without being able to see the original contracts, it's hard to judge merits, but it's a nice law firm. I used to drive by their office. Not the sort of fly-by-night/anything-for-a-buck firm I expected.

I suspect the entertainment will continue. Hooray!

God there is so much in that filing, even the "vision" shows up on page 20.

So whats the chance of David Allen being proved as a public figure(to nix the libel/slander counts)?

I'm going to toss this on the fire as well.

New game item in the game. (http://www.myalganon.com/library/items/details/item_id/403345)

In case it gets removed:


Also, warning, there is a link on MMORPG.com directly to Matthew "Hue" Henrys postings here in the news article for this anoucement.

Starfucking alert.

All the dignity that's left?  :grin:

Is there a database scraper like to indicate when that was added to the game?

I am just an observer, I have no idea. Some are claiming that it was in before all this, so it could well be irrelevant.

 :oh_i_see:

<prepares to fight off the incoming hordes>

<does some laundry>

<takes a nap>

<has a drink by the pool>

...

"There's one!  Get it!"

Good ol' forum dry humping would likely require some sort of stars to be involved in all of this. Even though Dr. Dmart is a colossal internet narcissist, I'm pretty sure no one else cares enough to risk their neck in front of the F13 firing squad. I mean, have you seen the type of language used by some of the potty mouths here? Those barbs pierce deep enough to deter the bravest of souls.  ;D

Still, that in-game item just lights a warm glow in my heart. Why be an adult about any of this when you can act like a six-year-old?

That would require "stars." No offense to that dude who showed up, but I don't think anyone cares about Smart or his raft of stupid.

Beaten by Ollie.

apparently the item has been in the game since beta, or atleast before DS was there.

You in the new house yet?  You have a pool AND a laundry room?  Why do you need both? 

Because drinking in the laundry room is a bit sad?

I don't know- that might make me want to do laundry more often.

I do all of my best ironing tipsy.  ;D

Hmm, do I smell a business venture? A washer-dryer with a built-in minibar, and an ironing board with a cup holder.

No pools.  Unless I flood the laundry room, which doubles as the garage.  But then I could drink while doing laundry and not feel sad.  I'm not sure what I'd do with the car then.

Hmph.  That is what I was implying. :-P

I guess we need poolside laundry.  And cabana boys!  Or girls.  Depending.

There used to be a bar in Seattle that started as a laundromat. Always made sense to me.

There was a laundromat/bar right next to my university campus. They made good money. Put in a bit of laundry, grab a beer, play some pool. /win.

Sooner or later though there's going to be a drunk who dumps an entire bottle of detergent in the washer.

Or a drunk who *drinks* an entire bottle of detergent.

Oh please, Internet Gods, let this go to trial and be broadcast on CourtTV. That's must watch television!  :why_so_serious:

Deposing a guy like DS is a lawyer's dream.

On the public figure question, I seriously doubt it so David's burden is not as high as actual malice.

They may never make it to court.  DS will probably get distracted by his own reflection in some shop window and David Allen, well, anything shiny, really.  It's all insane.

He's suing the bajeezus out of a bunch of venture capitalists, and has a good shot at most of the findings going his way.  I think the shiny he's about to make will keep Allen focused.

I hope so.  I'm actually rooting for him.  I wish he'd find a way of sticking it to David Bowman while he's at it!

Yeah, it's money. You don't get distracted from money. I wish this would make it to court, but of course they'll settle. Allen has the best case ever. Derek literally said "nobody should hire this guy" in writing.

A. Duds N' Suds had completely left my memory, but was awesome for University shenanigans.  And we're talking about This http://www.requnix.com/?p=208 (http://www.requnix.com/?p=208) right?

The complaint is pretty straight forward with a couple of small suprises.  The way Dr. soon to be broke went on about how Allen embezzelled money made me wonder if the manging agreement had actually restricted Allen's ability to make day to day operational decisions.  Seemed unlikely at the outset and from all appearances it didn't.  I was also suprised at the stake Allen held in the company.  As the majority stakeholder his positiion seems pretty unassailable and trying to tie a failure of fiduciary responsibility to the hiring of a friend or two who from all accounts really did show up at work and performed thier duties, however incompetently is not something I'd want to try to do.

More interstingly is that the consulting contract was accepted by 3000ad and not the individual.  Good for Allen and bad for DS et. al.  

What's the over/under on ithe incoming countersuit and new round of ridiculousness?  I would hate to think that a small thing like a civil filing would have the power to shut this retard up.

From here. (http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/3488850#3488850)


It amazes me he ran all that through legal council.  :why_so_serious:

Well, I mean, he didn't. He's full of shit.

It's a funny mental picture, though. Imagine Doktor Smart in an elegantly appointed conference room, handing over a meticulously typed-out statement to his attorneys, who I imagine a serious-looking balding men in suits and thin-rimmed glasses, one of them asian or black so we're multicultural, solid Yale men, with said statement ending in "So go ahead David, bring it!". After they read it, he says "Comments, questions? No notes? We good to go?"

There's a pregnant pause. His attorneys are expressionless as they look at each other for a beat, then in unison take off their glasses and rub the bridge of their noses. They begin to speak but pause again, take a sip of water, another meaningful glance, then open their mouths to give the news...

Awwwwkward!

 :uhrr:

I mean

 :uhrr: - I got nothing else for this...

That is the operational definition of unstoppable. The lawyers must have told him that he cannot and must not continue to post on the whole matter besides a brief bit of boilerplate "high confidence that our judgment will be vindicated" etc, but they can't get him to. He'll keep yakking all the way up to the day that his lawyer turns to him and tells him he has to pay a settlement, and then he'll talk some more the day after he writes the check. Just imagine a settlement that included the condition that Serek forgo future public comment. That would be like a law that orders the sun not to rise tomorrow.

I wonder if the investors are fine with getting "screwed" in legal bills in QOL's defense around the fallout from termination of David. I'm sure they would be smart enough to keep their mouths shut  :grin:

I just read through the whole lawsuit PDF and I gotta say, everything here hinges on Smart, Allen, and QOL having any credibility or ability to work in this industry prior to these events.

Which, btw, is lol. These two should embrace eachother because the san lost taken by anyone else who encounters them would kill most normal nerds. Misery loves company, dudes, kiss and make up. You have no one else.

In this industry? Really? Think of all the multiply-failed people who somehow keep finding someone who will hire them. It's pretty baffling: people with money sacks seem to think it's better to turn over rocks looking for slugs rather than take a chance on that nice looking flower over there.

Look, there are a lot of lulzy failures in the industry, but the cream of that crop is the triple headed hydra of Allen, Bowman, and Smart. We can talk about all these other folks, but really, we're just pissing in the wind if we don't place those 3 on top.

This reminds me of a situation that happened yesterday. Two people, one a wheelchair-bound black man, and a white woman with her son, were arguing on a street corner. The black man accused the woman of having his phone and was screaming at the top of his lungs to have his phone returned to him. The woman was being defensive, refusing to take out the phone lest the scary and aggressive black man snatch it from her and wheel off. Neither was willing to give the other any ground. What was likely going to happen was they would come to some violence or the police would have to get involved.

As I was passing the scene, I stopped, listened for a moment, and decided, eh, what the hell. I walked up to the black man and said "What's your phone number?". Both of their attention turned to me, as I had my cellphone out. They were both still being aggressive to each other, screaming at each other, and I did my best to tone down the noise so I could examine the facts and help resolve the situation. Got the number, called it. No ring, no vibrate. Wasn't sure where the phone was at this point. The son had it. I asked if it was OK if I could see the phone to see if my call was received. They're still screaming at each other, the woman delirious that she might give the phone to the wrong person, the man livid that the culprit was right in front of him and refusing to accept that the phone was his. Both were villians in the eyes of each other, though both were villians because they couldn't work it out civilly and get to the facts of the situation.

Turns out my phone number was on the phone after the non-involved son took it out and let me see. I handed the phone to black guy, the guy said thank you and immediately calmed down. I said if you want to thank me, just wheel off (because nothing good would have come from staying in that situation). He started to, and the woman had the audacity to keep going and yelling at the man. I got in her way, multiple people could see (and said) to leave the dude alone.

We walked down the same block afterwards. The woman would just not shut up. I was telling her "Hey! It's over! Why are you still going on? What is there to gain?". I eventually started getting pissed at her obstinate attitude and the example she was setting for her son, wanted to cuss her out myself once or twice since her mind was so locked to reason, and left her standing on the corner by saying "Hey, I'm going to set a good example now. Good bye. Sorry for the trouble, kid." and left without another word.

John Romero?

Actually that completely makes sense to me:  if David ever wants to talk to him directly, it'll be "talk to the lawyers", but on that trusty public internet forum where he's posting, that's secure communication because that's where all his friends are.

Now I get it... I think. Is David actually winning by pulling the Doktor's strings? It would make sense given Dmart's affinity to opening up when baited. 

As other people have noted, John Romero very quietly built a successful company and had some successful releases in between 2001 and 2009.  He's probably not the example you want.

Agreed. Romero had the worst start to ion storm with his terribad daikatana, but he's stopped with the "suck it down" etc crap, and apparently made quite a lot of games for mobiles etc (I think it was). I'd say that warrants taking him off that list, as he learned his lesson.

Not to take this too seriously but the defamation is really a small part of the complaint, although may lead to the biggest recovery if successful.  That said, defamation is defamation and never really leads to elegant or straightforward litigation.  Although in this case...

Otherwise the NDA violations can amount to a signifcant award if there realy is proprietary tech. involved.  Intellectual property in the tech. fields tend to get some pretty impressive valuations in these cases.  So whatever the state of the Truegames deal or any other future potential deals were in before Dr. Dumbass got involved they're now dead and as it's unlikely 3000AD will pay fmv for it QOL has fairly obviously been damaged.  

The current spate of negative press has demonstrably and markedly decreased the value of the intellectual property owned by QOL.  The responsibility for this decrease can be laid right on the doorstep of Dr. Derek STFU-Already and is pretty obviously contrary to his fiduciary responsibility to either his client or his employer (depending on who you ask) to maximize the valuation of his clients property, now ostensibly his property.  A favorable result here is really gonna sting.

A successful wrongful termination action is also going to lead to a pretty substantial reward, although I can't remember if it's triple indemnification if there's no civil right violations.  Still Allen was getting a pile of cash and given he's not likely to be re employed anytime soon Allen could potentially stand to gain at least slightly more than the cost of dinner and a movie.

All things that can go very badly for QOL et. al. even if Alllen is the drooling drivelling retard his worst critics say that he is.

The more I read the more I think that DS is going to be genuinely shcoked by the result of this if (when) he gets an unfavorable result.  I really think he is of the opinion that wasting the companies money and hiring a bunch of incompetent fools  to make a horrbile game is justification for all the idiocy he's been spewing.  Allen was the controlling manager of the place and as far as we've seen he had carte blanche to hire strippers (NOT hookers) and throw keggers every damn night so long as there was adequate disclosure to the stakeholders.  

The only way I can imaine Allen could get himself in trouble is by intentionally and knowingly misleading the shareholders to his own advantage.  A claim that's pretty much been the action de jur since Enron and has resulted in about 1 positive result worth about $18 in damages.  It's even tougher case to amake here as QOL is a privately held entity and Allen had just about as much to lose by the products failure as anyone.

*That said the sheer tonnage of things I don't know about this case could quite probably stun a team of oxen, obviously.

 :headscratch:

 :uhrr: I read it twice, and think it may be the best Bloodworth impression we've had here. Lacking in coherence, cohesion, AND sense.

You actually read it?

Twice!

Made sense to me.

/shrug

I'm fuzzy on this whole lawyer thing. Would a claim Mr.Allen is currently unable to find work because of what was said by Dr.Dmart require some sort of proving that the latter actually has any credibility, and that anyone srsly listens to what he's got to say? I mean, that could be interesting spectacle entirely on its own...

No it doesn't.

Much of the complaint concerns breaches of the Operating Agreement for QOL. Mainly that removing a manager required unanimous agreement. Since we can presume that David Allen did not vote to remove himself his "firing" is in breach if indeed the Operating Agreement includes that clause.

The pdf maintains that legally David Allen is still a member of QOL since he can only be removed by unanimous vote (and presumably has not voted to remove himself). This is turn hamstrings what QOL and Serek Dmart are allowed to do since the Operating Agreement can only be amended by unanimous agreement (according to the pdf).

If the people who ousted David Allen are in breach of the company constitution then David Allen has a pretty good case.

Next there's no issue of wrongful termination anywhere that I could see. This is an argument over a piece of property by the owners of that property and it would seem that according to the company constitution DA is still an owner, still a manager and has been unlawfully restricted from access to the company he manages and part-owns.

The pdf challenges the appointment of DS:
and maintains that Serek Dmart did not have the authority to remove David Allen granted to him by the investment amendment addendum (the paperwork bringing Smart in, signed by DA in January 2010).

Regarding the defamation the pdf establishes grounds for violation of UN article 17

Article 17 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states

"    1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.
    2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. "
(emphasis added, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation ).

as well as damage to his future employment and finance-raising capabilities.

In other words even if he was completely unemployable/unbackable before Serek Dmart started he still has the right to damages in response to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.

Was he unemployable/unbackable?

No surely not. He made Horizons and Alganon. Horizons is still going as a commercial concern. Alganon is still going and the fact that the plug has not been pulled implies that the current investors believe it can be turned round and made profitable. Alternatively they will have to admit in open court that they're willingly throwing good money after bad. If Alganon does turn round then he will be one of the only developers with two commercially viable MMOs out there.

Critically we may think his games are terrible but surely for legal purposes all that matters is whether he could possibly make commercially viable games. If Horizons/Istaria is still paying its bills then that's proven. Even if it weren't it would be a very big ask to prove that someone should never work in an industry again because they could not possibly succeed.

He seems to think that if he posts in an "unofficial capacity" it doesn't count.

I don't know US libel law but certainly in the UK you can't get away with claiming "This is the guy who goes and "withdraws" whatever little money was left in the company, then gave it to attorneys (first one in Seattle, we just laughed at and sent him packing, then he got another in AZ - we're still laughing)  in a bid to sue the very company and investors whose money it was. Money that was for payroll and company expenses." unless you are able to prove in court when challenged that he really did steal that money. I mean, that's what the post says.

Libel law is pretty different over there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation

However DS still can't get away with claiming the money was stolen if DA's claim that part of the money is his, that he is still legally the manager of QOL and has never lawfully been removed from that position turns out to be supported by the paperwork as claimed in the pdf court document.

I think where DS has been particularly foolish is his desire to take this to the internet. You can, legally, be pretty rude about people and get away with it if you don't go out of your way to disseminate that information everywhere and in public.

On the bright side I think DS has achieved new milestones in internet posting.

What was said was pretty close (if not the outright definition) to being defamation per se which is a particular type of defamation where you don't have to really prove special damages, i.e. you don't have to prove up the dollars you specifically lost.  Truth is still a defense though.

I haven't read the court documents, but a lot of this comes down to trying to prove some kind of intent.

In one corner, Allen appears to be saying, "We tried our best to launch a game and then D-Sma came and stabbed me in the back. To the courts!"

In the other, D-Sma is going with, "I don't want to point any fingers, but Allen is a lying liar who lies. To the courts!"

End result: a winner is us.
Romero is still a great example. There was the pissing match he got into with Mike Wilson (http://kotaku.com/346816/gamecock-head-tears-into-john-romero-its-getting-ugly) and his development history continues to be spotty. He's founded several studios and closed them too or walked away, plus reports are that since Slipgate Ironworks joined Gazillion (where John claims to be a founder and may have the title Executive Vice-President) it has seen large layoffs (http://www.massively.com/2009/10/18/gazillion-layoffs-hit-romeros-slipgate-ironworks/) and may actually be a studio in name only. (Most likely these people have all been moved to other, more urgent Gazillion projects and I've heard a rumour that Romero may even be the lead developer on the new Marvel Universe Online game - after all, the EVP of Gazillion needs to be doing something with his time.)

Looking at Romero's recent games history (http://www.mobygames.com/game/ps3/heavy-rain/credits), his last title appears to be as a Lead Quality Assurance Tester for Heavy Rain. This is probably an error on MobyGames' part, but if true:  :awesome_for_real:

So: Romero may not be the industry fool he once was, but he also serves as a case for continuing to fail yet finding investors to fund it.

The fancy legal term is, Annuity.

Just because it's semi relevant, the MMORPG site isn't the only place Dmart has posted after Allen's response. He posted the exact same thing that's on MMORPG over into the Massively comments page (http://www.massively.com/2010/04/09/alganon-founder-david-allen-strikes-back/2#comments) as well.

The text is exactly the same on both, and I seriously doubt it was filtered through "legal counsel" because not only would a good lawyer tell him to keep quiet, but also would never allow him to refer to cases like this as "extortion" publicly.

All of the filtering in the world can't keep a client from shooting his mouth off like a dumbass.

Even the best lawyer in the world can't control an uncontrollable client.

They can revoke their services, however.  It'll be great if the only lawyer firm he can keep is Dewey, Cheetum, and Howe.

I love this game.

From experience, sometimes it is harder to fire your client than one would think. But yes, doing shit like that would be a pretty decent reason to withdraw. It all depends on the judge, really.

What are the chances the good doktor is representing himself?  Then everything he says is vetted by his lawyers? ;D

Even if he was going pro se, he couldn't represent any of the entities or other individual defendants.

As I said earlier, the dude is an opposing counsel's dream.

Horizons may be "paying its bills" (as far as I know it has ~ 1 to 2 thousand subs) but it has never even come close to recouping its development costs.


If you look at what each party said in that pissing match, Wilson is definitely slinging a LOT more mud. Last I heard Slipgate was still working on an MMO as part of Gazillion, and avoiding all publicity specifically to avoid "Romero's Latest Project" sort of news stories.

Plus, uh, Romero designed Doom. Last I checked neither David Allen nor Serek Dmart had anything like that on their resume.

Garriot designed Ultima, that doesn't make him any less unemployably crazy than he is in the present, nor did it before NCSoft decided it was a good idea. Look what happened there. What's your point?

I mean, I agree with the rest of what you have to say, but your edit is ridiculous. Hell, comparing Romero to those guys is already ridiculous but they're all varying levels of burnt out, Romero is just the "Old Guard never Evolved" brand of silly whereas those guys are core evil and outright lame).

You didn't make the comparison though. Romero is a terrible example. They're totally different classes of "THESE GUYS NEED TO GET AWAY FROM GAME DEVELOPMENT."

David Allen did make that game named Mordor which was all about, well, I'm not really sure except it wasn't Mordor.  Doesn't that count for something?

Daikatana is still the watchword for overpromising and underdelivering when it comes to video games though and that is stamped up the top of Romero's CV.

Maybe Garriott and Romero are more direct equivalents than Allen and Smart, but they all meet lulzy failure requirements. It all depends if we want to argue points like whether a major fall from grace is the equivalent of being a loud-mouth forum troll who just happens to know how to code.

I honestly don't think people outside the games industry look at games industry careers in anything like the manner people have been doing in this thread.

Although it would be pretty funny if Serek Dmart was introduced as a professional games developer with twenty years experience and the judge said "yeah - twenty years experience of suck!"

I would kind of trust romero to be a cool guy who has more or less learned important lessons from his own personal disasters and take them and grow from them, as opposed to voldmart who seems more or less incurably sperglord.

For my money, Duke Nukem easily tops Daikatana.  After all, Daikatana was actually released.

Except it's really not. So, uhhh, OK.

Actually played and enjoyed that game for some time, though I can't really explain how or why I enjoyed it. *scratches head*

Me too.

You can't explain why he played or enjoyed it?

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/388/feature/4159/Alganon-Derek-Smart-Interview.html

lol nice pic

He doesn't even need an orange spray tan to look like a douche.

...next, on The Jersey Shore, the gang meet their match in the drama dept.  :why_so_serious:

Compelling stuff. He really spins quite a tale, portraying himself as the humble hero who saves a struggling game from mediocrity.

As for the picture, well. It might convey many things, but professionalism isn't one of them – though it might have been MMORPG.com's editorial pick. All that is missing is Smart's Alganon net handle "BVRBandit" detailed on the front of his wife beater, and we'd be good to go. Business casual isn't quite what it used to be.

Oh fuck would that be funny!

Very entertained to note that worshippers of the great man will be able to express their hero-worship via the game's new microtransaction system:

(Source:http://www.alganon.com/index/new-features)

An exciting opportunity to pay tribute to a true internet legend!

If I pay the $1.25 can I cock-punch the good doctor, or must I purchase the full meal package?

And to think people scoffed at me when I suggested an in-game event featuring Serek Dmart! The demand is clearly there.

Get out the popcorn folks, another round of entertainment ensues.

DS gives an interview to Alganon critic Darzin here:
http://darzin.blogspot.com/2010/04/derek-smart-interview.html

Overall fairly sensible but I did like this gem:


(by the way Darzin, your comments box is too small for people to enter the capcha).

Also Derek summarises the legal situation on his own blog here:

http://www.dereksmart.com/2010/04/dave_allen_saga/

It begins


and continues

Christ. I normally love to read, but reading yet another Serek Dmart "you're all faggots and I rule" post? No thanks.

Also, just copy/pasted it into word. 19 pages, 8741 words. Christ he likes to zergrush people with words.

Skimmed through the blog post. Meandering build-up, but once he gets going the man delivers the crazy in the end. From petty jibes to the kinds of remarks that make an eight-year-old seem mature, they're all there.

At the risk of sounding like a buzz-kill, I feel oddly compelled to quote Schild from page 5:


When it comes to Dmart, less really would be more, though I'm guessing the lawyers won't mind, as they'll be amply compensated for their time either way.

 :ye_gods:

I still am under the impression that letting Serek continue to go upon his merry path has to be for a purpose. There MUST be a reason the shareholders have not ordered him to a code of silence because this is almost too much, even given Serek's history. I'd like to know what the undercurrent is in not gagging him already.

Things you knew already:

"So I’m just going to lay it all out as it flows from my brain to my fingers."

There's a brain involved? I would've thought any brain would be screaming "NO!" as loudly as it could. :oh_i_see:

If you are going to read it, skip to the "open letter to David Allen", where the crazy really starts to come in at an accelerated rate. Dr. Dmart really is not all there.

Wow. Posting pictures of your wife and kids. I'm sure they're just thrilled to be a part of this.

Ludicrous, indeed. I honestly can't see where that's coming from.

I'd bet the lawyers are furious. I would also bet they've told him not to keep giving his opponents ammo.

Three things would I think particularly worry a lawyer.

1) After they've been retained DS is pissing the case away. This is (arguably) their fault for not making it clear to their client he cannot continue to do this. This is bad for their reputation.

2) Possible professional negligence proceedings arising from 1) after DS and QOL lose their case.

3) They may have to go to court with this guy. Does anyone think he will come across well in court before a judge?

It must be particularly worrying looking at the beginning of the blog post before the comedy parts. DS attempts to explain the law of defamation and concludes he can say anything he likes based on David Allen being a "public figure" (arguable) and based on a California precedent where someone got away with calling some public figure a dumb-ass. (The precedent does not apply because a) the proceedings are in a different state with separate defamation law and b) you can call someone a dumb-ass in California because it's not specific. Some of the mud thrown by DS is very specific).

So the lawyers have a situation where, perhaps, they are trying to restrain a client who is continuing to defame the plaintiff because he "knows better" than they do because he did a bit of googling on defamation law. /facepalm.

What must be especially tough on the lawyers is that they know they absolutely cannot go to court with Dmart. They can't count on him to behave well once they're there, and no judge in the world is going to look generously on the innumerable ramblings that he's providing the other side. If you have a client that you can't afford to go to court with and the other side knows it, you're going into a settlement negotiation with them holding all the cards.

You can buy insurance against being sued for breach of contract and defamation? lol...

All this aside, Dsmart must be a brilliant speaker and charming guy in person, its the only reason I can see all of the shenanigans he has been involved in explained. From investors, to working his way from consultant to lead, to well, people listening to him in any real capacity. I mean, doesn't he chair a IGDC panal?

I am sure Smerek would eventually be jailed for contempt - and he would wear that as a badge of honor. Hell, I could not even imagine his ego fitting into the courtroom, let alone on the stand to testify if it came to that.

I wonder what this part means? That him posting it and it being part of the internet and therefore public is not part of a potential lawsuit? That it's going to be revised? I understand the reprinting part, but seriously?

I await the redacted version anyway, it was too much to read.

The redacted file Smart posted is not so redacted after all  :oh_i_see:

http://www.dereksmart.org/bin/TheDaveAllenSaga-REDACTED.pdf

In case you're wondering just how badly Alganon did at launch you can find it on page 6...

I think it means he is trying to scare the unknowing from reprinting his embarrassing rants.

Note that he quoted f13 within his blog, without attribution. It occurs when he refers to "this post by Hue" which is linked to this screenshot:
www.*erek*mart.org/bin/Mathew_Henry_on_Alganon_tech.jpg

(duplicated here (http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/9526/mathewhenryonalganontec.jpg))

Am I missing something? The version I have has blacked out parts in the approrpiate places (including Alganon's subs at launch).

The text is still there under the black boxes. You can select it and copy it over to notepad or something to see what was probably meant to be hidden. -Names of investors, how big the settlements they were discussing were etc. It's all there...

Really? In this day and age, that blunder happens over and over again. People STILL don't learn "redacted" text in PDFs is nothing of the sort.

I wonder when the backers of the game realize they probably have grounds to dismiss DS and then make this all an extremely ironic and funny ending, and BTW one I hope for.

You can't really blame end users on this one. Adobe should have fixed this a long time ago. The CIA, the justice department, Mr. Smart, all these institutions accidentally disclosed sensitive information they were contractually obliged to keep to themselves because of this. Shame on you Adobe, shame on you.

Its for printing, not distribution in digital form, thats what backspace is for. But otherwise :facepalm:.

I think I know some people who'll be interested in reading that.

I love the irony of Derek lambasting David Allen for filing frivolous lawsuits, of all things. That's some good shit, man.

Derek first threatened to sue me in 1993 for an offhand comment about his already legendary flamewars on usenet. I'm not a unique snowflake. He's threatened to sue hundreds if not thousands over the years but never actually followed through. He has no teeth. I'm sure there are other members of that very special club reading these boards right now.

He's totally pathological. And so entertaining!

I maybe incompotent (or maybe its foxit) but I can't highlight the text in the pdf :?

It is not just foxit, the text isn't selectable under full Adobe Acrobat, the pages are images. At least that's true of the PDF that is there now, maybe a different version preceded it.

Hopefully someone has the originals. I would like to see behind the curtain.

Yep, the original has been replaced by an image version.

The PDF got linked in so many places, I think he must have read a tutorial about how to convert it.

Odds on Grumblesmurph being Serek's plausibly deniable leak-alt?

That would be too funny.

Doubt it. Can't imagine him capable of not spewing back once he's in a thread like this, alt or no alt. Plus whomever the person is who uses that handle elsewhere seems to have a sense of humor, not really Serek's forte.

Can we start referring to him by name? He knows that we're laughing at him.

The sheer amount of times his name appears in links as part of this thread should've already summoned him, but it still wouldn't be prudent to summon the demon intentionally by actually doing that... Would it?

If he is lurking, it's probably in his best interests not to respond, but that would mean he'd learned something (and that is not something we can conclude by other times he's posted).

Still is internet history like the thread title suggests, and still delivers after a couple of weeks.

+++++ = 5 stars!

If I didn't make this clear enough in my earlier post, he linked a screenshot (http://www.dereksmart.org/bin/Mathew_Henry_on_Alganon_tech.jpg) from this very thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=18916.msg780088#msg780088) in his latest blog entry.

He doesn't seem like the sort of person who can resist correcting our mistakes or fulfilling his curiosity and not reading, so god knows whats happening.

Reading through the PDF, I'm mostly surprised at how small the numbers are. Not just the abysmal sales (we all knew it was a flop, although selling only 1600 copies is pretty sad) but their budget, too.

You can't even make a Wii game for $2M these days, much less a MMO. It's an astonishing accomplishment that Algalon actually exists, that it's not vaporware, that you can log in and play. Sure it sucks, but it's the talking dog syndrome. If you're walking in the park and you see a talking dog, it doesn't matter what he says!

If the server can only handle 100 simultaneous users I'd say the word "exist" is subjective.

All this shit over that few users? Seriously? Holy fuck.

It really does show just how bad the game is doing (did?) with those numbers.  I mean, realistically speaking its a total non issue and the fact that we are discussing it at all is pretty shocking.  I mean, I expected low numbers, but that low is really something. 1600...that makes barely living games like Champions Online look thriving.

Everyone involved must be rule whores. It's the only way something this insignificant can turn into the drama bomb that it did.

Actually, I'm with Sam on this one: if you can make something that works, even a slavish WoW clone, for that money, that's already kind of an accomplishment. It's like if I made a model of a jet plane in my garage for $1,000 and it kind of made a whooshing noise and sort of threatened to maybe fly for a second and looked pretty much like a teeny-weeny 747. That would get me some kind of credit.

I don't think there ARE any lawyers. Both sides bluffed the other and the actual confrontation will be between 2 sock puppets who refer to each other in the 3rd person.

So what numbers were buried in the PDF? A 2 million dollar budget? 1600 accounts in total?

Comstar might well be right. Though I honestly think Allen should be able to find someone who thinks there might be contingency fees somewhere in the bottom of all this.

Yeah, although he contradicts himself and calls it a $4M investment elsewhere, so who knows which number (if any) is accurate. It also notes Allen's salary, which was shockingly low at under $100k. Although if he was actually a crook as Derek claims, he could have just paid for his groceries and mortgage with the company credit card.

There are certainly lawyers. Allen has a strong case. He might well be a crook, but that burden of proof is high. He was certainly defamed, publicly, repeatedly, and maliciously.

ROFL, lawyers furious or worried?  Nah, they're not, it's part of their job to be extremely calm and not care.  He does whatever he wants, and the laywers will just charge him more, as it will take "more time" to fix all the extra crap.  I doubt any of the laywers have any sort of emotion re: this.

It's like tech support people being furious at the computer not working, or devs being furious that bugs exist in their code. 

Nah.

Depends on the lawyer really. I had a few uncontrollable clients when I was an attorney and they drove me up the wall.  You have to work with other attorneys and appear before judges so its necessary to maintain a bit of credibility just for the sake of your overall practice. When you are repping someone that continually makes your work turn to shit, it gets a bit aggravating. I'm sure there are some lawyers who just don't care and will churn hours, but many attorneys actually don't like representing wild clients. 

One of the things they teach you in law school for this very reason is that a "lawyer is not a bus". You don't have to rep every client that wants you to. Most lawyers have enough to do without the stress of a wild client.

Are lawyers a series of tubes?

Although once you accept the case you have certain ethical obligations to continue representation.

You can bail at many different places. Really the only time you are stuck is if it gets so far into the case (i.e. the trial is coming up) that withdrawing prejudices the client.

oh. OH. the comic just came to me. finally

/

(http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/9864/spergrush.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real:

Brilliant!

That picture is on the edge of being eligible for the awesome pictures thread.

From the blog post.

"I'm not going to accuse you of having committed a white collar crime, but..."

Jesus. I love his way of hinting very very strongly.

I should probably overcome my tldr reaction (which is not a common reaction since I usually love to read) and just go through the entire thing, it must be filled with absolute fucking gems like this.

Edit: Christ. I started to read, and a few paragraphs down:

I love the "in the arizona heat" bit, because that's so relevant. There are probably tons of people in the US that openly carry when going to the mall. Thankfully not that many here in Norway, since we're not as gun crazy as you americans, but still. Not exactly something I'd think that much over if I were in the US. Well, unless the guy looked like an absolute loon.

Oh wait, I thought he wasn't going to accuse him of white collar crime. I see how long that restraint lasted. Christ, someone needs to beat him over the head with his own keyboard, he's a menace to himself.

No earthly keyboard could put a dent in that colossal cranium.

You probably shouldn't watch so much television.  Open carry is legal in many places but it's pretty rare, I lived in Florida (a notorious open carry state) for years and years and only ever saw guns openly carried by uniformed police.

I wasn't actually using television as a reference there, but I was reading a forum which was for gun enthusiasts, where they were talking about OC/Open Carry. I just assumed there would be more people who did that, although "tons" is probably overstating it a bit.

I still probably wouldn't wonder so much about people who were openly carrying if I walked around in Arizona, unless they looked like a loon, since it's legal there. I would at least not consider it a firing "offense" or something to drag out into the public fora over. But then again, he who must not be named doesn't exactly come across as very reasonable.

I actually like Allen better for his open carry. It's so wonderfully non-PC. Perhaps a bit unwise if the visitors were from out-of state, but at least he stayed true to his beliefs.

Besides, it's not as if a gun is going to suddenly jump out of its holster and start shooting people, so I would be happy if people could carry openly here in Norway as well.

BTW, unless things have changed the last few years we have more guns per capita than the yanks do. We probably shouldn't call anyone gun crazy...

We still have one of those old Commodore keyboards which seem to be made of concrete.  I'd donate it if there were pictures involved.

Remember in American Psycho how Bateman was doing all the crossword puzzles with just the words "meat" and "bone?"  Someone should do a comic of that shot with the words "Derek" and "Smart" in lieu of meat and bone.

Gotta love the complete misunderstanding of the legal system in there (with bonus Random Capitalization).  The judge and jury do not "accuse" anyone of anything (and your personal attorneys don't either). For criminal matters the victim or the state makes a complaint and the prosecutor makes the "accusation" in the form of an indictment.

I just realised than Christian Bale's character in American Psycho was called Bateman  :uhrr:

Not too surprising given the individual in question.  This is a civil trial, so half of the supposed offenses don't mean much.

I tried to read that entire blog post, but the last time I saw that much crazy written in one place, it was done in dripping feces on walls made of rubber.

lol, sounds like a good time.

Serek Dmart Serek Dmart Serek Dmart

Damn you forum software!

Shop smart, shop D-mart!

... it's been in my head.

I will give DSma this: his presence on Alganon has certainly increased awareness of the title, so he can tick that marketing goal off.

In case anyone missed it, Lum posted about Dmart's latest blog entry and now has the pleasure of his presence in the Comments section of his blog (http://brokentoys.org/2010/04/19/my-god-its-full-of-derek-smart-and-also-stars/#comments).

BTW Lum, sorry it had to be you, but it should make the comments slightly better than Geld arguing with himself.

Pretty sure it was just a driveby.

Read comment 34 for a larf. ;D

Whoever wins... We lose.

From Dmart's comments to Lum's post:


Even when he tries to insult other people, he keeps inadvertently describing himself. God bless rampant narcissism.

Damn he's funny. He's apparently edited the blog a bit, and added some more stuff. Like:


I bolded the most :ye_gods: part. He's going out, very publically, and guesses. That's awesome. :oh_i_see:

On the contrary, my friend. I believe we are the only winners here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsqJFIJ5lLs

Someone made a comment on Lum's blog that I think might actually reflect what's going on in Smart's head.  The theory was that Smart is trying to bait David Allen and co. into a giant flamewar in order to make David Allen a public figure for defamation law purposes (a public figure who sues for defamation has a higher burden of proof).  It rang true for me because it's sort of the logic of a complete idiot, and it also explains Smart's many legal commentaries (such as they are) juxtaposed with the rest of his drivel. 

That might be a reach considering the past history of Dmart. This is just part of the trend rather than something with purpose...my guess anyway.

True, I don't know a lot of the past history of the guy (though I did find a sweet website that went into extreme detail debunking his claim of having a Phd) but my experience has been that even the most insane douchebags generally have some sort of internal logic.

It really doesn't appear to be so in this case.  I think a lot of this is him not really realizing what a douche he really seems like in his posts.  He seems like one of those guys who leads a charmed life, and doesn't really know other people think he's retarded.  What was that episode of 30 rock that I'm thinking of?

He is sure convinced he is a special flower.  :oh_i_see:

"It's not defamation; I was guessing!"

I think his thought process goes something like, "It's not defamation if you're awesome".

lol

I like him. He's silly.

Hee. Hee. Hee.

And it's Lum's own fault. He invoked. Thus come the wrath, the hammer, the presence.

I can take it, I ain't skeered!

Dear god this is an incestuous community. Reading those comments (apologies Lum, I read your blog but not the comments) fully 1/2 those folks post/posted here and elsewhere. MY GOD ARE WE THAT VAPID?

Edit: Of course we are. Carry on.

I laughed. My wife nearly fell on the floor laughing.

Permission to adapt for use as forum avatar, Captain?

He's getting mentioned all over the place (link to EVE Online general discussion, click (http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1304476&page=25#721) at own risk...  That thread is about a possible teleport-to-target and dont-appear-in-local exploit, with lots of drama, too.  And, it's probably one of y'all who posted about him there, so, apologies for linking).

ALL URS!

I hadn't thought of DS in the context of Eve but it would be a superb fit for him. CAOD seems like it could be his home away from home.

Serek Dmart = Jade Constantine?

No, he's not Jade Constantine, I've heard Jade speak, he's British.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daowPKIj0CA

Dear God. How does getting fired from a customer service position turn you from a sometimes cogent, reasonable fellow into a raging, balloon-headed twat with delusions of adequacy?

So which Battlecruiser should I play, 3K or Millenium? They have a kooky ambitious concept that I'd probably be willing to forgive a lot for, and the price is right.

This One (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/battlecruiser3000ad/review.html)

Yeah, yeah, but it's supposedly patched up to being at least a functional piece of crap now. And anyway it's free. I just don't know how this Millenium game stacks up.

if you do it, make sure you blog the hell out of your experiences.

Fuck, that reminds me, I need to get back to my Tales of the Sword Coast thing. But yeah, c'mon people, someone has to know. Is Millenium playable? From what little I've learned it seems to be the "better" of the two if you operate from the naive premise that everything more or less works.

I wouldn't give the man the time even if it meant being able to rip it to pieces. All the man needs to know is you that you played it... that taint may never come off.

 :pedobear: Alganon finishes changes, announces relaunch (http://www.massively.com/2010/04/29/alganon-finishes-changes-announces-relaunch/) :pedobear:

That looks awesome.

For 1999.

Two weeks?  What did they do, just reskin the UI?

and troll !

I'll admit, it now looks hugely different from WoW.

 :oh_i_see:

How very... ummm... retro!

But seriously, that's the game they are "releasing" now? Well I guess it will run on any pc this side of a Windows98 machine right?

I'm curious. I'm gonna try this now. I wanna see the Smartification with my own eyes.

Just be aware that this kinda shit sticks with you for life, like herpes.

oohhh report back soon, I'll be making popcorn  :popcorn:

It's more likely to get in your eyes. Make sure you have a clear path to your sink.

That looks worse than it did before.

I thought Serek Dmart was too? (or did I just get trolled?)

I think that's the idea: make it look less like WoW by making it look shittier.

Didn't they basically say they ripped off WoW 'cause they couldn't do any better?
Point proven I guess   :oh_i_see:

I just received an account confirmation email from "MyAganon - Confirmation". That's right, without an L. I guess Serek is trying to stealth-change the name of the game for obscure lawsuit reasons.

I'd re-use my WoW password.

He can't possibly be British, he's too ungentlemanly.

To be honest I just assumed Smart was American. He lives and works in America, trolls the internet incessantly, threatens to sue or call the FBI at the drop of a hat and has an ego the size of Texas. Where else could he be from?

He also uses the handle Beaver Bandit which isn't a term we use here in Britain. That in itself suggests that he is not Jade since no one has ever accused Jade of being heterosexual.

Canada?

You're from Eton, aren't you?  Or maybe Windsor?

We like our beaver. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w119vuZVdz8) :why_so_serious:

Sony hates my Germanitude. However if that wasn't Primus then you fail.

He failed.  I am here to rescue you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYDfwUJzYQg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYDfwUJzYQg)

It really does seem that captain dickhead is trying to crashfail this game while pretending on the surface to the investors that he's tried to save their sinking ship, so that he can then turn around and buy the code/tech/etc for peanuts. On top of being batshit insane, of course.

Hee hee.  I tried the trial prior to and after the 2.0 upgrade. It was funny how Dr. Dumb blasted Alganon for being a copy of WoW, and said how they have these new great starting areas etc, etc.

Well the new starting areas are like this:

After you create a character,  you get a fly by with narration which is exactly like WoW.  Unbelievable.

Once there,  you start a short " go to and talk to these people "  quest, where the npcs are within 20 feet of each other, then enter a teleporter and are unceremoniously dropped into the 1.0 starting areas with the same  quests as the earlier version.  The new improved starting area takes about 3 minutes or less to complete.   Everything is exactly the same except the interface and the item shop.   Performance is worse as well.

Bravo good Doctor, Bravo.  :awesome_for_real:

Did anyone call him out on his negativity and suggest he, you got it, Leave?

Somewhere in all this mess is a fantastic Leave It to Beaver joke...

I'm sure if Alganon dies he'll be ver y sorry.

DON'T WORRY GUYS DOCTOR SMURT IS HERE TO SAVE YOUR GAME AND YELL AT PEOPPLE

(http://i.imgur.com/ji7Jo.gif)