Mr. Smart is the Best Forum Poster [INTERNET HISTORY ITT]

[tgr]

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

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

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.

[Riggswolfe]

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

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

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?

[schild]

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.

[tgr]

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

[rattran]

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.

[Koyasha]

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.

[stu]

Is Alganon the expansion to Forumwarz I keep hearing about?

[Riggswolfe]

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.

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.

[Tarami]

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.

[01101010]

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.

[Sheepherder]

Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu don't get out much, do you?

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

[Khaldun]

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."

[KallDrexx]

lol "pure definition of same" ?

[Ixxit]

New interview up with "He who cannot be named"


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

[schild]

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

[Mrbloodworth]

New interview up with "He who cannot be named"


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

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

[01101010]

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."

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[tmp]

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 (..)

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

[Pendan]

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?

[tgr]

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.

[Ixxit]

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?

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:

Oh and Serek Dmart, the moment you opened your big fat ugly mouth and the words "I fired David Allen, he didn't leave" came out, you made it entirely about you. Because you wouldn't let the QoL press release hold you back from being yourself. You needed the world to know what you are about.

Again, tell us how you did you try to stop David Allen and Co. from releasing the game in November? Since you weren't with the company as a programmer or manager of any sort -- how did you suddenly get chosen as the new President, entirely out of the blue? How is it you knew, as an employee that there was vote of no confidence in David Allen?

Oh, you weren't an employee, just an investor who backstabbed his way into a leadership position so you could get your grubby hands on the one thing you could never program yourself, a working network code.

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.

[UnSub]

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

Favourite quote from that article:

This was a silent role and not to be made public because I didn't want to take attention and focus away from the game, given that anything to do with me would create the equivalent of a media blitz.

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

[Daeven]

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.

Roman Polanski
Woody Allen

...

[IainC]

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

[sam, an eggplant]

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

[Daeven]

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

[HaemishM]

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

[Dtrain]

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

[Soln]

The story will remain 100% consistent and truthful because there is nothing to hide, there is no libel, there is no defamation, there is no tort.

there is no tort

there is no tort

the cake is a lie

I knew it!

[Xuri]

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

[proudft]

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

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

[hyuu]

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?

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.

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;"        



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.)

[Mrbloodworth]

Uh oh.  

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.  

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

[Lantyssa]

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.)

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.