Colossal wall of fail text crits you for over 9000.

Man where to start.

First and foremost, one would think someone would try to distance themselves from a pile of utter fail instead of trying to take credit for every single piece of it. Now maybe, just maybe this is David Allen taking one for the team and trying to place 100% of the blame on himself, but somehow I doubt that. I’m also not sure how much of an accomplishment it really is to ship crap. I mean perhaps shipping crap is better than trying to build crap and failing before launch, but I’m not fully convinced here, since the end result is still a product that failed to make a profit. The major difference however between something like Alganon and failed-to-launch-MMO-X is that you know Alganon sucks, while MMO X might have been decent if finished. Not all canned games are indeed horrible (or at least not Alganon-level of horrible).

Moving on.

I built the UI.

Really? You really built that UI? You sure?

Because… oh I don’t know… if I did not have keys in my game, would I really include a keychain icon in my UI? Or maybe, just maybe, that’s an ‘oops’ you forgot to change when you did a straight copy/paste from the fan-made / Blizzard-profited WoW UI?

However the market shifted; interest in fantasy MMOGs changed

News at 11, people no longer want fantasy MMOs. Yes, that’s it. Perhaps more accurately, since the dawn of mankind, NO ONE HAS EVER WANTED TERRIBLE GAMES. Well, that’s just my opinion of course, perhaps after decades, this whole elves ‘fad’ really is over. To the profit-heavy lands of Sci-Fi and Steampunk!

I told him an “alternative to WoW and other fantasy-based MMOGs” would be a great first product.

Well you succeeded. You created something that, despite your ‘best’ effort, was more or less nothing like WoW in terms of enjoyment. Mission accomplished!

People say “for a $20 million dollar game, Alganon sure didn’t deliver” and when they realize we shipped for less than $3.5M they cannot believe it.

The unbelievable part is not that you did it with 3.5m rather than 20m, it’s that you managed to create a pile of fail and perhaps the genre’s ‘best’ direct copy/paste game. That alone is remarkable. How exactly do you create both something so terrible and yet something so similar to the source? It’s magic really; the ability to remove just the good bits and leave everything else intact. Bravo for that.

None of them even played a MMOG before their investment in Alganon.

That most likely explains why you got the money in the first place. Had any of them actually played an MMO, let alone the one you tried and failed to clone, they would have recognized how terrible your product was and never got involved in the first place. You should be THANKING them for being so clueless.

Also, most of the Fantasy F2P games were cheap Asian-developed “money makers”, and nothing more. I didn’t want Alganon to be like that

Mission accomplished again! Alganon stayed as far away from a “money maker” as possible, while still delivering cheap Asian F2P-level gameplay! That’s almost as impressive as cloning WoW with 0% of the fun.

Alganon is definitely no clone of WOW and anyone who plays it more than a few hours can see this. I want to say again; Alganon was supposed to be the first real viable alternative to WoW – for gamers who liked fantasy-based MMOGs and liked WoW, but wanted something different.

The sky is green today.

But seriously, the FIRST viable alternative to WoW? Really? You sure beat all those other WoW clones to market, and dominated in both quality and originality!

In addition to the above facts, QOL has made allegations such as I was just a consultant and didn’t contribute anything as co-founder of the company. They have also removed me from the credits as the creator of Alganon. Its one thing to challenge and debate, but it’s another thing altogether to rewrite factual history by fabricating lies and removing credit, which is exactly what Derek and those who support him have done.

Now I don’t know about you, but if I was at work and basically made the single biggest mistake one could make on the job (Alganon), and someone else at work said “Hey that mistake (Alganon) is all me”, I’m not sure I would write up a wall of text to ‘defend’ myself and claim credit. Especially if I hated the person attempting to take the bullet in the chest for me. Derek is trying to do you a FAVOR and claim responsibility for this disaster, and yet you are so completely blind you are fighting him for who can rule the fail kingdom and wear the terribad crown…

I also remember during the final conversation I had with Greg where I stated something along the lines of “do you realize you and Willard are endorsing a lying malicious person who has no qualifications whatsoever to run QOL?” and his exact response was “nobody’s perfect.”

I would have said “Can it get any worse?”.

Finally, we have Derek Smart. The name alone is enough for a red flag.

Yet when he first approached you, you jumped right at the chance to work with him. Hmmm.

Derek has open criminal warrants for his arrest, a lengthy police record, is a proven PhD fraud, and has been banned from Wikipedia

Sing along: One of these is not like the others.

Ok I’ll be honest and say I skimmed the rest of it, as even a slow Monday is not enough to get me through the rest. It really is amazing though, watching someone fight so hard to gain credit for something so terrible. I get that you put all this time/effort into it, I do, but when the end result is such a blatantly failed hackjob, just walk away.

It’s not the genre’s shift away from elves, or the lack of publicity (has any fail product ever received MORE publicity than this game?), or lack of funding. It’s that you created a really, really bad WoW clone, released it in a pre-alpha state, and to this day claim it’s not what it is.

Hopefully the nightmare ends soon and you wake up.

Bonus Chuck-link-o-the-day-from-reader-Sleepy-Sam: Enjoy!