Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Brad Mcquaid looted 45k of the crowdfunding
This discussion has been closed.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
It is the senior citizens fault and the scammers should be prosecuted.
Problem is, what you describe is an actual crime, and what McQuaid did, is not necessarily so.
And further, since McQuaid's reputation for not delivering was certainly well known, at least in so far as that anyone that knew who McQuaid was, should have known who they were giving money to. And thus, the high chance it would be scam.
Getting scammed by a known "scammer" is dumb, and I feel no pity for the people that forked over cash after the failed KS; there were all the red flags in the world.
People that got fleeced here, deserve what they got for forking over cash to McQuaid, for some pipe-dream game that would not even have come out for 4-5 years.
Dumb.
People can say what they want about Brad's shady actions, but what he did was plainly a last ditch effort to keep Pantheon alive.
This is not a defense of his actions, I personally would have just divided the money and gone down with the ship, but he wants to make this game and it seems he was willing to step on his friends and colleagues in order to get it done. They made $150k in donations and had nothing else coming in, so at that point, who do you pay and who do you cut? If Brad lost the rest of the people on Pantheon staff (and he did), it would be terrible (and it was) because they were all talented and respected developers, but alas, "the show must go on". Had he lacked the funding to pay his bills, he would have been out looking for a new job, and pantheon would be 6 feet under, never to see the light of day again.
As much as people want to hate on Brad McQuaid, this genre needs him. However horrible of a person he may be, every game he has been involved with was amazing, even Vanguard launching a year early, missing content and completely unstable. Anyone who says otherwise is simply ignorant of his contributions to this genre and should get an mmo education.
You can hate the man, but I still hope he manages to make Pantheon. He may not deserve it, but for purely selfish reasons and for the sake of gamers like myself, I hope the new team is successful.
They opened up posting on their forums by anyone. You no longer have the pay wall restriction.
That being said, they have pretty much deleted or banned any post or account that does not drink their Kool-Aid. So be wary of what you post. Their forum guidelines are not followed. They will also likely gang up on you, accuse you of being from rerolled and other things that paranoia brings.
But do go have fun there while you can.
K-TAM Radio
is this guy trolling!? Brad is that you!?!?
Definitely an odd post. Could just be someone in denial but whatever.
I think I posted once about his new game and kept a fairly neutral attitude. Everyone deserves a second chance. That said I personally would not have given his project money because of his history and how it went down. He screwed over a lot of people that worked for him. It was pretty messed up how the his last company went down. Sad sad sad..
Second chances are fine, when it is on your own dime.
This guy was begging for cash based on long past glories, and on the heels of his last project being a complete failure from the business side.
So this time, he suckers a few diehards to cough up cash based on some BS and pipedreams (although they may be opiate dreams in this case) after the failed KS,
And then took the money and ran.
This is all the chances this guy is ever going to get in the industry.
I've been saying this since the prick stole Everquest and passed it off as his own.
I will take it even further and say Scott Hartsman is another one just like him.
How he goes from being a part-time server tech at Earthlink, to Project Lead for EQ2, to being GM at Trion is by being a charming BS artist who lies on his resume.
If you look at his resume on linkedin everything before SOE is a total fabrication.
Sadly that is the problem with the industry, the guys making the decisions aren't developers, they are the liars, cheaters, and thieves that scam their way to the top on other peoples work.
I pretty much said what you just said just nicer. It's why I stated I would not have given him money. Anyone who followed what happened with Sigil should know. There was some really bad low stuff that happened. He screwed a lot of people who counted on him for income. If I remember correctly SOE didn't get nearly as much positive credit as they should have when they stepped in.
I wouldn't be so sure about the last bit. People knew what he did last time and still backed him. He's got a recognizable name. That goes a long ways. I am not going to start bum kicking someone because we all get second , third chances. TBH I thought he may have gotten his shit together.
Still wouldn't have given him a dime though. 
Well its a shame it went south, I did back it, but on the premise that you don't give more than you can afford to lose. Like a lot of others it was really the only game with promise, not saying that others may not come, but the themepark MMO hopping junk we get dished out these days is a poor reflection on where MMO's came from. Brad may not have the where withal to actually come thru on a game but I did enjoy Vanguard and can "Optimistically" see the possibilities.
I feel sorry for the other dev's, as lets be honest, they were hoping his name would bring it all about and the KS failure really didn't help.
I hope the game does see the light of day, but somehow I don't see it happening under present management. There's definitely a market for it and seeing some articles and forum talk about harder group based games only confirms that someone will take notice soon than later.
What exactly do you mean by he stole Everquest and passed it off as his own? I have never heard this before can you please elaborate.
Not exactly sure what he is referring to, BUT I have heard gossip (vague internet postings) that during the wild days of game development in the 90s developers shared ideas and were not so proprietary about them as today. Brad just listened well and collected these ideas as his own. I have no idea if this is true. After all, any large achievement is usually the result of the work of many people.
Thing about gossip is, its often a way of passing around a lie by pretending to have heard something from somewhere else.
Even the devs involved with EQ have varying opinions of the amount of credit Brad deserves. I've spoken to a decent amount of them over the years and some give him credit and others not so much.
After being pretty involved with the Pantheon project and having direct access to Brad, I can say I left this project with no confidence in the guy. He's just missing something. He's smart but he lack common sense. He has to be lead around and nudged in the right directions. It's very apparent.
Might want to look at this
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/9/feature/5970/EverQuest-The-Making-of-a-Classic.html
Everquest the base game was designed and coded by a group of guys sitting around the NWN dev chat room on AOL. Back in the day we use to share code so that a lot of people could contribute and work on the problems together. Brad use to hang out in the room, not as a coder, not contributing, just as a wannabe and big talker.
This was in the infancy on the industry when people trusted each other, and it was just about making the best game possible.
Regardless Brad took the code claimed he wrote it, secured financing to develop the game based on code he stole and claimed was his.
SOE eventually realized Brad was a con man and liar and eventually rode him out on a rail.
To give credit where it is due, his wife is one hell of a coder and was the true creative force behind EQ2, even if that other BS artist Hartsman came in and got credit for her work.
That is the dumbest rumor I've ever heard. You people try way too hard at this. He sucks, he stole money and he's failed once again....but don't try and rewrite history because you're mad at him.
What's next...did he hammer in one of the nails on the cross ?
^This
Why he thinks he needed money ahead of a product that's not even out, let alone successful is beyond me...but that BS story about him quoted there....typical round here
yep, also, he build the wall around berlin, made bush attack the iraq and worst, he made the russians send that nasty sputnik up there!
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Why is this even news,of course bills need to be paid weather he told the others or not.I guarantee you Chris Roberts is not only taking more than that out of his fund i bet he is paying himself a rather large salary.If your wife went ahead and paid some bills without telling you it would be considered common household chores and nobody would care.What are you going to do ridicule the wife for paying bills thinking you had another 50 bucks there to go drinking and buy smokes?
Point is paying the bills is far more important than the game,it is called taking care of responsibilities.
This sort of stuff has been going on forever yet seems more important if Brad does it?Other leads are doing much worse including the infamous "donations" tag,most likely to avoid paying taxes.
There are multi millionaire businesses out there taking crowd funding money and they don't need one cent of it ,yet they are all cool and fine with just taking from the naive.One rich and famous took crowd funding money and used it to put her kid through school.One of the big movie production operations used crowd funding to pay for their TV series the list goes on and on.
Those that jumped ship were not getting paid anyhow and even if they had two more months,that would have been 2 more not paid and the game would still not be finished.
Just like crowd funder's,anyone who joined the team knew what they were getting into ,NOTHING was secure as far as money or jobs were concerned.
I would say there is some room for complaint if the game was finished and needed that 45k to role out the publishing and get the funds coming back,but this was a project that was not going to make any money until it was completely finished.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
What are you some kind of moron? You're basically saying that because other people steal and pocket money, that this guy doing it is somehow alright? Who the hell cares what other people do? This is about a guy who scammed people out of money for a project he's not working on. On top of that, he took money that was donated to creation of something and blew it on personal expenses. Is it illegal? I doubt it, but it sure as hell is unethical and we don't need morons like you defending them. Bills are more important than the game? Sure, but people didn't pay money to help Brad with his bills. He took the money under very specific terms and personal spending was not in the terms. Either you didn't read and follow this story or you're a waste of humanity.