The man who started it all!
1,635 posts
It's no big deal and has nothing to do with our decision to not do a Vanguard site. That decision was solely a factor of not being able to get enough people into the beta to start a site and also my playing both lotro and vanguard and deciding lotro was by far the better game and the one we wanted to use our resources toward.
Some background is in order. Once upon a time there was a game called Everquest. It was an amazing game unlike any we had seen up to then, but not without some serious flaws. One flaw was in the quest system. To get a quest in Everquest, you had to walk around a town and walk up to every NPC, click on them and hit "H". They would then say something to you. You then had to try out every possible response to what they said until you happened to hit upon the right combination of key works in the right order and they then would talk back to you. This would continus until you got a quest. Quests were hard and extremely vague. They often took days to work through and involved literally hours of mindlessly running around or sitting in a single place killing the same mob over and over. When you were done you would finally return to the quest giver and 9 times out of 10 he would thank you, pat you on the head and give you the in game equivalent of a nickle. I got frustrated with the quest system and began a site where I posted up full walkthroughs of the quests with what to say, who to say it to, what to kill and what the ultimate reward was. This did not fit into Brad McQuaid's vision of the game and he expressed a serious dislike of our site, despite the fact that over time most of the players started to go there and look up the quests.
By the time Everquest released its first expansion, Allakhazam had become the indisputed leader for EQ information. We not only did quests, but items (showing what to kill to get the item, which was supposed to be secret), trade skills (originally the idea was players would just try different combinations and discover how to make things), mobs and more. Illia had come aboard and databased everything as well. It was frankly already far bigger than I had ever imagined the site would get when I started it.
There was a weekend long party for the expansion release being held in Las Vegas, so I decided to go. At the party, I was introduced to the commnunity manager for EQ. While we were talking, he saw Brad and said I just have to introduce you to him. So he went up to Brad and said I want to introduce you -- Brad started to stick out his hand -- to Allakhazam. Brad snapped his hand back down, turned his back and walked away. I actually found it more amusing than insulting.
So anyways that's my story of the first time I met with Brad McQuaid. Years later I met him again and told him about that time and he didn't remember it. As I said, it's more of an amusing anectdote than anything serious. I would very happily deal with Brad or anyone else at Sigil. In fact, I had always gotten along very will with the folks at Sigil. Jeff Butler has his own Allakhazam story that is also very amusing.
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