player that rose to power leading one of the largest fansite communities. He earned the esteemed "Community Influencer" rank that opened the gates to game designers and allowed him to forge ties with prominent SOE staff. With his connections it wasn't long before the site he administrates,
developers to post on. Behind the scenes "LFG" played a role working with inside sources to leak information that resulted in the
. The forum also resulted in leak of the news (almost a month before it actually happened) that former Senior Producer,
.
His actions wouldn't come without serious ramifications. Last week
as the reasoning behind their decision. In the destructive wake that followed an ugly entanglement by both
players has surfaced. Allegations of cheating,
, and other scuttlebutt permeate forum posts. This is a drama that pits community against community, developers against players, and more than likely developers against developers. It is a story that has shaken up a very large community and that has once placed SOE in a questionable spotlight. I contacted "LFG", the
Flames administrator, to help bring some clarity to it all.
Please tell us a little bit about the SOE community Influencer Program and your history as a member.
LFG: I have been a member of the SOE Community Influencer Program, formerly known as the Community Summit Program, since shortly before the first Fanfaire in 2005. Participation in that program involved access to a private web forum where we were able to interact with SOE employees, and where they sought our feedback. It also involved events, sometimes at SOE HQ and sometimes held at Fanfaires, where SOE flew us in and provided lodging and accommodations. I've been invited to three of these events. The first one I attended was at the Las Vegas Fanfaire in 2005, the most recent one I attended was again at the Las Vegas Fanfaire of 2007. SOE held another Community Influencer event last week in San Diego, but I wasn't invited to that one. I now understand why.
(Editor's Note: A little history on SOE's "Summit" program. It first started out as the "Guild Summit" for EverQuest players in June 2004. After EQ2 launched it was branded as a "Community Summit" where knowledgeable players from both games discussed development ideas and their respective concerns. This lasted for several years until 2007 when it turned into the "Influencer Summit" and took on a vastly different approach, such as invitation list that spanned a broader playerbase and more fansite representation.
According to various reports, the "Influencer Summit" served SOE's marketing and evaluation interests more heavily than past summits. One respected attendee and community representative went as far as calling these new summits "a dog and pony show."
In the following comments, Craig "Grimwell" Dalrymple, Senior Community Manager for SOE San Diego, states older summits that focused on productive discussion between developers and players would be billed as "Developer Summits." No date or time was specified.)
Now that we have a little history about your role in the program, tell us more about EQ2 Flames for those that are unfamiliar with its background. Some people hate your forums and others love it, but there is no denying its popularity.
LFG: To me and many other players, forums are half the fun of a MMO. I'd been an active participant in the private EQ forums that grew up around that game.
Private forums were widely used by players in EQ because there were no "official forums" when EQ first launched, until sometime later. But when SOE launched the Official Forums for EQ2 on the same day it launched EQ2, players flocked there, and all other attempts to launch private forums by EQ2 players failed. Players just used the Official Forums, and other EQ2 forum attempts littered the Internet like road kill.
The EQ2 Official Forum community thrived until the end of 2005, when Brenlo, who was formerly manager of the EQ forums, took responsibility for all SOE websites. Up until that time, EQ2 had an active community manager, who lightly moderated the forums in addition to reaching out to the EQ2 community and serving as the interface between players and SOE employees.
Brenlo came to his new position with the idea that the forums needed more moderation. I'd categorize his style as corporate, politically correct, and G rated. Before his time, free speech was usually tolerated on the official forums, but all that soon came to an end.
Brenlo decided to impose much heavier moderation and censorship on the official forums. The man is smart, and figured out how to do that without additional cost to SOE. His solution was to empower a group of incognito player-volunteers as moderators. These moderators began overrunning and micro managing the official forums to the extent that you couldn't get into a disagreement with anyone, or strongly criticize SOE or EQ2, or your posts would be deleted and you could be banned. The censorship on the official forums grew worse and worse, until all of my favorite posters and most of my guildmates were banned. People began being banned for reasons including "excessive negativity." The fun of the game was gone for me because nothing more than happy talk and roleplaying was tolerated on the forums I loved. The final straw for me came one day when an on-line friend of mine, Khalan, was banned for nothing more than daring to suggest that SOE devs would have a better understanding of the bugs in game if they actually played it. After complaining about this repeatedly and being told "if you don't like these forums, go make your own", I decided to do just that, against all odds.
(Editor's Note: Alan "Brenlo" Crosby is the Director of Global Community Relations for SOE)
It hasn't been long since the changing of the guard at the upper echelons in the EQ2 development team with Bruce "Froech" Ferguson taking over as Senior Producer. You were right about Scott "Gallenite" Hartsman leaving the company. Did his leaving the company play a factor in the relations between SOE and EQ2 Flames? Why do you think you were booted from SOE's "Influencer" program?
LFG: Once Gallenite left EQ2, relations between me, my site, and SOE immediately began to chill. Scott was a tolerant, creative person and free thinker. Gallenite's replacement, Bruce, is a politically correct, corporate thinker much like Brenlo. Grimwell is little more than a yes man to Brenlo. So once Bruce took over for Scott, there is no doubt in my mind that this trio began looking for an excuse to revoke my fan site status and boot me out of the Community Influencer Program.
They found that excuse yesterday, after a dev (Aeralik) complained to them about one of my users posting his ingame character and guild name on my site, which basically "outed" who he was as a player. But here's the rest of the story. A long time ago, I'd added mod rights to the SOE user group on my site, so that SOE employees could edit their posts if they wanted without me having to grant edit rights to them on demand, or on a post by post basis. My site has a 15 minute edit timeout, which I imposed back in the beginning after repeated situations where players would start drama, change their mind, and delete all their posts. That left a lot of unreadable threads and holes in my site, so we shortened the edit timer to 15 minutes, and that policy has worked well for us.
(Editor's Note: Chris "Aeralik" Kozak is an EverQuest 2 developer)
I'm not a technical person, I rely upon my partner (Niber) on the site to do all the technical stuff, I just add content and direction to the site, and enforce our Site Rules. So what I didn't know is that when I gave Aeralik global mod rights to his own posts, I was actually giving him the global ability to edit or delete any post on the site.
After the user posted Aeralik's character name and guild, Aeralik saw that post and deleted it. I was pretty shocked about that, because I wasn't even aware he had the ability to do that. So after he did that, Aeralik sent me a PM expressing outrage about what the user had posted, and said he deleted the post. Shortly thereafter, I posted that I was the one who deleted it, in a good faith attempt to keep the situation from exploding.
What Aeralik refused to accept was that we don't delete posts on my site unless they are in violation of a specific Site Rule. This has always been our answer to the over moderation of the official forums, and the reason for our popularity - you can't take things back. But there was no rule to cover what he did or to prevent a user from posting his character information. So I decided to cover the situation by amending my Site Rules, which according to my site policy, is done after user comment and a vote. I put up a poll asking the whether the Site Rules should be amended to prevent players from "outing" devs who play EQ2 by posting their player information, without even naming him. That's when Aeralik got angry, and accused me of doing what I did to embarrass him for the purpose of getting advertising revenue. And then I got angry at him in return - he created the problem by disclosing his identity to other players, and I was just trying to help him out. He refused to believe I'd acted in good faith, and said I should have done all this privately. I'm sorry, but that doesn't work on my site, we are not the Official Forums, we don't censor except based on our Site Rules. Aeralik then complained at SOE about this situation, and the very next day my fan site and Community Influencer status was revoked.
I am outraged that Grimwell has stated that I abused a position of trust and access to SOE devs by what I've posted on my forums. Nothing is further from the truth. The great majority of SOE employees seemed afraid to talk to me based on the culture of fear and repression at SOE headquarters. Of the few SOE employees I maintain ongoing relations with, we NEVER even discussed EQ2, we only had social conversations. I simply never wanted to put them into a position that would make them uncomfortable, and I would never and have never breached any confidence with a SOE employee or anyone else.
Grimwell's statements are based on the fact that I've successfully leaked several big stories about SOE on my site in the past year. For example, I was first to announce that SOE was purchasing Vanguard, and that Scott Hartsman was leaving EQ2. More recently, I broke the scandal involving the Test server where dozens of player accounts were secretly moved to a live server after some of those players had been involved in some outrageous exploitation and abuse. I obtained all this information fair and square from SOE employees who approached me with it for the purpose of wanting it disclosed publicly while maintaining their confidentially. I did not ask for this information, it was given to me by rightfully concerned SOE employees who wanted it leaked. Grimwell somehow believes that my honest conduct and investigative journalism amounts to an abuse of trust, and that SOE was buying my silence when it flew me to Fanfaires and gave me VIP treatment. He is very wrong, and I will not be bought or silenced by him or anyone else.
Thank you for your time and your story.
Massively readers, if you have your own questions for "LFG" please leave a comment, and I will ask him to answer them.
I felt this story was too important not to cover because it raises a lot of questions. EQ2 players, anyone playing a SOE game, should care about what is going on behind-the-scenes at SOE. We should question the policies between players and developers. Favorites will always be played, but please, also keep in mind that not every developer is leaking high-end strategies, or posting anonymously with ulterior motives on a player run forum. The majority are hard working, and conducts their actions and behavior in a professional manner.
As for the summits, I think they worked extremely well in the past, but there needs to be more transparency on SOE's end. The players from the different communities should vote on their representation when SOE holds a "Guild" or "Developer" summit. The last one that took place a week ago was called an "Influencer Summit." This is the wrong label because most if not all attendants represented fansites and not specific player communities or play servers. There is nothing wrong with different summits as long as SOE clearly communicates with their playerbase the purpose that summit serves and how attendance is decided.
At last, it is also important to question the actions of high-favored players and fansite media with inside connections to developers. "LFG" is a perfect example where a relationship between a player and developers was muddied and went horribly wrong. His removal from the program as a consequence for leaking information given to him by SOE developers comes as no surprise, and even if told to do so by those parties I believe SOE's decision was justified. In his defense, there was a bigger story than leaks from inside the company, and he has brought to light a truth, revealing a political climate between players and developers that is not often seen nor heard about.
Additional: In the interests of full disclosure, it should be noted that Massively lead blogger Michael Zenke
participated in the most recent Influencers event.
_thumbnail.jpg "Aion Beta: Asmodian Ascension Quest")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
David McGraw said on 12:23PM 3-18-2008
It's ALL their fault, isn't it, LFG? I lose more and more respect for you as this event moves further. What happened was for a reason, and you seem to be caught up in your own world. Man up and take responsibility for what YOUR actions did or didn't do. And there is no excuse for publicly presenting developer information on your site. They entrusted it to you for a sole purpose. Your childish acts of posting all the developers information was stupid.
It's called respect.
"I wasn't even aware he had the ability to do that" - How do you not know this? You run the site! Even if somebody helps you with the web content, you still run the site and can see that!
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Petgroup said on 12:42PM 3-18-2008
LFG didn't post dev info, someone else did. Just like somebody could post 10,000 credit card numbers right now if they wanted to there. The post was delted, they screwed him over, a better post was created that revealed SoE devs give handouts to NPU. Thats fair.
Sam said on 1:02PM 3-18-2008
I just want to clear something up. Alot of people seem to be making the mistake that LFG posted up a list of information about the developers identities that he had received via the Influencers Program in a "childish backlash" for being kicked out of the program.
This is not the case.
It was another individual poster on EQ2Flames who posted a summary of developer information on the site, not LFG. And as far as I am aware, that individual obtained this information simply by collating a combination of publically available information from places such as Google, the EQ2 website, the developers own public blogs, and from people who the developers had revealed this information to in game.
Not taking sides here btw - just wanted to point out the inaccuracy of saying the LFG posted up "insider" info that he shouldn't have....
David McGraw said on 12:55PM 3-18-2008
@jay: I've read plenty, including this entire article, and based my feedback on it all. But thanks for providing some great feedback yourself and running to save the day. *thumbs up*
@pet: LFG is responsible for that website. He allowed all of that contact information to remain present. That's a huge sign of disrespect, and you can't ignore that.
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Petgroup said on 1:21PM 3-18-2008
He allowed nothing to remain. He removed every post that had dev info from it THEN amended his site rules to ban anyone that posted that info.
THEN after all that, SoE cut ties with him. He removed the new site rule and Snark posted everything.
You are commenting on this and your comments and timeline are 100% bogus.
Do some research.
David McGraw said on 1:30PM 3-18-2008
I know LFG cut ties with SOE. EQ2Flames is still a site that revolves around EQ2. Just because they part ways, doesn't mean that one side has to jab a knife into the side of the other. Especially when it comes to maintaining a personal information list thats designed to get back at SOE, when the reason for this event isn't even on all of those employees to begin with.
Both sides needed compromise, but one side really blew the chances out of the water.
Genda said on 1:05PM 3-18-2008
I also run a fan site for a SOE game, although not as well trafficked as LFG's. I've had some of the same experiences and made some of the same observations about Crosby in particular. He's a brick wall between SOE and what they want to see, hear, and say and the community.
It's best to distance yourself officially from SOE as a fan site operator, as being close only subjects you to the carefully-crafted corporate speak of the SOE community bots. I've always tied to run my site by my rules, and have never taken instructions from SOE or Sigil before them when it came to NDA-breakers. I was on the same page as they were anyway, so it wasn't like they had to strongarm me.
LFG, I think you made a mistake in outing SOE on your site. I've always felt a fansite should be free of politics from both sides. If you don't have a blog, this would have been a great opportunity to start one. Frankly it's a little unprofessional what you did. You had a rule against posting private emails and PM's didn't you? Why isn't that rule as important as the other ones your site has?
I admire that you have built a community over there, I know how hard that is. I think you were done wrong in all this, but I think your reaction has just served to create drama.
You didn't really need to embarrass SOE, I think they do a pretty good job of doing that themselves.
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Petgroup said on 1:34PM 3-18-2008
LFG did not out anyone.
There was no rule at all on his site since it started that you were not allowed to post developers in game character names. He made it a rule after somebody posted one EVEN THOUGH the community voted against the rule.
After SoE cut ties with him the next day, he removed the rule he put in place to protect them and the floodgates opened.
SoE has no one to blame but themselves. If devs didn't want players to know who they really were, they would have kept that info private. They chose not to.
Mark said on 1:09PM 3-18-2008
Dave,
Best stop posting as you're making a fool of yourself. Your reading comprehension skills are severely lacking.
Is anyone surprised at the outcome here? This is SOE's track record with their MMO fanbase. There is a reason MMO players have great distaste and distrust of SOE. That reputation has been well earned.
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kelenvor said on 1:32PM 3-18-2008
Wouldn't it make sense for devs not to inform anyone of their identity on their personal accounts? Once you let anyone know, you put yourself at risk. I don't have a problem with the devs playing but they should keep an extremely low profile.
What LFG might of done was wrong, but it doesn't excuse this air of secrecy that SOE has developed around the dev team and the interaction with other players.
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Hailin said on 1:41PM 3-18-2008
Genda your comments sound really familiar to The Grouchy Gamers comments on the latest Shut up we're Talking episode.
Though it was unprofessional I can't say even going out and starting a blog to post about this would be any more unprofessional of him to do so. It would be no different if Massively or Kotaku did the same thing and both of them are simply in there most basic form blogs about gaming.
I think what is happening over at EQflames now is just happening out of anger and spite. In a month or two no one will remember it even happened.
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Petgroup said on 1:49PM 3-18-2008
Somebody in a month or two will remember what happened. Heck even months from now they will. Whoever collects a check at SoE.
Subscriptions being canceled and them losing even more of the 1.2% market share they hold. I bet they drop down below 1% after this and its not just because of Eq2flames, its because they don't test content that gets pushed live and even casual players are coming to that realization. 10 second spell lag when you are the only player in a zone? Thats one example of a plethora of others that plague Eq2.
Dr.Twister said on 1:59PM 3-18-2008
Sounds familiar... not sure where I've heard this story before...
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Green Armadillo said on 3:16PM 3-18-2008
I don't have any vested interest in this story either way since I don't play EQ2 and I'm not depending on good relations with SOE for future "exclusive" content. From this neutral perspective, I find this story very interesting.
IMO, Sony bungled their PR.... a long time ago. Right now, the OFFICIAL EQ2 forums claim to have 762 people online and EQ2Flames has 2511. (Maybe this story is influencing the "guest" user count slightly, but where logged in, registered users are concerned, the official site has 213 and EQflames has 694.) That is genuinely remarkable. How badly do you have to bungle your community before a third party site is outdrawing you 3 to 1? Every single player knows where the official site is. You have to FIND the un-official one, and its owners need to feel strongly enough about the issue to be willing to spend time and money running it (where the official one is being paid for by people who are actually making money off the game) - lots and lots of bandwidth money when you're talking about the numbers that EQFlames has. And theirs IS the better site - when I was curious about EQ2 I learned a lot more from their forums than the official ones, and seriously considered giving EQ2 a test drive as a result.
Anyway, once your community is centered on a third party site, this sort of thing is almost inevitable. Your people have to go off-site to address the community because the community is off-site, but you can't actually prevent third parties from saying things you don't like. (Ironically, Sony itself got burned just last year for blackballing Kotaku after the site published leaked information, and suffered so much backlash that they had to reinstate Kotaku's media access.) Several political campaigns had similar issues as well because they failed to register their candidates on social networking sites and were beaten to the punch.
Of course, it would help a lot if your employees could keep their noses clean so that there isn't any dirt on you to leak when you do cut ties with people. Perhaps EQ's culture makes the temptation to share inside strategies more tempting - in WoW, all the strategies are out there, almost immediately, so there is no real reason to leak insider information, while it seems that EQ has a lot more secrecy around it. And perhaps it is mean to "out" characters of innocent developers and employees who didn't have anything to do with the company's decision to cut off relations with your site, though, again, those developers should not have revealed their identities in the first place and certainly should not have leaked inside information.
But, at the end of the day, if you fail to manage your community in such a spectacular fashion as SOE has here, it's going to come back to burn you. I hope the EA-Mythic folks, with their "we don't need no stinking forums" approach, are watching to see how much power you give outside folks when you don't make a good effort to run your own community.
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GRT said on 6:20PM 3-18-2008
"lots and lots of bandwidth money when you're talking about the numbers that EQFlames has"
ANd lots and lots of ad revenue.
Don't be so naive, this guy is making plenty of income from this site. Any time you see "pop under" ads like the tribalfusion one I just got his with, you know you're in the presence of someone who has making money off a site his #1 priority.
Seriously, my living comes from ad revenue on a site too, and we wouldn't treat our customers so shabbily because we care about the user experience. This clown clearly doesn't.
pufonthis said on 3:38PM 3-18-2008
Dave.. you apparently must be very young or very inexperienced if you think that the owner/president/CEO/whatever of an operation would know every last detail of how the technical systems work.
The guy at the top makes broad decisions about the way the company proceeds. Then the managers/employees carry out those objectives by his or her guidelines. To think that LFG would or even should know every aspect of the tech behind the forums/programming is absurd.
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Techie said on 3:44PM 3-18-2008
Just a tiny note here, but if you're going to base your argument on "facts" related to the number of concurrent users of one site versus another, make sure you understand the process by which different sites actually track online users.
Please note that the cookies which are enabled for the official SOE forums essentially shut off relatively quickly after you leave the page. By way of contrast, EQ2Flames maintains cookies for eight hours or more. It's simply not an apples to apples comparison.
Don't take my word on it, though. Test it for yourself.
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GRT said on 6:16PM 3-18-2008
Meh.
For accounting purposes. I currently have an active EQ2 account.
The only thing less interesting than Guild Drama is Forum Drama, and this "LFG" person comes across as an attention whore just trying to get sites like Massively to get him some exposure. And I'm sure it'll work well for him.
People need to get some kind of perspective. At the end of the day, these are just games. If you feel like SOE is somehow hurting your enjoyment of the game, stop playing. It's really as simple as that.
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Snark said on 9:07PM 3-18-2008
First thanks to the author for treating this topic with journalistic integrity. Unfortunately most fansites expect their writers to imprint an unmistakable bias in every article they print.
I was the person that posted developer information, and based on the comments here I think it's important I express why I did that...
First of all to understand the drama you have to understand how SOE "manages" their employees. Merely revealing their character's in game names is a very serious offense. This is why Aeralik immediately deleted a reference to his character. Since compiling and posting the in-game names of developers, coders, and GMs, I have recieved plenty of direct conversation with these people saying I overreacted and that their jobs are on the line because of it. One developer went so far as to say "what's more important - this or the game?" Clearly these people feel personally threatened by my thread (this is something I did not anticipate).
SOEs community team is atrocious, which wouldn't be such a bad problem if they showed any signs of improving. As years go on, the "summit" meetings recruit more of the fansite representatives and fewer active, vocal, and upset gamers. To pull feedback from a fansite just seems ludicrous to me - all they contain are the authors throwing on party hats and reading the latest patch notes with praise and nary a complaint. SOE regularly feeds these sites early information about popular upcoming updates (such as Epic Weapons, Heroic Zones etc.) to keep traffic steady on these glorified PR circles. The sites generate traffic and money, and SOE generates positive feedback. Its a win-win situation that Brenlo clearly feels is the future of SOE Public Relations. The previous Community Manager actually had the intelligence and foresight to offer EQ2Flames certain privileges that were reserved for "standard" fansites, but progress in this direction was completely abandoned with the latest CM to step in and take over.
It's overly transparent to see why Brenlo made the decision he did to cut EQ2Flames from the "official" community. Regardless of the fact that it is the largest EQ2Community in existence (more popular than the official one)... its criticism of the game was deemed unacceptable. After all, when you are trying to manage the publics opinion of your game, EQ2Flames is certainly an easy target.
But on to why I listed developer information:
Because SOE decided to cut off constructive criticism on its official forums, and internally stated that SOE employees risk losing their jobs for even sending or reading PM's on EQ2Flames (I was told this by a dev directly), I had to ask myself how we could provide any criticism at all that would be heard. The only possible thing I could think of was providing the in-game name of a few Devs I was aware of, and asked that people send them a /tell with the type of constructive feedback we were used to generating successfully on the forum. Within 2 hours of making the post I had received almost 100 PMs containing information about more developers (most of which was so private/personal I haven't posted it). I was trying to be objective and instead of targeting a few SOE employees I tried to provide as much information as possible. It was only a logical progression that when players see a coder guilded with a top raid guild they start asking questions, and I answered those questions as best I could. Did this make some people look worse in the end? I suppose, but its all left up to interpretation. Though my opinions on SOE employees are generally seen to be negative, I have had some really awesome and candid conversations with a few employees since this drama exploded that my feelings are currently neutral. Its a shame that the worst apple of all has to be leading the community into a ditch, though.
Did my experiment work out like I planned? Not at all. In fact, I've talked to enough employees with integrity to almost make me regret doing it at all. But when an action I took on a whim gets greenlit on Fark, blogged about, and receives more page views than EQ2 has active subscribers, there is clearly a point to be learned from all of this. I think that point is obvious, and its a weight to be carried by the SOE Community staff. Thousands of people who have never heard of EQ2 at all were introduced to this conflict, and read about it and weighed in on it. And I love that. I think everyone should form their own opinions and post how they feel on the forums and threads that are discussing this. Because opinions are like assholes... even if Brenlo doesn't want to acknowledge that ^_~
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Rijacki said on 5:19PM 3-19-2008
"First thanks to the author for treating this topic with journalistic integrity. Unfortunately most fansites expect their writers to imprint an unmistakable bias in every article they print."
The only reason you don't see the "unmistakable bias" in this editorial commentary it's only because the bias was weighted so far in the direction of LFG it's very unmistakable. There is nothing even-handed or even journalistic about it since there was absolutely no independent validation of the information fed to the author by LFG, not even a glimmer of an attempt to get objective information.
The majority of this who fiasco has been nothing short of grandstanding. I don't think that SOE's hands are spotless in this nor that their handling wasn't ill-timed or even heavy handed and "spin-doctored" but most of the allegations by LFG and the EQ2Flames community is nothing short of perposterous.
I have openly and voraciously posted negative criticism of SOE, one dev in particular (who is no longer with them), and of game changes, yet I have never had one of my own posts removed and have never been banned nor even received any actual warnings (the closest I got was a PM asking me, politely, to tone down in a particularly charged thread). I did nearly get de-guilded from my guild on Guk because of my negativity about a certain former dev and an aspect of gameplay related to that dev, but that's because of who that guild's leader is. So, why, if I have been openly and broadly negative about aspects of the game have -I- never been banned? Simple, I don't think one is required to utter a stream of profanity or issue personal insults towards devs or other posters in order to make a point (though that aforementioned guildleader has taken comments of mine to be personal insults to him, even his reporting me to the forum moderators didn't result in warnings or bans through, since they weren't insults, just disagreements with his opinion).
In the spirit of "full disclosure", I have been on EQ2Flames and have even posted there, but generally could only stomach the Coercer forums since I don't particularly enjoy diatribe laced with profane invective. Many of the EQ2Flames posters are intelligent and insightful. Sadly a lot of it is obscured.
I really am looking forward to even one "news" outlet / fansite to have a truly unbiased, factual, fully researched article on this affair. As I said, I don't think SOE's hands are lily white in the affair, but I also don't think there was any mad conspiracy to discredit LFG or eliminate his site (providing fuel for a drama fire would be the least effective way to do anything but increase the traffic to a particular site).
Oh.. and about that pop-under. I used to read the EQ2Flames Coercer forum on my Treo while I was in transit from home to work. With the pop-under, I was prevented from doing so. Thus, my activity or participation there was severely curtailed. I hate pop-unders at any time but even more so because of their effects on my ability to surf locations.