Back in March of this year, Quest Online (QOL) announced that veteran developer Derek Smart was put in position to head the company as President. His main duty was to head the Alganon team in completion of the game that had suffered under the mistakes that former lead developer David Allen had created.

Consequentially, independent contractor, Allen, was removed from the company during this time. In two separate, unanimous votes, Allen was removed as Managing Member of Quest Online LLC and then as a Voting Member due to over-budgeting, missing deadlines and a terrible December 2009 Beta launch. As a result, Greg Wexler (investor/co-founder of the company) became the sole acting Managing Member.

In response to these actions, Allen filed what the Quest Online LLC members called a “frivolous” lawsuit in Arizona (Case #CV2010-010391 ) against Quest Online, 3000AD and other parties. It was announced today that QOL has fired back at Allen with their own counter-suit, claiming that Allen was responsible for Alganon’s mismanagement and sewed his own fate and troubles by acting in an unprofessional and generally faulty manner.

Alganon, the companies premier product, a game that already had $4 million pumped into it during Allen’s stay, was a mess in December 2009, seen as incomplete and generally buggy with the launch of the Beta and was universally panned by gaming websites. The game was being viewed as a failure from all angles and the company was subject to a lot of bad press as a result of the missteps, much of the blame being placed on Allen. Allen’s lack of synchronization with the company over Alagon has become evidenced by looking back at his November 11, 2009 interview with gaming website Massively .com. When asked about whether the game would be free to play, Allen stated, “that’s just something we [aren't] interested in.” Cut to May 2 of this year, and Alganon has fully embraced the free-to-play model in an effort to stay competitive, leading MMOCrunch.com to believe that Allen was detached or otherwise inept with his handling of the project from the onset. Compounding this fact, in a move that pleased gamers, Smart opted to refund any players that pre-ordered the game, hundreds of subscriptions worth thousands of dollars bought under Allen’s reign, as gamers were unaware of the mistakes taking place behind the scenes.

To further counteract Allen’s mistakes, Smart aided QOL in obtaining new funding, lessening overhead, smoothing out operations, energizing the developers, and giving investors renewed confidence in the company and their funding. Most importantly, Smart led QOL to the successful completion and release of Alganon in late April, 2010.

As a result of Smart’s apparent business savvy, the investors and owners of QOL recently elected him to the empty Managing Member position. Giving Smart this chair shows QOLs embrace of Smart’s leadership tactics and grace under fire, further cementing Smart as the President of QOL as the company moves ahead.

As for Allen’s lawsuit, everyone involved has filed a counter-suit through QOL against Allen in Maricopa County Court, Arizona. The counter-suit is QOL vs. David Allen and his wife, simply known as Jane Doe Allen. The affirmative defenses of the suit claim that Allen caused and continues to cause his own damages, that he was negligent in his duties at QOL, that Allen lacks standing to assert his claims and most importantly, that some or all of Allen’s claims fail to state a claim upon which relief may be granted.

The transcript also goes into detail on more aspects of Allen’s blunders during his time at QOL. It states that Allen paid himself 8,000 dollars a month as an independent contractor and procured hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors because he promised Alganon would be finished by April 2009. This launch date was pushed until summer 2009, then mid-2009. As time went on, Alganon, under Allen’s rule, continued to struggle. By March 1, 2009, Allen told investors that funds were beginning to dry up and that there wasn’t enough payroll to fund his staff. This back and forth between Allen asking investors for funds and further pushing back the deadline went on until QOL finally pulled the trigger with Alganon and released a Beta in December 2009 that was met with terrible reviews. Massively.com stated after testing the Alganon Beta, “the game suffers from bugs. A large number of them in fact, and a symptom of how quickly it moved to release … It’s not a spectacular game at this point, and the earliness with which it launched is unpleasantly apparent.”

All this and more revealed in the court documents, including dozens of misappropriations of power after he was released from QOL, like continuing to use the company VISA card and other incentives, showing that Allen was at the heart of Alganon’s foibles while he was in control. After looking into the details available more closely, MMOCrunch.com believes that Allen was indeed at fault and wasted QOL’s time and money, pulling them along with a shoddy product that he never fully understood or had the ability to complete in a timely manner. We’ll be following this case as it progresses.