Hello all. I've lurked here for a while but have only posted once.

Since ME mod is not going to happen due to legal issues, I got to thinking: What about that ME game that Daerk mentioned a while back? If I remember correctly he wanted to build his own game, obtain a license from the Tolkien Estate, and sell it. My question is: if Daerk returns, will this still be possible? Or it would it also not be possible due to legal issues?

I really hope it will happen, because it seens like our only hope for an accurate Middle-Earth RPG. I know Daerk has not been heard from for a long time, but I believe he talked about starting his own game company someday. Though I didn't know him personally, he doesn't seem like the type of person who would give up on something like this.

There will be no MEGame, and Daerk will never be heard from again.

*looks up from the new concrete patio in his backyard*

Oh, no reason...

There is no reason to believe that Daerk will return. Suz made a post a while ago about Daerk's disappearance from the Mod team. We have been unable to contact him since that time.

We all need a good laugh .

Well, let's just hope Daerk is all right. Maybe it is selfish to wish that "he will come on a white horse, in shining armor, and save the MeMod" (when, by the way, it has already been said that his coming back won't change anything) if he has more important problems of his own to take care of.

I wasn't trying to be selfish, I know he has more important things going on. And I know his returning won't save ME mod (where did I say that?). I was merely wondering about the ME game. I didn't mean to offend or disrespect anyone.

Lol, sorry, I wasn't talking about you in specific It's just that I've already seen other people saying "Ah, if only Daerk was back" or stuff like that

Daerk wont be seen again.

ME Game wont happen.

Immortal's porch holds the answers...

How could Daerk just disappear?!
Didn't anyone get an email, phone call, anything?

Do any of the Devs/Teamsters live near Daerk? Can't they check on him?

I know he can't do anything about the situation of the mod (unless he found some loophole in the laws that he neglected to tell you about) but for all we know this guy could be dead. Doesn't Suzerain have Daerk's phone#? If that doesn't work, can his fiance be contacted?

Did Daerk just fall off the face of the earth as you people are making it sound or did he oficially leave?

Daerk doesn't matter anymore.

MEmod=

Thats it, and no amount of Daerk is gonna change that.

peace

But he could seriously be decomposing in some one's backyard right now!

All I want to know is in what fasion he left.

Aww, f*ck it. MeMod's dead, what've we got to loose?

Do you really want to know what happened to Daerk?

Really?

Want the dream you had shattered? if not, press the back button now.
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Daerk lied to each and every one of us, and you in turn.

in early 2004, I took on the MeGame project on D's behalf, working professionally for the setup of studios. Critical professional irregularities resulted during that process, which forced us to make important questions to Daerk - the professional conduct that I took during that work means I will not reveal the exact details of what happened to the general public.

However, during the stages of these actions, Daerk became increasingly erratic and irregular, becoming difficult to contact, before he then did a runner, citing "real life issues" that meant he was "in court" and unable to attend. By all the evidence we've gathered so far, if he is in court this long, he's either got OJ Simpson's lawyers, or is collecting soap in jail...
Neither of these we beleive to be the truth.

Daerk left MeMod in such a state that approximately 95% of the content which he was reputed to have produced was not evident.

Pixel-shaded grass. Landscape heightmaps. the entire design document. licence from the Tolkien estate, the Game story.
All non-existent.
If you really want those pieces... you have to find Daerk. that does'nt seem likely to happen any time soon.

It ended up as my responsibility (because I had the vision which the other devs supported, and more importantly the stupidity to do it) to rebuild a shattered MeMod team from the ground up and actually have content produced where daerk had virtually none made at all. Nine Tenths of the content of memod over the last 2 years has come from the last 8 months since D was removed.

And where did he go? no idea. he ran, he buggered off, he f*cked off and scarpered when it became clear that the whistle had been blown. his "brother" was found on the forums occasionally. PMs were ignored.
We have no evidence that a single claim that D made was true - from him having the money to finance MeGame, to producing content, to any details of his life.

Contact email and phone numbers failed to produce any response, eventually forcing the members of MEMod to agree to the complete removal of daerk from the MeMod Devs leadership.

at that point, we started having to get down to the difficult business of producing MeMod instead of the vapourware that he'd done.

We announced he'd stepped down from MeMod because, well, firstly, he was'nt there to do it himself, and secondly, we did'nt want to completely let you all down. instead we set to work at ten times the previous rate of work, and ensured that we had produced most of the content that D had claimed to have. Perhaps in some misplaced sense of loyalty, we did'nt want to say the truth about D in case he miraculously came back - quite aside from the fact that not one of us could bear to let you all down by saying "Hey, D lied to you all, we've got nothing he made, and memod's going to take months longer"

as a result of the discovery that Daerk was a lying two-faced scumbag, I had to write the script for the main storyline. Theta had to produce the design documentation. we as a team had to work on the details of pixelshading to try to produce what derk had claimed to have done. I personally do not beleive that the pixel-shaded grass D produced ever existed. another senior dev has stated his suspicion that the screenshot of grass was taken from a 3ds max tutorial. I cannot confirm or deny this.
Daerk's entire contribution to memod, in practical terms, was the creation of a sequence of lies and misinformation that engineered a false reputation of his skill and ability, and in fact hindered the production of the MeMod critically.
Were it not for the fact that D had been found out, I would never have needed to take control of the MeMod project, and have investigated his claimed "agreement" to be able to produce a non-profit Mod.

In short.

D was a hoax. We, the team, had to nearly kill ourselves to make MeMod come back from the dead, and by god, we did it, and were progressing well production without D in the way... But the cruellest lie he pulled on us was the claim of a lisencing agreement, and when we discovered that last lie, we were unable to continue without breaking the law.

And now you know.

Now you know why I took over.

Now you know exactly why the "prove it's not dead" threads made us angry, when we'd virtually crawled over broken glass for this mod after his lies.

Without the team we had, MeMod would've folded when we discovered his lies. Now you know how bloody fantastic all the teamsters were, from devs to the new members, in buckling down and getting re-organised and producing so much content in the last 8 months, to make up for D's lies, and actually allow us to be able to say "MeMod lives".



so there you go.

Anyone still want to think Daerk will ride in on the white horse and miraculously "save" the MeMod and recover the Holy Grail?


and if you read down to here.
I'm sorry to have shattered another dream. But the memod members are likely to be producing something else, sometime. and if we do, I'm not going to have the ghost of Daerk lurking over the project like some family ghost we all know the ghastly truth about.

MeMod's team were real. Daerk? Nothing but a pack of lies, we've discovered to our shame and anger.


I would give good money for 5 minutes in a locked room with D. and if it was'nt allowed to use a bastard sword, the only question would be "why?". If I were allowed to use the sword... it would be "why, and you've got 4 minutes to answer honestly".



Suzerain.

No words can describe how shocking this is to me, and probably everyone else as well. But thank you anyway for telling us, suze. As some of us have thought for a long time: you becoming the leader was the best thing to ever have happened for MEMod. But surely we did not know how correct that was. Thank you again, teamsters and devs alike, for the fabulous work you've done and trying to make our dream come true.


pharzon..

Well, I think it needed to be said in the end. If only so the public can now understand the reality of MeMod, rather than be unavoidably sucked in by the lie fuelled hype that surrounded it.

The funny thing is, we could and certainly would've achieved every last detail of the mod that Daerk bragged about to the public.

Including Tim and Boris.

Well, whatever happens I suspect that those two lightly dressed buggers will play an important part.

Suzerain and all Teamsters, your bloody champs. The dedication you've shown... its just astonishing.

First thing I can think of is thanks for being so honest with all of us.

After reading that MeMod was cancelled, I guess not much else could shock me. After reading that suzerain, I guess it wasn't that surprising, but more of a relief to know what actually happened behind such a 'foggy' subject.

If the team does get together, and I pray that you all don't loose contact!
IF the team decides to begin work on another project then I'm sure it will be nothing short of extraordinary.

PLEASE, all I can request is that when a decision is reached on what is to happen with all the work that’s been done, then please, let us know.
A great idea I'd think is a batch of screenies, with a caption or something similar of what the scene was to be.
Unless that fringes on any copyright issues. =\

Another question that lingers, was there ever a landmass?

Thanks for your time. Really.

To Professionalism! *DUFF*

Well honestly I'm not too suprised that Daerk turned out to be a sack of s**t. After the leadership change I was skeptical about how the project was going to pan out and once I found out that it was being scraped I pretty much knew that Daerk was the root of all this. Maybe it's just intuition that led me to this conclusion. As dissappointed as I am to see such a valiant effort go I'm not the least bit suprised given the feeling I got from Daerk's dissappearance. Sorry if I seem like a cold prick, but I can't go through life without being skeptical.

Thanks again for being honest Suz, that took a lot of courage and that's a wonderful quality you posses. To all the other people who turned blue in the face to get things done in the past 8 months my most heartfelt appologies for being deceived in the most malevolent of ways (ponders making a mod where Dagoth Ur is renamed Daerk).

Wouldn't it be more an insult to name all the rats, or cliffracers that?

heh

Still, I don't understand why this got bumped to 100%..

WTF???????????????????


*gets breath back*

Well, all I can say after reading your account of Daerk's actions, Suze, is 'well vulking done'. You took essentially a piece of total vapourware that some asshole had bragged about so convincingly that a great many people (including me) had been taken in and were eagerly anticipating and were making it reality. The only real bugger about it was that legal issues stopped you from completing the work.

To be honest, I think the most complete satisfaction you could possibly have had was to actually finish it, managing, by some Herculean effort, to fulfill all of Daerk's brags, then sending him a copy. That would show him exactly how skilled a team he was, at one point, leading, and how much of a wanker he is for losing it by deceiving you.

i´m wordless.......


After all those years, the ex-leader was just a lie

Suze..

yep. did'nt really want to, but...

well.
The idea that people will start thinking "but if D returned we'd have the licence and it'd all be perfect" was rather getting on my tits.

S

I'm just sorry that I hit too close to the mark in this thread. Indeed, it would seem the observations I originally made were accurate to a fault.

I was very cynical at first, as I am about most things. However the wealth of information that the team provided combined with the absolute secrecy of the project made it more believable that something special was in the works. I now know that the secrecy was not what it appeared. Apparently it is easy to keep a project secret when it is non-existent.

But, unless someone knows with certainty otherwise, I would be more willing to give Daerk the benefit of the doubt.

I do not believe he meant to deceive anyone, at least not originally. I think it would be more accurate to say he bit off more than he could chew, as the saying goes. He created an artificial sense of expectation, hoping that the “team” he would develop would cover for him. It would appear he succeeded at least in that; the team he recruited was as capable and talented as any out there, and had he kept a cool head he would likely have delivered on his promise. As delays and postponements kept mounting, I believe he was forced into a corner. The only escape he saw was through grandiose tales of license agreements and ambitious new games; throwing us a bone to keep us interested. The man who sows lies will not want for harvest in the end. Finally, he ran out of believable tales and made a decision to make a sudden exit, citing one trouble or another as the reason.

That is one theory and fairly cynical.

It is also possible that he had real life problems and had to turn his attention otherwise. It could be that the information he had is sitting on a computer in a room somewhere, unused.

This is the less likely story, but what is improbable is not necessarily impossible.

I would still like to thank Suz for his honesty and candor on the issue. Sometimes things do need to be put quite bluntly and laid out for others to judge. A more delicate response would have created a false impression of hope that is simply not there. It would seem he is as hurt by this as anyone, perhaps more so since he felt compelled to cover for the absent “leader”.

Thank you Suze. I think it's important that everyone knows.

I just wish that Daerk would step forward and acknowledge his treachery, and apologize to us all.

That really explains a lot...

Vandorssen - I feel the same way.

That really explains a lot...

I would like to thank the MEMOD team for their years of dedication and hard work. I would also like to thank them for being honest about the whole ordeal. It's truly ridiculous that a project this great will never see the light of day due to legal issues, but I understand that it is unavoidable.

This really is a great community and an even better team. Please inform us of any future endeavors.

Well at least we finally have someone to blame!

The shitbag Daerk!

Wow, I never thought I would describe him with such contempt.

Could someone please erase the "Daerk on."

Better yet, rename it "dIrK oN'




*deletes morrowind+expansions bought just for MEMod

I for one, hope that D never shows his face again in these forums.

Why? Well, jeez, probably for all the above mentioned reasons that Suze stated and the fact that D was a fake.

To be honest, when D started squawking about ME Game, I began to get suspicious about his motives, and the coincidence of his timing. Since he 'suddenly' comes up with this new tasty morsel of his 'grand plan' concerning the X-Ray engine when, oddly enough, STALKER was a hot topic in the off-topic forums and speculation of a MEMod port to the engine was beginning to take shape. I never said anything because to be honest, it was hard to know who to trust.

But from what I was gathering, it seemed to me as just rhetoric. Something to distract the members and give them something to fantasize about and draw them away from the real issue...which was MEMod's stagnation. I mean, 3 bloody years, and all we had was the WORD of one person that stuff was actually being done. They had a RIGHT to know what the hell was keeping up the Mod, not to mention the Beta.

Put me in a room with him, bastard sword or not, I would tear him limb from limb for decieving the members and us. In my heart, treachery and deception is a far worse crime than murder, because you kill a person's trust and hope. There are so many things that I wish to do to D that the nicest one would still land me in a maximum security prison.

I wouldn't need 4 minutes alone with D, I wouldn't need to ask him 'why?', I don't want to know why he did it, because there are probably darker motives that I do not wish to know. I mean, the bastard owes Suze money, money which Suze will not see again.

...Man, I need to lie down again...

Whooo... wow.... ...

uh....

deep dude... I could NEVER do that... Blood sweat and tears...


Man... All I can say now is....


You guys Friggin Rule...

Just don't delete the Daerk On thread... It is a reminder of what could've been...

Thanks for being honest with us, Suzerain. I am not going to insult him now, just like I never actually thought that he would come back on a white horse and save the mod (I was ironic in my last post). What you have just revealed to us just makes me appreciate you even more for what you have done for us. Good luck for whatever it is that you do next

Just a moment, just a moment. If all that are true then we must not blame ONLY Daerk. In such situations the blame is for all. We must all (members, team) had suspected the truth, however nobody tolerated that.

So in conclusion, MEMod was nothing more than talk (except the last months). Ah, this was a little relief. And we must not be angry to anybody, but ourselves that let everybody telling his/her lies.


P.S. Don't bother to find a "why", there is no such thing.

In all honesty; I'm not surprised. In many threads I have felt an ever so subtle indication that Daerk was not all he seemed to be. You could often sense that the devs were not too happy about Daerk getting praise after he left. I had indeed thought of commenting on it, but let it go incase I was wrong. Too bad, but all credit to you for still pulling through such an event as Daerks treachery. It's sad that the aftermath of his leaving would bring down the mod now, with this copyright thing.

MEMod was not just 'talk'. It was hundreds of hours of work by dozens of people.

I'm sorry that everyone had to hear this, but at the same time it's something that had to be said eventually. Daerk's disappearance from the mod predates my acceptance into the mod by a couple months but I have known about this since I was accepted. I can tell you this much at least: As an outsider coming into MEMod my very first question was "Where is all the stuff that was supposed to be done?" I was quickly pointed to threads in the teamster forums where Daerk's departure and his lies were discussed in some detail and it was made clear to me that about 3 months before I was accepted the team litterally had to start from scratch again. Of course, there were several members who had been producing 3d models the whole time and concept art and some code, but there was nothing to call a "Mod" to speak of.

The second thing I thought was "Wow, after all that, and in only a few short months you've actually managed to get THIS much done!". The team had pulled itself together thanks, in large part, to Suz's leadership. It is absolutely true that after Daerk left more than 10 times what was done in the 2 years he was leader had been done in the span of 3 or 4 months. If you want my absolutely honest opinion on a timeframe for when you would have seen a beta I would have to say it would probably have been released in about 2 or 3 months at the most. We all worked our arses off and doubly so for all the members who had been around when Daerk was still the leader because they had to deal with the knowledge that they had all been lied to.

Trust me, Suz is a better leader and got things done. As a teamster I didn't know much about the details involved with the timeline specific storyline or things like that but he kept us up to date with the other parts of the mod and gave us direction, helped us when he needed to and took control of the parts that we coulnd't have taken control of. However, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that Daerk could still have hurt the mod now that he was gone. It's sad but it's true.

First, thanks suze.

Honestly, I wasn't completely suprised when you announced memod's ending, but I was not expecting the amount of lying done by daerk.
I know I've become even more appreciative of all the work you and the rest of the team did to fill in this huge gap between fantasy and reality through long hours of work. I hope you guys (and girls) can continue producing quality work for TESIV, whether or not Tolkien based. And if not, good luck getting on with life.

oh, and btw, this thread has caused me some paranoia, so whenever you get the chance, i'd love to see some of the hard work you all did in these last few months, just so we know you guys arent lying too

I know it's a sore spot with everyone and i'm sorry but this has piqued my curiosity.

Just consider this one last "what happened to teh beta" post...

when Daerk was saying that the beta was going to be released around christmas and that it had been released to the teamsters, etc. for play-testing.. well...what was really going on then...because word was that everything was done on the beta save a few textures...i'm assuming this was not true but, was there even a part of a beta done then? did teamsters ever actually play an "unfinished beta"?

well i couldn't find a post saying that teamsters had it, but here's one where he was talking about it being "play-tested"

Wow well this really does shed some light on the situation, i had no idea Daerk had done that or in this case so 'little'. Oh well but to be absolutely honest i never liked him much anyway This just enforces how much Suze and the rest of the team deserve all the credit they get and more.
So all those release dates, ages and ages ago, were totally rubbish?! It makes me mad to even think about it, didn't even Darky know what was going on?

well, that's sad to hear(not surprising at all, it was pretty obvious he was full of crap, but still sad) that daerk was a sham. but speaking of him, we know he's still around SOMEWHERE. he was active on september 11(not too long ago) on the main elder scrolls forums. maybe there'd be some way to contact him through that.