Anyway, hopefully it sells for some good money. Krayz did a great job on the programming and dealing with my never-ending list of bugs and changes.

Since tons of people want to know about FFR… I got an email from Synth last night that he was indisposed and would hopefully have the site up by Monday. So we’ll see.

So I set my alarm for 8:30 this morning, so that I could call them nice and early and get my comp down to them ASAP. I called them and explained the situation. They said I could bring it in and they’d fix it. The place is in Pasadena, which is 44 miles away as per Google. It took 80 minutes, leaving at 9:15am… gotta love LA traffic. By 10:55, they diagnosed it as motherboard failure and they did not have a replacement in stock, but that new ones were already on order. So I said ok, and now have to sit and wait until they call me to say the mobos are in and that my sexiness is fixed.

I also had a lunch meeting with Troy/Maldon/Dawnerd scheduled for 12:30 in Santa Monica, which I wasn’t sure whether I’d make because of the computer. Since I was done in Pasadena by 11, I headed off to Santa Monica, which is 35 miles from Pasadena, as per Google. That took about 50 minutes; got in right around noon. My bowels were troubling me greatly, so I used the time to find a public bathroom… which is much harder to do than one would expect, as Santa Monica has tons and tons of foot traffic. I wound up meeting up with Troy at 12:40 and we grabbed Subway and chatted for about 45 minutes on the future of FFR and life in general. We’re both on the same page, and I think we have the basics of a deal worked out. This is good.

Then I needed to get back from Santa Monica to the Valley (San Fernando). Google was telling me to take the 405, which was displaying RED for traffic most of the way. I decided to take the PCH and Topanga Canyon instead, which probably took the same amount of time (40 minutes), but is peaceful, scenic, and fun to drive.

And now I am home, on Whorli’s laptop, trying to quickly download my video recording/editing software so that I can re-make a walkthrough that is stuck on my desktop and needs to be ready for a game’s release tomorrow. *sigh*.

“I had two disasters happen at once. The first was our mysql server literally had a fire start up in the power supply which destroyed the drives and caused  one of the quad core harpertowns to overheat and break. The other processor and ram is ok. I had to pull the machine out of the data center and literally spent 2 months in non-work time trying to pull data from a backup on 1 Linux lvm volume and mix it with the files that were recovered with low level tools. I think I have about 90%+ of the DB recovered at this point. Of course I still have 3 server leases I have to pay for each month which is putting a huge strain on things.  The other issue was that at around the same time, I received an email from the place we were hosting that demanded we either provide legal proof that we could distribute all the songs in the game and for download or  that we would need to remove the servers. You can imagine how that went.  I am about a week out from having a functional FFR with the old records and data inside a virtual environment on a single sever.”

Beyond this, I think he and I have come to an agreement where I’ll be coming back to the site. It won’t be my full-time job; FFR will go back to where it was in 2005-ish… a hobby for the owners. Synth will keep doing the day job he’s done for 2 years or so and I’ll keep doing all my other flash game stuff.

To start, I have 2 forums… General and FFR People. General will be for anything… suggestions, feedback, bugs, what you had for breakfast… whatever. If I see certain things are requested (such as a Walkthroughs or Flash Game forum), I’ll add them. The FFR People forum will be for those former FFR users to congregate, meet up, talk about the good old days, that sort of thing.

Hopefully this will be beneficial to some folk. Take a look and register.

I really appreciate all the support and dedication I’ve seen via the comments on my original FFR blog post. I want to respond, in general, to a few of them:

First, I still have no idea what is going on with the site or if it’ll ever be back. I talked to Synth about 5 weeks ago when he reached out to me in regards to a last ditch effort to sell the site. I did some initial inquiries to some old and new contacts, but after 2 days Synth stopped responding to me, so I stopped pursuing it. It was about 10 days after that that the site went down and has been down ever since. I haven’t talked to him since, nor do I really care anymore whether or not the site comes back.

To those with an offline engine torrenting it… I think that is what Synth would want, assuming the site stays offline. I recall him posting something on FFR a few months back saying that if he ever pulled the site, he’d want the engine released publicly so that people could still enjoy it. So best of luck with that endeavor; hope you keep it seeded.

And finally, to the business offers out there… if you’re really serious, send me an email with an actual business proposal. No offense, but I can’t take someone seriously when their offer is coming in the form of a comment on a blog post. My email is public enough to the point where if you can’t find it, you shouldn’t be contacting me about this in the first place.

Seriously. Please stop IMing me, whispering me on Kong, posting comments on my YT channel, or emailing me about FFR being down. I understand it’s been down for over 2 weeks now. I have NOTHING to do with it. I haven’t worked for FFR in months. If you weren’t aware of that, read this earlier blog post.

This is an overview of what went down in the secret world of FFR over the past 2 years. Not going to go into all of the specifics, but hopefully it will make people understand what happened and why the site is the way it is now. This is all from my perspective, and may not be 100% accurate… so if Synth or Jason want to let me know of something wrong in what I’m saying, please do.

FFR started to come into its own in the middle of 2006, with a few things all happening: Jason came on board and I graduated college. Jason started to improve the chats and create the profile system, which jumped our Alexa ranking from all the added pageviews. I was spending even more time on the site and took over management of the game/community. Things were good through the end of 2006 and into 2007; tons of new songs, a new crowd was coming to the site for the social networking, and we were starting to get noticed for potential business deals. In May 2007, I moved to LA and put Synth to an ultimatum… start paying me, since I’m already working on the site full-time or I’m going to have to find a real job, leaving little time for the site. He agreed to put me on salary starting in August 2007. It was also right around this time that the widgets were created, a suggestion from one of those potential business deal people. And for about 8 months, widgets were making us rock stars.

In January 2008, the core FFR team moved out to LA to work on a project in associated with Vagrant Records, known to all of you as the MFA. This was one of the best times in my life… since I wasn’t doing any coding work on the MFA, I would go over almost daily and hang out with Synth, playing Rock Band or Wii. We partied with bands and got all sorts of hook-ups to concerts. Was fantastic to spend all that quality time with all of these people who I had known for years, yet either never met or met only once or twice. The problems started when everyone left LA.

Now let me preface with this… Since 2006, Synth has mentioned to me at least 10-15 different potential business deals. From multiple different high CPM ad networks wanting to supply us with ads to the MFA to going to Japan and creating our own skinned SM for some conference. This is the part that blows my mind: out of all of these deals, some of which were in the works for a year, the ONLY one that ever materialized was the MFA. Not one other deal was sealed. I also was only ever included in about 2-3 of them, and those only on the outskirts… despite having a very shiny business degree from a highly respected university. You’d think that that (plus, y’know, the fact that I was on payroll and #3 in the company) would have been reason to include me. Oh yeah… we were also in and out of talk with Konami for over a year.

Ok… now, even with all of these deals falling through, we were still top7000 Alexa and pulling in huge traffic. So our ad revenue was keeping us ok (from what I know… I’ve never known specifics about FFRs financials) plus money from Vagrant for the MFA. The fatal flaw, to me, was that after we finished the MFA and the guys left LA, Synth kept them on payroll. Now, I like BemaniRuler, Plaguefox, Summerschool, Maldon, and Xelius… but the fact remains, they were doing little work for the company after the MFA was finished, yet were still expecting their salary. Granted, Isak and Xelius were being paid before this, part time, for php and flash work… but not full time. All Synth had to do was tell them, “Guys, the project is over. So I can’t keep you on payroll anymore.” Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But, instead, Synth just stopped talking to any of them. I doubt Synth has talked to any of those 5 guys more than 3-4 times in the past 18+ months. Naturally, they were all very upset at this and came to me, since I actually would talk to them and could actually get ahold of Synth. And they did come to me, often, for a few months. But what could I do? I passed the info along to Synth and I listen to their issues… but I was powerless to help. Eventually, they realized the lost cause and stopped trying to get to Synth through me. Even Jason started to get the silent treatment and was forced to come to me. I really feel for those guys, especially since it eventually happened to me too.

At some point after this, Synth was unable to pay me. I was not happy, but I also didn’t want to start looking for a new job. I had some savings, so I tapped into that for a few months, and eventually he started to pay me again. And I made it very clear that I did expect to be re-paid at some point for those lost wages. Also that if he stopped paying me again and started to ignore me like he did to others, I’d leave.

In early 2008, many users really started to get excited over the idea of a new t-shirt design. So I held a contest to create a design… which turned into the OMW shirt. Now, Synth couldn’t (didn’t want to?) pay for these, so he kept putting it off. After a while, I just really wanted to make the community happy, so I offered to front the money for the shirts, under the understanding that I’d be paid back off of the initial wave of shirt sales. Deep down, I knew this was a bad idea, but I had to get those shirts made. Needless to say, I’ve never seen a penny off of those shirts.

Some time in late 2007 or early 2008, Synth got a job, as a network admin for a hosting company. He still kept me on payroll to oversee the site. It was at this point that he became completely inactive around the site. After a year or so of this, I strongly suggested we look to sell the site, because he either didn’t want to, or couldn’t, maintain the site in the manner which it needed. As expected, this produced nothing of value. I wanted to reach back out to Konami, since they were itching to buy us in early 2007… but Synth claims they never responded. I have my doubts he contacted him. In early 2009, I was in San Fran for a conference, and met some people who might have been interested in buying the site, funding us, or putting us in contact with other people who would. They wanted a big meeting, and I needed Synth for this, since a) I don’t own FFR or even have any equity stake whatsoever and b) I don’t know the numbers about the site’s traffic that were needed. Synth never got back to me with anything of value for the meeting. We were looking at the potential for 6-figures of funding, and he couldn’t be bothered to even return my phone calls about it.

I don’t have the exact numbers, but I don’t think Synth has reached out to me a single time in the past year. Every single conversation we’ve had (not many, and most very brief) has been initiated by me. Kind of an odd dichotomy between a boss and employee, right? I haven’t talked to him a single time since July. Nor have I been paid since the end of July, and every payment to me this year has either been late, been paid after multiple reminders to pay me, or both. After my walkthrough business became profitable, I stopped bothering to remind Synth to pay me… so he did. Which led to the events in this thread where I finally left the site in September.

One other tidbit that you guys all likely didn’t know… Jason was never paid for any of the work he did on FFR. Some of his bills were paid by the company (internet, cable, phone I think), but that’s it. Jason didn’t stop handling t-shirt orders or subscription activations until Synth cancelled the credit card that was being billed for Jason’s stuff. To me, that’s perfectly reasonable: Stop paying a few of my bills and I stop doing the work on the site that I was doing.

I’m sure I missed stuff out of all of this… so feel free to post questions or comments, and I’ll either update this post with more stuff or respond in the comments. But I hope that now you guys can all see where I came from and why I needed to leave the site. All told, Synth owes me over $10,000.

-Tass

edit: Oh yeah, I forgot. You guys all know about not getting your t-shirts and subbies activated… but it took Spook months to see any money from his album sales, and the other 2 albums were only ever sent 1 payment. Money is definitely owed to all 3 of those guys as well. Not much, since the albums never sold well… but it’s the principle.

edit2: Synth, if you somehow do actually read this… I’d love to talk to you. Despite the business failings, you’re a great guy to talk to. And, y’know, I’d like to hear your side of things.