Yellowperil,

While it's not so easy to do, it can be done. See some new uploaded documents here. The first one is Robert McKell's reply to memorandum of points. Fromt here, you can follow the money and see that his investor deal is tied to both MMOGULS and CME. Because the two companies are tethered together for the success of MMOGULS, it is in the plaintiff’s best interest to control 1) the company the money goes into (Garvick), 2) the company that is producing the moneymaker (CME) and 3) the company that is going to make continued money thereafter (MMOGULS). The McKell’s were promised revenue from both CME & MMOGULS in addition to CME Stock.

Therefore, to protect his investment, he needs to protect all three companies.

On the tail end of that upload is the McKell response to the previously filed documents on the 9th? And the Whiting response to the McKell’s arguments.

I am going to update the other cases, once I find that thread. Of interest is the Ann Colson case, which is ripe with long torrid affairs, polygamy with up to 5 wives! And the final Judgment in the case. Stay tuned!
 

Originally posted by yellowperil

as far as I knew GW didnt actually control any of the money decisions anymore anyways, the group of investors that came in with there money are now controlling how its spent, is this guy gonna come in, and say no you cant do that, and watch the investors leave ?

As far as I knew, they were only putting in a little at a time and controlling what was spent, if this guy comes in he wont have anything to spend, or control, as the investors literally only put in what they need and when they need it.

I have the feeling that even if they did bring this guy in, he would have little to no control over the money or how it would be spent.

Just because a group of investors gives you some money, does not mean get you get to do with it what you please or they please, especially if you have a garnishment or a judgment out against Whiting, CME, MMOGULS, etc.    CME owes some serious cash to many.  

Oddly, CME recently changed banks -- maybe in an effort for dodging payment on some of the old debts owed?  Yeah, tell the courts we still bank with Wells Fargo, but have the investors deposit it somewhere else.

Originally posted by Zhiroc

I was thinking... OK, let's say Nedra wins their lawsuit. Then what?

Would she be looking to liquidate and get out what she can, or finish the game? And if the latter, that means with MMOGULs as part of it, right? She's not some white knight rescuing SGW from the jaws of an MLM... she's into that full bore.

What of the "new investors" and MGM who want no part of an MLM?

I'm not saying I'd rather have GW, but just thinking ahead.

What a mess.

 

Yeah, we have no idea what Nedra's true intentions are. I could only hope it is to finish Stargate Worlds (and not battle deadlands or whatever).   I can understand their frustration in that they had this whole deal all set up as a win (coming in and rescuing Gary from non-payroll #1), and because of Gary’s inability to keep his hands out of the cookie jar, it completely fell apart.

In digesting the pleadings, I am enjoying how Gary Whiting likes to twist things into his favor. First, Whiting makes it seem like Brent Barton stole the business plan and key employees, and there after Whiting had to then deal with Jeff Knowles trying to steal his MMOGULS money too.

When in reality, Gary first removed unauthorized money from MMOGULS causing the waterfall effect of Brent bolting and Jeff Knowles withholding funds due to the large amount of chargeback’s they were expecting.   Isn’t that a form of perjury? Of course, he could always say he got his dates confused I suppose.

Mr. Whiting states “I had to borrow money to pay for operational costs during February and March” Yeah, you borrowed it from Nedra & Jeff Knowles!   Again, what caused the house of cards to fall?   After everything fell apart, he didnt borrow anything until the Doctors came to his rescue.  

I will upload more of the documents tomorrow. The affidavit from Nedra and the details around the deal are worth it.
 

No update on what happened in Court today, but it is true. CME is fighting for its life and has been since mid July 2009 when the court proceedings started in Utah. They are indeed looking to oust Whiting from all his companies.

While I don’t have all the court documents copied (Whiting's filing is one big whine fest), you can find a good splattering here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/19743774/CME0001

• Nedra Rodney Mckell contributed over 2.5 million into “the deal” which included stock in CME in addition to guaranteed profits from MMOGULS and SGW.
• CME partnered with MMOGULS to provide MMOGULS with video game content
• MMOGULS was designed to be the company through which CME would market SGW and make it available to the public.
• SGW was/is essential to the viability and stability of MMOGULS as a company
• MMOGULS brought in nearly 1,000,000 in it’s first month.
• Gary had no non-compete or non-disclosure agreements in place to protect him when Brent Barton left with other key MMOGULS personnel
• Jeff Knowles was to receive 20% of the credit card processing but somehow wanted 50%. Jeff Knowles then was keeping 100% of the processed funds.
• Mr. Whiting states in his filings that there is no proof that he took 5M from CME and invested it in UTAH real estate
• Mr. Whiting also states there is no proof he ever took MMOGULS funds for personal use

Originally posted by Zhiroc

Just something I saw on the court proceedings, dated 9/8:

"NOTE: DEFENDANT WHITING’S LEGAL MEMORANDA RE: (1) TRO; (2) RECEIVER AND (3) FRAUD AS IT RELATES TO FULL FAITH AND CREDIT"

Full Faith & Credit: Allows judgments between different courts/state/jurisdictions. “full faith and credit clause of the United States Constitution requires that a final judgment entered in a sister state must be respected by the courts” of another state. “

From what is posted, Gary Whiting’s defense does not want to allow what Utah has already given Nedra because of a FRAUD. This can be many things, but simply it can mean 1) extrinsic fraud if it was produced by outright fraudulent tactics (such as bribery of judicial officers which is doubtful) or 2) Gary is accusing Nedra of producing fraudulent documents or lies (perjury) to which she won her case in Utah allowing the order originally entered (Oh, Mr. fraud accusing others of fraud! How exciting!)

TRO = Temporary Restraining Order which among other things, freezes the defendant’s assets, requires preservation of documents, etc. and is in preparation for a RO (receivership order) which actually grants a plaintiff to take control of said assets. If this goes through, she'll have control of whatever investor money is in an account when granted!
 
Any way your slice it, this case is serious to the future of CME and all it's half-started games.

I have to keep biting my tongue not to share what this month's news from CME before they do. What I can say is prepare to be underwhelmed and disenchanted with CME’s announcement this month. (if they get to make an announcement -- Nedra's big hearing is on Monday!!)  While they will say work continues on SGW, lies.

SGW is so far on the back burner with so many ‘ifs’ to make it happen. Moreover, all the real industry luminaries are no longer with CME. You will not see them bringing Chris Klug back from PA, etc.   Instead they brought back the Art Director that made the horrible looking avatars for Hand Crank's prototype (digging to find my screen shots) and is now overseeing the art on SGB, etc. Why couldn’t they just promote that Jake dude? His stuff looked so much better.  

At current counts, the amount of administrative staff and "director" type people who collect the larger salaries (does not mean they produce work) outweighs those who can actually do any real game developmen. CME’s business plan to stay afloat is still severely flawed.

Folks on the official boards want that new web page they have been working on. Ha! They cannot even get the dev tracker working on their own forums or the current corporate or SGW web pages updated with new information – Oh, maybe they are working on the battles pages. Then again, it is the official forums where they are happy with Khestral’s strip tease (hello, I want attention) posting techniques.

 

Originally posted by Zhiroc

I kinda doubt it was CME or even GW who was behind the craigslist thing. At the prices offered, they weren't going to raise a lot of capital. I'd expect that if it was, they would be asking for a lot more per share. CME is not registered with a lot of shares  (I seem to recall 500K total, but that could be wrong).

To me, it's more likely some poor investor who thought that his shares were toast anyways, so they thought to have some fun becoming a mini-market, and seeing what they could get.

Maybe it was one of the Doctor's with cold feet trying to get a portion of his investment back. Or, another shoddy investment shyster hired by Gary to pimp CME shares to anyone with a pulse.

Yeah, scenario no. 2 seems more likely.

Did anyone get that guy's phone number?    Damn, I hate when I dont do screenshots. 

Advertising the sale of stock on a non-publically traded company has CME violating Security & Exchange Commission Rule 506 again!   

p.s.  Ascendence Capital still has those confidential documents up on the web for everyone to see.    Since the crack team is back at work, maybe they can take care of that and get the CME webpages updated with the 1 or 2 executives that are left.  LOL.

Looks like the 1 Million only paid off the licensing and some of the back debts due (without putting a dent into any of it).  I doubt they have paid much, if any, of the millions of dollars CME owes in back payroll taxes.    And I find it hard to believe the Doctors got that much control over expenses with only a 1 Million contribution.   I'm doubting it was that low. 

So they are surviving paycheck-to-paycheck on selling penny stock?   Why on earth would anybody go back to work for them without the guarantee of a paycheck.

Nice find!  Is anyone going to call Mr. Masters?     

Originally posted by kadevolpi

Also, the reason the MMORPG staff banned him was because they felt he was slandering the Mormon faith..  So he was banned for 120 days, all of which in my opinion is BS.

Gary Whiting and most of the CME staff do a fine job of doing what you mentioned all themselves (skirts around the ban stick).   

Thanks for sticking your neck out to give us an update.   

Why is Joe Unger’s portfolio page so important to the future of SGB/SGW you ask?  Well, let me tell you!  Oh and you should probably grab copies of the screen shots as I’m sure {mod edit} Shane will have him take down this site soon.

First, you have to know some history of the Superstition Studios & Shane Hensley deal. Some of the most important people now working on SGB/SGW are Shane’s special friends that have been working with him since Pinnacle Entertainment (both Shane and the producer still work [and maybe more?] for Pinnacle and this helps explain how some had the means to last the CME no-pay period). Actually, step it back to Cryptic Studios where Shane brought in many of his Pinnacle workers before he was let go. He was bringing them into CME/Superstition (having CME pay the relocation expenses, not Pinnacle) before the CME money tit ran dry.

Superstition Studios was first working on their MMO version of Deadlands with the Hero engine.  If you look at Joe Unger’s portfolio, you will see some screen shots of a few areas they put together. Simply put, it looks like a bad WOW game, and the team had many excuses about why the game looked so poorly: not enough resources, not enough staff, couldn’t license the engine so less engine functionality, etc.   But now they can develope cool shit with a small crack team?   Give me a break!

Let us move onto First-person battle Deadlands. They threw this together in the Unreal engine after the Hero engine fell apart. Not much to say about this, it is what it is.

While this ‘crack team’ will be able to ninja all art assets previously created for SGW, it is very obvious their quality levels are less than par on the stuff they were able to put together on their own. Granted, they inherited a few CME artists (one has some talent), and that will lift them a few levels. Even so, they are under Shane’s creative leadership and their past work shows what he is capable of directing. This is nowhere near AAA level (maybe B level ) – even for a first person shooter.

I was looking at the new Game Informer today, and noticed there was no mention or hype of any of the battle games CME is now assembling. Imagine that!

Gary Whiting and the Sr. Management at CME are still supporting the MMOGULS mentality of getting a game out with the Stargate IP to save Gary, and nothing else.  
 

A little birdie told me today at our lunch that they are doing the same thing with Stargate Battles with Deadlands.... in fact, Deadlands Battles!

Actually Deadlands never really came together as a mmo as all it was just toons running around shooting each other with old fashion western guns. Expect the same Quality and thoughtfulness to go into Stargate Battles.
 

IT IS ORDERED staying these proceedings until September 14, 2009.

IT IS ORDERED that counsel shall simultaneously file legal memorandum regarding whether a Temporary Restraining Order, preliminary injunction, and/or an order appointing a receiver is subject to full faith and credit by September 8, 2009. Counsel shall hand-deliver or fax to opposing counsel and the Court said memorandum. Counsel shall simultaneously file responses with a copy hand-delivered or faxed to opposing counsel and the Court by September 11, 2009.

Apparently, my voice on the matter is old. I hit the old investor blog (stargateworldsinvestors.blogspot.com) and saw that T. W. Anderson is of the same opinion, just more eloquently said, but right on target: 

Well, from the posts today from Tkksnow on the official forums we can see this:

With the scope of the project(s) scaled back, and the correct human resources capacity, we're no longer working on a mega-blockbuster MMORPG budget. There's a skilled, small group of crack developers working. It's arguable that this is how it should have always been (but I would have never been here to begin with then).

In the past, people in the company talked up the investment funds. It's something we can't hide when things stalled out. Yes, there was a ton of money invested. And I think we discovered, it doesn't have to be like that again to produce.
__________________

In other words...all their real developers are gone. The people requiring actual pay. The skilled people. I'm sorry, but I absolutely don't believe that "crack" developers are willing to work for below-realistic budget numbers, regardless of how passionate about a project they might be. CME are the masters of spin, if nothing else, and with the average salary of a game developer being around 70k a year, I just don't see any actual developers on-hand who are willing to work for anything less. As we can see, anyone with any skill has moved on to other companies and other games, because like any skilled worker in any trade/industry they want to get paid for what they do.

Secondly is the comment that they are no longer working on an AAA budget. In other words...SGW is dead in the water. If anything is released, expect it to be sub-standard, sub-quality, and not to expect anything for at least a year, because with such drastically reduced numbers and all of the REAL developers moving on to other projects CME is left facing the reality that the only people they can afford to hire are either people who have other means of staying afloat (large bank accounts) and the willingness to risk another 2-3 years of their careers on a game that will never be anywhere close to an AAA title, or interns or newbies who are willing to work for little/nothing. In both cases it boils down to the same thing: they don't have more than 10-15 people working on the game. And while that might have worked 10 years ago for games like Ultima, we are in the 21st century. If you want to make an AAA title and have it be successful you have to invest 80+ million dollars and have that money be spent on ACTUAL development of the IP...not on random crap that has nothing to do with the game.

In the meantime, CME has released information on their forums that they are coming out with a different game in the meantime...another Stargate game that is taking precedence over what used to be their flagship product, the Stargate: Worlds project. In other words...they blew all their money in bad investments and are now trying to recoup their losses in any way possible...by releasing a sub-standard non-MMORPG product simply to try and make a few dollars to keep their "crack" team of interns and newbie developers working.

Lets take a look at what tkksnow had to say today: 

With the scope of the project(s) scaled back, and the correct human resources capacity, we're no longer working on a mega-blockbuster MMORPG budget. There's a skilled, small group of crack developers working. It's arguable that this is how it should have always been (but I would have never been here to begin with then).

In the past, people in the company talked up the investment funds. It's something we can't hide when things stalled out. Yes, there was a ton of money invested. And I think we discovered, it doesn't have to be like that again to produce.

Interpreted this means: We don’t have enough people to put out a quality game, even after cutting features left and right. Our ‘skilled’ (people with little game experience that stuck around during our no-pay period) are spinning their wheels, working long hours to help further Gary’s ponzi scheme before the lawsuits hit and we're out of money again.

We have let go our skilled developers so we could save some funds in hope of attracting at least one more programmer to the team.

Because of our bold moves, we now do not have to give credit to all those developers who worked the past four years on SGW! Look at all the completion bonus money we’ll save (plus we’ll get all their stock options back! ) Of course, even with so few devs, we still have the large-sized administrative staff !
 

You have made an assumption about nobody in these parts being vested financially. I also am acquainted with some who have invested in this game and developers that have gone endless months without pay.  If Whiting was on the up, there would not be anything to talk about.

The attention these days are on the endless lawsuits. Depending on how they hit, it could kill CME & SGW/SGB quicker than how long it will take to download a pirated version of Stargate Battles. I am curious how much the current investors (doctors) knew about all these suits. Nobody could be that stupid to contribute, could they?
 

Originally posted by yellowperil

I am no legal expert, but what does that actually mean ?

I'm guessing the McNells know that CME has a little money atm and they want their debt repaid - NOW. The protective order could be anything.   In a nutshell, it will force Gary to do something or nothing, depending on what the McNells are seeking. As with emergency orders, they are asking to forego the normal notices, etc. and get down to business in front of a judge ASAP.

As to the long list of other suits, it appears CME partially lost the suit regarding the building they never finished. Expect to see additional motions/filings that ask for a dollar amount. 

The poor employees left at CME are racing against time & lawsuits to finish Stargate Battles to get it on Gary's MMOGULS site, so he can make money for months to come pimping MMOGULS in foreign countries.

They are too nice to Gary, even though they will most likely be jobless afterwards. When Nedra’s and the rest of the suits hit, the poor doctors money will go there instead of the few developer’s pockets.
 

Updated movement on this filing.  Looks like the McKnell's mean business! 

8/27/2009 MOT - Motion 8/28/2009
NOTE: EMERGENCY MOTION FOR PROTECTIVE ORDER AND STAY OF ENFORCEMENT OF FOREIGN JUDGMENT

8/27/2009 MOT - Motion 8/28/2009
NOTE: EMERGENCY / FOR PROTECTIVE ORDER AND STAY OF ENFORCEMENT OF FOREIGN JUDGMENT EMERGENCY REQEUST FOR HEARING WITH NOTICE

8/27/2009 NOF - Notice Of Filing 8/28/2009
NOTE: Notice of E-Filing of Emergency Motion for Protective Order and Certificate of Notice by Facsimile Transmission to Plaintiffs Utah Counsel / PAID $223.00 Receipt #11219572
 

The only people who would have been offended are the Cheyenne Mountain Executives (the few that are left) who want to get their precious Stargate Battles finished and ported to the MMOGULS before the investor lawsuits start to take action. They are very good at trying to get that kind of press deleted.

Bob, you need to just direct folks to your portal where you can give them information.

I still do not have a copy of the complaint. Apparently, it takes a few business days after a filing to get a copy.  

In other news, I heard they are working hard (some harder than others) on Stargate Battles. All Battles devs (including the guy they nabbed from the renaissance fair who's never held a game job before and was recently promoted to designer!) are herded in one room at what is left of the Stargate Worlds development area.     They still only have 1 programmer type, 3 artists and one animator. Design has more bodies. QA out numbers programming! Lol

And kudus to Kevin Balentine as he escaped CME and is now the Senior Community Manager at Vogster Entertainment!