Ah, yes thank you. :p

I think it would be more accurate to say he came back to Cryptic (and NW).

And there was also that ranger-guy who worked in qa or something that used to post a lot and completely disappeared as well

He (or someone claiming to be him) was posting on a lot of news sites. Near as I can tell, he got laid off in the divestment, retained a high opinion of Cryptic, and had a very low opinion of Atari. He claimed that Atari sold themselves the Champions IP under the table so they could charge Cryptic a licensing fee to bleed money out of them on the books.

He seemed to act like Atari was ready to run everything into the ground, while Cryptic was stuck trying to stay afloat. If any of that's true, it seems Perfect World negotiated that out in the sale because there's no indication that Atari owns the Champs IP.

Incidentally, that whole thing reminded me of a gas station chain I knew where these guys owned two companies: the gas station and the fuel delivery.

They started overcharging their gas stations for gas so they could make the gas delivery service look profitable and sell it. Then they bankrupted the gas stations and bought up their best locations at a foreclosure auction with the money they got from selling the gas delivery service.

Near as I could tell, it was all legal but really dubious... and my experience with a lot of those kinds of business dealings is part of what leads me to believe the guy claiming to be coderanger. You can do some really weird things when you own multiple corporations.

I don't think Phoxe was here but a couple months after launch. It seemed rather abrupt but he could have put a two week notice in for all I know.

Was Phoxe the one who leaked plans for paid adventure packs in Champions?

That was pretty shortsighted in retrospect. It led to Vibora Bay being free (which it might have anyway) but, in any case, Champs ended up dropping the pay model for PvE content because it didn't work from a business perspective.

I blather on about this stuff as a player but I wouldn't risk a job over it.

All I know was he was very vocal with us we talked with him often then he was just gone. Then we got the cryptic response confirming he left and the doom post started.

No, that was David "Daeke" Bass who was sacked as community manager at CO for blabbing about the expansions being pay to play. That's why Stormshade was taken off STO for a while as he had to take up the slack in the CO community.

I know Phoxe did not think highly of Atari and i understand that he was initially one of their employees as a community rep there. He had a poor reputation in the Atari forums but on the whole i got on OK with him.

I made a thread about his disappearance about a few months later. No one seemed to notice it though. Phoxe was a lot of fun. All of a sudden, you had a community rep guy doing things with the community. Even if those polls didn't mean anything in the long run, he tried.

I'm guessing, and only guessing, he got the axe. I'm sure he would have said good bye if he was leaving on good terms. He was very active with the community here.