In case you missed it, last night the Wolf Larsen fan club kicked off on /r/starcitizen. I gotta tell you, with the imagination and flair for drama my first stalker has, I only wish he or she would step out of the shadowy world of closet-masturbating, anonymous, online bullies and write some Star Citizen fan-fiction for INN. This post has got role-playing gold written all over it.

But seriously, the rhetoric of many tin-foil hat wearing fruit-loops has an ounce of truth to it, and ‘WolfsWorstNightmare’ is no exception. Before I comment further, here it is, in all its delicious, dramatic glory:

There is one man in control here at INN. He is a power tripper.

He is so consumed with power he is destroying both the ideals of Star Citizen and what INN was founded on.

His only goal is absolute power over all news about Star Citizen. He firmly believes that anything Star Citizen should go thru INN. If he had his way this SUB would be 100% controlled at the very least by INN. He would personally prefer if you all come to INN.

I am from INN and today this has to stop.

For too long Wolf Larsen (of reddit account /u/WolfLarsenSC) has been able to lord over the rest of us at INN and the community at large. He has used others unknowingly to do his bidding.

I speak now of /u/Dolvak a mod of this Sub. You cannot have a unbiased community when the mods are working for and creating news stories for another news site. It just does not work and happens naturally, either it be intentionally or not. It is at the expense of all other user created content. You either need to step down from one or the other. You can no longer do both. You have be caught up in this and it is not your fault, Wolf has used you, just like the rest of us. Please choose wisely as I do not want to make you a further casualty of my attack.

As for Wolf. Today I will no longer be silent, you are being called out. I am taking you down. I will fight you at every turn, I will break you from within.

You will try to find me, you will ask me to my face. I will relish in saying ‘it wasn’t me’. I will be smiling and laughing on the inside.

You have brought this on yourself, the Star Citizen community deserves better, hell INN deserves better. Stand aside or I will put you down.

This is your only warning, there will be no further communication. Do not make me flush you out the Airlock.

Pretty pleasant, huh?

So, on with the real truth behind the ‘Real Truth’.

The one power tripper to rule them all

First, while I am the majority shareholder and ranking officer of Imperial News Network’s parent company, I am certainly not alone in ownership or control over the business. INN is the intellectual property of a Limited Liability Partnership owned by myself, and two other members of the team. INN is a brand new start up, strategically focused on growth, not profit, and as such, we are operating at a loss and significant personal expense to the owners, who pay for equipment, hosting, contest prizes, and other expenses related to building a news organization this size -out of their own pockets.

As for my being ‘consumed with power’, I’m not really sure what that means. By way of providing some visibility into how we are run, for anybody who isn’t bored to death by such trivial, organizing information, INN is a fairly flat hierarchy, managed by a cadre of Directors who, along with any contributors who care to participate, decide on the vision and direction of INN in a bi-weekly steering committee meeting. Coincidentally, anyone in the community who would like to contribute to INN is welcome to, as long as your content meets some basic, minimal standards of quality. As a contributor you are welcome to join the steering committee meetings, where you too can share an equal and valued voice at the table to determine the overall direction we take INN in the future.

As the ‘CEO’ I do have the benefit of spending some of my time thinking about strategic vision and growth, but that doesn’t mean my role is any more or less important than the casual contributor who shares one post a month with our audience. In fact, I’d say my role is less important than our content contributors. That said, most of my time at INN is spent providing tech support, code maintenance, and the slow, steady expansion of tools and solutions our team needs to be successful. With 20 years of experience as a professional web developer in real life, I’m the guy who keeps the lights on. It ain’t very glamorous, but somebody has to do it.

Getting drunk on absolute power

As for my goals, for the most part, I can’t disagree: My hope for INN, like any entrepreneur, is for it to be a successful, slightly profitable business someday. Eventually we hope to have enough income to pay our team for all their hard work, but as of now everyone at INN is in it for the love and glory. If and when we do start to receive more money, it will always be reinvested into the business so we can grow our capability to provide our audience with the best possible coverage on Star Citizen. This might include sending INN team members to cover events, buying better equipment, contest prizes, and continuing to expand our storage and bandwidth, as demand grows.

As for ambition, in a community as large as the one around Star Citizen it’s unlikely we’ll be the only dedicated fan site, but we are trying to be the best. I’m not sure this is something to be ashamed of. Maybe WolfsWorstNightmare is anti-ambition? One can only speculate.

All that said, much more important than my goals, are the goals of the INN team. These are, and have always been, to get the story about Star Citizen right, based on the fact that we are all certifiably insane, Star Citizen fans, as opposed to professional gaming journalists. I think this team’s record, in that regard, speaks for itself.

One thing WolfsWorstNightmare shared I will point out is completely false, is the suggestion that we want to control /r/starcitizen. This is, for obvious reasons, ridiculous. Reddit is a community we participate in, like all other community members: as equals and individuals. We all have the same ability to post, comment, and vote, like anyone else. We are not banned because we are, for the most part, active, participating members of the community in good standing. Reddit is very good at weeding out content sites whose only goal is self-promotion and this simply isn’t INN’s story. We are members of the subreddit community, and that’s how we like it.

Look deeply into my eyes

With regards to ‘using others unknowingly to do my bidding’ I can only laugh. I’m not sure if WolfsWorstNightmare is suggesting I have hypnotized my teammates or what, but this is obviously kind of silly. Not sure how to respond. Likewise, I’ll let Dolvak speak for himself. There’s certainly no rule at INN about a subreddit moderator working here. I don’t believe Reddit restricts moderators from having other jobs.

The rest of the post is just a bunch of silly, non-credible threats and absurd fantasies which I am uninterested in entertaining. If WolfsWorstNightmare is an INNsider (Sorry, I can’t stop the puns) I can’t imagine why he or she is waiting so long to ‘take us down’…

Join me, and together we’ll rule the Star Citizen News Universe, as father and son (or daughter)

At the end of the day, there’s one big thing I would like everyone in the Star Citizen community to know about INN: This is an open, creative, collaborative place to share Star Citizen related content. If you’ve got something to share, we invite you to join the team. Your content will always be owned by you and you will always get credit. Sharing it with INN just means your content will get in front of Star Citizen’s largest and most successful fan site’s considerable audience, while leveraging our promotional engine. At the same time, we’re a community of super fans who love hanging out and playing the game and your contributions will help us all grow together, as a team, while covering the game we love so very much.

So, if you’ve got questions about joining INN, please contact me, or any other member of the team. Even you WolfsWorstNightmare, even you. In the meantime, enjoy the classic internet meme which inspireed the title of this post: All Your Base Are Belong To Us

See you around the ‘Verse!