Lum the Mad
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- This article is about the MMORPG commentator known as Lum the Mad. For the Dungeons and Dragons character known as Lum the Mad, see Lum the Mad (Greyhawk).
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Scott Jennings, more widely known as Lum the Mad, was a well-known MMORPG commentator whose site, The Rantings of Lum The Mad, existed from 1998 to 2001. Prior to the explosion of blog sites, Lum's website played host to a long series of rants about the MMORPG community of the time. Until recently he was an employee of Mythic Entertainment, makers of Dark Age of Camelot, but left to work on as as-yet unrevealed project at NCsoft. He also has a blog, Broken Toys, which is updated infrequently (and sometimes about games, too).
Scott's nom de plume of Lum the Mad was his Ultima Online character's name; the original Lum the Mad was a character in the Greyhawk campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons.
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[edit] A Brief History
Archives of Scott's early writings are sparse, especially things before his rise to notoriety. He has some copies of his old articles available in a barely organized format.
[edit] Before The Fame
Scott's foray into the internet began with a web site about Daggerfall, where he dispensed helpful tips and tricks. His focus eventually shifted to a game called Ultima Online (UO), where a lot of his familiar rantings began.
Lum's attitude was mostly humorous and intelligent, but very vitrolic and bitter on some issues. His ease in flexing from humor to anger and back without loseing sight of the topic lended his rants a distinctive tone. It was his punctual and relevant topics that brought the fans and haters of UO to his site, along with some of UO's developers and personnel.
He was beaten in his attempt to register lumthemad.com by a competing ranter known as Dr. Twister, who became infamous as a host for MMORPG specific bugs and exploits. In a case of cybersquatting, Twister announced he would only relinquish the domain for a substantial amount of money. Instead, Scott settled for a .net extension.
[edit] The Golden Days
Ultima Online, being the most popular "massive" online RPG at the time, was the focus of a lot of his initial MMORPG rantings. His views on supporting macroing in UO was fierce and, while ultimately futile, made him very popular in the UO community. His opinions on lesser matters, such as the tete-a-tete of GM Ironwill's opinions of the UO community (and the subsequent distorted importance by CR representative LadyMOI), were informative and humorous. He also played an important role in getting the word out about GM Darwin, who was caught and subsequently fired by EA for generating gold and other virtual items for the purpose of selling on eBay for real money.
As Everquest entered the scene, he was one of the first in line to buy it. His early opinions on EQ focused mostly on its differences to UO. His opinions rather quickly changed, when he saw how detrimental the fundamental game designs were leading to. Even though EQ had surpassed UO in subscriptions, he felt that long periods of time to gain very little was not fun, especially since most of it consisted of beating up the same mobs over and over. He pointed out several cases of where player greed was surpassing any amount of fun, such as large guilds squatting in zones for the purpose of keeping limited spawned mobs to themselves. Class balance, Real-money trading, server lag, "raiding" as an end-game, and the later expansion's lack of finished and working content were some of the many issues he covered.
Lum did not leave any prospective MMORPG behind. Newer games entering the scene like Asheron's Call and Anarchy Online became regular subjects with their own curiosities and drama. While Asheron's Call was given fairly positive opinions, he had concern that it was a little too close to the Everquest model, in that it took long periods of time to reach higher levels and also relied on raid content. Later issues included AC's inability to fix major exploits in PvP and an article actually done by a later staff member about a powerful demon character played by a GM who was caught out-of-character accepting make-believe twinkies from a female gamer. Anarchy Online also followed an Everquest-like model, however they had major problems of their own, such as constant crashing, server lag, and even some cases of Windows registry corruptions, which Lum was more than willing to harp on.
His later works became even more elaborate, such as a mock-up event for Shadowbane done entirely with Warcraft 2 sprites. Instead of the usual review article for World War II Online, he posted a long, profane and hilarious chatlog of him testing the game offline, in which he proclaimed, "I WILL TAXI TO VICTORY!" That phrase has become a favorite to his fans.
He attracted many well-known MMORPG staff and developers to his site for discussions on his forums, such as Richard Garriott, Raph Koster, and Mark Jacobs. Discussions often centered around the very virtual worlds they built, with much input from the community, both constructive and negative.
He wasn't always there to write every day, however. He gathered together a team of writers to fill in with whatever he couldn't cover. The LumCorp staff, as they were called, consisted of quite a few people over time. Arcadian Del Sol, Delusion, Hedron, Bob "gBob" Roland (who worked for NetDevil), Lietgardis (who now works for Wolfpack Studios), Myschyf, Riprend, Savant (who until 2004 worked for Themis Group), and Lum's Other Half (his wife). Later additions included Wikipedia editor Bruce Rolston (BruceR) and some other Wikipedia editor (Snowspinner).
[edit] Lum Sells Out For A Bagel
Keeping up the immense bandwidth bills was tedious. Being at the fall of the dot com bubble, finding a host with cheap prices and reliable service was tough. It also didn't help that banner ad revenues were beginning to fail miserably, which eventually led to the end of one of his favorite hosts and sponsor, the Crossroads gaming network.
He began asking for donations, of which the community provided him with a large amount. It's estimated over $2,000 was donated before the falling out. He kept the site going for quite some time on the money, even keeping a page updated as to how he spent it.
Unfortunately, as with many of the tech positions at the time, Lum lost his job. However, it wasn't long after being laid-off that he was approached by Mythic Entertainment for a job opening. He was hired to work on the back-end parts of Dark Age of Camelot and developed the Camelot Herald.
The term "sold out for a bagel" was actually coined by Sanya "Tweety" Thomas, who also used to rant and was hired by Mythic as their Internet Relations Manager. On her own rant site, she made the comment "Also, Mythic's CEO bought me a bagel", which has become a running gag since. Another important line Lum borrowed was the response to the conspiracy theorists, "please direct all complaints about me being a sell-out corporate whore to www.I Don't See You Paying For My Health Insurance.com".
[edit] Successor Site Self-Destructs
With Lum gone, it was up to the writers to keep the site going. The money which had been donated was given to the writers, and a new site sprang up as slownewsday.net.
The rabid events that took place at slownewsday.net would fill a list of its own. Primarily, hatred grew between some of the writers and Mythic. Intent on keeping its realistic image, Eldin (the head writer at the time) would constantly rip into Mythic's game, the company, and their CEO, very much nonsensically. However, at the same time, Eldin failed to change the back-end of the site, which was necessary to remove any implication Lum had anything to do with them. In what he admits was a very immature thing to do, Lum went into the site and shut it down himself. He rather quickly went back and restored it, realising he wasn't really helping the situation.
While Lum continued to not interfere afterwards, slownewsday.net eventually killed itself in a fiery blaze. Some details are very speculative, but you can get an idea of the SND.net fallout from Down In Flames, a great retelling/rant by a good friend of Lum and very overlooked MMORPG ranter, Musashi.
[edit] The Diaspora Of LTM and What Lum Does Now
After the slownewsday.net break-up, the community spread into several communities, some of which still exist and are quite active.
- Player2Player (2001-present), originally headed by gBob, became the immediate successor site after SND's implosion. After some changes in ownership and some scuffles, it lost a lot of favor with the community and pretty much is dead in the water.
- Waterthread (2002-2003), named after a famous LTM board thread, was the main successor for some time. Eventually, the head man lost interest and transferred the forums to f13.net.
- f13.net (2003-present), which wasn't well-received by the "hard core" community members on its launch, weathered the stormy migration from waterthread and now has the most active message board of this list.
- Corpnews (2000-present), which began around the same time as lumthemad.net, got a large boost when the community that didn't like the waterthread/f13 merge went here instead. This site is fairly active.
- The Morlocks (2001-present), born as the result of a few more prolific LtM message board posters, still has a fairly active message board.
Lum himself has taken up his own blog, Broken Toys, which he infrequently updates about random stuff sometimes but not always relating to online gaming. His old writings are hosted in a separate archive.
Lum left Mythic Entertainment's employ on February 17, 2006 on good terms, seeking to move back southwest. His new job is with NCsoft in Austin, TX.
He is now a published author, having written Massively Multiplayer Games For Dummies (part of the ...For Dummies series). The book (ISBN 0-471-75273-8) was published on December 5, 2005.
[edit] External links
- Broken Toys - Lum's current blog
- An archived posting about an Ultima Online fan gathering dating from 1999.
- An interview with Corpnews - ironically, Sanya Thomas was one of the interviewers.
- Amazon Link to MMOGs for Dummies
