gurugeorge
Arcane
What happened with SOTA was the same thing that happened with Tabula Rasa and UO2 - the white elephant in the room of Richard Garriott pitching out high design concepts with the detail equivalent to napkin scribbles (or any game pitching post starting with "It would be really kewl...") and having everyone else do the actual work for him, taking credit for everyone else's work, spending tons of money on himself while leading nothing (or even being completely absent), so that every publisher regrets their decision to back him and tries to get rid of him.
I'm sure Travian Games (who picked up SOTA because of the CEO Lars Janssen was a total fanboy at the time) wishes forging a resignation letter worked to have gotten rid of him much, much earlier.
As of now, Lord Dick occasionally shows up on the SOTA livestreams like a guest thot for tips while other people are still working on what his Ultimate RPG was (not) supposed to be. So, not much different than when he was dancing around taking shots during the begathons with his pet monkeyboys.
Oh yeah, I remember reading a post-mortem on Tabula Rasa. The game that ended up being made was something cobbled together in the last year or so of development by the long-suffering development team that bore almost no relation whatsoever to the original ideas that had been proposed, or the stuff that had been done in the 5 years or so of development up to that point. Given that, the developers ended up speed-building the framework of a pretty decent MMO and it's a shame it never had enough support to keep it going. I still remember those ad hoc base battles fondly, and the way the enemy spawns used to dropship in.