I'm not at all sure he would agree with that statement. He had close to 15 years with the company, to me that counts for something. And he's the only CM to have ever given me a forum suspension (not for any of the MMOs). Other CMs need to get their skates haste buffs on.
It doesn't matter if he agrees or not, nor does it matter how long he's been with the company. If he were in charge of the entire team, he would be Lead CM (Lead is the supervisor title at DBG) and not Senior like the other Senior CM's with the company (maybe there's a reason he never became lead after 13 years and is now gone). The fact that he was the only CM to ever give you a forum suspension is equated to the fact that either he had thinner skin about things than his successors, or you stopped rule breaking after your suspension.
And you would be wrong on both counts. I was suspended all the way back in 2011, shortly after the launch of Magic: Tactics and also shortly after the closure of the Denver studio. There was never any offending post. (This was in the days of the old forum software, so none of the message traffic survives.) Mepps was still a relatively new SOE employee at the time, and he was in charge of the CM for all the strategy games that had at one point been run out of Denver, including LoN and the ill-fated Tactics. Mepps suspended me under orders from Smed, who had found out (I was never sure how, exactly) that I had a personal friend who worked in a senior management position at WotC, and that I was privy to internal conversations at that company about their dissatisfaction with SOE's performace in the wake of the Denver closure. There was talk about shutting down Magic: Tactics not long after its launch on the grounds of non-compliance with the terms of the license. It was a crap game from the start, and SOE was getting vilified by many players on its own forum. Plus, key members of the design team had left the company before launch, hence nothing to do with the Denver closure, a fact which SOE had tried to keep secret from WotC, and Smed seemed to think I was the whistleblower. He was clueless to the notion that SOE had customers who had been in the gaming hobby longer than he was, and even more so to the fact there were a number of SOE customers in Seattle who knew people at WotC. So now you know why I have never liked Smed. For the record, while I was never on the Magic pro tour, I did play regularly during the mid-'90s at Saturday sealed deck events at WotC's Renton HQ, and later when they moved that operation to their so-called Tournament Center in Seattle's U-District, one of my old stomping grounds. All part of my misguided mid-life crisis.
