I used to wish people would just drop this whole "Voss/TAS" thing, then Voss started posting on the subject and it became quite clear as to why that should never happen.
This is going to be kinda long... you've been warned.
I was not a TAS beta tester
I was playing WB at the time of the "scam"
I've generated an overall opinion of this situation that seems to vary a bit from what others are trying to portray:
- In regards to being an "F-16/P-51 pilot": Voss flies remote control aircraft. He had a model F-16 and P-51 as well as some others. He also insisted that flying R/C aircraft gave you extremely accurate incite into the performance characteristics of planes. This morphed into "I'm an F-16 pilot" and "I own a P-51"
- I don't recall seeing Voss claim he had 2 PhDs. I believe it was something that was said about him in an interview with an on-line gaming magazine. That said, I distinctly remember that Voss never said anything to correct the error. I have no idea if he actually told the individual that he had 2 PhDs. Really, only 2 people in the world know the answer to that one.
- I don't recall anyone losing money through "investments" other than his partner who gave him some computer hardware. I honestly believe this aspect of things has been exagerated in vitrolic posts.
- The brain tumor excuse and scorpion bite excuse were actually from Voss. From what I've seen to date and given the excellent timing of both, I sincerely believe both were lies.
- Voss was outed by an actual AFA graduate who actually gave voss the bennifit of the doubt at first then recognized the outright lies in regards to military service and decided enough was enough.
- Voss did present "screenshots" that weren't actually screenshots of a game but simply generated pictures (from what I have no idea).
- Voss presented a doctored picture of a P-51/pilot where he superimposed his head over the other pilot's in order to prove he had a P-51.
- Voss claimed to have a game capable of doing things that everyone wanted in a game at the time and has not shown a single line of the code to anyone. He still maintains that he "invented" aspects of games that in effect translate to being "more realistic" and thus are actually aparent to anyone that knows anything about combat/aircraft/war.
- Voss did claim that he was friend with someone at the FBI and was going to turn in people for violating their TOS agreement from the beta test period of TAS.
- Nobody recieved a single beta copy of TAS to steal secrets from.
Voss started "TAS" on the premise that it would be easy to do something that AW and WB were claiming would be extremely difficult (if not impossible at the time) to do. He lied to get people to support TAS in doing so. The "TAS will be able to do this... why can't your game?" slams started rolling into both AW and WB threads and called all the programmers to the mat. Voss loved every minute of it... since he didn't have to do much other than seed the misconceptions with simple harmless lies.
The lies Voss was telling grew out of control, and Voss (being something of an idiot) didn't know when to throw in his hand and began lieing more... only not little white lies... real whoppers. But that was OK, because he still had some support from those who simply had to believe that AW and WB programmers had their heads up their tulips and a better world did exist.
It finally snapped when Voss simply took it too far and pissed on the wrong people. That's when Voss disappeared multiple times... citing multiple reasons.
And here we are... watching Voss claim it is everyone else that has it wrong. He didn't lie, he didn't defraud, he was not the villain people make him out to be. There is some level of truth to that, as there was to almost every other lie voss told. That's the truly sad thing about him: he believes that a part truth is not a lie.
MiniD
