I'm just going to toss around a bit of a hypothetical here. It's some thoughts, nothing more, nothing less really.
Joe Capone, the unknown quality, has some money and some ideas and approaches Wes Harris, who has a smallish but positive reputation and some genuine knowledge about reptile husbandry. Joe uses his money to purchase a very large number of animals from a large number of established breeders, purchases on a scale that would almost certainly require some fairly substantial contact and likely includes discussions about things like market saturation and some hints at price... setting...
Wes produces animals using Joe's money, enough animals so that there's difficulty selling them quickly. The intended return on some of the investments isn't happening quickly, the market is reanalyzed and prices are dropped; there may at this point have been some growing animosity between Joe and a number of people he purchased from and has subsequently condemned. Their "market value" was too high for him to move his animals at, his reprices animals undercut them by a signifigant margin. A whole lot of basement and hobbiest breeders who thought they had some kind of surefire thing going on saw their potential profit seeming to leave their investment and started crying. What they seem to fail to realize is that their animals wouldn't have moved any better at the artificially maintained higher prices either and they would have had just as much trouble getting a return on their investment. Still, they get loud in their displeasure and Joe shows up in a fighting mood; this will influence how he is seen, how his business decisions are characterized and how he as an individual views his competition.
Sometime in the middle of that, he forms an association with reptileauctions and reptileforums. MKR is basically Joe's money and loud mouth... and Wes Harris' hard work... MKR banners appear on those sites, MKR animals are used as contest prizes, there are forum sponserships and Wes Harris takes an active role answering ball python questions. I strongly suspect that it will be important to remember that, as of the time these associations formed, Joe hadn't gotten loud or started throwing around his egomaniacal weight. AS things started to come to a head... well, yeah, some things were deleted on reptileforums when they got out of hand. It's not the BOI, it's not TRR's old war room and anything that's antagonistic and not family friendly dissapears fast, regardless of who it's aimed at. The target happened to be a forum sponser and advertiser but I know for a fact (having gotten my angry up over there myself at a non-sponser non-staff nobody) that they just pull any posts that cross certain lines.
Now Joe sees that and HE decides he "owns" the forums. Given the amount of money I suspect he invested in advertising based on the banner ads, the forum sponserships and his half hour used car salesman style "TV show" that's hosted over there, he doesn't own it outright... the sites are owned by Howard Fluker... but I'd say he'd thrown enough cash at the website to have the site staff by the short hair when he wants to demand something. Leaving them in a fairly unpleasant position of either letting him make a few more decisions than he really should, or pissing off and possibly driving off a substantial financial supporter. 'course at this point, leaving MKR (and Joe specifically since Wes Harris has not, to my knowledge, done anything underhanded, shady, unscrupulous or even offensive and there may come a time when it's important to divide MKR into "Stuff Joe did" and "Stuff Wes did") as a major advertiser and one that's apparantly throwing around dictates and ultimatums is just as damaging.
All just thoughts, of course, I don't know and can't prove anything.
I think, and this is more guesswork, when the rock gets lifted and all the slimey things living underneath it come to light, the end result is going to be as follows- Wes Harris is a good guy who produces and sells quality animals, he made a decision to pick up a financial backer that made sense. Morph prices dropped because the animals weren't selling at the higher prices. Perhaps MKR overshot the mark a bit with their sales drives and advertising, since someone seems to have either accepted money for animals they didn't have OR they sold everything they did and are looking for more to sell (although everything said about that so far has been secondhand "I know a guy who got asked" is somewhat questionable). Reptileforums and reptileauctions and the other related sites are looking like they may be in the same boat as Wes Harris, having accepted money and being left in a position where they've got this anchor tied around their collective (owner, admin, site staff, other invested advertisers and people who are simple users that liked the site design and content prior to this explosion) necks. Even so, at the bottom of it I'm not so sure there's anything that's actually wrong in a tangible sense... yet anyway, no misrepresented animals, nothing stolen nobody ripped off- just Joe Capone's monumental big mouth and his ego driven bullshit about how he's running the reptile industry. He's crapping all over everyone who ended up associated with him before his personality change but he doesn't seem to care much. He also doesn't seem to care about the fact that he crippled his own business, not through his price dropping, but through his comments and behavior- since the new morphs come from a fairly small number of people who have "first dibs" from the exporters on the other side, or the stock to invest in long term projects mixing various color traits... and MKR is going to be left out of those, no matter how much money Joe tries to throw at it. Their current stock is all they're ever going to get and after the prices drop on each morph they're dealing with... well... eventually the business will be left as something much less than it is now. Joe really has everything in his hands, he could probably still turn things around if he just got his own idiotic influence out of the business. He's a money-man who wanted to play idea-man; he should stick to what he's actually good at- providing capitol and taking his profits and just shut the hell up about everything else.
