f13.net

Question for all old timers, what did DrTwister did back in UO days to become hated? Was it 'working' with GM Darwin?

From the wiki (the actual wikipedia):


I'm sure Lum can give more insight. I would link to the very old Corpnews interview, but it's an IRC Chat and doesn't actually give much information on this situation.

Edit: Link to the Wiki Entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lum_the_Mad)
Edit: Brokentoys archives. (http://archives.brokentoys.org/?m=199912)

From the same wikipedia article:


It's wikipedia right, someone should edit that shit, I mean that is what wikipedia is all about.

This thread's about Dr.Twister, but I mean, that line is fairly accurate. We weren't well-received and compared to say, 1up.com, we're only fairly active.

I took it more to mean the dispute when Waterthread was merged with F13.  There was a fair amount of complaint about the move, with the rest being neutral.  Almost no one was happy.

When life hands you lemons, make StarBurst Fruit Candies.

Dr. Twister was hated because, as I recall, he was as slimy as snake oil.  His site was a hack/ exploit archive that always 'reported' the hacks with a proclimation of 'oh, gee I didn't expect people to actually USE them'.

I largely missed the Dr. Twister vs Lum days, since I didn't play UO (and found LTM through an odd cartoon by Evercrest, an old EQ comic that first gave Woody of GU his webspace.)

As for that wiki article, I'd say it's accurate.  It's tracing the lineage of Lum's site and the lummies.  While there's a lot of faces here, and some have been here for years, very few are lummies anymore and the 'merger' was taken very badly by most of those people. This site has it's own community now, one that mixes some lurkers from those days in but isn't defined by them.  If it were a Wiki article about gaming sites and rants and it dismissed F13 as 'not well-recieved' that'd be a different matter entirely.

I think someone needs to edit that shit into the Wiki entry.


I agree.

'This is the only way to get OSI to fix these exploits!"

Which it didn't.

Was that the one with Sock Puppet Abashi?  Fucking classic.

Dr. Twister was hated because he had a holier than thou attitude about being an exploiter.  Also, even though he published exploits, I don't recall that he ever actually tried to work with the devs to get them fixed before publishing them.  He wasn't interested in improving the game.

And as the Ltm.net/.com thing shows he was just an all around jerk of the first order.

It was, and you can't find the 'toons anymore or else I'd link to the one that first made me search 'Lum the Mad' wondering what the hell was going on the toon.  It was 4 panels some odd-looking guy with a goatee (who I now know to be Scott) in some bizarre fight with a female ranter.  I seem to recall it being about Lum abusing/exploiting cute pre-teen Japanese cosplayers if I remember right.  I never did find out why it was a big enough deal to do a comic about it, though.

Merusk and Murgos have it right. Though it predates my time with the community even as a lurker (I really only actively started messing with this stuff before the Slownewsday.net implosion), I do know that Twister was just a rotten fuck. He was an exploiter who loved exploiting just for the sake of it, and if he could have gotten paid to exploit he would. A totally reprehensible human being as MMOG players go.

And yet, people are still talking about him.

Only Sinij, who still thinks it's 1999.

And used "did Dr. Twister did" in an sentence.  Twice.

in an sentence?

Someone needs to get a mop and clean this up.

There.

I love you this thread.

From my foggy memory, Dr. Twister's position was that "I give OSI one week warning - then post the exploit for you all to protect yourselves from it! And look at this Lum the Mad's website, he thinks I'm stupid, and gives me a funny Neo picture next to rants about my website."

Needless to say, thousands of Dr. Twister readers (myself included) started reading Lum's very entertaining website. Of course it took me several years to discover there was a message board attached to the front page....

Lum would probably be the best to comment. Or Dr. Twister. I understand he was 5 feet from Lum once, and made some sort of stalker like post.

Twister was responsible for a lot of Lum's early traffic.  Twister had a lot of readers.  He didn't just get the multitude of would be exploiters, but he got even more honest players who tried to keep up with the latest sploits, for their own protection.  One day, Twister linked one of (maybe the first?) Lum's rants, and suddenly Lum had a horde of pissed off UO players, who loved to hear what bile he was spitting at OSI, reading his page.

Those early days of LTM, when he was very actively posting were cool.  The Darwin controversy, Siege Perilous development and early times, etc.  Lots of good memories there.

Lum was fun, interesting, and packed full of interesting newsbits. 
Those days are long gone sadly.

Well at least I'm VERY protected from Y2K bug.

LtM was the first stop on my long journey that ended here. I'm not even sure how I found LtM (might've been a link in the EQ forums or from the newsgroups), but I only found Lum near the end of his career. Then it became SlowNewsDay. Then that died and had a link to thisisnotacommunity.com. From there I'd hit Arc's site, Broken Toys, The Murlocks, etc. and then Waterthread. Daily. As far as I know, you guys are the true spiritual successors to LtM. The other sites tried, but frankly, could never keep the momentum. This site has never lost the edge. Well, maybe a little since I don't think Boog lives here anymore. That dude used to make me shoot both liquid and solid food through my nose. He is legend. Bastard owes me a new keyboard for the beer he once made me spill into it. ;)

Oh no, is it that time of the year again?

How did you manage to miss the Player2Player stage of the community Raydeen? For a year or so after the Slownewsday implosion that was where everyone posted because Angelstorm and GBob put a link to it on the front page of Slownewday.  It was a very active site until it suffered a meltdown that it never recovered from and most people moved over to Waterthread.

If anyone's interested in the early days of Lum he's posted complete archives of the site over at Brokentoys. I've been going through them for the past few days and getting all nostalgic about the old days when I actually gave a crap about UO. :)

I'm very happy that furries and raging feminists are gone. Anyone remembers warner fuzzleeyerapes and boobs rants?

Wasn't missed. It was in the 'etc.' along with Unknown Player and a few of the others. Used to hit them all on a daily basis to see what the fresh poop was on EQ and DAoC.

Went to the Lum archive at Brokentoys.  So many potentially siggable quotes...

"And I have faith, if anyone could whiz in all 100,000 UO user’s wheaties on a personal basis, it would be Designer Dragon, the man who has made Online Presence a new fighting discipline, sort of like Jeet Kune Do, but on message boards."

"Everquest is like a beautiful, mentally retarded woman. At first you’re entranced, but then it starts to sink in that something is missing…"

Boog was love/hate. Most people hated him. Most others loved to hate him. I personally thought he was hilarious. But samples sizes of 5-10 out of thousands, don't work.

Anyway, far as I can tell, he's disappeared from the net. I can only assume his house was raided by the FBI and they found the heads of online gamers on sticks.

I used to hang at Arcadian's after SND blew up.  Until he started waiting 18 months between updates.

Does anyone know exactly where his Chick-Fil-A is located in D.C.?  I'm there now and bored.

iirc, it's way down 695. But he didn't leave the address here for a reason. So I'm certainly not going to guess.

Just start running into random chicken joints and asking for "Arcadian del Sol from teh intarweb."

Or just look for the guy with the really keen hat.

Make sure you do control shot to the head or he just might respawn at the hospital.

Oh, if only I were still alive!

One thing that didn't get touched on here is this chain of events:

1) Someone (probably an irked low-level EA employee) sends Dr. Twister the entire contents of UO2's intranet development site. It's about a year or so out of date, but still with megabytes more information than anyone's ever seen.
2) Twister starts posting it on a weekly basis. Things like the map world (with things like "player housing areas" helpfully marked) and, eventually, the milestone timeline for the game's development.
3) EA's lawyers hand deliver a cease and desist to Twister, demanding the following sequence of events:
 - He publically apologize
 - He remove everything and anything involving UO2 from his web site
 - He never uses any EA-related material again. Logos, artwork, screenshots, etc. Ever.
4) He did all of these. Needless to say this somewhat burned him out on the whole "posting things on the web" thing.

To quote (http://archives.brokentoys.org/?p=4680) Kirk Black, who was lead programmer of UO at the time:

I did. (I didn't write the initial entry but have been correcting some of the more tinfoil hat stuff. Wiki stores versions if you're curious as to what I "whitewashed".)

The only thing I remember very clearly from the LTM days is Whamadoodles. That shit was funny and horribly scary at the same time.

To be fair Lum, the OSI devs did have a long and infamous history of pushing patches onto the live servers without bothering to fix any of the bugs reported to them from the people who tried Test Center. And many bugs were initially justified by Raph's "Creative use of magic" excuse. For all Twister's faults I'm pretty certain that his publicizing exploits did get them fixed faster than sending an email to Runesabre would have done.

What he did was still inexcusable though. By publicizing them he caused much more damage to the game than if he'd just kept his mouth shut.

If he did, then he only would've succeeded in screwing up the dev schedule for everything else and slow down productivity overall as plans get changed mid-stream to accomidate his postings. 

Every dev I've worked with (and I've no reason to think MMOG devs are different) absolutely HATE bugs.  They don't hate that they're reported, they hate that they exist because it comes as an insult to their integrity.  It's almost personal - "I screwed up?" People tend to take pride in things they make, and dislike flaws for seing them as extentions of themselves.  "Suits"  hate them from a liability standpoint. 

Devs hate their _own_ bugs and want to fix them if the suits let them. But there's nothing a programmer hates more than having to fix someone else's bugs. I think that's the main reason that some bugs in UO remained in the game for literally years. They had a high dev turnover rate and it just wasn't any fun going back and learning someone else's shitty code when there were new and cool things that they could be doing.

I think I know where he's been (http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/07/04/idaho.children/index.html).

I just hope he's not out there breeding.

I'm in the same boat as Furiously, I hung around Lum's for about a year before even realizing there was a message board beyond the frontpage threads. First message board I ever registered on.

If you played the early days of UO, you at least knew of Twister. He was pretty much reviled by anyone who didn't support cheating. Unfortunately, even if you didn't support him, you still had to go to his site to find out the latest cheats, so you'ld have half a chance of defending yourself against them.

I'd actually go to the Dr.Twister site just out of sheer curiosity. Rarely did I ever use a bug, which is funny, because I remember two of my friends stumbling upon the old teleport house loot bug in like 1997. They went on a total rampage of house lootery, but I didn't join them.

I DID enjoy tinkering with UOE, though. Although the first time I loaded it up, I walked up to a guy and said "Hey... why are you blue, dude?". I quickly realized what a moron I was and bolted, heh.

As far as Twister himself, I had him on IPY. As with anyone you can watch play an internet game (hey, come on, what GM doesn't have a list of people to check in on occasionally?), you gain a little insight and some opinions on the person. They aren't to be made public, of course :P

I remember getting linked to Lum's from the old crossroads of dereth message board shortly after AC came out.  Great forum back in the day.  I was fairly active there and through the beginning of the Eldin era, then I mostly dropped out of the community save the occasional lurk until waterthread.  Now I'm here, much to everyone's great joy, I am sure.  TOUUUUUUUCCCCHHH MEEEEEE.....IT'S SO EEEEEEEEAAASY TO LEEEEEAAAAAVE MEEEEEEE, ALL ALOOOOOONE WITH MY MEEEMORIES.....


As for Twister, he was a tool.