Down the memory lane - what did DrTwister did to get hated?

[Lum]

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

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 It's about a year or so out of date, but still with megabytes more information than anyone's ever seen.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.

[Lum]

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.

To quote Kirk Black, who was lead programmer of UO at the time:

You know what’s amusing with all these “I am helping UO by posting bugs” websites…

You would think with such obvious “concern” for the well-being of UO, those same people would go the more direct and easy route of trying to get things fixed by sending such exploits to the Lead Programmer of UO. Seems to be some advantages to this approach:

1) Don’t have to learn HTML, find website space and spend time updating a website. A simple text email to my address seems pretty easy compared to running a website.

2) Would actually get their mission accomplished quicker without hurting a bunch of innocent players along the way.

3) Don’t have to martyr themselves on public display and can escape the constant public limelight/ridicule for posting such things.

Yet, one longstanding *fact*: I have yet to ever receive a detailed exploit from any person as described by my first statement.

Maybe I am missing something.

[Lum]

From the same wikipedia article:

# F13, which wasn't well-received, kept a few of those who migrated from waterthread and is fairly active with new readers.

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

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".)

[NiX]

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

[Reg]

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.

[Roac]

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.

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. 

[Reg]

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.

[HaemishM]

Well, maybe a little since I don't think Boog lives here anymore.

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 think I know where he's been.

[Murgos]

I just hope he's not out there breeding.

[Bunk]

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.

[Azaroth]

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

[El Gallo]

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.