“DR. TWISTER MADE ME THE MAN I AM TODAY!” [Author: wirehead]
GD: You’ve been scrutinized quite a bit by the UO and ORPG community, how do you feel about websites who try to discredit you such as Lum the Mad?
TwisTer: I’ve had 3 sites pop up that are totally against me and all that they were doing is dedicating their life and time just to try and get rid of me. It’s hilarious. I mean… Why?
The fact is, I promoted (Lum) when he first came out. He wrote his first article and it bashed me and I read it and laughed out loud. I mean, I was laughing hysterically and I said, “hey, give the guy some hits.” Well he got gob-loads of hits in his first week and obviously he’s built up a little bit of a following.
OK. I read this. You can stop sending me email about it. 😀
Unlike some folks I’ve never actually denied St. Twister’s right to exist. As he said and I’ve often noted, to the consternation of almost everyone, if it weren’t for Twister’s almost daily linking to me on his page when this site opened, it would have been what it was originally intended to be: a page for me to bitch and moan, easily accessible to about 10 or 20 people. It’s nice that the site took off, but I’m not exactly monomaniacal about counting the “7+ digit site impressions” (in fact, last time I bothered to check the hit tracker was broken).
But this isn’t about me (no one has put up any Anti-Lum sites YET. Get to work, worms!) but about the Patron Saint of L33t Xpl0itz. Believe it or not, I actually consider Twister a fairly decent writer. A messiah complex a mile wide, but a decent writer. The worst thing he ever did for his site was the Invasion of the Updaters, during which I and I suspect pretty much everyone else quit reading the St. Twister Network on a regular basis.
However, quotes like this (so, did the interviewer actually sleep with Twisty, or did they only get to third base?) make me hurl:
It’s been Dr TwisTer’s aggressive attitude towards forcing companies to listen to gamers and to make their games bug free which has made him an almost martyr in the online RPG universe.
…spare me. Twister’s worst nightmare is that OSI/Verant/Turbine’s programmers issue bug free product. Then he’s back to trolling junior high for site updaters.
Let me use very small words here: Twister is not your friend. He does not care about you. He wants hits. To get hits he needs controversy. Failing a GM auctioning off Atlantic on eBay, the quickest route to controversy is posting a gamecrashing bug that causes all the little k3wld3wd pinheads to rush in and find out how to fuck with YOU.
Let me let you in on a little secret here: there were more bugs in UO than Twister ever DREAMED of. Bugs that take you to GM skills in one minute. Instakill skinning knives. Bottles that you fish up that let you get hundreds of vanq weapons (OK so that wasn’t quite a bug, but a feature). I know this is hard for some of you to grasp, but Origin actually managed to fix them without every Joe R00xj00 on the production servers using them to prove their nonexistent manhood. It’s called QA testing. Origin has been pretty pisspoor on QA (and Verant hasn’t been much better) but they do actually have people whose jobs involve fixing the kind of things that make Twister all warm and tingly inside.
The best way to fix a bug is NOT to post it to the entire world to abuse. How many people were actually benefited by Twister’s minons posting the dupe bug, reminding folks about the mushroom bug. What, is there some sort of DEFENSE you can do against duping or house looting? How does this benefit my, or your gameplay? Please explain it to me. I missed it somewhere.
“Well, if he didn’t post those bugs, Origin would never fix them.” Oh give me a BREAK. Maybe two years ago (before Twister was even around) that may have been true. But the current dev team actually plays the game. As players, not with the god client. It’s a nice change of pace, and explains a lot of the long-needed fixes we’ve been seeing. You think THEY want to play in a bug-infested hell-hole of dupes and sploitz? Uh, no.
Meanwhile, Twister’s moved on to other games… and his record has been about par there as well, including posting dupe bugs for Everquest and single-handedly wrecking Asheron’s Call’s magic system. Great work, dude!
Twister has done some good, I’ll admit. He broke the GM Darwin story, along with quite a few other tales of abuse in the support system. Many players feel that he is their only voice. In a way, that makes his betrayal of them all the more sad.
That’s not to say that the kindly gnomes of Austin don’t need watchdogs… but it is possible to keep an eye on your child without choking him to death. Really. It’s usually better for the child that way, too.