Friday, April 2nd 2010
Gotcha!
April's Fool!
Guess we really got you guys this time. I will not be leaving the site, nor will there by any of the announced changes. It was all an elaborate April's Fools Joke that we played on you.
Read on for the details...
As most of you remember, NVIDIA's Fermi launch was at midnight my local time, so I posted the review after countless hours of work, watched how our traffic spiked quickly and went to bed smiling and reliefed that everything went well. After I woke up I grabbed my notebook to check if the site might be crashed or something - no everything was fine, I started reading the comments and was shocked to see all the drama about Catalyst 9.12 being used. While I was aware that 9.12 weren't the latest drivers, I was pretty sure that the performance gains were not significant enough to retest all ATI cards and instead not have something like the Metro & Heaven tests (time is limited). After sifting through hundreds of posts all stating the same I did feel quite some anger towards the userbase in general: I was pissed. But as countless people stated in the comments for the "I am going away thread" the comments are just a tiny subset of what people think; happy people don't post comments.
Still with some anger I made my first posts in the comment thread: I think I'm done, I'm quitting and a couple more ... after a while I went away from the PC and started thinking a bit about it. "Let's just prove those idiots wrong". So I started benchmarking the 5870 on 10.3 and posted the results several hours later. As expected the difference was only 2%.
As we moved closer to April 1st I thought "hey, why not use those posts to create an epic April's Fools Joke", talked to my good buddy btarunr about it and he also thought it might be worthwile doing. Bta was the only person to know, not even the TPU staff knew. So the post was made and the story unfolded...
While I had originally planned to come clean some time next week, I realized it would be cruel to let you guys suffer that long.
Thank you all for your amazing comments. I had no idea how appreciated my work is. I am also sorry if you were hurt by it - I didn't mean it. Thanks again guys! and again, don't worry, nothing big will change here. Feel free to express your anger toward me in the comments, the mods are instructed to give you even more leeway as usually.
Guess we really got you guys this time. I will not be leaving the site, nor will there by any of the announced changes. It was all an elaborate April's Fools Joke that we played on you.
Read on for the details...
As most of you remember, NVIDIA's Fermi launch was at midnight my local time, so I posted the review after countless hours of work, watched how our traffic spiked quickly and went to bed smiling and reliefed that everything went well. After I woke up I grabbed my notebook to check if the site might be crashed or something - no everything was fine, I started reading the comments and was shocked to see all the drama about Catalyst 9.12 being used. While I was aware that 9.12 weren't the latest drivers, I was pretty sure that the performance gains were not significant enough to retest all ATI cards and instead not have something like the Metro & Heaven tests (time is limited). After sifting through hundreds of posts all stating the same I did feel quite some anger towards the userbase in general: I was pissed. But as countless people stated in the comments for the "I am going away thread" the comments are just a tiny subset of what people think; happy people don't post comments.
Still with some anger I made my first posts in the comment thread: I think I'm done, I'm quitting and a couple more ... after a while I went away from the PC and started thinking a bit about it. "Let's just prove those idiots wrong". So I started benchmarking the 5870 on 10.3 and posted the results several hours later. As expected the difference was only 2%.
As we moved closer to April 1st I thought "hey, why not use those posts to create an epic April's Fools Joke", talked to my good buddy btarunr about it and he also thought it might be worthwile doing. Bta was the only person to know, not even the TPU staff knew. So the post was made and the story unfolded...
While I had originally planned to come clean some time next week, I realized it would be cruel to let you guys suffer that long.
Thank you all for your amazing comments. I had no idea how appreciated my work is. I am also sorry if you were hurt by it - I didn't mean it. Thanks again guys! and again, don't worry, nothing big will change here. Feel free to express your anger toward me in the comments, the mods are instructed to give you even more leeway as usually.
407 Comments on Gotcha!
BTA, you insensitive, uncaring... lol ... I can't do it. LOLLOLOL
Never trust the news guy.
Great job you two. :toast:
naw only fooling
But the great thing is that he appreciates all of the support we have given him as members of the community on his site, and we appreciate the support he has given us as members.
He's gone out of his way to listen to everyones suggestions and has made changes to the site based on communiity response (unheard of on other sites).
Two words ... TPU Rocks.
(EDIT: if anyone didn't get it yet, I am joking :p)
However, I do hope in the future that people will pause and count to ten before posting in anger.
I'm glad W1zz is not going anywhere soon.
Time to get back to work helping TPU'ers where I can, so I am out of these 4/1 threads.
See you all in the forums. :toast:
Anyway, great to know that you'll provide us with your precious intel for yet, longer.
Cheers w1zz
EDIT: A bit off topic but isn't this like the fastest growing thread ever? It has populated 11 pages of rage and appreciation within the last, 8 or so hours (I guess but haven't checked the timestamps). So w1zz, now you know how much we all love you (no homo though for the majority of us anyway)
Well I'll go remove some of my thanks to you, not only you made me sad but you made me read ALL of the 'I'm leaving thread' and wasted few hours of my life :D edit: took out 4 thanks (rest were too usefull to remove :slap:) :)
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
W1zzard we <3 you!
Don't ever pull something like that again or I'll have Black Panther tie you up & do stuff to you.
Now, back to W1z: YOU SONOFABITCH!!!! I was seriously distraught over this (well, that plus the loss of OtherOS support on PS3).
That was one of the more convincing April Fools jokes I've seen.