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!
i really did hope that it was a joke, but since you kept it going for so long i really began believing it
NICE that you won't leave ... there's nothing better than TPU!!!!1111oneoneone
you have to know that i sign this forum for this..
this actually fun.. i never knew, in any forum it will be funny like this..
i`m 20, and technology is something in my head..
i bought my 1200US PC because of W1z. and he is leaving..
what annoying thing i think..
but yeah.. i got fooled.. thanks for making me sign up w1z..
Fail.
Anyways great to see you'll still be here, Reviews were view informative helped me choose my cards to my liking.
Keep it up!:toast:
well being fooled with that kind of freakin joke doesnt change our affection toward tpu and you .
keep up the good work .
I didn't get the slowpoke joke at first xD
back on-topic though...
I wonder if W1zzard ever thought about the negative things that could happen with this jk