Mercenaries Guild

So this year, much like last few years, I decided to pull a combined prank on Tremulous.net and Mercenariesguild.net. As usual we waited until just the day or two before to set it up, generally ensuring that the joke is going to be of only average quality. The recent stuff happening at Nexuiz served as inspiration for this prank.

What we did

• Post on Tremulous homepage as Timbo that he has sold trem to Microsoft to be made XboX live only.
• Post on MG homepage with the remainder of the devs decrying the decision, and announcing a fork - librelous
• Created librelous.info with funny content (mostly stolen from xonotic) about the fork
  • Including working forums, issue tracker, and a real repository (that even got a patch submitted)
• Change the official servers to run only map-librelous in rotation, be named about librelous, and have some fun april-fools days hacks
• Create #librelous and get most of the devs to idle there
• Be as serious as possible

The Reactions

The reaction to this prank was absolutely unbelievable, and went far beyond all of our expectations. Hundreds of people believed what was going on to be true, and we even had several people join #librelous looking to help contribute!

• We made the frontpage of Slashdot
• Timbo got threatened with murder
• The Tremulous forums completely blew up with threads about it.
• Some quotes from #librelous
  

Timbo [~tma@tremulous/developer/timbo] has joined #librelous
Timbo: seriously wtf
Timbo [~tma@tremulous/developer/timbo] has left #librelous []

superspirality: I'm a tremulous player, 
and I'd like to contribute in developing Librelous

>>> Yarou [~himuraken@unaffiliated/yarou] has joined #librelous
Yarou: i like tihs website
Yarou: it a gr8 thing

>>> A_Spork  has joined #librelous
A_Spork: you morons are no better than timbo
>>> A_Spork  has left #librelous ["kthxbai"] 2

Amanieu: Khalsa: I love you

philh: how could timbo do this to tremulous?
 just years before the much anticipated 1.2 release?

Who did it

• Khalsa - Obviously I was the main perpetrator. Created librelous.info, the MG post, and coordinated the overall effort
• Who-[Soup] - My main partner in crime, he wrote the announcements, created the images, put the final touches on map-librelous, and added a lot to the general merriment on IRC and in the forums.
• Ingar - Created map-librelous
• benmachine - created the remote-control hax for the servers, reset the official servers to be librelous
• Timbo - went along with it all. came up with the name librelous
  
• Supertanker - created a couple of the images used in map-librelous
• kevlarman - setup the librelous repository, and made the best commit ever.
  

A big thanks to all those who made this possible, and bigger thanks to all the supporters of Tremulous (and librelous)!