Surviving April Fool's Day

I have a love-hate relationship with April the first. I don't mind being surprised, but I do get this feeling I have to double-check everything to make sure it's not a joke. And then some jokes are so bad they make me sigh and wish the day was over already. This Wednesday, I initially didn't think about what day it was. I had just enough time to hit the "publish" button for my (serious) Guild Wars exploration article during breakfast and went off to university.

SWTOR's mega-mounts

It was only when I read SWTOR's proposal for introducing macro- and micro mounts that I realized the date. The "stationary mounts" (basically characters sitting on a rock or a tree trunk) made me chuckle in particular. It reminded me of the IKEA's humour making fun of Apple with this video.

The "sandcrawler mega-mount", as presented by the SWTOR team

Guild Wars' flight simulator

Guild Wars took a more bold approach by applying an in-game sepia filter and giving everyone's characters a pilot's cap and widespread arms, as if they were trying to fly. I was so annoyed that I didn't have a gaming PC to check it out for myself! 

Guild Wars' attempt was also bold in the sense that their prank made the game virtually unplayable, so most people I know told me they logged out after messing around with it a bit in favour of another game.

Bhagpuss from Inventory Full brought something to my attention in an uncharacteristically grumpy post: Guild Wars' joke wasn't very respectful in regards of the recent plane crashes that have filled the news. I didn't think of that at all, but ouch, looking at it that way the timing was really quite painful.

The gaming PC being broken, Conrad went out in the field to take us this picture of his GW character

Guild quitting on April Fool's

The best April Fool's day jokes, in my humble opinion, are the ones that make people actually fall for it, though, and in that regard both games' jokes were pretty safe: nobody will have missed that it wasn't serious. The real surprise came when I checked my Imperial guild (of SWTOR) and found the following Important Notification from our guild master on their website:

"So it is of course the start of a new financial year for many, (2015-16) and that got me thinking.

We have never used the guild bank and the repair funds feature - a travesty for a guild with so many raid teams (and let's face it, such high repair bills).

I've had a long discussion with the officers and we have agreed upon a fair tax to fund repair costs for the guild.

Starting immediately all players must contribute 20% (the same as VAT!) of their personal wealth to the guild bank. This large influx of money will fund repair costs for a good long time! All the officers will be leading by example - E., with 1 billion credits, will be putting up 200 million, so yes, you too need to donate. 20% of my own funds adding another 10 million.

To make sure it lasts a long time, we think a suitable weekly allowance for repair costs is 10k. I'm sure you're all very excited that you will save that money every week, and it will make raiding less stressful!

To ensure everyone donates, if you do not, I'm afraid your rank will be reduced to 'Lord Scrooge' which will not have chat functionality for /g, or be able to use the guild bank at all.

Thanks in advance everyone"

Most people enthusiastically played along in the thread, for instance Conrad:

"I'm at a loss for words, B. Finally, this guild has adopted the way of the welfare; like my proud Nordic brethren did so long ago. In Sweden, we have an expression called "shedding an elk tear" - I feel this is very appropriate for this joyous occasion."*

Some, however, missed these hints and reacted surprised on the news, pointing out with extensive calculations that it wasn't exactly fair. To which someone else, who thought they were playing along for fun as well, wrote that people disagreeing would be guild kicked and, oh, that they were thinking about a bedroom tax for owning strongholds as well.

Apparently that made someone ragequit the guild. Oops.

Naturally, there was some behind-the-scenes talking and the person in question returned to the guild the same day. The guild master concluded yesterday that he clearly "come(s) up with such stupid stuff normally that this was considered pretty believable". All in all, I think everyone had a good time.

(How) did you survive April Fool's Day?

And with that I wish you a good Easter weekend. I'll see you back next week, with (hopefully) a properly working gaming PC!

Edit: seems like the guild quitting person only did that to fool our guildmaster back. So I guess I fell for an April Fool's joke after all!

* Yes, it included that picture, too, and for those who missed the memo, Conrad is from Sweden, the country with the highest taxes in the world. And no, he's not always this nationalistic!