Druid: All of the Tribal Wars community should know who you are, but just in the off chance that someone has missed out, could you introduce yourself?
Morthy: Hi, my name is Jon, but I go around the game under the name ‘Morthy’. I work for InnoGames, the creator of Tribal Wars, and run the International version of the game (.net).
Druid: Every player who logged in on the morning of April first was treated to a somewhat unpleasant surprise. They were told that because of an issue with the start of w56, the “no hauls” world, there was an issue with the hauls in all worlds. The supposed fix flipped all the features on the screen. Who came up with this idea, and how?
Morthy: Well, the in-game joke was formulated for around a month by Allyboo, a co-community manager, and myself. We decided we wanted to do something related to the no hauls introduction fairly early on, but weren’t really sure of exactly what. The originally ‘evil’ idea that would have resulted in a lynch mob outside my house would have been to actually turn off hauls for real for the day, and pretend they were going to stay off for a couple of weeks. We realised pretty quickly that’d be too much, so we also considered just pretending that hauls were off without making the change. When we started planning World 56 a few days later, we decided it’d be fun to start it on April 1st, mainly to throw people off the scent of the real joke. In truth, we only came up with the ‘fix farming’ link idea and actually hiding hauls in-game on the 31st of March mid afternoon. It was a pretty good compromise between losing our lives due to actually turning off farming and the lameness of announcing they were off without changing anything. A hour or so of coding and a quick draft of the announcement, and we were ready to go.
Druid: For such a hurriedly concocted plot, you certainly got a lot of people upset. How does the staff handle this?
Morthy: We added a message to the support system that gave detailed instructions on what was happening, the nature of the joke, as well as a Javascript snippet they could paste into their browser to completely disable all effects of the joke. Which reminds me, I should probably remove that.
Druid: There was also a thread on the externals with quite a lot of angry posters, particularly at the beginning.
Morthy: Well, it’s pretty understandable really. If it were a real announcement, it would be something completely unacceptable. There were quite a few people who did immediately realise it was an April Fools’ joke, but oddly all their posts failed to show up in the first couple of pages of the discussion thread.
Druid: Did the people who realized just simply not bother posting, or did something happen to their posts?
Morthy: Their posts were eaten by the server gremlin named Mr. Potatoe.
Druid: If I ask how that works, am I going to get an absurd answer because it’s a staff secret, or is there an actual explanation?
Morthy: Well, we made Mr. Potatoe the manager of all posts in the feedback forum. If a mod approved a post, it was spared the misfortune of being eaten. If not, the gremlin ate it.
Druid: So in other words it was all rigged for the effect?
Morthy: Kinda. We just didn’t approve any of the “April fools!” posts that would have appeared on the first two pages.
Druid: From what I saw, it certainly worked. Plenty of people even at the end of the thread were quite alarmed by the announcement.
Morthy: Which is why it’s always a good idea to read a thread before you reply!
Druid: Quite true. I know lots of people would benefit from that advice. There was also an announcement on the homepage about Tribal Wars being made into 3D. Where did that idea come from?
Morthy: InnoGames wanted to do something globally for all versions of TW. The product manager and the CTO came up with a few ideas, and then all the community managers from the different versions voted on the one to use.
Druid: What other ideas were there that you liked, or is this secret in case they are used in future years?
Morthy: I believe there was something about merging multiple worlds into one, as well as changing TW to be ‘location’ based. So if you lived in Hamburg, you’d see your village there, and any other people that lived there, so on, on a Google maps-like interface.
Druid: On the external forums, the Off Topica section saw quite a change. Do you have anything to say about that?
Morthy: I can’t understand how anyone could possibly not love Justin Bieber.
Druid: So you are a Justin Bieber fan?
Morthy: I’ve never actually heard any of his songs, I just find people’s reaction to him amusing.
Druid: To be honest, I can actually tolerate him. But why did you choose him over Rebecca Black?
Morthy: Don’t really know who she is to be honest.
Druid: So, are there any hints for next year’s plan, or should I wait until next March 31st to ask?
Morthy: You’ll have to wait and see. 
Druid: On behalf of w42 and any other readers out there, thank you for taking the time to explain a little bit of what goes on behind the scenes.
Morthy: No problem.
Hello, all! w42 blogger, reporting for duty once again. I have something special this time. For this issue, I managed to convince a certain person that it was in his better interest to allow himself to be interviewed for the blog. It was rather difficult to find him in the first place. I finally found him hiding in a basement, eating fish and chips, and hunched over in the glow of a computer screen. The following is the result of me distracting him from his frantic coding. (And no, this has nothing to do with procrastinating on the blog and realizing I didn’t have any better ideas until just a few hours ago. ;P)
