Warehouse 23

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Our thanks goes to Chubbles for this history of Warehouse 23. The clan's website can be found here.

Beginnings.

Warehouse 23 began inauspiciously, as a splinter clan, some time in June of 2004. Kung Fu Joe had taken leave of Rivendell, where he "learned how a clan should never, ever work", and set up a clan composed mainly of people he knew in real life. Many of the names have faded into obscurity; they were not well-known players, and most of them are no longer in the clan. Players like PolkaNinja (#76276), Spider Jerusalem (#29837), and kungfuhamster (#91352) were early members that got the clan off its feet, but they were never known outside the clan and, in some cases, have gone inactive. With the exception of a few very trustworthy east coasters, Kung Fu Joe (a Washingtonian) admitted members according to what he called the "circle of punchability" - as hAvAAck once put it, "If Joe couldn't drive less than 2 hours to punch you if you fucked the clan, you weren't allowed in." He set up a few ground rules:

- No warfare. In my considered opinion, clan warfare is a complete Meat sink, and being wealthy is no excuse to throw good money away, after bad. Unlike PvP, it can't actually get you anywhere. And it's bad for business.
- No babysitting. I don't believe in making up complicated rules about the stash, and then watching everybody like a hawk to make sure we're not robbed. Instead, I only let in people that I would trust with complete karma immunity.
- Ascension, Ascension, Ascension. Our primary purpose *as* a clan was originally to ensure that all members were able to ascend. At the time, I thought it wasn't that far off, figured we needed to band together to make sure that everyone would make it in time.
As of right now, everybody in the clan is powerful enough that they could do it alone, which is why we're expanding. We're set: now is the time to move even further.

By the time, or soon after, he had written this (early July), Kung Fu Joe had added a legion of passionate players, /trade buffers, and competent coders, including Marshall, Sandrylene, hAvAAck, Fusilliban, and HotStuff. Ever believing that Ascension, and Reset, would be coming soon, they set about making detailed plans for their post-Ascension careers, blind, as all were, to such planning's ultimate futility. They first came to pan-KoL prominence in the rushing tide of the Hell ramen wars, as July came to a close; to understand the Zeitgeist and the reasons behind their project, a little background information is necessary.

The Hell ramen Era.

Anyone who ate Ramen early in 2004 could expect to gain 20+ subpoints in each stat, about 250 meat, and 3-5 adventures. While its recipe was the same as it is now, Jick did not have a scaled system for food adventure gains; they were more or less haphazard, entered in as Jick made the items. All this changed on April 27, when Jick revamped the food and booze system and indexed consumables' effects to their in-game difficulty to produce. The best food in the game, based on the number of adventures you could get, was Hell ramen. Its era had begun.

From early May until Black Sunday (and, to some extent, far after that), Hell ramen was one of the most heavily traded items in the Kingdom, and the main concern of dozens of merchants in the Mall of Loathing.

Some Famous Stores From The Hell ramen Era:
Burnination Station (Trog Dor)
The Gruehaha Grocery (Gigs)
Mickalicious Mart (Mick)
Meat Street Café (harml3ss)
Jayo's Store (Jayo)
Rawmeat's House Of Uncooked Things (rawmeat, #129805)
Base Cochise (Hawkwing74, #109737)
International House Of Pancakes (lect, #100144)
I Could Buy And Sell You (Sherman Potter, #94606)
Want A Cookie? Com on in. (DaPunisher)
***Dean*** (Jurgen)
Tran Phuc Longs (toothpik, #47390)
JustAnAverageGuy's JustAnAverageStore (JustAnAverageGuy, #114357 or #114543)
(note: this list will be augmented as the author and others remember more.)

It was worth about 16,000 meat per bowl by late May, and gradually inflated as summer passed. As prices crept up, especially in the wake of sporadic bug-driven inflation, more and more players became alarmed at its increasing unavailability, and of the state of the economy in general. As Ramen passed 20,000 meat, players began discussing the possibility of driving prices back down, somehow.

The first player to make a large-scale effort to do so was Gigs (See Philanthropists). By now already a noted powergamer and market shark (despite his relatively high playerid for the time), Gigs started a massive drive to push down Ramen prices in mid-July 2004 by putting huge quantities of Ramen in his store at the lowest price, waiting for undercutters, and then undercutting the undercutters. Typically, it would temporarily lower prices, until someone with enough meat to buy out Gigs's entire supply would do so. Even with a supply of several thousand, Gigs kept getting bought out, no matter how many times he tried; nonetheless, he was probably singlehandedly responsible for at least stagnating the price, or decreasing its acceleration.

One day late in July, Kung Fu Joe bought 4524 of Gigs's ramen for over 100 million meat. Gigs was furious, considering he knew KFJ and his clanmates were also interested in solutions for the skyrocketing inflation. However, Kung Fu Joe & co. believed Gigs's attempts would ultimately be fruitless, and decided on a new tack. A smattering of code and a new account later, cheap ramen was everywhere.

The Clockwork Man.

There is a player, still in the clan, called Warehouse23. It is a bot, and its original purpose was to stem the inflation of ramen by giving players an end-run around the free market. It worked as follows: Every day, any player could type "/msg warehouse23 sell 2 ramen" in chat, and the bot would respond with a pm of "Godzilla is friend to all children!" and an offer of 2 ramen for 15,000 meat each. Players were prevented from buying more than once per day, and players with playerids above 165,000 were automatically rejected, as a basic measure against multi abuse. Warehouse 23 had a large stockpile of ramen (much of it bought from Gigs, who was taking huge losses in his efforts), and they offered to pay farmers at below-market prices to keep the bot solvent. They announced the project to the forums on July 30, and got many like-minded players (including the author) to serve as mouthpieces for the bot in chat channels. Despite crashing several times, the bot (coded by Fusilliban) was initially a huge hit, especially with low-level players, who, all of a sudden, had affordable ramen (or, as was increasingly obvious, 10,000 more meat; after the bot's introduction, a cottage industry sprang up of people who sold 2 ramen every day in their store or chat at fair market prices).

On August 4th, Mafia Penguins first appeared on the Icy Peak, bringing with them Jick's attempted fix for the ramen market: Scrolls of Pasta Summoning. They dropped from Mob Penguin Pasta Chefs, and, when used, gave the user access to most noodle dishes, excepting Hell ramen, without needing to go through a Pastamancer. It had an immediate effect on the markets for such dishes as Fettucini Inconnu and Gnocchetti di Nietzsche, but made little impact on Dry Noodle prices, or Ramen. However, the pasta scroll's in-game importance would only last for about a day and a half, for around midday on August 6, two thirteen-year-old kids would blow the economists, the bugfinders, and the botmakers all out of the water.

Brothers WhatTheDeuce and PsycicPsyco (see Crazen Markay's Madmen) found their second major bug that day. By offering large amounts of something valuable to each other, and having one cancel the offer at the same time the other accepted it, they managed to duplicate several hundred thousand of a number of very popular items, such as Gourd Quest items, Rolls In The Hay, and Hell ramen. After reporting the bug, they placed 600,000 Ramen in their stores at 15,000 meat. No one in the Kingdom could afford to buy them out, this time; they had outdone both Gigs and Warehouse 23, who hailed them as welcome aid to the battle. Undercutters got to work almost immediately; hundreds of players tried to dump their ramen storehouses, so much so that on the afternoon of August 7, Deuce and Psyco were able to drop prices to 12,000 without trouble.

At this point, the bot was in semi-retirement; twenty-four hours later, it was fully supplanted. Black Sunday erupted, and the ramen in J's Store (original eh? [nudge nudge]) and Random Store of Random Randomness disappeared. Ramen cost a million meat by night's end - and ten meat a few days later. From there on, the saga of Hell ramen properly belongs to other clans.

Atrophy.

Warehouse23 had done an amazing amount of planning for Ascension; they had strategies mapped out for optimizing the speed at which it could be done, and had stashes of millions of items they thought would be useful. It is because of their mass collections of Gourd quest items that Jick limited the number of times the Gourd Quest could be completed.

The bugs of August 9th dropped like an anvil on Warehouse 23. Marshall notes the serious toll that Black Sunday took on the Warehouse collective:

We were ready to blitz-ascend, no matter what form it took, hoping for a minimum of three Ascensions per person in the two weeks before reset, although we knew from our metrics that it would be possible to get many, many more with our huge stash of sober pills and booze (literally thousands and thousands of umbrella drinks). The next two weeks were filled with mass activity, as we prepped for everything.
But then... Black Sunday hit. Our wealth and sober pill stash were made meaningless by the duplication of millions of sober pills and quintillions of meat. When Jick didn't roll back, many of us lost heart, and then blow after blow hit... sober pills were destroyed, meat was obliterated, reset was cancelled... to some of us, it appeared that all of our plans were for naught, and clan morale drooped dangerously low. Long time members quit, or idled. We had a brief influx of new members while other clans were going through some growth pains, but these members came into a clan that was a shell of its former self.

Kung Fu Joe went into a sort of hibernation after Black Sunday, leaving the clan leaderless and without one of its most important members. This dark period in W23's history ran until some time in October, 2004, when Kung Fu Joe returned briefly and appointed Sylph leader of the clan. Sylph called a vote; Marshall beat out the recently accepted BoozerBear in the election, and he remained clan leader until he was nominated a playtester for Ascension. In addition to Boozer, a number of other KoL luminaries (including Arbitrage, Trog Dor, AliceCat, and Werebear) were invited in, and the inactive members slowly excised from the ranks.

Bugfinders.

It is as game-tweakers and bug-hunters that Warehouse 23 are best known, and some of their members were noted bugfinders well before the launching of the ramen bot. As Warehouse 23 became better known, its reputation as the Orkin Men of KoL became its most visible trait. Below are detailed as many of the clan's bugfinding adventures as the author could batter out of them.

Early in June, 2004, HotStuff bought several Mr. Accessories for 2 meat. When players made their offers to him, they typed 2,000,000, with commas; because of the way PhP is coded, the commas (which would affect the game's coding) were automatically deleted, as was all the information after them (i.e., the "million" part). The same problem occurred in the mall and flea market; eventually, all 3 were fixed.

On June 19, 2004, HotStuff reported to the forums that, after being given some 150 alcoholic beverages by BoozerBear and expending nearly 2000 turns, that it was indeed possible, given the then-current probabilities, that one could get infinite adventures (and infinite stats, along the way) by abusing the Drunk Tank adventure. The Drunk Tank was an adventure one could get by adventuring while drunk; it removed drunkenness at the cost of extra adventures, but not enough adventures to keep it from being exploitable.

On July 2nd, HotStuff duplicated Sober pills. Citing Boozer as inspiration, he decided he would make 100 of them available to the masses, and posted a complex riddle in the forums. When solved, it led players to initiate a PvP attack against the player SoberPill (#134578), which, if won, would yield the attacker one of the duped pills. BoozerBear (see Mahi), Trog Dor, and Aphrodite (see Philanthopists) were the first players to solve the riddle.

Hotstuff first reports the unbalancing effects of 668 scrolls to Jick early in July 2004, but nothing is done about it, at first.

On August 24, 2004, Marshall and HotStuff found a PvP exploit that resulted in some heated controversy. Marshall explains:

Hotstuff determined that you could choose 'no stance' by remote form submission, and in so doing fight a PvP battle with no stat selected. This set up a fight in which the attacker would theoretically be able to win against anyone, regardless of stat differences. Hotstuff tried it out, and found out that he could win fights that were 'impossible'. He also learned, to his detriment, that while this bug could let the attacker win an impossible fight, it also made a strong attacker almost certainly lose. This gave HotStuff his 4th PvP loss.
He told me about the bug, and I started beating on it. Literally the next day, Sharpie2Pen was offering a huge bounty for any PvP wins against him. Hotpasta contacted me, and asked me if I could beat him with Bach (her multi that was the proper level and in PvP). I saw here a perfect testbed. She was barely level 15, with 'normal' stats, and Sharpie was level 15 with a huge substat imbalance. I took over Bach, wrote the form submission script that would PvP without choosing a stance, and at the last minute decided to test a race condition, and had my script submit the form approximately 50 times. On the 13th submission, the exploit worked, and Sharpie2Pen lost. The bug had two main parts, and they were both corrected quickly by Jick. The first was allowing you to bypass the stance selection (Jick required a stance be chosen), and the second was to check to make sure your PvP attack count was actually checked against the database as they came in (Basically, the same code that prevents you from drinking 4 drinks when you only have 1 was added to the PvP attack code.)

However, Sharpie2pen (#138650), a multi of Sealh8r (#129383), was logged in at the time of the attack, and a war of words began. Seal (as Sharpie) immediately started a thread in the forums, entitled "Fuck This", in which he detailed the exploit that had cost him his first PvP loss (he now had a record of 264-1), and posted all the messages he received from Bach (#108302) that said "Bach tried to you, but you managed to win the fight", without a stat specified. Jick quickly patched the holes, but never restored Sharpie2pen's undefeated record; Sealh8r, citing the exploit, refused to pay out the 5 billion meat prize to Bach or Marshall.

Advertising budgets for stores could be jacked up to ridiculously large levels, at no cost (except, apparently, to bandwidth). HotStuff's mall store stays at the #1 advertised slot for most of the second half of 2004 because of this.

As recognition of their bugfinding contributions to the game, Jick awarded all members of Warehouse 23 the item Warehouse 23 bling on October 5, 2004.

In addition, HotStuff and Arbitrage found a stat bug on 10/20/04. HotStuff found more bugs on 11/21/04, 11/22/04 and 12/22/04.

On December 9, 2004, Marshall and Fnord7 were awarded Bigger Bugfinder Blades for uncovering an infinite dupe bug. Marshall recalls:

18,000 Mr. As were on a character, and Jick was afraid they were duped. While he was working on fixing the problem of 18,000 Mr. As, I realized a dupe bug might be on the loose. I had had an idea of a dupe bug for quite some time, but had never bothered to test it... well, this seemed like the time. The exploit required you to use the message system, multiple servers, and race conditions to send yourself more items than you actually had. The exploit worked, and was confirmed. Fnord and I decided not to exploit the bug, as with 18K A's loose, Jick didn't need anymore stress. However, I did keep a duped Chicken Brimstone Sandwich. Interestingly enough, the Mr. As were a clerical error, not a dupe bug.

The 668 Controversy.

Early in the summer of 2004, HotStuff sent a k-mail to Jick regarding 668 scrolls. He may not have been the first player to notice or report their exploitability; it is enough to note that 668's were known to be dangerous long before several Warehouse 23 members made them one of the most popular items in the kingdom.

668 scrolls, when used, summon The Neighbor of the Beast. The Neighbor says one of a number of words, all of which came up with equal probability. Two of the words, "Power!" and "Weakness!", affected the user's stats profoundly and with wild irregularity; however, in the long run, when used in bulk, their effects would balance out. What made them potentially imbalancing was use on a stat day. If a Pastamancer collected a large number of scrolls and used them all on a Mysticality day, he would theoretically see little change in his secondary stats, as the losses would cancel out the gains; however, he would be gaining 1.5 times as much mysticality as he was losing, since stat days gains affect only gains and not losses. On a large scale, said pastamancer could potentially level up very quickly with thousands of scrolls.

After being apprised of their exploitability, Jick decided not to change anything with the 668 scrolls. Attaining enough scrolls to make it worthwhile and notable was well-nigh impossible at the time HotStuff sent his note; even the most wealthy players probably didn't have the resources to buy tens of thousands of the scrolls, if the supply existed at all. Black Sunday, however, changed all that. By fall of 2004, 668 scroll prices were dipping, as the entire economy felt the effects of deflation due to meatsinks. At 40-50,000 meat a scroll, and with a post-bugmeat net worth still in the billions, several members of Warehouse 23 were able to accumulate a staggering number of them - literally hundreds of thousands.

It is difficult to say whether an event was planned, or whether the three W23'ers who shot to the tops of the leaderboards simply picked the same Moxie day (they were all Accordion Thieves) more or less by chance. To be certain, there must have been some in-clan discussion of the loophole, and of finding a way to convince Jick that its potential for exploit was rather great. Regardless, it was an utter surprise to the Kingdom when, on October 31, 2004, Arbitrage logged on at level 37, and logged off at level 48. The next day, HotStuff was level 50, and he and Arbitrage had made the login page's Top Ten. Boozer had gone from 60 to 63 in two days. It was initially thought by some (including the author, who posted as much in a new thread on the forums that day) that the massive stat gains (and mind you, HotStuff and Arbitrage were already noted powergamers; Arbitrage's stats were abnormally high for her start date) were due to a bug which caused the 668's Power! Gains to be calculated based on one's buffed stats, rather than the base stats. Eventually, it became clear that the absurd gains were the result of legitimate game mechanics, and the market skyrocketed; within two weeks, perhaps a dozen new faces were seen on the powerboards, all 668 exploiters.

Two weeks was all they would get. With enough prodding, Jick will eventually do something, and after witnessing the spectacle of 668 stat day gains, Jick tinkered with the probabilities and effectively nerfed "the 668 effect". Boozer announced the news by crashing the 668 market, selling off his hoard of tens of thousands; for unclear reasons, he also crashed several other markets, including Spectral Pickles (which he artificially deflated to prices even new players could afford).

A side effect of 668 scrolls is mass papaya creation; one of the words the Neighbor of the Beast may pick is "papaya!". Gargantuan amounts of papayas were to be had, and many of them ended up in the hands of Ashamalee (see Otori), a noted collector of them. This would later become important, although no one knew it at the time.

Wishes Of Loathing.

The 668 controversy sowed a lot of divisive seeds in the Kingdom. Warehouse 23 was, by this point, probably the most highly regarded clan in the game, and with the fame came many detractors. Some players saw the 668 exploits as another instance of bughunters illegitimately using their skills for personal gain; others cried favoritism, as BoozerBear (as of October 16), and then Jick (as of November 10) became members of the clan itself. Such accusations continue to this day, though they were more frequent and pointed in the late days of 2004.

But for as much as they were hated, they were indeed loved in more than equal measure. One of the things that made them so was the Warehouse 23 Wishing Well project, rolled out on November 15. Based on an idea of Pimonkey's and coded by BoozerBear and Arbitrage, players could submit wishes to the well, and players in the clan would grant or deny them as they saw fit. After sifting through thousands of wishes, the clan granted a rather large number of them, sometimes giving out rares and large sums of meat in the process.

Another of their attempts to ameliorate in-game problems, and help with PR, came late in November. HotStuff announced that the clan, via his mall store, would be selling some of their considerable overstock of sundries at cut-rate prices, as a meatsink. The proceeds were then donated to HotStuff's mall store (which had, by then, occasionally flagged as the #1 store in the mall). Several billion meat was believed to have been sunk out of the economy via this route, more than any other player-run meatsink, at least until BoozerBear began selling Steaming Evils for 1 billion meat each early in 2005.

Once Gamebreakers, Now Gamemakers.

When Jick's character joined Warehouse 23 (it was not the first clan he'd joined, but he had been clanless for as long as anyone with a 5 or 6-digit playerid could remember), he said he did so more or less to make things easier on the coding end; W23's clan chat and private forums were often abuzz with talk of bugs, and his arrival cemented their reputation as the consummate bugfinders' clan. Some of W23's ideas about game reform were incorporated, as well, and the PvP system's overhaul in late November 2004 largely reflected ideas that Marshall, HotStuff, Winston Churchill, ShadowsLight, and Wormwood (all noted PvP'ers in their own right) had been mulling over for several months. Everyone agreed the PvP system as it then stood was flawed; it did not allow anyone to attack people who were not the same level, and there were certain game strategies one could take to maximize PvP dominance that made it rather predictable. With W23's help, Jick carved out a new system, the PvP system that is essentially as we see it today.

Initially, Jick came under fire for favoritism toward W23. The PvP papaya contest was introduced with this overhaul, just after the 668 controversy; though many of the Warehousers who had used 668 scrolls heavily had sold off their papayas to Ashamalee, some players decried this as an unfair PvP advantage constructed by the W23'ers and sanctioned by Jick. The response was simple, and undeniable; several of them promptly repaired their hippy stones as soon as they were able, and HotStuff, after being repeatedly targeted in the forums, reiterated his tireless devotion to the by-now-discarded reset.

It was also around this time that Warehouse 23 put together two branch clans. Marshall had spoken of the need for a sort of "sister" clan to W23; this would come to fruition as the Loading Dock. The clan "Loading Dock" was originally set up in the summer of 2004 by sylph as a house for multis and friends. Winston Churchill and sylph took the clan after Marshall's call and began recruiting "unknown but seemingly cool players", as sylph puts it. In time, it was filled with a number of noted KoL'ers, including ShadowsLight, Blythe, BunnyBabs (#255783), Fujiko, Mojomaiden (#82405), tehDangrUs (see Philanthropists), paxsarah (#75330), AlBassoon (#206500; Radio KoL DJ), Mr Happy Pants (#240811; forum poster), Rutabega (see Otori), The 3 (#167387), tuttle freely (#70071), One Winged Goose (#247309; chat mod), Synkronos (#164473; noted forum poster), Papa Zito (see Otori), Faustus Pringle (#10077; noted forum poster, Radio KoL DJ, and inspiration behind the Fez of Etymology), Fab (#349211; chat regular), Bete Noire (#180553; chat mod and forums regular), Jarkkolives (#120679; noted Hell ramen-era forum poster), cfm (#70438), and Nikatoni (#102429; developer of KoL Coldfront). AliceCat also spearheaded the creation of KoL University around this time. The University took newer players, recommended by trusted citizens, and matched them with "mentors", either in Warehouse 23 or hand-picked out of the willing veterans who knew of the project. As of now, the University is still active, and mature new players are being educated as you read this.

Early in March of 2005, a number of members of Warehouse 23 were asked to test the first draft of Ascension that Jick had coded up. Marshall, Werebear, BoozerBear, HotStuff, ShadowsLight, Riff (a recent recruit) and Pachelbel were all asked to participate, along with Xlyinia, Gigs, Jezerfly, and Jick and Mr Skullhead themselves. Much of this history is still to be written; a slew of bugs have been found and patched. For instance, Marshall found a bug that allowed him to gain essentially infinite stats; within a few minutes, he had gone from level 7 to level 69, stopping only to pay tribute to Boozer's level at the time he ascended, a number that has yet to be topped.

On March 24, 2005, Warehouse 23 underwent a rather large restructuring, and is now a considerably smaller clan. What this means for the clan, and for KoL, is yet to be known, and hence yet to be written.

Major Members

  • Kung Fu Joe (#32123) - Founder and first leader of the clan. Formerly a member of Rivendell. KFJ spearheaded the Ramen Bot project, and is in permanent retirement.
  • Marshall (#32917) - Former member and de facto leader of Knights Of Round Square. Marshall became well-known as a /trade buffer early in his KoL career, and was one of several players offering "Megabuff" services of 1 million turns for large amounts of meat. After Kung Fu Joe's retirement, Marshall was elected leader of the clan. He is also a noted bughunter, and PvP sniper; he was extremely successful as a fighter in the old PvP system, and made major contributions to the new system's design. In February of 2005, he was tapped to moderate the new /PvP channel.
  • hAvAAck (#59624) - hAvAAck was the black sheep of Warehouse23. He was one of its very early members, a high-level powergamer and economic titan. He was a major player in the Mr. Accessory market pre-Black Sunday; he made millions as a middleman between the common newbie and Kung Fu Joe, and later BoozerBear as well in his quest for 1000 Mr. Accessories. HotStuff, Havaack, and Kung Fu Joe worked closely together in the clan's first few months, sharing funds to buy Mr A's and rares, making killings in the mall, and planning the Ramen bot as an experiment in publicity and philanthropy. Havaack was also repeatedly targeted by The Real K (#82597), who often told his scam marks that he was a multi of havaack's before asking them to "borrow" rares. On the night of Black Sunday, Havaack sat in on the chaos and promptly began buying Hell ramen; he continued buying it en masse, at ever higher prices, such that by Monday, he had acquired nearly 75% of all the Hell ramen then in existence - over 1 billion units. Upon his asking, he sent the items to Jick. Havaack became increasingly frustrated with certain aspects of the game, particularly its modship, in the later months of 2004, and a number of ugly incidents spilled out publicly. It has become common knowledge that Havaack hacked and deleted the accounts of Inari (see Warclan) and her multis; she was not the only mod he had taking a dislike to. On October 26, 2004, Bragi let slip in chat that the trophy he had designed, the Hippy Trophy, was being implemented; Havaack, believing that Bragi was trying to capitalize on insider knowledge by buying cheap brownies, began spoilering the news everywhere he could, including chat (where he was banned) and the forums. Havaack's forum threads (there were a multitude of them; chafing at what he considered muzzling, he continued making new threads as they were locked or deleted) became open debates on several contentious topics, such as the need to update the Policies of Loathing, the degree to which mods abuse their power, and whether or not debate about the game's leadership should be allowed in the forums. They pitted Mr. Skullhead against a number of the most respected members of the game. Havaack and Skully butted heads both publicly and privately over the matter; harsh words were exchanged on both sides, and Havaack left the game, furious over the whole debacle. He left Warehouse 23 and formed a clan called "Fuck You KoL"; a few days later, he deleted the clan and left his character for dead.
  • Hotstuff (#59035) - To Be Written.
  • Winston Churchill (#43779) - Former member of Philanthropists. Winston is a noted PvPer and forum voice, and helped in the founding of the Loading Dock. For several months, he kept a list of noted PvP assassins, made available to people looking for retaliation from scams and clan looting; in October 2004, this service was handed over to Fnord7 and automated through chatbot. Many of Winston's ideas on PvP were incorporated in Jick's final rollout of PvP changes late in November 2004. Winston Churchill has recently retired from KoL.
  • AliceCat (#62474) - noted PvPer. AliceCat was a member of Philanthropists, and was a member/administrator of the Loading Dock.
  • BoozerBear (#4576)]] - See Mahi.
  • Arbitrage (#137878) - Major mall player and powergamer. Arbitrage is a chat moderator, although she is currently in semi-retirement. She became well-known for offering huge quantities of free buffs in channel /trade to anyone who asked, on a round-the-clock basis. Arbitrage was one of the three W23'ers at the center of the 668 scroll controversy; it left her firmly lodged on the leaderboards long after she stopped logging in daily. Arbitrage, along with Gigs (see Philanthropists), are in many ways the two players who, more than anyone else, legitimated playerid's over 100,000 as major in-game forces and powergamers, in much the same way that Birdy (see Warclan) and Jayo (see Alliance From Hell) did so for playerid's over 25k, and that Legend Dan (see Iocaine Powder), Qrrbrbirlbel (see 1337 sn4x0rs), and DaPunisher (see Alliance From Hell) did for playerid's over 50k.
  • Sandrylene (#30839) - Also Xandria (#30871; see Sparkle Motion). Sandrylene is a top powergamer and was, for a stretch of 2004, one of the best known free buffers in the game, both as a Turtle Tamer and as an Accordion Thief.
  • Pachelbel (#74504) - Noted Top 25 powergamer and bughunter. Pachelbel has a plethora of bug finds to his name. The buff bots, Petal (#98842, the Turtle Tamer) and Lawrence Welk (#95114, the Accordion Thief) are his creations. His store, Mancino's Pizza & Grinders, was a mall powerhouse in the summer and fall of 2004. Pachelbel was once the owner of, by far, the largest cache of Spectral Pickles, obtained from a duping bug. He was sitting on some 80 percent of the entire stock of pickles in game when he was called upon by Jick to delete them, just before the Ghost Pickle On A Stick recipe was re-implemented. Pachelbel also helped pre-test Ascension.
  • Werebear (#21163) - Longtime chat moderator; also a noted powergamer and onetime economic shark. Werebear helped to pretest Ascension before its public release.
  • Trog Dor (#33932) - well-known chat mod and respected forum voice. Trog Dor has an impressive list of extra-KoL contributions; he was an active participant in the KoL Wiki project, set up a "Bank of Loathing" in an attempt to facilitate economic ventures, is the author of the History of Loathing, and has set up a KoL blog. In-game, he was a major economic player in Summer 2004, especially during the Ramen Wars and beyond. Trog was on the wealthiest players' list when it was removed from the boards. He is noted for taking adversarial and sometimes unpopular opinions on the forums, and has repeatedly been at the core of a number of heated disputes, including, most notably, the fight against the death of the reset.
  • Wormwood (#44826) - Economic baron, PvP shark, and professional smartass. Starting in early summer 2004, Wormwood was one of the first players in the game to offer Crimbo items for rent, so that players who could not afford to buy and keep crimbo could still get the tattoo. Shortly after Black Sunday, he started an "Escrow Service" to help players get around the Mafia Taxes on large offer-for-trade transactions. It was quickly supplanted by Fnord7's escrowbot (#183893). Wormwood was the Wishing Well's Official Denier. After Fernswarthy's Basement was implemented, he created a spreadsheet which predicted the highest possible buffed stats one can have and the lowest level of the Basement they can clear based on their stats; it is still widely used, and can be viewed in his profile. Before Warehouse 23, he was a longtime member of the clan flickr. Wormwood announced his retirement from the game in April 2005.
  • Fusilliban (#115076) - Top powergamer and programmer. Fusilliban coded the W23 bot, as well as an auto-admit bot, which would allow people to leave and return to their clan by simply messaging the bot with the word "admit". He is also a Radio KoL DJ. In late March of 2005, he was appointed Multi Czar (#6), to track down multi abusers and earmark them for reprimand or deletion.
  • Hotpasta (#51705) - Longtime member; noted powergamer, /trade buffer, and clan administrator. Hotpasta was given charge of the clan when Marshall ascended. She is known as Fixerup (#51701) on the forums.
  • Idiania (#73601) - Idiania became a chat moderator in November, 2004. On April 1, 2005, Idiania retired her character.
  • Blythe (#59778) - well-known forum poster.
  • EyeSpeculum (#31634) - Radio KoL DJ; Eyespeculum was a major player in the founding of the radio station. He is known as its "Vizier Emeritus".
  • Der Zilla (#64725) - Semiretired KoL DJ.
  • Fnord7 (#122332) - longtime member of Lothlorien; joined W23 officially in February 2005. Fnord7 has been a member by proxy for many months, having been the coder of chatbot, as well as Chefbot (an auto-cooking bot). He, with Winston Churchill's blessing, made the Assassin's list available to the public through chatbot in late October 2004. Fnord also hunts bugs in his spare time.
  • Fujiko (#124537) - chat moderator, appointed February, 2005. Fujiko was leader of the Loading Dock before she was tapped to join Warehouse 23.
  • ShadowsLight (#101130) - Noted powergamer, PvP'er, and eloquent forum voice. ShadowsLight was a dev server Ascension tester. He is a former member of the Loading Dock, as well as Claws (also former home of Vultar (see Noblesse Oblige) and Synkronos (#164473)). After Wormwood's retirement from the game, ShadowsLight became the Official Denier of the Wishing Well. ShadowsLight himself announced his retirement, effective as of April 27, 2005.
  • Riff (#27048) - see Sparkle Motion!
  • Kiker (#40272) - noted PvP'er; in retirement. Kiker, like Marshall and sylph, was a sharp assassin.
  • Moth (#55661) - rumored to be a Radio KoL DJ. This rumor has been proven false. KWANGO!
  • Borax The Clean (#62164) - Former member of Loading Dock, and one of its early leaders; he was succeeded by Fujiko after being accepted into the main clan. Borax was made a forum moderatorin February 2005 after a spamming run by policeenforcerdude (#354455); he has been tapped to moderate chat as well.
  • Sylph (#37123) - also briefly a member of Noblesse Oblige. She was appointed leader after Kung Fu Joe's abdication. Sylph was the co-founder of the Loading Dock, and its ambassador to Warehouse 23.
  • Warehouse23 (#146057) - The Clockwork Man. His history is detailed above.
  • HolderOfSecrets (#216194) - A multi of Werebear, created in a quest to obtain every single item in the game (including nontradables). It is believed that HolderOfSecrets has the most comprehensive collection of KoL items ever compiled in its inventory, including a Bugfinder Blade and a Bigger Bugfinder Blade.
  • chatbot (#142302) - created by Fnord7 (see Rivendell) as a coding experiment. chatbot is now the most fully developed AI character in the game, and serves the community with a number of utilities beyond her in-game flirting, such as moon data and information on Radio KoL.
  • Jick (#1) - I don't know, some n00b.

See Also