TRICKY TRICKY

In the beginning, there was Jick, and MightyBjorn. After that, there was Tricky Tricky. Before Warehouse23, before Alliance From Hell, before 1337 sn4x0rs, and Elite Ones, and even Sparkle Motion!, there was Tricky Tricky, the black sheep of the Kingdom of Loathing.

The KoL community at large may be forgiven for forgetting, or never knowing, who Morehen was when he came back to the forums in July 2004 and promptly told Jick to “ROT IN HELL YOU SCUM!” Indeed, to most who read the forums today, Morehen was nothing but a curious footnote in the Ring of Flame, who seemed to have a bizarre obsession with TheBub’s ass. Yet Morehen was the founder of the clan Tricky Tricky, and he did so in March, 2003, when most of today’s flamers were no more than twinkles in Jick’s eye.

Morehen, Greekotilley, and Steve (no relation to the player who currently carries the name Steve) were all real-life friends who stumbled on this game and decided to take it by storm. Morehen was the first to make it to a clan-forming level, so he founded the clan and accepted Steve and Greeko as the core of the clan in its first incarnation.

Forumgoers routinely lament the poor grammar quality of new posters; they would surely cry if they looked back at some of the ancient threads in Discussion and the Ring of Flame, to see the atrocities Tricky Tricky inflicted upon the English language. Tricky Tricky played host to some of the most notorious forum spammers ever to grace the game with their presence: Morehen, Spikey, Sheep, and Zippy, among others. Before clan warfare was instituted, “clan war” consisted more or less of PvP battles and shouting/spamming matches in Discussion; barely a thread would go by without a post from someone in Tricky Tricky or the Cool Guy Crew, berating the other clan. Pimonkey and the other forum moderators would spend hours deleting literally hundreds of posts from Tricky Tricky members that could only be called unbridled spam. Morehen may have only 163 posts now, but he probably posted over 500 total; Spikey has likely had over half his posts deleted, many by he himself.

Before writing them off as better left in the past, one should note that the members of Tricky Tricky played in a very different era of KoL. Not only were the game mechanics different, but the spirit of the game, and interaction between the players, were quite different than they are now. The game’s top players were all exploiters; the Kingdom was rife with holes, and nearly everyone delighted in soaking them for all they were worth before they were patched up. Furthermore, nearly everyone knew everyone else. Anyone who belonged to a decent clan, or who talked in chat (since there was only one channel), would meet pretty much everyone else who played, including Jick (who adopted some TT slang in real life), and Skully (who, this far back, was merely just another powergamer). For this reason, even though someone like Spikey or Steve might now be regarded as an extreme annoyance on the forums, there was, back then, a certain spirit of camaraderie that surrounded the somewhat juvenile flames. You learn to love your family, even when they screw up or act like children. And that’s pretty much how the KoL world seemed to take Tricky Tricky.

When clan warfare was instituted, however, Tricky couldn’t buy a friend. They had been mortal enemies of [AzN] since either clan could remember, and they traded perennial blows with the Cool Guy Crew and the 1337 clans. At some point, the exact date of which is still unclear, Tricky Tricky began a massive rivalry with the Monkeys of Basingstoke City, culminating in a vast two-week series of retaliatory assaults that left MobC in the dust. Many of MobC’s players became members of Tricky Tricky after this, and the two were allies, but nearly every other clan in the game routinely had it out for TT. Spikey relates a time when TT was given several million meat by “an anonymous donor”, which allowed them to momentarily overcome 1337 sn4x0rs’ war machine; needless to say, such a state of affairs was reversed in a matter of days.

Though Tricky Tricky still exists (albeit in name only), they have been almost entirely inactive for most of 2004. Their glory days are over, and this has mainly to do with the personal histories of their most famous players. TT’s history is inextricably intertwined, and in some ways overshadowed, by the histories of its towering figures, whose accounts were all deleted, more than once.

Many of Tricky Tricky’s players were major players on the power leaderboards, and in the days before there was a Hole in the Sky or a Shore, or even a Yeti Peak to power up in, they would simply burn off their adventures every day in the clan gym. In July of 2003, Jick began running the first autodelete scripts, which would eliminate the accounts of anyone who had not adventured in 30 days. The autodelete also mistakenly deleted players who spent all their time at the gym, without an “actual” adventure played. It was in this manner that Steve, Greekotilley, Quantum Duck, Morehen, Spikey, and Master_of_Puppets all had their accounts deleted. At first they believed they had been hacked, and a great deal of acrimony was exchanged on the forums over it. Eventually, all of these players remade their accounts, and Tricky Tricky, which had, in their absence, more or less emptied out, was eventually reclaimed by Morehen and rebuilt into a clan warfare machine.

The true death knell for the TT team, however, came by their own hands. It is detailed in Spikey’s history, below.

Major Members:

-morehen (#577)/(#4555) – Morehen’s original character was deleted by Jick’s rogue script in July 2003, and he did not recreate his account until August. He is the founder of Tricky Tricky, regained control of the clan in September 2003, and remains to this day the leader of the now-inactive clan. Morehen is best remembered nowadays for his “thebub and his ass” threads in the Ring of Flame, which are perennially bumped whenever someone wants a good laugh.

-Greekotilley (#633/#5142) – Greekotilley was the fourth member to join the clan. He was a familiar spammer to all in the early days of the game. It is unclear whether the character who now holds the name Greekotilley is his or not.

-Steve (#388/second playerid unknown; believed to be #2XXX) – Steve was the second member into the clan, and completes the original “triumvirate” of TT players. Ancient threads in Discussion reveal that he and Mr. Skullhead had truly hilarious rhyming flame battles with each other. Steve was, at one point, actually accepted into the Cool Guy Crew; no one is quite sure what its leaders were drinking at the time, but after exploiting a clan stat bug, he pilfered their stash and immediately returned to Tricky Tricky with the loot. He was the ultimate culprit behind Spikey’s undoing.

-Spikey (#679/#2077) – Spikey. A name that truly echoes in KOL history, and one that should be as familiar to any player as BoozerBear, TheBub, Giboc, HotStuff, or Mr Skullhead. Spikey’s first clan was the Monkeys of Basingstoke City, which he joined when he first came to the game in late March 2003. Spikey flitted about from clan to clan over the next few months, looting wherever he went, and all the while spamming his way into history. He left MobC for Tricky Tricky in April, and went to their rivals CGC in May. In June he returned to TT, but went back to CGC again; in July and early August he formed his own clan, The Guild Of Sorcerers, but was back in CGC later that month. He left CGC “for good” to join TT a third time in September 2003, but several weeks later he jumped ship after receiving an invite to Sparkle Motion. He looted TT’s stash all three times. In the meantime, he went from a grating forum nuisance to a highly respected player, and a contributor of many great ideas to the game (including clan warfare itself, listing a player’s clans in his profile, ideas for player contact lists, and an off-site KoL walkthrough, which was never completed). He had the first shop in the Mall of Loathing, ever. Once a great powergamer, he was one of the players whose stats were nerfed after the clan stat booster hack was discovered. Spikey also managed to sneak multis into [AzN] and destroy the clan, twice. (See their entry for more details).

In September 2003, Spikey was made a moderator over a new forum, Random Ramblings, with Giboc. At least four knockoff accounts were made in the forums, to flame him (spikey1, unknown; spikey2, alias TheBub; spikey 3, alias The Player; and spikey4, alias Samurai Toad). On April 8, 2004, after thousands of posts had been added to this forum, Giboc and Spikey decided, on a whim, to go through and delete every single thread in RR. A great sadness swept over the forums in RR’s passing; Spikey and Giboc were de-modded, and the underused General Asymmetry gradually took its place. Random Ramblings would later return under Scyld’s modship in November 2004.

While Spikey lost his powers as a forum mod, he had somehow retained chat moderator powers, although how he got them is unclear. Spikey was leaving town on the weekend of May 28, 2004, and gave Greekotilley his password to play for him while he was gone. Steve came over to Greekotilley’s house, and got drunk with Greeko while they logged onto Spikey’s account. Greeko uttered the infamous words, "ok, you can go onto Spikey's account...just DONT do anything seriously bad....", and Steve immediately typed /ban Jick upon logging into chat. He then proceeded to ban most of the mods and many players who were chatting at the time, before he was finally banned himself by a mod who logged on in the midst of it all. The chat logs of this occurrence were preserved in the forums by stable (#9585); they are incredibly funny (or depressing, depending on your view of this event). Steve, Greekotilley, and Spikey all had their accounts disabled by Mr. Skullhead soon after, and bid farewell to KoL for good.

Spikey and morehen reappeared in the forums briefly in late October and early November 2004, but did not stay long enough for most people to notice, or care. Spikey still swears a return, and only time will tell if he lives up to his word on it.

-Master_of_Puppets (#1021/second playerid unknown) – Formerly a Monkey of Basingstoke City. Master_of_puppets was part of a sort of “second generation” of TT players, who were asked to carry on with TT after its first wave was deleted; unfortunately for them, MOP was, himself, deleted soon after. He returned to the game as Pupp3ts, but this account is no longer extant, either. He held his own in the spam wars, and came to be as respected as the original TT’ers within the clan (and by nobody else).

-Sheep (playerid unknown) – Sheep and Spikey went on a spamming rampage one night, and the rest is history. Nearly all of Sheep’s posts have been deleted from the forums.

-Zippy (#1644) – Zippy was at one point a TT member; see Head Clan for other tidbits. More information forthcoming.

-Crawly (#96) – an Ancient. Crawly is still a member of TT.

-Cheesemonkey (#2010) – See Monkeys of Basingstoke City. Cheesemonkey joined Sparkle Motion in October 2003; he is currently in the remnants of Tricky Tricky. More information forthcoming.

-Gazza (#910) – still a member of Tricky Tricky.

-treyoc (#1352) – still a member of Tricky Tricky.

-hAZ (#578/#15143) – Haz was booted from Tricky Tricky in November 2003. His KoL history is legendary. More information forthcoming.

-jay (#653) – former TT’er, in its very early days. His account is still extant.

-emma (#766) – another old TT’er. Her account is still extant.

-Spikey69 (#782) – Spikey’s old multi, who, incredibly, still exists!

Other Tricky Tricky players with playerid’s likely under 1000:

Xing (third person to join the clan)
hippy_x
Gentyle
Elendrel
darkelf_for_life
sara44
bedheaded (haz?)
bob

candysuxxx
Studmuffin

Darcon