Tortoise played many servers and is remembered as a native of Delteria. Diefool and his brother Thrashensk8 introduced him to the game in the late 90s; he was an active player from 2000-2007. During 2004-2006, Tortoise claimed to be the greatest sparrer in the game. In 2007, he was the Dev Admin of Delteria. His server release in July 2007 achieved three-digit playercounts sustained for three months. As the founder of Veracity, he is involved in a number of controversies.
Early Days
Tortoise learned of Graal through Diefool and Thrashensk8, friends he made at his Roman Catholic elementary school. At the time he connected via 56k modem and did not like the lag in the game. He later returned with a high-bandwidth connection and played on Lostworld, Celestia, the preview of X made by Missing Link Merai, Bravo Online, Unholy Nation, and Enigma Graal. Like Diefool, Tortoise took an subversive interest in the game since his earliest days. Deciding that hex editing trees into live levels was tiresome, Tortoise sought to possess the private NPCWs of staff. On an early visit to the playerworld LostWorld, he acquired and then abused InfernoDragon's mechwarrior NPCWs along with Johnny#25 of The Flames. He proceeded to slaughter every player on the server with unrelenting brutality and named his friend, Lexie, queen of the server. InfernoDragon later returned to the server and jailed Tortoise; when he escaped using an unstick me bug, the server administrators created a custom level (hell.graal) in a mounting bid to keep him imprisoned. This was the beginning of his antagonistic relationship with the game's administrators.
Tortoise met Yakuna on Bravo Online. He was soon conscripted into abusing one of many game trainers on the players of that server; this coincided with the rise of Unholy Nation as the most popular playerworld.
Tortoise specifically recalls being horrified by Elven Lands and its admin, King Arthur. In moments of pre-teen wonder, he would get lost on the labyrinthine server during warm summer nights. The odd, dimensionally incomprehensible architecture of the server reminded him of The Flames guildhouse, containing the player population while at the same time giving it something interesting to explore. This shaped his early opinions of what constituted a 'good' Graal level. Down the road, Tortoise and King Arthur would find themselves in further disputes due to Tortoise's position as leader of Veracity.
On Christmas 2001, Tortoise's grandfather gave him an upgraded computer. Combined with his cable connection, he was now able to spar and PK. A lesbian catgirl taught him to fight using a basic C-technique, and pummeled him for an hour before explaining that he never acquired the Lizardon Shield. He finally learned how to play the game properly around this time. When Unholy Nation was later reset, he refused to do the quests a second time and demanded that all opponents face him in three-hit spars where he did not have the speed advantage of the Lizardon Shield.
Delteria
Tortoise followed Charm to Delteria and brought most members of Veracity with him. His early impressions of the server were particularly favorable. He endorsed Mars Thrax and the efficiency of the LS team, who eliminated tile errors without imposing unnecessary regulation upon published levels. His experiences to this point led him to distrust centrally planned servers, instead preferring an opportunistic milieu more commonly characterized by capitalist economies such as the guild-driven value economy on Delteria. Furthermore, as Delteria was a server without a Lizardon Shield quest, Tortoise soon recovered his early sparring advantage and rose to dominance by representing Delteria in unofficial, inter-server spar tournaments.
Tortoise's first act on the server was to pick a fight with Alamaris of TNR, who was often seen mass messaging fundamentalist and anti-homosexual Christian rhetoric. He convinced Shlong Dilly of EBiL to harass Alamaris's girlfriend, Princess Aurora Daimondine, until she left the server. She soon left Graal entirely to become the famous gamer girl model, Princess Aura. The guilds TNR and EBiL bloodied themselves in the ensuing conflict while Tortoise stirred the pot on the Delteria forums, recruiting competent new allies and slowly supplying founding memories of Veracity with pay-to-play accounts.
Tortoise soon met Majibob and the two became great friends. Majibob invited Tortoise to edit his infamous Diablo 2 PKing guide detailing the 'Middle East Method'; though the manual was rejected from GameFAQs, the two shared many inspiring discussions about the inevitable need for a social scapegoat in player-versus-player situations.
During the Summer of 2002, Tortoise accessed a rival guild's website, deleting all of the content and posting some of his own. This act was repeated once more in late 2003, when he deleted the entire guild roster by exploiting the colon/semicolon bug, in addition to the guild website.
Rising to a position of authority on Delteria by the dawn of '04, Tortoise next expanded his reputation as a sparrer. In 2004, Tortoise lost in round one of the Graalympics (to ShadowLynx). He returned to win the Graalympics in 2005 and was runner up in 2006. On Delteria, he insisted on server lore and active administrators, but this might have all been the rhetoric of what some critics refer to as 'Veracity corruption'. No lore was ever officially published on the server, only the forums. He did help overthrow SP Agent, replacing him with the even more inactive substitute Dysangelist. This increased inactivity in the top ranks of Delterian management had the perverse outcome of increasing activity in the lower ranks, and the server entered a high-yield creative period where new content was published daily. Tupper, Alex Stravier, Suoirafen, and Nullify all published for Delteria at this time. Additionally, MisconceptioN also joined the staff team as a GP around this time; he led the game in spar center innovation with the Morbid Visage Spar Complex and many automated events.
Siva Dreamer Controversy
Tortoise was accused of developing and using the "Siva Dreamer trainer". According to Shadow, a rival sparrer, the Siva Dreamer would selectively godmode its user. The Siva Dreamer could be 'toggled' by means of a hotkey button so as to prevent referees from fairly testing his godmode status. However, no evidence of the Siva Dreamer was ever found. Some thought that the Siva Dreamer trainer was account locked to Kisharha's VIP account, Siva. On this account, Tortoise held a 3000+ rating on Unholy Nation and a rolled over rating of 4099 (displayed as 3/350 due to overflow beyond 4096) on Delteria.
Shortly after the discovery of Siva Dreamer, gr44l released a toggle trainer of its own. This trainer was often incorrectly identified as Siva Dreamer.
Tortoise's bans for spar hacking were consistently overturned. In his Graal profile, he claims Brett's former title of 'The Professional. . . .' from 2004-2006, choosing to present it next to a Kesha Siebert quote.
In a poll on the Graal Communication Center, he was voted as one of the top sparrers in the game.
Sparring Record
- Delteria - 5x weekly spar champion streak
- Babylon - 10x weekly spar, ice spar, and team spar (with Rhea) champion
- Server Team Championship, 2002 (Rudora) - Champion
- Server Team Championship, 2003 (Rudora) - Champion
- Graalympics 2004 (Graalympics) - Lost in first round to ShadowLynx
- Graalympics 2005 (Graalympics) - Champion
- Graalympics 2006 (Delteria) - 2nd Place (lost to NeoJenova)
Veracity Controversy
As leader of Veracity, Tortoise was criticized for exploiting known bugs and inducing staff corruption. Predictably, Tortoise denied exploiting all of these bugs. Later on in his career, accusations of ban evasion began to mount.
Tortoise formed Veracity on Enigma Graal using local tags; at the time, the GuildCP was entirely inaccessible. This problem taught Tortoise the importance of making friends on the staff roster early on. In July 2002, the guild was incorporated as a global guild.
In August 2002, Tortoise acquired local tags for other guilds, uploaded junk .gifs to ab opponent's guildhouses, and caused a massive ruckus before deleting the opponent's website. Majibob recalls a story:
Tort got a few of us tags ... we walked around the members-only
area of the server while he trashed the website, then we sprayed gifs to make
everything inaccessible. A guy in MHX followed us around and threatened to
kill Tort, IRL. Tortoise gave him his full name and address.
Tortoise was in the same AIM chat room as Nemesis when he decided to quit his job as GM and delete as many accounts as possible on his way out. All deleted accounts were recovered by Unixmad and gifted 21 free days of Graal Gold.
In October 2003, Tortoise exploited a Guild Control Panel bug where inputting a colon or semicolon in the guild member's email field would give the member all possible rights, including the right to delete all tags except the leader's. With a dummy account, Tortoise deleted multiple guild rosters using this bug. He was banned by King Arthur for this crime, but the ban was lifted in time.
Tortoise was particularly pleased when MagicTux was installed as Guild Admin. Tux is remembered for un-deleting Veracity multiple times, and himself was a member of Veracity. Much like fellow Veracity alum Sheep who now works on FlorinCoin, MagicTux also went on to have a successful career in the BitCoin market.
Tortoise was also close to Jagen, former global NPC Admin. Jagen would return to Graal to work on New Delteria, under a secret alias in 2007. However, he was fired and banned in early 2005.
By 2006, Tortoise's top lieutenants Majibob, Alex Stravier, Kefka Maxon, and Chance Mercy all had admin roles with NC access. Additionally, Tupper's coding prowess afforded him NC access at his discretion. The org chart for Delteria's staff team exactly matched that of Veracity, supposing one substituted Misconception for Tortoise and Cloven for Helcanos. Allegations of staff corruption remained high, but Tortoise insists that he was not responsible for the development of the /kill 55555555555555 feature or the controversial SSJ/Kamehameha ganis. Tortoise's practice of recruiting Developers out of his guild network would continue into 2007.
Involvement with Dysangelist
Tortoise was thought to be close to Dysangelist, a server manager of Delteria. Holy Knight suggests that this might be because of their shared Jewish heritage. In a recent interview, Holy Knight shared this story:
One time... Dysangelist and I sat in MVSPAR talking about the
September 11 terrorist attacks. Dys told me that ... Dan Lewin shared the
same birthday as Mark Zuckerburg ... now Akamai serves up their login page.
dys was like, 'in a few years, the internet will be the bombing zone for al
qaeda and the chinese. We (Jews) take that seriously.' a few days later he put
tap on all the guild leaders. I gave my account to tort LMAO
According to Holy Knight, Dysangelist played as an undercover Facebook employee or consultant working on the then-unannounced Facebook platform from mid 2004 to late 2006. Dysangelist was connected to Facebook through the Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi, and was tasked with evaluating game platforms to ensure they could be surveilled and incorporated into Facebook's business model. He was also interested in observing how Graal users managed anonymity. Knowing that Graal was used by many pre-teen catgirls trying to elude the safesearch filters set up by their parents, Dysangelist set out to defeat the sexual communications Graal had inadvertently been encrypting. Under the guise of a corrupt Veracity templar, Dysangelist developed the *-tap NPC and gave it to many of Tortoise's opponents. The ensuing exodus of butthurt opponents cemented Delteria's reputation as "the Veracity server".
Later, Dysangelist worked on the more sophisticated Wizard's Glass along with Helcanos, Tortoise's right hand man. The Wizard's Glass, made with gscript2, provided a visual record in addition to a chat log. Visuals were very important to Dysangelist, who was insistent on sexual symbolism throughout Delteria. In an RC log, he justified his deletion of the entire eastern part of the server by explaining that Helcanos needed to have the biggest, blackest tower of mystery in the game, complete with custom tileset and dramatic lighting. He cited the work of Jackson to validate this attitude. He went on to upload the level pack to the server, bundling the infamous Wizard's Glass level with the rest of the package. The quest-less dungeon which had no influence on stats whatsoever turned out to be one of the biggest new player attractors in server history, and was responsible for inducing new players to survey and explore the massive overworld designed by Tiamat.
As Development Admin of Delteria
In August 2006, Tortoise entered university and enrolled in a programming class. Shortly after, in September 2006, Majibob hired Tortoise as a "creative consultant" with no RC. Even so, this permitted Tortoise to access Delteria Dev.
Tortoise never intended to publish a class, level, or grind-based system, and publicly admonished servers which chose to do so. As a player, his creative differences on this point led to sustained disagreements with Yen. These disagreements ultimately motivated him to leave his position on Delteria and work on Zodiac. Now, he opposed Cloven. His major effort was convincing Majibob to abandon the plateau system and instead recreate the excitement of membership in Team Copyright Infringement at scale and with a bigger audience. His vision of Delteria as a chaotic manifestation of spontaneous creativity moved Majibob, who soon disappeared without explanation and left his Dev Admin position vacant. Many leadership figures became inactive in his absence, leaving Tiamat and Sandz to crank out many underutilized levels and graphics.
In April 2007, Misconception promoted Tortoise to Development Admin, giving him a level 3 RC. Though Tortoise was forced to vet permission requests through Misconception, he was given free reign to hire anyone who he saw fit. In a notoriously aggressive recruiting thread, Tortoise offered a preview and sought qualified employees.
By the end of May, Tortoise had assembled an all-star roster of developers, many of whom had been server managers or global admins in the past. After a frenzied month of work, the server was completed and he released everything on July 7, 2007. Tortoise felt he had assembled a 'best in show' server which kept the community in a compact, high-resolution city, featuring a high-functioning spar center, automated server rankings, beloved events created by the events team (such as Charge), a dungeon summarizing the lore and history of the server, and a rip-off of triple triad featuring former and current players. The staff NPC was also all-in-one and logged everything.
Tortoise considered the release a wild success, observing that he had centralized the top developers and most interesting players without overextending his commitments as a game developer. The player count was three digits for the rest of the summer.
In late August, Cloven and Tortoise were locked in a political stalemate, debating the value of two options:
- Assign no work to staff members, and allow them to reap the rewards of the work they had done by permitting them to create whatever they liked. (Tortoise's perspective.)
- Assign work on an economy, class, and quest system to the elite team of coders, thus centralizing the NPC Administration function. (Cloven's perspective.)
Tortoise was unwilling to tolerate dissent on this point and demanded Cloven's resignation. When Misconception refused to terminate Cloven's position, Tortoise himself became an inactive administrator. Cloven also returned to a dormant state, and no economy system was ever published. Gradually, server managers abandoned the server until it was finally passed to Tortoise's third in command, Alex Stravier, who held on to it for five years.
Modern Day
Sightings of Tortoise are uncommon events; when he does play, he prefers Unholy Nation. Tortoise now plays Howrse with Kisharha, but was recently banned for duplicating thoroughbred unicorns and black pegasi.
Tortoise doubts the sustainability and profitability of MMO business models. He also believes that they repress and oppress creativity. He has not specifically indicated his approval or disapproval of Graal's current model. However, he has reiterated that a volunteer labor model is both 'unsustainable' and 'value-destroying for all users'. Uncoincidentally, he refers to most game devs as volunteers in spite of the fact that some receive token compensation.
Tortoise was very critical of MysticDragon's Cow Milking system, and as of July 2014, Cow Milking has not been published on any server.
He is rumored to be the final boss of New Delteria, due out 'next spring'.