Ninja's April Fools' Day

From 2008-2016, the Bungie.net Forum Ninjas pranked the Bungie Community on April Fools' Day. The pranks usually consisted of an announcement either by found by a member of the community from the Ninja's private group, HFCS, or the Ninjas making the announcement themselves.

While the Ninjas never collaborated with Bungie, they certainly took inspiration from Bungie's own pranks.

## 2008

Back when Groups could create and share articles, Achilles1108 posted one in HFCS. Achilles said that Achronos was moving to Hawaii with his wife and leaving Shishka in charge to "get acquainted with the ropes of the Overlord." Qbix89 posted a thread in the Community Forum announcing that he had been performing his daily browsing of Bungie.net Groups when he noticed the announcement. Within 10 minutes of Qbix's thread being made, the article had been removed. The next day, Achilles posted that it "wasn't real" and that the Ninjas "took it upon ourselves to have some fun" before locking the thread. Nosferatu\_Soldie then added "APRIL FOOLS!!!" to officially end the prank.

## 2009

On March 31, x FoMan123 x made a news announcement on HFCS' front page that a "moderator rebellion" had occurred and the Ninjas had split in two: one side that agreed with Achronos and the Web Team's "new moderating plan" and stayed within the group, and the other side who didn't agree with the plan and decided to leave.

On the same day, the community noticed that five new accounts had been added to HFCS, and all had the same avatar and title within the group: Shadow Moderator. The ones who left HFCS, led by Great\_Pretender, formed a new group, NFEM. After seeing this announcement, a community member named *WB Wolves* posted a thread in the Community Forum asking members what this could mean. Throughout the day, the thread kept was locked and unlocked by various Ninjas, and several posts were made within the thread by them and Achronos about the state of affairs.

While this was happening, Duardo, prior to becoming a Ninja, was banned from the main forums for speaking his mind, and moderator Achilles was banned for breaking forum rules by posting in all caps and pinning "non-pin-worthy" topics.

    The next day at 12 AM PDT, x FoMan123 x posted a thread explaining the "new moderating structure to the public forums" that was being implemented though "a pilot program called the "Shadow Ninjas."" The intention behind the program was to create moderators who could moderate in complete secrecy, with the community unaware of who was a moderator since the Shadows wouldn't have a custom title, special avatar, custom colored text, and even their name being obscured when editing posts or issuing bans.

**Community Participation**

Several community members, such as *SonicJohn*, *CAVX*, *Cryptic*, and *Index* decided to play along with the joke by posting in the announcement thread that they were selected to be the new "Shadow Ninjas." To further their claim, Cryptic created a group called "AFEM" in an effort to be similar in name to the rebel moderator group, NFEM. The membership was open for anyone to join, and everyone was granted the power to post directly to the group's front page, lock threads in the group's forum, and pin threads, too. The reason for this was explained that the next batch of Shadow Ninjas would be selected from the group and granting everyone moderation powers was a test.

Members in the group signed their posts with AFEM in the public forums and changed their Avatars and profile backgrounds to *Oni*, representing HFCS' theme always being *Oni*. This mystified members who were not in the know about AFEM and helped convince them that the joke was actually real. The group was deleted a day later.

While this was happening, jmh9072 changed the Mod Stalker site to show random Bungie.net members and random numbers for the date.

**Ending the Joke**

On April 2, FoMan updated the announcement thread that the entire announcement had been a joke, locking the thread. Duardo and Achilles were also unbanned. The NFEM and AFEM groups were deleted, and jmh9072 reverted the Mod Stalker but saved the special version with another link.

## 2010

For 2010, the Forum Ninjas posted new supplemental forum rules, asking the requesting input from the community. Although, x FoMan123 x did point out that, "It doesn't mean we'll pay any attention to it, but whatever."

The supplemental forum rules included:

1. You are required to not wear pants while logged into Bungie.net.
2. You are required to choose the Bungie.net avatar which best represents what your mother looks like.
3. You are required to refer to Forum Ninjas as "Forum -blam!-s." and begin and end each sentence with "sir" when addressing a Ninja (or "ma'am" for Achilles1108).
4. Lumpy pudding is against the rules (as it always has been), along with all other food that isn't considered to be celery.
5. Use of the ampersand ("&") and semicolons (";") are now considered memes.
6. From now on, you must browse Bungie.net using only a Mac. Your audio player must be Windows Media Player and it must be set to play a loop of Miley Cyrus songs whenever browsing BNet.
7. Do not refer to yourself in the first person.
8. All questions asked on the forums must be phrased as an answer, Jeopardy Style.
9. There will be random bannings, because we may have not caught you doing anything wrong, but we are sure you did at some point
10. All posts in all forums must include a subliminal message praising Bungie, Achronos, and/or the Forum Ninjas.
11. All posts addressed to or private messages sent to Achronos must include at least six (6) smileys.
12. For sanitary reasons, you are required to wash your hands and use Purell before typing any post in the public forums. Additionally, you must wash your own mouth out with soap whenever typing a word that is censored out by the -blam!- filter.
13. Every new forum post must be screened by a Forum Ninja. Please PM Duardo with exactly what you wish to post for approval.
14. Due to the increased popularity of Twitter, all posts must be "Twitter-style."
15. Since conveying emotions through text is hard to do, you must now prefix all your posts with an emotive statement to clarify your tone.

Additionally, examples were included, and every rule violation had its own punishment, such as: punishment bans, deportation from your home country, viewing Richard Simmons videos, immediate promotion to Exalted Mythic Member, and more.

The thread was updated 13 hours later, explaining the joke.

## 2011

   At 2:16 AM PDT, community member *CWO\_Jorge\_052* created a thread entitled "must be nice to be legendary or mythic."

The thread topic was discussing why Legendary and Mythic Members never got banned on Wednesdays. CWO had been stalking the Ninjas for a few weeks and happened to find a news article in HFCS about an HFCS Official Twitter.

Bungie.net member *Bungie fan 117* posted about the Twitter feed after a full page of replies. Once the Twitter feed was linked, CWO updated the thread around 6:45 AM PDT, renaming it "must be nice to be legendary or mythic (hfcs artical/twitter)" with a link to the HFCS article as well as to the Twitter feed.

It wasn't until 12:40 PM PDT that Bungie.net member *CTN 0452 9* posted about the coincidences on why CWO was mentioned twice in the feed, as well as their join date being on March 24, 2011, a day before the Twitter feed was created.

At 2:02 PM PDT, x Foman123 x locked the thread, explaining that the Twitter Feed was fake, and that *CWO\_Jorge\_052* was not real.

## 2012

On the morning of April 1, 2012, a new user account named *HFCSucks* created a thread in the Community Forum, linking to a blog entitled "The Truth About HFCS". According to HFCSucks, they were an anonymous Forum Ninja who was "fed up" with HFCS' shady and corrupt practices, and was hellbent on a mission to expose the Ninja's true nature.

The blog contained a number of accusations against the Forum Ninjas with screenshots of alleged HFCS forum threads, along with other images. The accusations included:

* Bungie employees are scared of the Forum Ninjas
* Forum Ninjas control whether swag will be distributed to the community
* Recon Number 54 is senile and his posts are controlled by other Forum Ninjas
* The Forum Ninjas use spam attacks and other "fear" tactics to make the community think that it needs the Forum Ninjas around
* Tom Gioconda (Achronos) is not a real person, and is actually a Ninja-shared alternate account
* Forum Ninjas have an "Uberban List" containing thousands of users whom the Forum Ninjas extort for money

The thread in the Community Forum continued all day, with several Ninjas posting to accuse each other of being "HFCSucks" and claiming that they were not involved.

A little after 4:00 PM PDT, the April Fool's joke was revealed, and the thread was locked a few hours later.

## 2013

April 1, 2013 was unusually silent for the Ninjas. In the afternoon, Foman123 created a thread in #Community thanking everybody for participating in the annual Ninja April Fools joke. This led to the community asking if they had missed the joke, while the Ninjas congratulated each other.

## 2014

Early in the morning on April 1, 2014, HFCS posted a thread in #Community announcing that the Forum Ninjas, having been burned one too many times by Bungie (because Bungie had refused to grant the Ninjas' perfectly reasonable demand for invulnerability and extreme powers in *Destiny*), were coming out with a competing game: "Fortune," available in November 2014.

The backstory and plot of "Fortune" were suspiciously similar to *Destiny*. In fact, the backstory was a direct rip-off with some of the names changed. And the similarities to Destiny continued when it came to actual gameplay, with the basics of the game being obviously a straight-up ripoff of *Destiny*, except that Fortune would contain an important gameplay twist: players would be low-class citizens and slaves to the almighty Forum Ninjas, an elite group of warriors. All combat and magical abilities would be restricted to Forum Ninjas only, with other players laboring in fields, mining minerals deep underground, or begging in the streets, with all proceeds of these labors going to the Ninjas. The game's tagline was, "They will become legend, and you will help."

The thread in #Community also contained a link to a Fortune Wiki with more crazy details about and "screenshots" from the outrageous game (which were awful photoshops of *Destiny* assets), as well as a Facebook page that users were asked to "Like."

The thread in #Community continued all day, with several Ninjas posting in the thread to confirm that the game would be all about glorifying the Ninjas and would also be an outrageous money-grab (with microtransactions, subscription fees, and DLC for pathetic add-ons).

At around 2:00 PM Pacific Time, the April Fool's joke was revealed.

## 2015

Nothing suggests that the Ninjas posted an April Fools Day joke in 2015. Maybe that's the joke?

## 2016

For the final year of Ninja April Fools Day jokes, Duardo created a thread in #Community demanding that Forum Ninjas become Forum Band o' Pirates. The language of his post had been translated using pirate-speech, as were other Ninja posts in the thread. Duardo responded to posts using a custom pirate version of his avatar.

## References

1. ↑ Bungie.net - Qbix89: WHAT?!? (April 1, 2008)
2. ↑ Bungie.net - Achilles and Nosferatu\_Soldie (April 2, 2008)
3. ↑ Bungie.net - Groups: NFEM
4. ↑ Bungie.net - WB Wolves: New Moderating Structure? (March 31, 2009)
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Bungie.net - FoMan123: HFCS Welcomes the Shadow Ninjas! (April 1, 2009)
6. ↑ jmh9072.com - User Stalk Page (March 2009)
7. ↑ Bungie.net - jmh9072: Moderator Finder :: uStalker :: uStalk v1.1 released! Updated GM script! (March 28, 2009)
8. ↑ jmh9072.com - Mod Stalk April Fools 2009
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Bungie.net - x FoMan123 x: HFCS Announces New Supplemental Forum Rules (April 1, 2010)
10. ↑ Bungie.net - CWO\_Jorge\_052: must be nice to be legendary or mythic (April 1, 2011)
11. ↑ Twitter - BnetHFCS
12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Bungie.net - HFCSucks: The Truth About HFCS (April 1, 2012)
13. ↑ WordPress - The Truth About HFCS
14. ↑ Bungie.net - FoMan123: April Fool's! (April 1, 2013)
15. ↑ Bungie.net - FoMan123: HFCS Announces "Fortune," the Game (April 1, 2014)
16. ↑ YouTube - FoMan123: Fortune the Game - Official Reveal Trailer (March 31, 2014)
17. ↑ Fandom - Fortune the Game
18. ↑ Facebook - Fortune the Game
19. ↑ Bungie.net - Duardo: Arr! Ninjas demand to become Forum Band 'o Pirates! (April 1, 2016)