Hobby Drama

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A community for the drama, big and small, in hobby groups.

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founded 2 years ago
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This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Jeremy Renner. The actor, the artist, the influencer, the celebrity sensation, the legend. From the outside, he is mostly known as Hawkeye from the Marvel MCU movies, but on the inside, he is Jeremy Renner.

Jokes aside, Jeremy Renner is quite a respected actor who is also really successful, getting tons of recognition and even getting multiple Academy Award nominations. It is why when he recently got into a snow plowing accident which left him in critical condition, many were concerned for him (recently he updated that he is now okay I am genuinely glad he is). But even after this awful injury, all that people can talk about is the thing that has been haunting Jeremy Renner’s career for the past half a decade: The Jeremy Renner app. Designed to be an app to get Jeremy Renner more in touch with his adoring fans, it only took a week to turn into a massive laughing stock that quickly shut down. So how did the Jeremy Renner app start and how did it end so quickly?

There is no escape from EscapeX

Before we can talk about the Jeremy app, we need to talk about the people who made it first: the company EscapeX. The company was founded in 2014 and the year after was able to raise over 18 million dollars in funding. They put that money to good use as they started racking up celebrity deals all over the world, most notably famous Bollywood stars. They would then make a special apps that were basically social media sites entirely dedicated to the stars the apps were named after. They had quite some success, as they reported that in 2018 they got 5.5 million dollars in revenue.

While their foot was mostly in Asian markets, they also had some notable western names they had made official apps for, like

  • Akon

  • Chris D’Elia

  • Dita Von Teese

  • Bob Marley (yes this is real)

  • The Backpack Kid (yes also very real)

  • And ofcourse, the man, Jeremy Renner

The inner workings of Jeremy Renner

The official Jeremy Renner app launched in March 2017. So how did this app work?

Well, when you opened the app and after an exclusive video of Jeremy Renner explaining what the app was about, you would find Instagram but everything revolved around Jeremy Renner. All of the pictures were posted by Jeremy Renner, the posts you could reply to were that of Jeremy Renner, and you could pay Jeremy Renner money- wait what? Yes, the Jeremy Renner app had in-app purchases were you could buy stars and use those stars to boost your comment under Jeremy Renner posts and when you got enough starts to boost your comment into the top 3 you may could get a reply from Jeremy Renner.

Yep, the app was that simple: Replying to Jeremy Renner until maybe at some point in your life Jeremy Renner would acknowledge you. If this app sounds pretty lazy, it gets even lazier when you realise the Jeremy Renner app was just literally Jeremy Renner’s Instagram page. Every post Jeremy Renner made on Instagram he also posted on the Jeremy Renner app. He even copied the Instagram captions which created some awkward posts when he used hashtags or @’s people in posts even though the Jeremy Renner app had no hashtag or @ function. The Jeremy Renner app did include some exclusive Jeremy Renner content.. but almost all of it was related to his music career. Some might then say that the Jeremy Renner app was used to promote his music but my middle name is Some so yeah Jeremy Renner definitely used the Jeremy Renner app the most to promote his music.

While the existence of this app was absurd and the inner working even more absurd, the app was quite a success and it got many fans religiously using the app. There was an actual community on the Jeremy Renner app, with memes, events and giveaways. There were dramas about censorship and contest rigging which are too big to go into now, but overall the app continued to work smoothly for two years… until August 2019.

The One-Two Punch

While it is quite difficult to pin down where it all went wrong, I have pinpointed the two things that one-two punched the Jeremy Renner app into chaos.

The first punch was this comedic tweet. While the tweet itself didn’t catch a lot of attention, it did caught the attention of the youtuber Danny Gonzallez, who a few days later made a collab with Drew Gooden exploring the Jeremy Renner app. As you can see, the video was quite popular, and it exposed a lot of people to the Jeremy Renner app.

The first punch got the manpower, but the second punch gave the tools. On August 20th 2019, Jeremy Renner posted a picture with the caption “Have a rockin weekend everyone!!! What’s the plan ??? “. Comedian Stevan Heck then posted a honest comment:

I will be looking at porno on my computer

While there was an expected backlash from loyal Jeremy Renner fans and an expected ban, Stefan Heck did realise something: everyone who commented on the post got notifications from his comment, and the notification of the Jeremy Renner app was constructed that it looked like Jeremy Renner sent that porno comment. After Stevan Heck was banned from the app, he came the next day back on an account called JeremyRennerPornoTruth where he posted a quote from Ai Weiwei before he got quickly banned again. He posted his experience on both his his twitter and on an article he wrote.

An update Stevan added to the article says everything what happened after:

Update (Sept. 4, 5:58 p.m. ET): Oh no.

All hell breaks loose

It started out calm, with a few accounts changing their names like “Jeremy Renner’s Swedish Dog” or “Italian Jeremy Renner”, but quickly it spiraled out of control. So many people were flooding in the Jeremy Renner app with accounts impersonating celebrities. From Steve Jobs to OJ Simpson to Jeffrey Epstein to Jar Jar Binks to, ofcourse, Jerermy Renner himself. These impersonation accounts started spamming comments, memes and everything you would expect a troll raid to do. It got to the point that the earnest users did not even know which Jeremy Renner account was the real Jeremy Renner. The moderators of the Jeremy Renner app tried to put out the flames but the Jeremy Renners were too strong. Nothing could stop the horde of Jeremy Renners.

And that point Jeremy Renner, the real one, had enough. On september 4th, Jeremy Renner made one final post on the Jeremy Renner app.

The app has jumped the shark. Literally. Due to clever individuals that were able to manipulate ways to impersonate me and others within the app I have asked ESCAPEX, the company the runs this app to shut it down immediately and refund anyone who has purchased any stars over the last 90 days.

The Jeremy Renner app shut down shortly after that.

The Aftermath

After the Jeremy Renner app shut down and the countless articles were made, Jeremy Renner moved on to focus posting on his regular social media. Other than that, he continued being Jeremy Renner. EscapeX on the other hand met a worse fate. After the Jeremy Renner app shut down, they pretty much fell off the face of earth. All of their celebrity apps shut down (yes, even the Backpack kid app), all their socials haven’t updated since 2019 and their website is defunct. It is safe to assume that they won’t be coming back.

To most, the Jeremy Renner app is nothing more than a punchline. What was meant to be a new way for huge celebrities to interact with their fans became a joke that couldn’t handle its own scrutiny. Some still defend the Jeremy Renner app and a few even have fond memories of it, but today it is a funny curiosity that once in a moon someone goes “Hey, remember when Jeremy Renner had an app?”

Also, this post contains 60 Jeremy Renners.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

27
 
 

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Content warning: discussion of sexual assault for procreation purposes in the Sims 4

xxx

Friendly Introduction

Ah, The Sims, the virtual dollhouse game franchise that has no competitors and keeps churning out content and drama with no end in sight. The game where for over two decades people have been murdering their Sims by drowning or starving them. You know the one.

The Sims 4 drama often revolves around the release of new packs with broken or unsatisfying features like the Wedding Pack that failed to deliver on its promise to have guests sit down and watch the wedding. Additionally, there’s a huge modding scene creating anything from script mods to cosmetic items that isn’t exactly drama-free. The pro-paywall and anti-paywall wars have been going strong for almost as long as the game has existed.

This story is nowhere on that scale. This drama is about a minor change to a gameplay trait so universally despised and thoughtless, EA walked it back immediately. This is the story about the few short weeks when rape was part of the Sims’ official gameplay.

I realize Sims exist only for the entertainment of the player/God. Consent doesn't exist in the Sims world. In the real world, however, it is both very real and very important. It’s not surprising that players would apply this concept to a life simulation. I’ll be talking about Sims consenting to mean performing actions in an impaired state that they, due to their in-game traits, would not agree to if in any other emotional state. In doing so, I don’t mean to at any point trivialize or make light of sexual assault in real life and if I’m insensitive or tone-deaf, please let me know.

To explain why I even had to write that disclaimer, I need to explain two game mechanics that influence a Sim’s behavior before moving on to the controversy.

Get To Know

Sims’ personalities comprise three traits. These are supposed to give your Sims distinct personalities but due to poor tuning and the Emotion System most Sims still feel pretty samey. The traits have always been criticized because they were more fleshed out in previous games. Over the years, EA has made attempts to improve some of these traits to varying levels of success.

In terms of traits, the Hates Children trait is pretty self-explanatory. These Sims hate children and get Tense or Angry in their presence. They get Bored reading children’s books, get Tense when pregnant, and are Happy when they take a negative pregnancy test.

That’s the idea at least. In reality, the negative moodlets aren’t very strong and Sims who Hate Children interact with children autonomously and get positive moodlets from doing so like Sims without the trait do. The hate also doesn’t extend to babies or toddlers, really nerfing what could be a fun trait for those looking to bring some dysfunction into their family gameplay. I think we all agree that a Sim who Hates Children shouldn’t always be cooing over the damned baby, yet that’s where you’d often find them.

Try to Calm Down

Sims’ lives are often ruled far more by their Emotions than their traits. The only time Sims aren’t feeling things is when they’re asleep. They can be Fine, Happy, Flirty, Confident, Energized, Inspired, Playful (and Hysterical), Angry (and Enraged), Bored. Tense, Sad, Embarrassed (and Mortified), Scared, or Dazed. Some whims (wishes the player can fulfill for reward points) and interactions only appear when a Sim is feeling a certain emotion. Flirting while Angry or Sad is bound to go wrong and being Flirty in the wrong company can get awkward fast. Some emotions can also be deadly. We don’t have time to talk about all the Sims I’ve lost because they laughed themselves to death.

Try for Baby

In late March 2021, as part of a large Spring update that introduced bunk beds, EA decided to overhaul some of the traits. Initially, they didn’t list what had been changed but it was obvious in the game. Suddenly, Clumsy Sims couldn’t go anywhere without tripping. Bookworms read books. Cheerful Sims were extra cheerful.

And Sims who Hate Children?

Most of the changes were positive. They would now get Tense, then Angry when around kids “and also move away when they get to the Angry stage,” which sounds about right.

Another bullet point stood out though. Let me quote the changelog (since deleted):

“Asking a Hates Children Sim to ‘Try for Baby’ has no chance of success unless the Sim is Dazed.”

You know, Dazed, that emotion Sims get when they’re sick, do a keg stand, get beat up, take medicine while not sick, are hypnotized, poisoned, electrocuted, or eaten by a Cowplant. (A popular mod that introduces alcohol and a variety of drugs into the game also makes copious use of it.) “Dazed” inhibits skill gain, gives Sims a slower, bedraggled walking style, and sometimes they see stars. The only Whims a Dazed Sim will have are “Go to Sleep,” “Sleep it Off,” and “Take a Nap” (and they’re all the same interaction). In addition to that, they are far more susceptible to death by electrocution.

And that’s the state a Hates Children Sim needs to be in to agree to Try for Baby.

(The WooHoo interaction, the Sims’ equivalent to sex with perfect birth control, remains unaltered.)

So, to have a Sim who Hates Children Try for Baby—an interaction that doesn’t happen autonomously—you have to get them Dazed, the equivalent of tricking someone into having sex without protection against their will. And you, the player, are the one doing it.

You tell me if that sounds off somehow, because to me, it sounds a lot like rape, specifically stealthing, as a gameplay feature.

For comparison as part of the same trait overhaul, asking Non-Committal Sims, also not very likely to want children, to Try for Baby had “a very low chance of success,” which adds some gameplay challenge and realism without any consent violations.

Lecture about Responsibilities

The outrage was quick, strong, and universal. Sims players, who at least online skew young and progressive, were Tense and Angry.

Some had noticed that there was something off with Trying for Baby with Sims who Hate Children for several weeks before EA’s patch notes but didn’t figure out that you could work around someone’s family planning choices by getting them Dazed.

When the patch notes came out and they put together what had happened, it was not well-received.

Some were angry it took away from their gameplay options. The popular 100 Baby Challenge was much harder to play if you couldn’t Try for Baby with anyone. Seducing a Sim while multiple children scream around you is hard enough without having to find out your partner’s traits and adjust according to that (by either not Trying for Baby with them or getting them Dazed.).

However, the loudest and most enduring complaints were not about gameplay limitations but sexual consent. This bug report for the new feature summarizes it nicely:

I realize that this is intended behavior, and not a bug. However, this aspect of the Hates Children trait seems to echo serious real-life issues a bit too closely. While I'm certain this was not the intention, it feels as though The Sims 4 has added elements of date [rape] by allowing a Sim to convince a Sim who does not want kids to try for a baby if the Sim is intoxicated (in the Dazed mood). I just don't feel like complicated issues of consent while intoxicated belong in The Sims 4.

It just didn’t feel right that this was now a feature when iconic elements from previous games, like burglars and the Sexy Dancer (later Party Dancer) bursting out of a cake, had been excluded from the Sims 4 for being inappropriate for a children’s game. But explicit sexual assault somehow didn’t cross that line in the Sims developers’ eyes?

This also reawakened discourse about alien abductions—a staple of the franchise present in every game—from which male Sims usually return pregnant. Wasn’t this sexual assault too?

One notable difference between the two features is that alien abductions and the resulting pregnancy are not player-directed or explicitly non-consensual. The player can’t trigger an abduction but can imagine what happened during the abduction off-screen where they can’t as easily handwave dazing a Sim so the Sim will agree to a pregnancy.

Whatever your view on alien abductions in the Sims, I feel Confident in saying that almost no Sims players have real-life traumatic experiences with aliens that might be triggered by the game. The same can unfortunately not be said for sexual assault. Sure, you can simply adjust your gameplay to not have children with Sims who Hate Children but knowing that the presence of the option to violate their consent is upsetting even if you don’t personally make use of it. (And since it’s a gameplay mechanic, I’m also not judging anyone who used it.)

Nobody seems to have thought EA had malicious intentions. It’s the thoughtlessness they took issue with. How had this made it into the game despite its obvious implications?

Smooth Recovery

We would never find out how this happened (and really, why would we?) but the Sims team responded to the viral tweet I linked in the header within a day:

“You are absolutely right! We appreciate you all holding us accountable to our values – especially when we miss the mark! Consent isn’t something to play with, so we’ve updated our language & will correct the trait in an upcoming patch.”

The patch notes were quickly altered to read, “Sims with the ‘Hates Children’ trait will be very unreceptive to any ‘Try For Baby’ actions” with no exception when they’re dazed.”

This satisfied Sims players, and the next patch a few weeks later eliminated the feature. Now it’s harder to Try for Baby with a Sim who Hates Children but when it happens, players can in good conscience say that no Sims were traumatized or harmed in the process.

In terms of controversy, it was a minor blip in Sims discourse, far overshadowed by the ongoing anger about the introduction of kits, small $5 DLC that include cosmetic items. A whopping 19 of them have since been released and they remain controversial.

Additionally, around the same time several huge Sims custom content creators on Patreon were revealed to be putting trackers on their files and “actively shar[ing] information on patrons, mass-blocking them, and coordinating attacks against them,” so it’s surprising the Hates Children controversy gained any attention at all.

But that doesn’t make it any less Embarrassing, nay Mortifying, that this happened because none of the developers realized that this was not a great idea in any game, let alone one rated 12+.

Thank you for reading. This has been sitting in my drafts unfinished for months but the Sims 4 is adding Infants, a new life stage, to the game next week. I can’t wait to terrorize a Sim who Hates Children with some new offspring. That sounds fun in a way getting a Sim Dazed to baby-trap them does absolutely not.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

28
 
 

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Before we start, fair warning: This comic isn't everyone's cup of tea. You may want to stop reading and participate in a more enjoyable, relaxing activity instead, like hitting your genitals with a meat tenderizer, or asking your parents to tell you how you were conceived.

The year was 2005. Youtube had just been created, and was already becoming a vortex absorbing people's free time. John Paul II had died, and a new pope won his hat through single combat. Shows like American Dad and Avatar the Last Airbender premiered. And DC comics had a great new idea.

It was amazing. It was exceptional. They were going to create alternate universe versions of all their most popular characters, with simplified backstories for new readers. This was the first time anyone had thought of that, not counting Batman: Year One, Robin: Year One, the entire Ultimate Universe, Elseworlds, and the other 27 times that comic creators had done this. If you ignore all those times, it was super original.

But skepticism be damned, because All Star Batman and Robin was going to be created by the dream team: Frank Miller and Jim Lee.

Who the hell are these guys?

Frank Miller is a legend among comics fans, even though his star has fallen somewhat. And in 2005, he was legendary. Among many comics, he wrote The Dark Knight Returns (and Batman: Year One).

For us now, it's hard to understand why that was such a big deal. Batman is a gritty, dark hero, so Miller wrote a dark and gritty Batman story. Big whoop. Except... he wasn't. Just look at the old Adam West cartoon, or some of the wacky old Batman comics where his gimmicky villains would rob banks with exploding penguins. And now, Batman is the poster child for a dark and brooding hero. It's hard to say that one person was 100% responsible for the change, but Miller's writing for The Dark Knight Returns had an undeniably massive impact on that. And Batman: Year One has since become the defining Batman origin. On a bigger scale, he shaped comics, pushing them more towards the dark and gritty side that we know and ~~love~~ ~~tolerate~~ generally accept today.

To put it simply: If you've ever watched any modern Batman movie -- from gravel voice to Martha to ex-vampire -- they all took a massive amount of plot points and design from Miller.

Jim Lee is an excellent artist, and general cool dude, who has since gone on to become Chief Creative Officer of DC. He has a stunning history of work both and Marvel and DC, as well as helping found Image Comics. His career has gone remarkably without major scandal or issue. Which unfortunately means that we won't discuss him much further. Sorry Jimbo.

Making a good first impression

As we all know, the opening pages of a story are vital. You have to hook people, draw them in. Make them feel like this is a narrative they want to be immersed in. The first two pages do this pretty well, showing off Robin with his parents at the circus. And the third page is... ah fuck, it's porn. Yeah, that's just straight up lingerie shots of Gotham reporter Vicki Vale speculating about Superman's dick.

OK, kinda weird start, but they can recover and nope, it's more porn. And she's still waxing poetic about the Super Schlong. Still though, it's not like they'd dedicate a third page to it and of course they would, fuck you.

The plot gets thicker than Vicki

Once everyone is fully clothed, the story moves to the circus, and things get back on track. Dick Grayson's parents are killed by mobsters -- not due to a sabotaged trapeze, but by being shot. Mild changes without destroying the beloved characters, that's the key, and HOLY FUCKING SHIT, BATMAN IS TORTURING A MAN WITH SNAKE VENOM.

That wasn't a quick change for comedic effect by the way. The story goes from "Batman sees Robin's parents die" to "Batman just hit a dude with batarangs tipped in snake venom which will cause him agonizing hallucinations for a month".

But there's no time to digest the many fucked up parts of that, because the plot is moving fast. The cops arrive! The cops punch Vicki, and take Dick Grayson! And also the cops are either pedophiles or abusers, so at least they did their research. Vicki chases the cops, and Batman chases Vicki!

And then, as a legion of bats scares off the cops, Batman rescues Robin. This is the foundational father-son moment, a broken man reaching out to a child. Batman takes an orphan under his wing, so that he doesn't go down the same dark path.

Or he lifts him into the air by the neck and screams "ON YOUR FEET SOLDIER, YOU'VE JUST BEEN DRAFTED. INTO A WAR." Yeah.

I guess either option works.

The Batmobile lost its wheel (and Vicki lost her arm)

I know this comic may seem crazy as shit so far. But I promise you: as weird as it sounds, the first issue was the most mild one.

Issue two opens with Batman kidnapping Robin. That's not me trying to dramatize it, he straight up uses the word "kidnap" as he pins down a struggling child and drugs him with sleeping gas. He then races off in the Batmobile, hitting Vicki Vale's car with his butler Alfred in it. Vicki is horrifically injured, and has a rib puncture her lungs. Batman doesn't give a shit.

Batman then goes on a monologue, which... holy fuck, it's so edgy. It's like Edward Scissorhands shaving himself in a discount machete shop. I tried to find the words to do it justice, but I can't, so I'm just gonna type the full thing out here. To the brain cells that are about to die, we salute you.

My world.

Welcome to MY world Dick Grayson. BATS and RATS and WARTS and all.

You poor boy. You poor little bastard. Welcome to HELL. Hell. Or the next best thing.

The GAS calms him down in the space of SECONDS. He won't be having any NIGHTMARES. Not the kind that aren't TRUE, anyway. Then he starts FUSSING.

(Robin tries to ask completely normal questions, like "Why am I being kidnapped by a furry with drugs?")

(Out loud) Sleep kid.

The GAS was supposed to knock him OUT. He should be sailing past the MOON, right now. What's this brat MADE out of?

(Out loud) SLEEP. The world I'm gonna wake you up to is no better than the world you already know -- but it'll make a lot more SENSE than that one did -- once I've put you through holy HELL, it will. It'll make sense. A LOT of sense. Holy Hell or the next best thing. So sleep TIGHT punk. Sleep TIGHT, my WARD.

And then it happens. The iconic panel that still rocks the world today. It pops up pretty much weekly on r/Comicsoutofcontext. Batman says "I'm the goddamn Batman" while calling Robin a slur. He'd go on to use the phrase "goddman Batman" at least once in every other issue of the comic. This image would also go on to become one of the Internet's earliest memes. So, silver lining I guess?

So that's when the edgelord energy peaked. I mean, bad as the writing was, it's not like they'd have Batman go on a cop killing spree as he laughs maniacally.

Batman goes on a cop killing spree as he laughs maniacally

Some cops catch up to Batman and shoot at him. His (very mature and grounded) response is to think "I guess somebody on the force put out a KILL ORDER on me. Cool. It's about damn TIME."

He then proceeds on a brutal destructive spree, ramming the Batmobile into cars as Robin screams and he laughs like a madman. Words genuinely cannot do this scene justice, so just read it yourself. Gotham cops are some of the most corrupt and vicious monsters in superhero media, so the fact that Batman genuinely seems more evil than them speaks volumes.

A moment of clarity

But as Batman soars off, and the blood of the corpses he left behind begins to congeal, he stops, and becomes pensive. Is he just perpetuating the cycle of abuse? Can he really expect a child to fight a war on crime?

And then he decides "NAAAAAAAAAH, that's pussy talk", and slaps Robin.

The rest of the series

Believe it or not, that was just the first two issues. This wasn't me cherry picking the worst parts out of hundreds and hundreds of pages of content. Alllllll of that bullshit was crammed into roughly forty pages, which were the first forty pages shown.

It'd take way, way too long to cover the entire rest of the series, so I'll give you a highlights reel

  • Joker has a Nazi henchmen, who is topless except for swastikas on her nipples. No, seriously.

  • Batman locks Robin up in the Batcave. The only food he is allowed to eat are the raw rats he catches and kills with his bare hands. He sleeps on the rocks.

  • Batman canonically tries (and fails) to make his voice sound like Clint Eastwood

  • Every single woman Batman meets canonically wants to fuck him. Black Canary. Batgirl. Catwoman. The rape victim he meets for two seconds. All of them.

  • Batman uses improvised napalm to burn men alive and laughs as he does so. He then has sex with Black Canary on a burning pier as they scream.

  • The word "goddamn" is used at least 17 times on each page. If you took a shot every time you saw it, you'd be dead of alcohol poisoning within minutes.

  • Batman forces Robin to paint an entire building yellow in a few hours. Why? To fuck with Green Lantern. Batman then painted himself yellow too for good measure. And also drank lemonade.

  • Green Arrow is a sexual predator who pervs on Black Canary. My boy Ollie deserves better.

  • Speaking of Black Canary, they take an iconic female hero, give her the most terribly written "girl power" moment ever, then reveal that the only reason she ever had the bravery to do anything was because Batman inspired her.

  • She also decides not to get too much money, because carrying it around would give her muscles, which are for men. No, I'm not kidding.

  • Wonder Woman hates all men (the nicest thing she calls them is "sperm banks"), and is an utter and complete psychopath who holds herself above any government or moral standard. But she's also dominated by Superman, because of his masculine aura. Pardon while I retch.

  • Everyone uses the Q-slur a lot. A lot.

It'd be way to hard to dive into all the complexities and fucked up parts of Batman and Robin's relationship, so I'll just repeat what a number of fans have pointed out: This Batman treats Robin like Rick treats Morty. And honestly, probably even worse.

How could this comic possibly get canceled?

Even before it was formally canceled, the comic went through major difficulties. After the fifth issue came out, they switched it to a bi-monthly release. At one point, in 2006, there was only a single new issue of the comic. Then, issue #10 was delayed for four months, then delayed for another month. And then once it was released, they forgot to censor the word "fuck" (but the slurs were fine I guess), so they had to be recalled, delaying it even further.

Jim Lee has talked about how part of this was due to him having too many responsibilities with the DC Universe Online game. However, fans have speculated for years that, more likely, DC and Lee just really didn't give much of a shit about the comic.

Incredibly, this comic managed to run for ten whole issues before DC decided to scrap it. They ended it in the middle of a major storyline, which I'd say would be a loss... except it's more like euthanasia. In 2011, they announced that Miller and Lee would be coming back to finish the story! Twelve years later, and absolutely jack shit has happened, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that it's not gonna happen.

The comic had started out with massive sales, which quickly plummeted as it was revealed just how far Miller had fallen. It still sold fairly well, but nowhere near the 300,000 issues that the first one sold.

Fan reception

I'm not gonna lie: When I was first reading this comic, I thought it was a parody. I genuinely didn't believe that a professional writer could write this and not be making fun of pointlessly edgy superhero stories. Even after realizing it, it was still a hilarious read, just because of how stupidly terrible it was.

There are some movies that are so bad they're good. And there are some movies that are so bad that they can never be good, but that badness is entertaining. This is the comics equivalent of that. Rob Bricken said it best, commenting "All Star Batman is such a magnificent asshole." If you've seen The Room, imagine that in comic book form. Many fans will still recommend it today, just because the pure shittiness of it all is hilarious. Miller was completely, 100% serious about everything, which just made it even more funny.

Critically, the comic has been widely panned, and is described as "one of the biggest train wrecks in comics history". When said history involves a story where Ms. Marvel gets raped, and the Avengers congratulate her rapist, you know that shit is fucked up. Other critics have said things like

it’s as if Miller was secretly trolling DC, trying to create the least ultimate Batman of all time

As I recall, there wasn't much of a throughline in the original book. Various superhero-related things just sort of happened.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely took on All-Star Superman, while Frank Miller and Jim Lee handled All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder. One of these series is regarded as one of the greatest superhero stories ever told. The other is All-Star Batman and Robin.

Remember All-Star Batman and Robin? I Sure Wish I Didn’t

The worst part is, the art is truly stunning. It's some of Jim Lee's best work, and genuinely still holds up today. It's just a shame that the art needs to have words on it.

Oh Miller, my Miller

Remember how I mentioned back at the start that Miller's star had fallen quite a bit? Again, blaming a single comic for that is hard, but these ten issues damaged Miller's legacy more than anything else. Fans were impressed by Miller's original idea to "make Batman darker and edgier". And then they saw him write another comic where he decided to make Batman darker and edgier, and realized that the man had exactly one go to option.

On top of that, fans started to become disillusioned with the grimdark era of comics. There's still room for heroes like Daredevil and Batman, but fans lamented the need to make everything dark and edgy all the time.

It also doesn't help that Miller genuinely cannot write women. This prompted the now infamous whorewhoreswhoreswhores comic from Shortpacked (SFW). And nowhere is this more prominent than in All Star. Every woman in Gotham is either a prostitute or rape victim. Women are portrayed as sex objects, and absolutely never anything else. They have a level of depth and complexity that would make Alison Bechdel quit comics forever.

All told, All Star was a perfectly terrible storm for Miller, that came across more as a parody of his work than an example of it. All of his worst traits were put on display, and he became a bit of a laughingstock. He's had other comics that did this (Holy Terror anyone?), but All Star was the most widely known, and thus, damaging to his reputation. He's still Frank Fucking Miller, and wields a tremendous amount of clout in the world of comics, but he is no longer the unparalleled champion that he once was.

I guess at the end of the day, the moral of the story is simple: Don't have Batman say slurs. And abuse children. And murder bystanders. And use chemical weapons...

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

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This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Fuck you Rian Johnson, there's a new exciting mystery set during Covid. And this one has butt stuff in it.

This is a bit of a bizarre case: an incident in a niche hobby went viral and spread across the Internet, to the point where most of you have probably heard at least something about this. But so many people don't know why the anal play was so controversial, or even what happened. So sit down, relax, and lube yourself up, because we're going to slide inside of the biggest drama chess has ever seen (except Bobby Fischer).


A few brief disclaimers before we start.

First, I don't want anyone to say that I haven't researched this well enough, or haven't checked my sources, so during the entire writing process, I have been wearing anal beads, which vibrate at varying speeds. During this time, I have not lost a single game of chess at the grandmaster level. That may be because I haven't played any games at grandmaster level, but I just think the beads are working.

Second, some of you may be worried that I'm not going to approach this seriously, and will spend a lot of time making anal jokes. You're absolutely correct. This writeup will be absolutely stuffed as I jam them in for your pleasure. But I also cover all the boring non-butt stuff as well, so you can stick around for that.

Finally, I tried writing a version of this where I'd stop occasionally to address public response. That immediately became unreadable, because there was so much. So while I'm only bringing up major figures, rest assured that at every point of this drama, there were hundreds of thousands of memes, tweets, and flame wars. This was (and often still is) half of the jokes on r/AnarchyChess. Every single person even remotely involved in chess knew about this. This got front page articles from major international newspapers. It was big.

With those settled, let's dive on in!


Setting up the board

Chess is the game with the little horsies and the bloated monarchy running around on a checkerboard. While not the oldest game in human history, it has certainly been the most successful and long lasting over the past 1,600 years. Over those years it has been the game of kings, a way to test improvements in programming, and the easiest way for any writer to show you that a character is super duper smart.

It's a bit odd to talk about something as widespread as chess "becoming popular", but nevertheless, that's what has happened in recent years. In a perfect storm of people staying home due to Covid, new online options to play, streamers looking for content, and Queen's Gambit being a smash hit on Netflix, a new wave of people to play chess. The most popular website, Chess.com noted that their daily users have grown five times larger since 2020, with five million people each day and three times the subscribers.

With that wave came increased attention and focus on watching professionals. Some are just a classic Twitch stream, but there has also been a surge of interest in the world's top players at tournaments. After all, while most pro sports had to be shut down, chess tournaments could continue online with a minimum of difficulty. And as we all know in any hobby: new fans leads to mo money, which leads to mo drama.

Now that the pieces are all in position, let's look a little more at our two players.

Magnus Carlsen became grandmaster at thirteen, and became world champion in 2013. He has held that position uninterrupted since, a record only matched by legendary Soviet chess master Garry Kasparov (Gary Chess to his friends). If I went into all of his various achievements, awards, and tournament victories, I'd hit Reddit's 40,000 character limit, so just believe me when I say that he is good -- maybe even the best ever. Aside from chess, Carlsen is generally seen as a decent guy. He's known for being mild mannered and polite, being both a good winner and loser. He has also managed to turn chess into a genuinely lucrative profession, on top of becoming a model and semi-celebrity with his own chess app.

It can be easy to underestimate the skills of chess grandmasters, and just hear "he's good". It goes way beyond that. Magnus playing a regular person in chess is like Muhammad Ali boxing against a cardboard cutout of a toddler. And that cardboard cutout is soaking wet. Chess scales exponentially, so he's not just crushing the average person, he is annihilating people who have dedicated their lives to the game.

Hans Niemann is the opposite of Magnus in many ways. While he also started chess at a younger age, he stalled for a few years, and didn't become a professional until he was in college (what a loser, am I right?). During Covid, he got a lot more into chess, amassing a significant following over Twitch. Part of that was due to his skill, but a large degree is how... let's say passionate he can get, win or lose. Unlike Carlsen's poker face, Niemann is prone to fits of emotion and yelling. You can get a picture of what that looks like here. This has lead him to be called the "bad boy of chess" (which is a bit like being the academic of the concussion ward). As you might imagine, he's not exactly well liked by many other chess players. According to close friends, Niemann has told them that he doesn't care how he's perceived, because he'll be good enough that major tournaments have to put up with him. He's well on his way to achieving that, with a rapid string of victories securing his spot as the fastest rising star in chess. However, even before this event, there were a number of rumors about him being a cheater.

Magnus and Hans represent the rapidly forming divide in chess, between the old and the new. This has been caused by the surge in online popularity, with far more amateur players being interested. Some don't even play that much, they just want to watch skilled streamers. As you can imagine, this can lead to more than a little bit of conflict. It also means that chess players now have fandoms, which is very weird, and also complicates drama, since each side's fans will follow along loyally.

Finally, the third character in our little drama. Hikaru Nakamura is sort of what you'd get if you crossed Hans and Magnus. He took a more traditional path to becoming successful chess player, at one point being ranked #2 in the world. However, he's far more well known for his Twitch stream, and is often credited as one of the major figures who started the online chess craze. Like Hans, he thrives on his personality -- although he tends to be less confrontational, more comedic. He has followed the time honored Internet tradition of "person who is really good at something uses their skill for stupid and ridiculous purposes", which has paid off. He is a friendly acquaintance of Magnus's, with the two of them collaborating to make the only use the Bongcloud attack opening (a common chess meme) in a professional game. He has a rivalry with Hans, making fun of him on stream for things like his accent (Hans is known for a fake European accent, which he will forget to speak in at times).

But enough setup. It's time for the game to begin

The Opening

For quick development is of the utmost importance, and he who succeeds first in placing all his pieces, from their initial awkward positions, to such places as give them command of the greatest possible number of squares, has the better chance of concentrating a superior force on some important point.


Most people hearing about this drama assume it started at the Sinquefield cup, the incident that really went public. In reality though, it was the second incident.

Always do foreplay before full anal

The first sparks of drama occurred a month previously, in August of 2022, at the FTX Crypto cup. You may now pause to laugh at the fact that FTX sponsored an event to convince people crypto was for smart people, then went tits up and lost everyone's money after robbing them blind. But a company who got to the top by brash maneuvering and blatant lying might have been oddly prophetic.

Niemann beat Carlsen in their first match, a major victory for him. When asked how he managed to pull it off, he told reporters that "the chess speaks for itself", and wouldn't say more. Carlsen then proceeded to steamroll him in their next three matches, eventually winning the whole tournament.

This didn't exactly go ignored at the time -- Niemann's fans celebrated, and a few chess fans took note. But the FTX cup wasn't a prestigious competitive event, where players were at their best. It's a little like scoring some points on Michael Jordan in a game of pickup basketball: still good, but it doesn't mean you can beat him in an actual NBA game.

With that out of the way, let's move on to where it gets really juicy.

Pounded in the butt by the Sinquefield Cup

On a lovely St. Louis day, September fourth, Magnus faced down Niemann at the Sinquefield cup. It was a significant tournament, with a prestigious history, world famous players and a $350,000 prize. Ahead of the game, most of the discussion wasn't on who would win, it was how well/badly Hans would lose (or tie). He was never going to beat the world champion (especially since Magnus played white, a major advantage), but he could prove his skill by how close the game was. Except... Hans didn't lose. He won. Carlsen went on to hand Niemann his ass in the two speed chess games which followed, but nobody cared about those. The drama had begun.

This was... an upset can't even begin to describe it. Carlsen has been the world champion since 2013, and the #1 rated player since 2011. Since 2011, he has only lost nineteen times in classical games where he played white (to fifteen players). Given that he was playing against some of the best players in the world, that is a staggeringly impressive record. At the time of this game, he had not lost a similar game in the last fifty-three sittings, over two years. Niemann isn't bad -- he's still competing at a level that most people could barely dream of, especially at his age. But this would be like if a random athlete from Belgium managed to outrun Usain Bolt. While wearing crocs. And hungover. Not to mention, it seriously damaged Magnus's attempts to raise his rating to 2900. The win seemed too good to be true -- which as it turned out, might have been because it wasn't.

Magnus withdraws

In a move that shocked and confused the chess community, Magnus withdrew from the tournament the next day. He refused to state why, only tweeting out this -- a withdrawal message, along with a video clip of Jose Mourinho saying "If I speak, I am in big trouble".

Jose Mourinho. The soccer/football coach. Whose comment about not speaking was because he wasn't allowed to make allegations of cheating.

Oh shit.

It may not seem like it, but in professional chess, this is a Very Big Deal. Withdrawing from a chess tournament, by your own choice, without some kind of emergency, at this level of play... it just isn't done. It's not just rare, or uncommon, it doesn't happen. Magnus had never done so in the past, nor had any other chess player at his level in the past fifty years. Former champion Gary Kasparov spoke out, asking Magnus to explain the decision, and calling it "unprecedented".

Along with the shock of him withdrawing, it meant the few games he'd already played were annulled for the purposes of the tournament -- so Niemann didn't get any benefit from his win. This almost certainly wasn't Magnus's main intent, and he didn't have a choice in it, but it can easily be seen as him twisting the knife.

The organizers politely wished Magnus well, and confirmed that he hadn't submitted any formal cheating complaint. Despite that, they instituted a fifteen minute delay on the broadcast, and increased anti-cheating measures. They later tweeted out that no player at the tournament was suspected of cheating, all of which fueled rumors even further.

Niemann responds

Niemann gave a post game interview, discussing both the game and Carlsen's withdrawal. In it, he said

And I think even if it was a draw, he was so demoralized because he was losing to such an idiot like me. It must be embarrassing for the World Champion to lose to me.

Not helping yourself dude.

Hans then went on to explain that, in actuality, it was all a big misunderstanding. Referring to it as a "ridiculous miracle", he explained that when studying Magnus's past games (a common tactic), he had seen Magnus use a similar variation of his opening against Wesley So at the 2018 London Chess classic. Problem solved, right? Still a good game, just a lucky one. Everyone can go home.

Except Magnus didn't play that opening against So. In fact, neither Magnus nor So played in that tournament at all, and analysts mentioned that the tactic was an unusual one for Magnus, not a repeat.

Whoops.

Throughout the whole interview, Niemann seemed to be struggling. He was unable to give explanations for some of his moves, and tried to argue that a computer's prediction for a move was wrong (it wasn't). All of this just caused even more speculation to grow.

PlayMagnus (Magnus's chess app) tweeted out in response to the interview, with a link to an article called "greatest chess scandals", and a meme. This was quickly deleted.

Suspicions of cheating

As mentioned at the start, the chess world exploded. People argued, analyzed, and took sides, all while the memesters reveled in glorious chaos. The reigning world champion was taking on one of the most polarizing figures in chess. As mentioned previously, the chess corner of the Internet was on fire, and the blaze was quickly spreading.

Professional chess players generally stayed neutral. Some of them, such as Kasparov and Karpov (who, despite their names, aren't a comedic slapstick duo) seemed to take Niemann's side, arguing that the game showed no evidence of cheating. However, most critics added that they would like to hear Magnus come forward with actual complaints and allegations so that they could make a real judgement. Professional chess is relatively drama-free, with many unspoken rules of etiquette, so no one wanted to rock the boat. They were professional, reasonable, and very unsatisfying to read about, so let's talk about the fightin'!

Hikaru became a very significant figure in all this. He had never hesitated to criticize Hans before, and he made his thoughts very clear: Carlsen had withdrawn from the tournament because he believed Niemann had cheated. Given that he was a streamer, his analysis of the situation was far more animated and entertaining than most other professionals. He also claimed that Hans had been banned from Chess.com in the past for cheating, a claim repeated by several other figures in the chess world.

I'm taking time to note Hikaru's response, because he was a crucial part in all of this. Of course it was always going to be a drama within the chess community. But Hikaru is notable for both being an Internet person, and understanding the Internet. He communicates in memes, in jokes, with big splashy statements that throw aside rules of etiquette. No major drama can thrive off of bland, pre-planned press releases and ten hour long analysis videos that end inconclusively. Magnus and Hans may have lit the fire, but Hikaru was the oxygen that it needed to grow into an inferno.

Both sides had a lot of arguments, so I've gathered them all here.

Magnus fans Hans fans
Hans's performance fell after the Sinquefield cup started using stronger anti-cheating methods, going from a 270 ELO to a 250 His performance is worse now because he can't cheat like before. Hans was publicly accused of cheating by a major figure, and chess is a highly mental game. It makes sense that he'd lose focus. Plus, other players in the tournament had similar drops in performance.
Experts looking at the game suggested they didn't see any proof of cheating That's because Hans did so subtly, and used technology sparingly. High level cheating can be hard to detect without analysis. There's no evidence of cheating because there was no cheating, Magnus is just mad.
Hans's interview made it look like he didn't understand the moves he made, and made a false statement about learning from Magnus's past game He clearly didn't make all these moves himself, because he's unable to understand them. His lie about analyzing Magnus's past game proves this even more. Again, he was just accused of cheating by the world's best chess player. Of course his head wasn't in it.
Hans has a long history of credible cheating accusations Once a cheater, always a cheater. Why would he stop? There's not enough proof to say that. Also, the allegations are that he cheated in online matches, not high level in person tournaments.
The tournament had vigorous anti-cheating methods even before they increased them Clearly, they weren't good enough, and we've seen evidence of people evading them in the past. This shows that Hans couldn't have cheated even if he wanted to.

An aside: Cheating at high level chess

I figured it'd be worth taking a moment, and explaining why there was such debate. After all, if Hans cheated, it should be easy to find out, right?

The problem with catching cheaters at high levels is that it is very difficult to do accurately. While plenty of cheaters get caught, they tend to either be low level players or they're physically caught with communication devices. The usual method of analysis is to compare the move suggested by a computer to the move played, and see how often they match up. Unfortunately, this is only really effective for amateurs. After all, "this grandmaster who dedicated years of their life to chess made a lot of optimal moves!" isn't exactly an airtight claim. They also have the skill required to play without the computer, so they can use it sparingly, and not get caught by an algorithm. Niemann could have made a move from a computer, then two or three of his own, then the computer, and so on.

So while analysis can prove that Niemann wasn't entirely relying on a computer, and it can suggest that his moves were his own, it is very hard to say that he never used one.

Making it even more difficult, chess is a game where a tiny advantage can have massive effects. A single suboptimal move -- not even bad, just suboptimal -- can lose you the whole game. Think about it like Olympic sprinters. Sure, adding 0.05 seconds to their time wouldn't seem like a big advantage. But at their level, a tiny advantage to one competitor can be what it takes to win.

One last thing: chess is a highly mental game (all those buff chess players you see are just a coincidence). So someone's emotional state, sleep patterns, hell, even their appetite can all provide that tiny edge someone needs. Remember that for later.

Digital anal-ysis

This is the point where the vibrating anal beads theory first started. Note that it started as anal beads, not a plug, like so many foolish butt plebeians thought. Trust me, completely different feel.

People joked that Hans Niemann had vibrating anal beads up his ass, with a friend watching the game. The friend would plug the board into an AI, get the best move, and vibrate it to Hans using the butt toy.

From what I can tell, Chessbrah was first to mention it on a stream (although Eric Hansen may have done so first). Within minutes of him saying it (and no, I'm not exaggerating), r/AnarchyChess had gleefully jumped onto the meme, and were milking the ~~prostate~~ joke for all it was worth. The most iconic version of it was penned by u/XiTro with this comment. Even Elon Musk (thrice cursed spawn of a dozen devils that he is) weighed in on Twitter.

Most treated it as the meme that it was, but a number of people seemed genuinely convinced. Several poor, long suffering reporters were told by their editors to go do a serious article about the potential butt-bead usage. An adult cam site even offered Hans a vast sum of money if he'd play nude to prove he didn't have anything up his... sleeve. The anal beads meme became far more well known than any of the other legitimate complaints about cheating.

Hans finally responds

In another interview on September sixth, Hans discussed the allegations. And oh boy, he came out swinging.

Throughout the entire interview, he was clearly pissed off. He admitted that he'd cheated twice on Chess.com -- once at age twelve, once at sixteen. But in the three years since then, he claimed he had played completely honestly. In addition, neither of the games was significant. There was no money or official tournament involved. Why should he continue to be punished for the mistakes he'd made as a kid?

He even seemed to address the anal allegations, which had clearly left him sore

They want me to strip fully naked, I’ll do it ... I don’t care, because I know that I’m clean. You want me to play in a closed box with zero electronic transmission? I don’t care, you know? Name whatever you guys want.

Hans, buddy, with all kindness: I really do not want to see you strip naked. Please don't.

But all of that became secondary. Because in the interview, he announced that he had just been banned from Chess.com because of the recent match against Magnus. Remember how I mentioned earlier that Magnus had made a chess app? Well, just over a week before Magnus had lost to Niemann, Chess.com had offered to buy it for $87 million. That deal was later finalized, with Magnus becoming a "Chess.com ambassador".

The plot thickens.

Hans accused Magnus, Hikaru, and Chess.com of trying to destroy his career, and announced that he was going to fight back. Why Hikaru? Well, Hans had noticed what was being said in the stream, as shown in his tweet.

The day after this, Chess.com uninvited Hans from a major tournament, explaining that they'd reached out to him privately to explain his ban, and reiterating that it was not in retribution for Magnus's loss.

The Middlegame

We must throughout maintain a favourable pawn formation, in view of the end-game which might be forced on us by exchanges. On the other hand, as soon as we have gained an advantage sufficient to secure the victory in the endgame, we must ourselves, by the exchange of pieces, try to reduce the position


The rematch of the century.

On September 19th, both Magnus and Hans were set to play against each other once again, in the Julius Baer Generation cup. The chess world waited with bated breath, and watched the stream to see what would happen.

Magnus made his opening move... then resigned, and switched off his webcam.

People were shocked -- most of all the poor announcers left to deal with it (seriously, just watch their reactions). A number of popular streamers were live streaming the game, many of whom had similar reactions as they watched it. This was a definite breach in etiquette, and it shattered any remaining possibility that Magnus didn't suspect Hans. He was clearly refusing to play against him, and was purposefully making that statement in the most dramatic way possible.

It also pissed off a lot of people, including those who were fans of Magnus and who believed Hans cheated. The common sentiment was that if Magnus really believed Hans was a cheater, he should officially come out and say so, not dance around with middle school "I'm not playing with you" bullshit.

Magnus had stated that he'd refuse any interviews during the Baer cup (for reasons that are obvious in retrospect). However, when asked on broadcast, he replied

Unfortunately, I cannot particularly speak on that, but people can draw their own conclusions, and they certainly have. I have to say I'm very impressed by Niemann's play and I think his mentor Maxim Dlugy must be doing a great job.

Hot damn. You can dislike Magnus, but the man has a genuine talent for subtle burns. Maxim Dlugy was Hans's mentor... and had been caught in a very public cheating scandal.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) sent out a tweet with their thoughts on the situation. They weren't the ones running either tournament, but they explained that, as the governing body for the chess world, they were tied up in it. Their message was similar to what most others were saying: "Cheating is bad, and we'll look into it. But Magnus, dude, get a hold of your shit and do this properly." It was a message that could have been crafted by a dozen politicians, saying a whole lot without taking a side.

(Magnus went on to win the Baer cup anyway, but no one really gave a shit about that.)

Magnus finally responds

The day after winning the cup, Magnus tweeted out an official statement

At this point, the gloves were off. He formally stated that he believed Hans was cheating, calling out not just one game, but his entire adult career. He talked about how cheating was an "existential threat" to chess, and how he wanted to fight it as a whole. At least in terms of worries about general cheating, Magnus is correct. Chess is experiencing a boom in popularity (with far more prize money), and is moving online, which means that people suddenly have much more motivation and opportunitY to cheat. This reframed the issue, from Magnus protecting his own reputation, to him defending the game as a whole from cheaters.

Magnus pointed out that Niemann had not been taking their game as seriously as most players would, appearing relaxed and not paying attention "while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do". This can certainly come off as a tad... egotistical, but Magnus seems to just be stating the facts as he views them. Chess is a highly stressful mental game, and grandmasters excel at studying each other's body language. A game with the best player in the world should have had more of an effect. Was Hans relaxed because he knew he was guaranteed to win? Or was he just really good at bluffing?

But what's that? What's that teeny little sentence near the end that most people overlooked?

I am not willing to play chess with Niemann

What many people would come to realize is that this was massive. If you're organizing a tournament, and you have to pick between the world champion and a guy who is a pretty good player (with a very bad reputation to boot), who are you gonna go with? Magnus had already proven he would follow through on his threat. He was essentially shutting Hans out from a lot of high level play, silently asking organizers to pick a side.

A new challenger has entered the arena -- the Chess.com report

Chess.com had been mostly quiet after banning Hans, just denying that it was in retribution for Carlsen's loss. And then, on October fourth, they released their report (alongside a Wall Street Journal Exclusive. And they brought the receipts.

The document is seventy-two pages long, and includes detailed analysis of over a hundred online games played by Hans, proving that he'd cheated in them. They used software, checked with experts, and looked to see how often he was clicking away from the page mid-game. All of that combined showed a frequent pattern of cheating. Contrary to Hans's previous claims, he had absolutely cheated at high levels and when money was involved, especially against other streamers. Quite repeatedly in fact. And far more recently than he had admitted.

And if that wasn't enough, it revealed that Hikaru's allegations had been true -- Niemann had previously been banned from the site. They revealed messages between Hans and themselves, where Hans apologized for cheating, which lead to him being allowed back. They also had transcripts from a call he made

As you [Hans] admitted to me [Danny] in our call where you confessed that “having a higher rating would mean people tune in more to my streams when I’m battling Hikaru, Danya or Eric (Hansen). I need people to believe that I’m a worthy rival to follow and subscribe”.

You have to wonder why he'd lie about something when he had handed evidence to the people he was lying about.

They explained that they usually kept such matters private, and were only revealing them because Hans had made a number of public claims against them, and they wanted to set the record straight. The report also repeatedly emphasized that Carlsen had not been involved in the decision to ban Hans from the site or tournament, and that they had not been biased against him.

Although most of the report focused on Hans's online play using their site, a few pages were dedicated to his OTB (over the board) play. They didn't make any concrete accusations, but pointed out some irregularities in his game with Magnus, along with suggesting that his rise in success with OTB (over the board) play was extremely rapid and suspicious. However, they concluded by saying that they could find no significant evidence of OTB cheating, but suggested that someone look into the irregularities further, as they had no authority or data to make a conclusive statement.

The report closed with a brutal finale: revealing a personal letter to Hans, sent just after he made public accusations against them. Much of it just details the same things mentioned above, but they closed by offering Hans a way to get his account back, and to play in tournaments again, if he was willing to own up to his mistakes and start playing honestly. Hans had refused. His permanent suspension was no one's fault but his own.

I guess you could say they wrecked 'em. Or in in this case, they rectum.

So... drama over, right? Niemann had just gotten slapped down hard, and was proven both a liar and a cheater. Except it wasn't over.

The holes in the report

Many people, both pros and fans, pointed out that the report didn't necessarily validate Magnus's claims. It could prove he had cheated online, yes, but it couldn't provide concrete evidence that he had cheated in any OTB game, including the one against Magnus.

And as many people were quick to point out, Niemann's skill jump would have been suspicious -- if it weren't for Covid. Being stuck inside for so long with nothing to do but play chess obviously meant that people would grow in skill much faster than usual. Niemann's rapid growth was matched by a number of other players, and in that context, wasn't as suspicious as it looked.

Additionally, the report had included a redacted list of other chess grandmasters who had been banned or suspended from the site for cheating. Some fans argued that, while Hans may have cheated, there was a culture of doing so, and Hans was unfairly singled out to be made an example of.

Finally, some pro players complained that they were worried about Chess.com banning them too if they criticized them. There is no current evidence of this happening, but some have claimed they were sent threatening emails. Chess.com obviously denies that. So far, no one has come forward with any proof on those emails, so we're left to speculate.

Still, Hans would probably fine so long as he didn't do anything monumentally stupid

Hans does something monumentally stupid

On October 20th, Hans filed a lawsuit against Carlsen, Play Magnus Group (Magnus's company), Chess.com, Daniel Rensch (Chess.com CCO), and Hikaru, demanding a hundred million dollars for supposedly destroying his livelihood with slander and libel (among other things). He announced it by saying (and I shit you not) "My lawsuit speaks for itself". You can read the whole thing here, which I highly recommend. Please, I beg of you, read the whole thing. Or at least as much of it as you can stomach. It's like if the Navy Seal copypasta went to Harvard. It reads like a teenager making their first edgy, overpowered OC for some kind of chess fanfic, where the world is against him but he triumphs nonetheless. I mean, there is a motherfucking narrative structure here. Sure, it's not a good one, but damn if they didn't commit.

Regardless of if you think Hans cheated, his legal case is nonexistent. All parties involved -- even Hikaru -- were very careful in the wording they chose. They insinuate or accuse him of cheating online, but avoided anything that could be considered direct slander. In fact, many have since speculated this is why the Chess.com report was so purposefully noncommittal over OTB cheating: they knew he'd take them to court, and only wanted to make airtight claims. Funny enough, although the lawsuit spends a lot of time talking about the report, they skip over the emails in which Hans confesses.

Also, Professor Ken Regan? The guy who the filing cites as "the world’s foremost expert on cheating in chess"? The guy they claim disproved all of the claims against Hans in the report? Yeah, he's one of the guys who wrote the report, and is extremely pissed off about them claiming his support.

Stalemate

If one side or the other emerges from the conflict with some material gain, it will generally be possible to force a mate in the end-game, whilst if both sides have succeeded by careful play to preserve equality of material, a draw will generally ensue.


Sadly, there is no earth-shattering conclusion to all this. Magnus didn't hack into Hans's anal beads and crank them up to max when he was on live TV. Hans never managed to destroy Magnus with facts and logic. Chess.com and Hikaru both filed for dismissal in the lawsuit, and while it may drag on for a long time, there is absolutely zero chance Hans will win it.

FIDE is still investigating the allegations, but it is going to be an extremely long process, and one unlikely to produce significant results. They require a 99% accuracy result to convict someone of cheating (barring physical or eyewitness evidence). They're pretty anal about this, and are notorious tightasses. Given that analysis by the best experts in the world has utterly failed to find anything so far, I doubt that Magnus's claims will pay off.

In contrast, the Chess.com report is airtight, and pretty much shut down any complaints in that area, as well as discrediting Hans's word. He still has some diehard supporters, but few people dispute the fact that he cheated online.

I don't think there's any party that came out of this experience with their reputation unscathed. Magnus is still widely popular, but more and more people have grown to dislike how he handled the situation, and doubt is cast on his accusations. Meanwhile, Hans's fate is far harsher. Few people still like him, and he has become more of a running joke than a serious contender. The common sentiment seems to be that even if Hans wasn't guilty of the exact thing Magnus accused him of, he was still a cheater and won't be missed. There's a heavy sense of karma around it.

It's more than a little Shakespearean: Hans had a very solid argument, and could have attracted a lot of sympathy. He was accused of OTB cheating without evidence, and did suffer because of Magnus publicly blacklisting him. If he'd stuck to that story, and avoided shitslinging, his reputation would have remained intact, and Chess.com never would have released their report. Hans has an aggressive style of play, and it appears that translates over into his real life as well. Ultimately, he is to blame for his own downfall. Worst of all for him, he's not just remembered for the cheating he did -- he is forever immortalized as "the butt plug guy". An eternal joke.

Both players have continued their professional careers. But given that Hans was given an extra thorough ass-scanning at security, it seems that people are unlikely to forget. People are left with the unanswerable question:

Did Hans cheat against Magnus?

At the end of it all, this is the question we're left with. We know that he cheated online, that's undeniable. So he was certainly willing to do so. But none of the methods he used online would work in person.

The anal beads theory is obviously ridiculous (probably). However, there have been several instances of people sneaking in communication devices, or finding other ways to get around anti-cheating methods.

Hans has pointed to the fact that he has been scanned for devices at all games he has played in since as proof. The issue is that... it's not really proof at all. All it proves is that he's not cheating in the present, which, given that the eyes of the world are on him, just proves that he's not a complete moron. No one doubts he's good enough to play very well on his own against similar or lesser players. The question is if he cheated against Magnus, which can't be retroactively disproven.

However, Magnus is also left without any way to prove his claims. Analysis has failed to provide any significant evidence of cheating, meaning that he'd have to find proof of the method Niemann used, or get an actual confession from Hans, both of which seem unlikely to ever happen. At this point, the only things Magnus has are speculation and circumstantial evidence.

One theory suggests that Magnus had heard the cheating rumors about Hans before their game (something Magnus confirmed). As mentioned, chess is a highly mental game, and there is a noted phenomenon where players are worse when they think their opponent has a bot (they often doubt themselves, or are distracted by speculation). This may have given Hans the edge he needed for a legal victory.

I'll confess to some bias here. Obviously, I don't like Hans as a person (I doubt anyone really does). And I'll admit, I wanted to believe he cheated. But I also have to admit that, at least against Magnus, the evidence seems to be on his side. In the end, I guess the chess skill was inside Hans all along. Deep, deep inside him.

After all that, I guess there's just one thing you can say: Holy hell.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

30
 
 

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

If I had a nickel for every time Wonder Woman launched a fascist state and took over the world, I'd have two nickels. Wait, no, there were the Justice Lords, so I'd have three. Oh, and the vampires, so four. Flashpoint also counts, so five. And I guess DCeased half counts, since she was a zombie dictator? Wait, there was also that time she became a Nazi after Hitler won...

OK, so I'd have a lot of nickels. Maybe Batman has been making contingency plans for the wrong friend.

But forget all those, because this time is special. Fascist Wonder Woman variants are a dime a dozen, but this particular one was sexy. Which apparently made it all OK, and her dictatorship was framed as a complete positive.

As per usual, I've included various TL;DRs in bold throughout in case (for some weird reason) you don't want to her about how Amazons conquered the world via hogtie. If you want to have extra fun, take a shot every time you see the phrase "submit to loving authority".

(You may have read this writeup before when I posted it in the scuffles thread a while back, because it didn't fit the requirements for a full post. I then read the rules, and realized I was a dumbass and that it did fit the rules. So, here we are.)

It takes one to Earth One

The Earth One concept was pretty simple: Streamlined, revamped versions of classic characters, given a few new twists, kinda like how Batman movies “start from the beginning” every few years with the basic stuff that everyone knows. It was a pretty clear attempt to copy the success of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, with one major change: instead of being long running comic series, they’d be full graphic novels, written and illustrated by some of the best in the business. The obvious problem with that was that the best writers and illustrators needed a lot of time to make a full book, especially given that they had a full time job with other series in the meantime. That meant that the series has been going for twelve years, with only thirteen books released over that time, and certain characters having four to six year gaps in between each graphic novel. However, the comics were a success. Not a massive goldmine like Ultimate comics, but they all had pretty solid sales, and got high critical reviews. Turns out, giving skilled writers the time and space they need to achieve their vision produces some pretty good content. Who woulda thunk?

And then along came Morrison

Grant Morrison is one of the most successful and respected writers in comics today, known for taking on more difficult or philosophical narratives. They were placed in charge of Wonder Woman’s Earth One story, which came out several years after Batman’s and Superman’s. The first graphic novel was pretty much what people expected from Earth One: similar story with some fun new twists. Diana was canonically bi with a girlfriend now, fulfilling years of coding and hinting (also, all Amazons are super duper constantly gay), as well as being the offspring of a rape by Hercules (rather than a child of Zeus). She also got a relatively regular body, with more time being spent drawing her muscles than her boobs, so that was nice. Overall, it brought back a lot of the classic Golden Age version of Wonder Woman, like the frequent bondage (SFW) and weird ideas of what 1950s men thought feminism was, but in general, it was a good comic.

Side note, which is kind of disconnected but is too bizarre not to share: Morrison explained in an interview that

Wonder Woman’s Invisible Plane is now shaped like a vagina, it’s the most incredible thing. It opens up in the back and it has a little clitoris hood, everything is a female-based design. It’s all based on shells and natural stuff.

Honestly? Hell yeah. Pussy plane it is.

The real issues wouldn’t start until the second book, and would culminate in the third. Although the publishers of DC repeatedly hammered home the idea that Earth One comics would never cross over or impact one another, Grant Morrison stated they felt such a crossover was “inevitable”. That opposing idea may be partly behind the drama that unfolded next. If you don’t have the time or inclination to read all this, the best way to sum it all up is a quote from a review of it:

“Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 3" is literally the phrase "I want Wonder Woman to step on me" extended into an entire book.

TL;DR: Earth One was a series about classic DC heroes reimagined in a more modern world. It was never a smash hit, but maintains a steady popularity. Grant Morrison was in charge of Wonder Woman's Earth One version, and took her back to her 1940s roots.

The Plot (or lack thereof)

You can feel free to skip ahead past all this if you don't have the time or inclination to read. However, I highly recommend you do. Partly because it'll help you understand how truly bizarre this was, and partly because I must free myself of the curse of this knowledge by passing it on to another. And remember: no matter how crazy or wild this may sound, this recap is somehow less bizarre than the actual comic.

Wonder Woman Deuce (Both the number and quality)

The second books started off a bit weird, with Nazis invading Paradise Island, home of the Amazons. And they were lead by a weird sexy Nazi girl because of course they were. Surprising no one, the heavily militarized Amazons kick their asses using orgasm guns, and Queen Hippolyta told them that they would be taken to the “Space Transformer” where

They will be transported to Aphrodite’s world where Queen Desira and her butterfly-winged Venus Girls wait to purge them of their need for conflict. They will be taught to submit to loving authority. They will learn to embrace peace and obedience. They will be as happy as men can be.

Yes, that is a real, unedited quote. It was revealed that apparently, the Amazons had a magic butterfly black ops site where they’d be brainwashed. Not the most… ethical concept, but hey, it’s Nazis, who gives a fuck. Sexy Nazi girl then tries to take on Hippolyta, but has her entire body weakened by Hippolyta’s… aura of control? I guess? Hippolyta then gives her a magic girdle that encourages obedience, causing her to renounce Nazism, and tells her

If you truly long to be a slave to the ideas of others, well… we can find you a loving mistress to explore your desires in a healthier context.

Remember that thing about BDSM subtext from the first one? Yeah, it wasn’t really subtext anymore. Nazi lady (aka Paula) then developed an obsession with getting dominated by Diana. Remember that, because the thirsty Nazi submissive will be important later. (Sweet holy fuck above, what has my life come to? Why does this sentence exist?)

Oh, also, Wonder Woman’s pet kangaroo Jumpa was made canon, which automatically makes this the best comic of all time.

Speedrunning through the rest of the comic: Wonder Woman became a celebrity on Earth, pushing an idea of female empowerment (which included trans women because Wonder Woman is fucking based) and also encourage the submission of all men (because Wonder Woman is fucking based?). The whole thing came off as a bit “Achieve all your dreams by buying my book and following these 11 principles for life, but there were some decent messages involved.

However, Leon Zeiko (aka Dr. Psycho), the most cartoonishly sexist man to ever exist, was hired by the US government (and a guy called Maxwell Lord) to seduce Diana and take her down. The government was threatened by the military and technological superiority of the Amazons, and wanted to take them out, or seize their knowledge.

Psycho pretends to be a harmless negotiator who Diana saves, and slowly seduces and draws her in, playing up how weak and helpless he is before her, before slowly starting to challenge her ideas. Some of his points are genuinely good (like how a society revolving around an ultimate authority using mind control and eugenics is a tad evil), which are immediately made meaningless by the uber sexism he then reveals in inner monologue or to the military. To get a general picture of how it went:

Psycho: Diana, you have to understand that people are going to be afraid of a bulletproof superhuman wielding a magic sword who says she's going to tear down their society. Just... take it a little slower. Also, maybe don't kill government officials.

Psycho's inner monologue two seconds later: Foolish female, as all women are. She will be a slave to me, because that's what women should be. Consent is meaningless. I'm the bad guy.

With the military, Maxwell Lord builds the totally-not-Iron-Man, aka the Armed Response Environment Suits (get it? It’s like Ares, but it’s modern and related to the military industrial complex. Subtlety of a brick.)

Also, his Dr. Psycho villain name is revealed to be his username on their version of 4chan where he posts misogynistic Andrew Tate style rants. Honestly, as much as I hate most attempts to “modernize” comics, this is absolute gold and should always be canon.

Psycho then somehow proves immune to the lasso of truth, lying to Diana and turning her against Steve Trevor and her girlfriend. He then manages to lasso her and touch her creepily while she’s tied up. Surely that straight up sexual assault will impact Diana later, right? Believe it or not, no, it's just kinda forgotten. Also, he mind controls her, because he can do that I guess. Mind control Diana punched out Steve Trevor, and called her mom Hippolyta, who gave some vague shit about Diana being a weapon and her own impending death. Also, Nazi super lady was drawing swastikas everywhere, but I’m sure that won’t lead to anything.

The swastikas everywhere lead to something. Shocker.

Two seconds later, the Nazi girl confirms her mind control was activated via radio by Maxwell Lord and kills Hippolyta. Also, Hippolyta spends half her death talking about how “all is proceeding as planned”, which will definitely not lead to anything.

Mind controlled Diana gives a speech about needing to overthrow the world of men, giving Lord the power he needs to effectively launch a coup. Diana breaks out of it, her girlfriend beats Psycho’s head in, and Diana beats Nazi girl, who reveals the whole thing was because she was super turned on by the idea of Diana enslaving all men, and wanted to kick start that by killing her mom. Psycho is sent to the magic butterfly brainwashing dimension, and Diana declares war on the world of men.

It’s good to note that this was a first for Earth One books. They’d had continued plots across books before, but generally, each story could be read on its own (given that it could be years before the next one, and they were never 100% sure if they’d get to keep writing). So a big cliffhanger and completely unresolved story were very new.

TL;DR for the second book: Lots and lots of BDSM stuff happened. Diana got dominated by a super sexist guy and used to start a war, and her mom got killed by a Nazi submissive. Diana then beat the everloving shit out of everyone, and prepared to do the one thing that the Nazi girl wanted.

The Queen is dead! Long live the totalitarian state!

The third book kicks off with a utopia called Harmonia set a thousand years in the future, with “Diana Day'' celebrations preparing. The day celebrates the end of all patriarchy, and women taking charge. Also, every man shown in it is basically what Fox News anchors think gay men look like. A hooded speaker steps up to recite their history, of how they took power.

In the past, Diana cremates her mother, then goes to get advice from her butterfly mind control aunt, who tells her that

Long, long ago we tamed the beast in man. Here, as you’ve seen, our men are pampered and subdued creatures. Domesticated, content with their privileged lives, their all-consuming hobbies … perfect submission to a loving authority.

It’s basically a Tucker Carlson/Jordan Peterson speech about masculinity, but framed as a positive. Diana is then shown the imprisoned and tormented Dr. Psycho who tells her that her black ops brainwashing island is why everyone feared the Amazons, which… honestly, fair. Again, you really hate to agree with the guy, but they keep having him make perfectly reasonable statements in between all the insane sexism.

The Amazons then set out to recruit allies in the war, revealing that their entire cavalry rides kangaroos, which makes all other issues with the comic meaningless, because it’s the best thing ever. The leader of the rebel Amazons, Artemis, points out that a monarchy is probably no longer relevant, that the war is Diana’s own fault, and that Wonder Woman’s anti-violence stance doesn’t fit much for a person walking around with a sword and massive army. Aaaaand then she goes off the rails and starts talking about killing all men. Because Kirby forbid we have a single reasonable person in this story. Diana then defeats Artemis through the power of BDSM and making out, and gains her alliance.

Also, the Nazi girl is there too, and she’s super chill now guys. Because they believe pollution is worthy of death, but an ethnic cleansing is just quirky.

The battle of the sexes

Maxwell Lord then launches all of the ARES suits, and reveals that he is Ares! Whoa! Who could have guessed. He then has all the women protesting violently attacked and imprisoned, all while repeatedly mentioning “fake news”, “deep fake liberal media”, and all kinds of other political commentary with the subtlety and maturity of a brick through a window.

Then comes the massive battle. Mechanized suits of ultimate war against ancient Greek super soldiers. A devastating battle ensues, neck and neck with neither side having a clear advantage. A vicious struggle for their home, their people, the whole world, a story that had been built up since years ago–

Oh. It’s over in like two seconds. The Amazons realize the suits are piloted by remote control and unleash their full power, with Diana destroying nearly half personally. No Amazons died, because they have insta-heal ray guns.

The world is then 100% on Wonder Woman’s side because sure, I guess America is the only country that exists. She offers complete liberation and free shit for all women. On a side note, she mentions “the women of Lysistrata”, which enrages the classicist in me. Lysistrata wasn’t a place, it was the name of the play. It felt like they googled “Greek women stuff”, and just included it without reading the full Wikipedia entry.

Oh, we're still going? There's more "plot"?

Diana then goes on a spirit quest to Hades in order to get her mom back, which immediately fails. She almost dies, but Steve Trevor saves her. They kiss (which ruins the fucking point about this version of them having mutual respect instead of romance), and then he dies for some reason. They can’t use any of their magic healing on him because… unexplained reasons. I'm gonna be honest here, it felt like Morrison realized the day before the book was due that they needed five or six extra pages to get paid and went "Shit, shit, shit, uhhhhhh... people tell her not to go to Hades, she goes to Hades, she immediately fails".

Ares then sends a second, bigger robot, which lasts about five seconds longer, and he dies in the process. Diana reveals their island is actually a flying island, and goes forth to conquer the whole world, and bring them into submission to a loving authority (there it is again). Diana goes full dommy mommy on the world, and women seize power. There’s one mention of mind controlling half the population being “problematic”, and it’s never questioned again.

Remember that initial framing device, of the future utopia? It cuts in and out, showing a “manly party terrorist” coming into the speech with a suicide bomb, talking about how the Amazon takeover and control was morally wrong. He then talks about how the superior male sex should take over again, because there can’t be a single fucking rational person in this comic. He fails, because “You just can’t get good bomb parts in a utopia”, and is arrested by the “love police” to be taken to “reformation island”. He makes very valid points about how mind control is basically slavery, and how a matriarchy isn't much better than a patriarchy, but he's ugly and cowardly, so he's wrong. It basically gets reduced to "Nice argument, but I have drawn myself as the chad and you as the soyjak"

Also, Steve Trevor is alive again? There's no explanation for how the guy they specifically said could never be brought back to life got brought back to life. It ends with Diana showing that she’d used her mother’s indestructible heart with clay to sculpt herself a mother-daughter hybrid, because why not at this point?

TL;DR: Wonder Woman kicks the entire world's ass with the power of love and BDSM. Steve Trevor dies (but not really), Hippolyta dies (but only partially), and the entire world becomes a utopia ruled by women who have fucked men into submission.

Even more TL;DR: It's 1984 with pegging.

So, what the fuck did I just read?

William Marston, eat your heart out

Marston was the original writer for Wonder Woman, and Morrison heavily drew on his views while writing Earth One. As most people have pointed out, the entire Earth One debacle is basically what would happen if DC editorial hadn't stopped Marston from letting Wonder Woman conquer the world.

Marston's views on women and gender relations... exist. They certainly are things that a person believed. This would usually be the point where I talk about how the 1940s man had some really dated views on women, but Marston's views are genuinely bizarre enough to exist in a vacuum.

He was a pop psychologist (and inventor of the lie detector), who came up with a theory about human nature and sexuality based on studies with his wife and their polyamorous partner called DISC (Dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance). His wife and their mutual girlfriend were also a massive driving force behind Wonder Woman, and their theories were heavily influential on her and the Amazon society, as you can see here. Remember that "submission to loving authority" quote from earlier? Yeah, that was a direct quote from him.

It'd take way too long to get into his views, but the very short version is: Some people are submissive, some are dominant. Society would be super-duper cool if all the submissive people just realized that the dominant people were right, and let themselves get tied up. To his credit, he acknowledges women are every bit as capable of being dominant as men, and that men can (and should) submit to ~~ferocious pegging~~ loving authority.

OK, but why?

The fact that Grant Morrison chose to address Marston's beliefs shouldn't be all that surprising in retrospect. They have a history of taking weird elements from decades old comics and experimenting with them. The weird part is that... there's no "Morrison twist". There's no statement on it, no parody of Marston's values, no critique of 70 year old pseudo-science which has been widely discredited, and is very dubious on consent. It's just "Hey, remember this shite? It's right fuckin' weird mate."

In an interview, Morrison would say that

It wasn’t even so much about trying to be timely. It was about trying to honor Marston’s original vision, and saying, ‘What would this really be like?’ The Wonder Woman: Earth One books are very much set in a contemporary, believable world. The simplicity here is about what would happen if Marston’s ideas were taken seriously, and some of those are very strange ideas.

Ok, yeah, but why? "The guy obsessed with bondage wanted everyone to be in bondage" isn't exactly a surprising twist. Not to mention, again, Marston's views on sexual consent really aren't great. People have also pointed out that choosing to make Steve Trevor a black American, then having Diana lecture him on how him being bound and submissive is the rightful order has some really fucking messed up implications. Finally, there's no mention of what happened to gay or asexual people. Again, while it probably wasn't intentional "gay men get sent to a camp where they're 'fixed' and are sexually submissive to women" has some... troubling implications.

Personally, my thought is that somebody snuck LSD into their lunch for months, but we’ll never really know.

(It’s also more than a little ironic that an author who is proudly and openly nonbinary created a future divided squarely between men and women, with no mention of what happened to everybody else).

TL;DR: William Marston, Wonder Woman's original creator had a bunch of views on sexuality and dominance that he included in his comics, which Morrison then picked up. However, many of those concepts are deeply fucked up, and Morrison plays them entirely straight with no real critique. The only guy who questions them is the uber-sexist who gets mocked and basically raped.

Wait, why don't people hate this?

I find it truly, utterly, and deeply hilarious that all the Gamergate and Comicsgate people who have been whining about "muh women taking over" have apparently all ignored the comic which has literal feminazis in it. There is a woman. Wearing swastikas. Who says all men must be conquered. And the edgelord crowd just kinda... ignored it.

As for the rest of fans, while a decent number of people pointed out the myriad weird shit involved, everyone else... well, it's Wonder Woman in high heels stepping on you and telling you to put on the leash and submit. It checks a lot of boxes.

And, to be fair, it had some absolutely gorgeous artwork and fight scenes, so you could just kinda skim over the pretty pictures and purposefully block out all the weird shit in the speech bubbles. There's also a decent number of people who think that Morrison did a good job exploring Marston's ideas. As you may have noticed (although it was subtle), I strongly disagree with that, but to each their own.

Finally, there are the fans who just went "Man, this is an absolutely batshit kinkfest with kangaroo armies and sororities undermining the government, hell yeah". Honestly, nothing but respect for those people. DC can often wallow in grimdark and grit, so it's nice to get a bright and fun comic that revels in the weirdness of the medium.

Goodbye Earth One

This also functionally may very well end the entire Earth One line. Green Lantern could continue in space, and they managed to squeak out the third Batman a few months later (because it was already 99% done, and they just said it was set a little while before Wonder Woman). The issue is pretty obvious: if Wonder Woman established a global utopia free of crime and struggle, there’s really nothing for anyone else to do. Gotham is a lot less dark and gritty for Batman when the Riddler is too busy putting on his catboy costume to rob a bank.

They may decide to go the same route as before, and just retcon that the Wonder Woman story takes place years after everyone else’s stories, but the future is left uncertain. The creators for Batman Earth One mentioned that they thought they were continuing the story, and had plans for the future. In a particularly shitty move, DC didn't tell them that the Batman series was canceled until after the third book was released, which may spell the end for the whole series. They had also been planning an Earth One Aquaman book, but insiders have revealed that it was most likely scrapped and repurposed for other comics. DC is keeping quiet on it, and is claiming they'll release the same Flash book they've been promising for years, but they may use Wonder Woman as an excuse to end the line.

So, I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to have a successful authoritarian state, just make all its rulers hot dominant women in speedos and people will be cool with it.

Edit: I can't believe that I almost forgot the best part of it all. This was Morrison's last comic with DC. After decades of working there, Morrison agreed to make one final comic... then went "Hey, Diana fucks now, deal with it", dropped the mic, and left.

Other comic writeups

Well, that was certainly one of the more bizarre things I've covered. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to wash my brain in bleach. If you liked this writeup, you may want to check out the rest of the series on superhero comics:

Ultimatum

New 52's Red Hood and the Outlaws

Chuck Dixon

Batman's Wedding

The Hank Pym slap

Or, if you want to read some writeups about newspaper comic strips

Chickweed Lane

Stephan Pastis's Divorce

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

31
 
 

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

If you’ve ever watched high-level poker on TV, you’ve probably seen plenty of bad beats. A pro player makes all the right moves only to lose to the river card. An amateur makes a dumb move that winds up netting him/her millions. Most pros accept this as a feature of the game, as the element of randomness leads to some bad luck once in a while. But last year featured a hand so strange, so outside the norm that it drew legitimate suspicion of foul play. And nobody could have predicted the wild rabbit-hole this scandal would take us down…

The scene? Hustler Casino, a popular poker hotspot in Southern California known for its high-stakes play. The casino also hosts its own live streams on YouTube, with tens of thousands of live viewers tuning in nightly to see players at the big money tables. Most of the players that appear on these streams are amateurs with deep pockets, but they also manage to draw some big pro names like Phil Ivey, Doug Polk, and Tom Dwan for their games. The casino therefore has a strong reputation among the pros and maintains relationships with these players to ensure they keep coming back.

On September 29, Hustler Casino Live hosted a cash game featuring a pro regular, Garrett Adelstein, widely known as one of the best cash players in the world – and one of the worst Survivor players, but that’s neither here nor there. He was doing fairly well against the table full of amateurs, including Robbi Jade Lew, an LA local with no prior high-level cash winnings who only started playing poker seriously during the pandemic. There was another amateur player by the name of Jacob “Rip” Chavez playing at the table, a former boxing trainer for Jake Paul, who will also become significant later.

The hand

Here is the now-infamous hand if you want to watch it in its entirety. Garrett is dealt 8-7 of clubs, a solid hand with a lot of flop potential, while Robbi has J-4 offsuit, a pretty garbage hand that you should usually fold. But Robbi has good position on Garrett and clearly wants to try something tricky, so she calls his raise and the two of them go to the flop.

The flop comes 10h10c9c, giving Garrett a straight flush draw, meaning he’s one card away from the best possible hand in poker but currently has nothing. He makes a small bet, and Robbi calls – strange, but so far not super suspicious.

The turn card is a 3h, a blank for both players. Garrett again bets small, Robbi makes a small raise to try and scare him away, and Garrett decides to go all-in for roughly $150,000 (a common play for strong draws like his to scare away all but the best of holdings). At this point Robbi still has nothing and has no choice but to fold. But inexplicably to everyone (including the commentators), she goes deep into the tank, thinking for several minutes and even wasting a time chip to keep thinking, before she calls!

The river turns up no help for Garrett, and he knows he’s beat. They turn over their hands, and Garrett is absolutely shocked at her call. The table is amazed at her successful “hero call” and compliments Robbi on her big win, and she engages Garrett in some light trash talk, but Garrett looks like he thinks something is very suspicious about her call and betting patterns.

A quick aside on ranges (technical poker speak here). In a situation like Robbi’s where you are considering a hero call, you have to assign a “range” of possible hands that Garrett could be representing with an all-in. By making the call, Robbi clearly had him on either a bluff or a draw. But strangely, several bluffs or draws STILL would have beaten her, including Ax, Kx, Qx, J8, or any pair. (You can even hear her say “I thought you had Ace high” at 5:27, which is a hand that would have beaten her.) Garrett happened to have the one exact hand combination she could beat within that range, and EVEN THEN she was barely 50-50 to win on the river as Garrett could still win with any club, Jack, 8, 7, or 6. Whether you think she was cheating or not, make no mistake: it was an objectively terrible call on all metrics.

Immediate aftermath and reactions

Garrett stepped away from the table after this hand and spoke to one of the stream managers off-camera. A few minutes later, Robbi was called away from the table to talk with both Garrett and this manager about the hand. As Garrett recounted in a statement after the fact, he questioned her directly about her play logic and shared his suspicions that she had somehow unfairly won the hand via third-party communication with somebody who knew the hole cards. Part 2 here. Robbi eventually offered to pay Garrett back the money she had won from him in the hand, and he accepted, interpreting this as an admission of guilt from her and an attempt to make the situation go away.

Hours later, Robbi fired back at Garrett, saying that she won the hand fair and square by reading him correctly. She also gave a slightly different version of events during their off-camera discussion, claiming that Garrett “cornered and threatened” her until she offered to pay him back. Robbi also appeared on Joe Ingram’s live stream later that night (at roughly the 6hr31m mark) to further defend herself, saying that she paid Garrett back not as an admission of guilt but as a peace offering to get him back to the table.

Interestingly, after Robbi gave Garrett his money back, the player known as Rip got up from the table and yelled at Garrett for pressuring her into it. Several other players also expressed disgust at Garrett’s behavior, but Rip in particular seemed to have a personal stake in the matter, and he could later be seen on stream talking privately with Robbi, indicating that the two had more than a passing relationship with one another. And indeed, earlier in the live stream, Robbi had mentioned that she and Rip were “business partners.” Had Rip staked her in this game, and was he upset that her paying Garrett meant that his cut of her profits would be lower?

Word of this incredible hand spread like wildfire through the poker community in the coming days, and the clip of Robbi beating Garrett went viral online. Poker pros were initially split on the scandal. Several pros like Daniel Negreanu, Ronnie Bardah, Melanie Weisner, Faraz Jaka, Allen Kessler and Liv Boeree came to Robbi’s defense, arguing that she may have just been caught up in the moment and made a bad play that happened to work out. Negreanu also argued that her paying Garrett off afterwards is not necessarily an admission of guilt, but perhaps just a way of avoiding conflict and settling the matter without further drama. Others like Shaun Deeb, Eric Froehlich, Tom Dwan and Doug Polk seemed fairly confident that something was fishy and sided with Garrett.

Hustler investigates

It should be noted that there was another infamous case in 2019 of a casino employee colluding with a player to cheat on live streamed games, and in that instance the casino’s response was to shut down the stream forever and go radio silent on the matter, providing zero closure for the fans and player base. However, Hustler Casino wanted to handle things differently, as the co-founders of the live stream believed in the integrity of the product and wanted to uncover the full truth. They began to review the footage and hired a third-party firm to conduct an internal investigation of the incident.

On October 6, Hustler released a statement updating fans on the investigation, and they revealed a shocking discovery made during their review of the tapes. At one point during the game, while Robbi was away from the table, a Hustler employee by the name of Bryan Sagbigsal walked up and stole $15,000 worth chips from her stack without anyone noticing. The casino fired Bryan and brought the matter to the attention of the local Gardena Police Department, who approached Robbi and asked her if she wanted to file charges against Bryan, but she declined.

In the hours and days following this revelation, online sleuths were quick to draw connections between Bryan and the allegedly cheated hand. For one thing, Bryan had tweeted in support of the production crew shortly after the hand went viral (later deleting his entire account after his theft was made public). Robbi put out a statement denying knowledge of who Bryan was when the police contacted her, but it was later uncovered that Robbi and Bryan followed each other on Twitter, seemingly contradicting that statement.

Doug Polk was permitted backstage access to Hustler during the investigation, and he discovered that Bryan’s desk was located directly in front of the hole card displays during live streams and that a file cabinet had recently been moved right next to the desk, as though to shield himself from view of the other employees. A couple days later during a separate live stream, Bryan was also caught on camera approaching the table and handing something to a different player; it was later revealed to be poker chips totaling $10,000 that he owed the player. Wonder where he got the money to pay him back? And how many different players did Bryan have financial ties to, exactly??

On October 7, Garrett posted a lengthy report on the TwoPlusTwo poker forums, outlining every bit of potential evidence he had that there was foul play involved. He concluded that Robbi was likely part of a (minimum) three-person cheating operation involving Rip, Bryan the employee, and potentially another player at the table by the name of Nik Airball, based on their suspicious on-camera behavior and previously-undisclosed financial ties to one another.

Robbi released her own statement hours later, saying that Garrett’s report was “full of inaccuracies and conjecture” and continuing to maintain her innocence. She also submitted herself to a lie detector test in an effort to further prove her innocence. Nik Airball preempted the report with a statement of his own and explained why he loaned Rip $175k to play in the now-infamous cash game. On October 9, a user claiming to be Bryan Sagbigsal made a post on Two Plus Two poker forums refuting Garrett’s cheating claims and affirming his own innocence in the scandal.

Things get really, really weird

At this point in the investigation, the poker community was HEAVILY invested in the outcome and wild speculation abounded. Many felt that a player of Garrett’s caliber would never risk his reputation with such accusations without good cause. Crazy theories were thrown about regarding possible cheating methods, including vibrating jewelry (sound familiar, chess fans?), the dealer giving odd hand signals and Jake Paul fight tickets being used as bribery for collusion. Poker pros were making parlay bets with one another on who was involved and a bounty for information was created, which eventually grew to over $200,000 for anyone who came clean about their role in the supposed cheating ring.

The LA Times wrote an article telling Robbi’s story, which only intensified the scrutiny on her. The same Times reporter later tracked down Sagbigsal to his girlfriend’s family’s house and he refused to give a statement (despite supposedly posting on the 2+2 forums the day before).

Robbi’s own behavior following the Hustler report was also scrutinized. Some questioned the legitimacy of the lie detector test, which was conducted by a shady bail bond business. The LA Times also disputed her prior claim that she had submitted her phone records to them when they never received any such thing. Many questioned why she had initially failed to file charges against Sagbigsal but later changed her mind when confronted about it. There was even speculation that Robbi had faked DM’s that Bryan allegedly sent her to try and distance herself further from him and explain her apathy to her stolen chips.

Hustler’s conclusion

The memes and wild conspiracy theories were truly out of control by this point. The eclectic cast of characters and downright absurd allegations felt akin to a Netflix melodrama, and it seemed impossible that things would resolve without some explosive revelations coming to light. But unfortunately, nothing ever did, and slowly but surely, interest in the investigation waned as it became clear no cheating ring was about to be uncovered.

Weeks later, on December 14, Hustler Casino completed their investigation and published their findings. They concluded that, while cheating was theoretically possible in the hand, no evidence of wrongdoing had been found, either by production staff or the private investigation firm hired for the task. The report refuted several of the more outlandish cheating theories, from the vibrating jewelry to the hacked RFID card reader system. HCL also announced increased security measures for future live streams, including limited access to hole cards among production staff and requiring signed statements from all players that they are not financially affiliated with anyone else at the table.

Garrett responded to the report by praising the security changes but making no comment on the findings themselves. He has yet to return to a live stream since the incident (his wife just had a baby, to be fair), but said that he has “found peace” away from poker and is open to returning to Hustler or another stream in the near future. Robbi released her own statement to the LA Times, saying the results were “as she expected” and implying that further legal action would be taken on the matter in the future (which has yet to materialize).

So the controversy ended with a whimper rather than a bang. The poker community remains divided on the subject, but for now the Robbi naysayers have been quieted by the lack of evidence. Many still believe Garrett should have to apologize and/or return Robbi’s money before he is accepted back into the community, though that seems increasingly unlikely to happen by the day.

Meanwhile, the J4 hand has become the stuff of legend, and players frequently tweet at Robbi sharing their own success stories with the dubious hand. Robbi’s popularity has grown significantly throughout the incident, especially after the Hustler investigation cleared her and the massive bounty went unclaimed. We may never know if there was foul play in the infamous hand or not, but it remains one of the biggest scandals in the poker world in over a decade.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here

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Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.


Part 4 - Cataclysm

This post is pretty short compared to the others. There were a number of smaller dramas like the banning of swifty or item duping or WoW closing in Iran, but I struggled to cobble them together into anything worth reading. I was getting into a bit of a rut with this post, so I cut my losses and posted the topics I've finished, rather than leave it unfinished forever.

The Leaks

Cataclysm didn’t just contain controversy. For the first time, an expansion was the controversy. So we need to go right back to the beginning to figure out how it all unfolded.

MMO Champion has always been one of the largest platforms for WoW discourse outside of the official forums. And it was here, on the 15th of August 2009, that Cataclysm was leaked. World of Warcraft was no stranger to leaks – there had already been half a dozen, each promising a different vision of WoW’s next expansion - but they were rarely this detailed, which lent these particular leaks a certain credibility.

In short, the premise was this:

The ancient dragon aspect Deathwing (one of the only big baddies left from the original Warcraft games) had broken free from his prison in the centre of the world, and had used his enormous power to tear Azeroth to pieces. The continents from WoW’s first release (Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms] were going to be totally overhauled with new visuals and new stories, as well as the addition of player-flying.

Five new zones would be slotted in around the world too, where players could level from 80 to 85. Each new zone had an elemental theme, which would continue throughout the expansion. They included the lore-heavy Mount Hyjal, the expansive underwater world of Vashj’ir, the dark and atmospheric subterranean Deepholm, the Arabian Nights-Ancient Egypt fusion which was Uldum and the once peaceful, now apocalyptic Twilight Highlands.

Every expansion included new classes or races, and Cataclysm would be no exception. The Alliance would get Worgen – the human inhabitants of the walled off nation of Gilneas, who had the ability to turn into werewolves. The Horde would get goblins. I joined during Cataclysm, and to this day Gilneas is my favourite zone in the game.

It almost seemed too good to be true. Players had been begging for an alternative to the Vanilla zones, which were really starting to show their age. But no one had expected the scale or scope of these leaks.

The user Naya said, “Everything I read here is all I ever wanted.”

Some fans were wary that too much was being promised.

”I love all of this, and really looking forward to it, but I wouldn't bet running around naked in paris on all of this (stick to the races) just yet,” the user Skysin warned, “a lot of it seems very far fetched, compared to what has been speculated so far. none the less this would be an awesome next expansion if even 75% of it makes it into the next expansion.”

And some didn’t believe it at all.

”giant troll by blizzard imo”, said revasky

Luckily, they wouldn’t have to wait too long in suspense. Blizzcon was just around the corner.

The Announcement

The 21st August was a sunny day in Anaheim, California - as every day is there. The city’s convention centre was packed to bursting with over twenty thousand fans. Most of them had turned up with one primary desire: to be there in person when the third World of Warcraft expansion was announced.

The Opening Ceremony began at 11:30 sharp. When Mike Morhaime took to the stage in Main Hall D, it was to raucous applause. He warmed up the crowd like a pro; he played them a montage of historic Blizzard opening nights, showed off a glossy new WoW ad featuring Ozzy Osbourne, and when the moment was right, brought out the only man capable of eliciting more hype than himself - Chris Metzen. Chris was the mastermind behind Warcaft, and his arrival could mean only one thing. Something big was about to happen.

Sure enough, in the ceremony’s closing minutes, the announcement was made and the trailer began to play. It wasn’t very impressive – the content being revealed was clearly in an early state of development. But that didn’t matter. The cheer that rose up from the crowd would never be matched by any announcement Blizzard made after that.

The leaks had been true, to the last word. Cataclysm would be the biggest expansion Blizzard ever made, and its development even outpaced the original production of the game in many ways. Perhaps for that reason, well over a year passed before the next big reveal, a glossy cinematic trailer.

Players were drip-fed information over that time, and due to WoW’s use of large scale beta testers, everyone knew exactly what the expansion was like months before it released. The hype had never been so high.

On 7th December 2010, Cataclysm released. It represents the time when World of Warcraft hit its peak. For a brief period, it would boast twelve million players, a number no subscription-based MMORPG had ever achieved before, or would ever achieve again. After a few months, WoW would begin its inexorable decline, but no one could ever have seen it at the time. On the contrary. World of Warcraft looked unstoppable.

Players loved it… for a while.

But slowly, the cracks began to show. Familiarity breeds resentment, and players had a lot of time to mull over the many problems with Cataclysm. Those cracks grew into canyons. And by the time the expansion ended in September 2012, World of Warcraft was a shadow of it its former self.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from Northrend in the first place. And some said that even Northrend had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left Outland.

There wasn’t any single thing that doomed Cataclysm. Trying to pin down the thing that killed it is like trying to pinpoint what ended the Roman Empire. It endured a death by a thousand cuts, some of which are complicated and difficult to explain.

But I’ll do the best I can.

Problem 1: Remaking the old world was pointless

In a tragic twist of fate, it was Cataclysm’s biggest and most anticipated feature which dealt the greatest blow: the recreation of Azeroth. You see, almost every single zone was remade from scratch, changed up a little, and given a whole new plot told through entirely new quests (all of them set during the time of Cataclysm). And for what it’s worth, they were very good. Great stories, creative design, nice visuals, and some of the funniest quests ever added to WoW.

But their purpose within the game was unchanged – they were levelling zones to get players to level 60, at which point they would go on to the Burning Crusade zones (until level 70) then the Wrath of the Lich King zones (until level 80), before finally returning to Azeroth for the new Cataclysm zones, which would take them through to level 85.

As you can imagine, this made the timeline incredibly confusing for any new players. But more importantly, levelling wasn’t a big deal any more. Every time Blizzard added a new expansion, players had to go through more content to reach max level, and so levelling was made quicker. By the time Cataclysm released, the 1-60 process was incredibly fast. If you were already max level when Cata came out, and didn’t want to level up alts (secondary characters), then you wouldn’t see any of the new content. And even if you did create a new character, you could always level through PvP or dungeons instead. If you made the specific decision to level through questing, you might only see five of the thirty-eight re-made zones. A vast amount of development time and resources had been put into a feature which was, in hindsight, expendable.

"They reworked the 1-60 content to be faster and easier for new players, but in my personal opinion reached a point of being too easy (almost mind numbing, what was wrong with having a few elites around every now and then?)," one user said. "The fact that world content was easier along with heirlooms and dungeon finder (even though the latter two were from WotLK) really made the leveling experience rather impersonal, where there was rarely any reason to really even speak to other players."

Azeroth was big. Really big. You won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it was. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Azeroth. Blizzard could only create so much content for Cataclysm, and most of their time and resources had been spent on the revamp. This would reduce every other aspect of the expansion to its barest bones.

Problem 2: There was nothing to do

There were only five new levels. The other expansions had ten. There were only five ‘new’ zones (six if we include the PvP zone, Tol Barad). Burning Crusade had seven and Wrath had eight (nine if we include Wintergrasp). There was no new city. Both previous expansions had included a city.

To make matters worse, the new zones weren’t even that good. Uldum had promised players a detailed look into the ancient lore of the Titans (WoW’s mysterious gods), but it turned out to be a prolonged Indiana Jones goof. Mount Hyjal felt artificial due to its over-reliance on ‘phasing’ – technology Blizzard had developed to seamlessly change zones around you, based on your actions.

And most controversial of all was Vashj’ir. It was huge (so big that they split it into three sub-zones), mostly empty, and entirely underwater. Players were given special extra-fast mounts to get them from place to place, as well as the ability to run on the sea floor, but it wasn’t enough to stop the zone from feeling like a chore to get around. The zone’s three-dimensional setting was difficult to navigate, because Vashj’ir had a number of vertically-layered areas, and quest markers never told the player how high or low their objectives were.

On top of that, WoW’s gameplay was never designed to work underwater. In the featureless abyss, it was often difficult to tell how far away an enemy was, and since they could be anywhere above or below you, players often found themselves taken by surprise.

Vashj’ir had its fans – in fact, all the new zones did. But they were a vocal minority. It wasn’t long before the community labelled Vashj’ir the worst, most hated zone in the game.

You didn't have a brand new continent to level up on, instead you had zones that weren't as 'linked together' as the ones in Outland or Northrend. Vash'jir, to most people, was a terrible leveling zone simply because it had a Z-axis. Mount Hyjal was on the other side of Kalimdor from Uldum, Twilight Highlands was off by itself in the Eastern Kingdoms, Vash'jir was underwater and Deepholm was underground. The game kept sending you back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar every time you finished up a zone just to send you through portals to get the next area. It seemed disjointed.

There were plenty of other hints that Blizzard had run out of time on Cataclysm. While Blood Elves and Draenei had been core to the story of Burning Crusade, Worgen and Goblins were often forgotten. Blizzard elected to totally block access to the Goblin starting zones (which was a big deal because one of them, Kezan, was the Goblin homeland), but they got the consolation prize of Azshara (one of the vanilla zones) being revamped with a Goblin story, a mono-rail and a mini-city, Bilgewater Harbour.

The Worgen got no such luck. Once they finished their starting zone, all of the NPCs, animals, and quests vanished. Gilneas was lavishly decorated and incredibly atmospheric and even included a fully built and decorated city. But for whatever reason, Blizzard decided not to finish it. To this day, its houses, streets, and villages are conspicuously empty. This is kind of a problem, because Gilneas is crucial to the story of Lordaeron. The lack of clear resolution on Gilneas would anger fans (particularly the Lore nerds) for over a decade.

Okay, so this all looks bad. But there was other stuff to do, right?

Usually, expansions would have ‘dailies’ – a set of quests in each new zone that you could re-do every day in order to fill up a ‘reputation’ meter with a certain faction. As you filled it, you gained access to a Quartermaster who sold lots of cool stuff, like fancy new mounts. But dailies took time to design, so Blizzard let players gain reputation by playing dungeons instead. Blizzard had promised other end-game content instead. Path of the Titans was planned to be a max level progression system, but it was canned in development. There was also the addition of the archaeology skill. But it had originally been devised as a way to work through the Path of the Titans, and without it, all that remained was a crushingly dull minigame. So in the end, dungeons were basically all there was to do.

But as long as they were good, the fans would manage, right?

Problem 3: Dungeons and raids were a mess

Wrath of the Lich King’s dungeons had been easy. Comically easy. Fans complained, and Blizzard promised to bring back the hard-core difficulty they had once loved. So when Cataclysm released, it was with brutal dungeons, unforgiving bosses and oodles of ‘trash’ – groups of enemies players had to dispatch before they could get to the important fights. Tanks struggled with crowd control, and healers often had to chug mana potions after every trash fight. Every dungeon group needs a tank and a healer, but no one wanted to take up those roles, so the queue to join a dungeon often exceeded two hours. When it finally happened, it was a slog which often ended with everyone dying and subsequently quitting.

The entire game devolved into players idling in Stormwind and Orgrimmar until the Dungeon Finder told them they could go out, struggle with a dungeon, fail, and teleport back. ‘Never Leave Major City Syndrome’ slowly destroyed the community and the game-world.

Casual fans were angry at Blizzard for making the game so difficult to play. Hard-core fans were angry at casual fans for being angry at Blizzard, and for not being better at the game. Casual fans then responded that they shouldn’t be expected to treat World of Warcraft like a full time job just to be good at it – it was meant to be fun. Hard-core fans replied that the difficulty was part of the fun. And this argument on for months.

In World of Warcraft, hard-core raiders had always assumed that they were more intelligent than casuals because they had achieved so much — the fall of the Lich King, Karazhan, Black Temple and so on — whilst all the casuals had ever done was muck about in the questing zones having a good time. But conversely, the casuals had always believed that they were far more intelligent than the hard-core raiders — for precisely the same reasons.

Blizzard weighed in on the issue, with Ghostcrawler basically telling players to stop shouting at each other and have fun.

We do understand that some healers are frustrated and giving up. That is sad and unfortunate. But the degree to which it's happening, at least at this point in time, is vastly overstated on the forums. We also know that plenty of players like the changes and find healing more enjoyable now. Both sides need to spend a little less effort trying to drown out the other side claiming that everyone they know -- and by extension, “the majority of players” -- agree with their point. You shouldn’t need to invoke a silent majority if you can make an articulate and salient point.

It didn’t work.

In April 2011, the first major patch came out, and made the problem even worse. ‘Rise of the Zandalari’ brought two ‘new’ dungeons (they were remakes of Vanilla dungeons), Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub. Not only did these dungeons make Cataclysm’s twelve other obsolete (because they had better gear), they were even harder. The player-base was livid. World of Warcraft was down 600,000 subscribers since the start of the expansion, and that was just the beginning.

Blizzard was desperate. They made every dungeon dramatically easier in order to stem the losses, which pissed off the only remaining people who had been happy about Cataclysm. Then they scrambled to release the next major patch as soon as possible, and even that wasn’t soon enough – another 300,000 subscribers would leave during patch 4.1. Rage of the Firelands was no instant-classic, but it was a much needed breath of fresh air in a very stale room. In addition to the Firelands raid, Blizzard introduced ‘the Molten Front’, a daily questing zone.

But the quick release of Firelands came at a cost. The patch was meant to resolve the two unfinished ‘elemental’ plots – fire and water. In one of Cataclysm’s first dungeons, the ruler of the plane of water (Neptulon) was abducted by Deathwing’s minions. A huge raid called The Abyssal Maw was designed where players would free him, but it was scrapped due to time constraints, and so Neptulon simply… stayed abducted forever?

When asked at Blizzon, Chris Metzen summed it up as ‘a damn mess’.

The fan speculation about the raid garnered more and more attention throughout Firelands. Greg ‘Ghostcrawler’ Street tried to minimise the loss of the Abyssal Maw, describing it as ‘three bosses inside Nespirah (a giant shell), with no unique art”. However players had seen the art and early designs, and so they knew this wasn’t true. Ghostcrawler insisted that it would have been shitty and cited the player pushback against the underwater gameplay of Vashj’ir as the major reason for its cancellation. Whether he was right, we will never know. But Firelands alone was not enough to tide the playerbase over for long.

I'm so salty about this getting scrapped. It would've been so much more unique than the rest of the raids.

[…]

It's kinda sad to look at the what-could-have-been... so much great content scrapped, remnants of it all left, a shadow of what it should have become. Makes me think, wouldn't it be so cool if it was in the game?

Problem 4: The terrible final patch

It was the end of November when the final patch released: Hour of Twilight. Sure, another 800,000 subscribers had left since Firelands, but Blizzard planned on winning them all back. The story of Cataclysm would be tied up, and players would finally get the chance to slay Deathwing. It would go down as one of the most despised patches in World of Warcraft history. This was all rooted in the fact that Deathwing was too big to engage in a conventional fight, and either Blizzard didn’t want to come up with anything creative, or they simply didn’t have the time or money to make it happen.

There were three new dungeons, and the idea was that they told a coherent story which players could follow through to the raid. Of these, one was well received - probably because it was originally going to be a raid, which had gotten shelved. The other two were slight edits of a Wrath of the Lich King zone called Dragonblight. ‘End time’ at least varied it up a bit but ‘Hour of Twilight’ (the dungeon, not the patch) barely changed anything.

But these disappointments were nothing to ‘Dragon Soul’, the final battle against Deathwing. Not only did it take place in another re-skin of Dragonblight, and not only was it an underwhelming end for WoW’s greatest villain, it also included some of the most mechanically awkward boss battles in the game – ‘Madness of Deathwing’ was especially hated for this reason.

80% of the raid is rehashed environments and models and the 20% that isn't was among the worst or most frustrating encounters in the history of the game. also the story was f***ing laughable

One of the new features introduced during this patch was the Raid Finder. It was a simple premise – the Dungeon Finder from Wrath of the Lich King had been a massive success, so Blizzard created a new one for Raids. LFR (Looking for Raid) was treated as a separate mode to the normal raids, which was astronomically easier. Personally, I loved it. I had never been good at WoW, so it was the first time I actually got to see current raid content, and feel like I was actually involved in the story (rather than watching it play out on youtube). I know a lot of people in the community loved it for the same reason.

Hardcore raiders made up a very small percentage of the community, and a huge amount of development time was dedicated to raids which most players would never see. It made sense for Blizzard to introduce LFR during a time when they were struggling to find content to keep players happy.

However to say that LFR was controversial is a massive understatement. A lot of fans absolutely despised it. Blizzard was accused of catering to the worst possible demographic – ultra casuals.

Instead of battling against people playing at the very peak of their class, you play with people content with being the very worst.

The reddit user /u/Hawk-of-Darkness explained it pretty fairly.

Typically speaking (LINKS TO REDDIT) people on LFR have no idea what they’re doing in the raid and it can become a train wreck very quickly, with only a couple people actually knowing what to do and then getting frustrated because everyone else keeps wiping.

However, it was often confusing exactly why hard-core players had such a burning resentment for LFR. After all, they didn’t need to play it, and it wasn’t aimed at them

There's this illusion that without LFR more people would be doing regular raiding, when in reality (and the devs already realized this) they would just quit because the reason raiding is avoided like a plague by the community isn't the difficulty, it's community and commitment reasons.

Writing for VentureBeat, William Harrison spoke for many players like me.

The new mechanic has received much praise and ire, causing an already polarized community to become even more hostile to one another. What are the claims? Why is everyone so angry? Most importantly, is the Looking For Raid system a help or hinderance to a game that has lost close to two million subscribers in the last year?

[..] until last week I had never seen the defeat of the main boss of a World of Warcraft expansion with my own eyes. That was until the LFR system took me straight into the maw of madness. I looked ahead and struck swiftly to victory.

As a fanatic of the lore and canon surrounding the Warcraft universe, I rejoiced at finally seeing the culmination of a story that I had been a part of for almost a year. To see Deathwing, bringer of the Catacylsm that destroyed the face of Azeroth itself, was a moment I never thought I would see. I mean, who has the time to raid when you have a full-time job and a life?

The LFR system is amazing for subscribers that want to experience the content while it's still relevant.

Over a year would pass before any new content was added. Another 1,200,000 subscribers left during that time. It was this patch that cemented Cataclysm’s reputation as the expansion that set WoW on its downward spiral.

Problem 5: The story took a nosedive

World of Warcraft has some of the most dense, complex lore of any video game franchise. While most fans probably don’t care about it, the most vocal ones usually do. And from the start, it was clear that something was wrong with Cataclysm.

The first hint was Deathwing, or more accurately, the complete lack of Deathwing. Every single part of Wrath of the Lich King tied into its main villain somehow, even tangentially. It was done to showed how he was a growing threat. You couldn’t get through a zone without him appearng in some way. But Deathwing was relatively absent in Cataclysm. There was a fun little feature where he would occasionally appear over a random zone, killing any players in it, but that’s all.

I still remember getting obliterated when Deathwing carpet-bombed my zone, it was ... GLORIOUS!

Most of Cataclysm’s story focused on other enemies – the Naga, the Twilight’s Hammer, and the Elemental Lords, whose only connection to Deathwing was their allegiance to him. In the lore, his motivations had always been flimsy compared to the previous two big bads, Illidan and the Lich King. And since Deathwing was never around, players never got to understand him. He was just a big angry dragon boy.

I'm very fond of this rant by /u/Diagnosan

I'd wanted a Deathwing patch from the first day of Vanilla. When it became clear that xpacks were going to be centered around individual villains with the announcement of BC, I wanted one for him. But when he looked nothing like he did in WC2 (Warcraft 2), I became a bit skeptical. This wasn't the Deathwing I'd grown up with.

Once we got to see him in game, all he did was flap his wings and yell at us like some senile old man wanting us to get off his lawn. Oh how I came to HATE that flapping sound, it was the Sindragosa log-in screen all over. We never got to see him cause havoc, really, just the aftermath. From time to time he'd gank you, sure. But it wasn't particularly linked to the story and it quickly turned into a boring annoyance. The one time it actually looked like he was going to kick some ass, the cinematic cut out. Even in dragon soul, what does he really... do? He just sits there and takes it while the same trashmob elementals we'd been fighting all xpack meekly walked up and gurgled at us threateningly.

He wasn't a raw, primal dragon that evoked fear and caused chaos during any of the actual gameplay. For a game about cataclysm, there was just so little of it. Then to add insult to all that injury, the old lizard was just a fucking pinyata with lava coming out of his face.

If the expansion’s antagonist was a bust, its protagonist wasn’t much better. Thrall was the founder of the Horde, and its leader. He was voiced by Chris Metzen and clearly his favourite character, as evidenced by the fact that he was a colossal Mary Sue. He was the biggest, strongest, magicalest, most level headed, most powerful, most loveliest, handsomest orc ever and if you didn’t want to lean through your screen and kiss him on the lips, well, you weren’t the kind of player Chris wanted in his game.

I won’t delve into his backstory much, but it involves being chosen by the elemental spirit of fire (et al), freeing his people from captivity, taking them across the sea, and founding a new nation. I don’t know if the Moses parallels were deliberate, but they sure were glaring. In Cataclysm, Thrall got an upgrade from saving his people to saving the entire world. And so Green Jesus was born.

Thrall’s goodie two shoes-ness was fine at first, because it kind of balanced out the crazies in the Horde. But he was becoming unbearable. He was constantly shoved in the player's face, and never questioned or criticised by other characters for his dumb decisions. The whole plot of the Hour of Twilight patch was to help Thrall power up the McGuffin weapon so that Thrall could work with the immortal dragon demi-gods and Thrall could take the final shot at Deathwing and Thrall could get all the credit. The ending cinematic of Cataclysm showed fireworks going up across the world while the camera panned to Thrall and his girlfriend, heavily implying she was about to give birth to a smorgasbord of mini-Thralls who no doubt promised to plague Azeroth with their manly Metzen voices for the rest of recorded time. He even got his own book, which went into further detail on just how spectacular he was, and how he was the only mortal worthy of taking Deathwing’s place as a demi-god of Earth.

Players came to despise him. On the Horde, they felt like he was constantly upstaging them. On the Alliance, they felt like Thrall (a Horde character) was turning into the MC of Warcraft. Other characters were being neglected or pushed aside to clear the way for Thrall.

To quote one user:

”I’ve had it with these motherfucking Thralls on this motherfucking elemental plane!”

As is often the case, someone wrote a whole university paper on Green Jesus.

While we’re on the topic of books, we need to remember that Blizzard released a novel accompaniment to every expansion. Sometimes they were decent, and sometimes they were written by Richard A Knaak. But these books had never been a big deal, because they just added detail to the events of the game – until Cataclysm. A number of major story events were only ever explained in the books, including important character deaths. Two faction leaders died in one of these books, with zero mention of it in the game. One day they were there, and the next they were gone. The decision divided fans, with some insisting all major story beats should be shown in game, and others pointing out that subtle character interactions and motivations were better portrayed through books because World of Warcraft’s writers were generally pretty bad.

And here we are. I think that’s everything people hated about Cataclysm. Not everyone hated it, of course. There were some who loved it – as I did. And some who held on in the vain hope that the next expansion would be better.

I think back to how much fun early Cataclysm was (LINKS TO REDDIT) with its brutal heroics, amazing outdoor questing areas and awesome first raid tier and then I think about what it turned into with Firelands and Dragon Soul and it makes me sad. Cataclysm could have and should have been a lot better and we the community with our incessant never ending whining played a huge part in its demise.

It was – at least in my opinion. But it was also even more controversial. We’ll save that for another time.

Brennan Jung summed it up best.

The idea of this expansion was great, the execution.. not so much.

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Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.


I recommend reading the first two parts first, but you should be able to understand this post just fine either way.

Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

Here we are, here’s the good stuff. This is one of my top two favourite expansions – but unlike my other favourite, most people actually loved this one too. After the bizarre two-year LSD-fuelled interlude that was Burning Crusade, players were back in Azeroth, plunging into the icy continent of Northrend. Out of all the content missed from Vanilla, this was the place players most desperately wanted to go. And it was excellently done. This expansion concerns the story of Arthas Menethil, also known as the Lich King. I won’t go into the details because we’d be here for hours, but here’s a quick twenty minute refresher and here’s a three hour long monstrosity.

On their journey from level 70 to 80, players had the option of starting out on Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra. From there they would visit either the jungle-heavy Scholozar Basin or Grizzly Hills, a chilled out alpine zone with beautiful music. After the nature zones were done, we moved onto the desolate Dragonblight, absolutely brimming with dragon lore, or the home of the Frost Trolls, Zul’Drak – wow’s first totally urban zone. After that, players usually hit level 68, and were able to buy the ability to fly – which was vital for the final two zones due to their inhuman scale – Icecrown, the bastion of the Lich King’s army, or the mystical Storm Peaks, which was an abandoned science lab left behind by the ancient Titans.

If it wasn’t obvious, this was a huge leap in scale and aesthetic compared to Burning Crusade, and I can tell you that the questing experience was vastly improved. Players had so many options, they could level two characters through Northrend without ever touching the same content. That said, there was very clearly a fan-favourite route. Howling Fjord (never Boring Tundra, as it was known), Grizzly Hills, Dragonblight, and then Storm Peaks, although every zone was good.

Right in the middle of the continent sat Crystalsong Forest, and above it, Dalaran, a city of mages and beautiful purple spires, which hung in the sky in much the same way bricks don’t. It immediately became a fan-favourite.

Then there was the addition of the Death Knight, a ‘hero’ class, which started at level 58, and was so popular at first that the game was overwhelmed by them for months.

On top of that, the expansion gave us some truly iconic raids, like Ulduar (considered to be one of the best ever), Naxxramas, and Icecrown Citadel.

The period encompassing Wrath is considered by many long-time players to be the game’s golden age. Subscribers reached their peak of between 11 and 12 million, and stayed there for the entire expansion. If this all sounds a little too good, then let me placate your fears. There was all sorts of drama to be had in Wrath of the Lich King.

Let’s go through some now.

The Zombie Infestation

To many, the most memorable moment of Wrath of the Lich King happened before it even released. Blizzard wanted to try having another go at a world event, because the one at Ahn’Qiraj had gone so smoothly (take a look at part 1 for that). It was called the Zombie Infestation, and it was designed as a throw-back to the Corrupted Blood incident (also in part 1). Players knew some kind of scourge-related event was on the way, but that’s all.

Wow Insider posted these portentous words right before the event began:

Will it be a simple replay of the Scourge Invasion that brought Naxxramas to our shores for the first time? Or will it be something even more sinister, a world event that shakes the very foundations of the World of Warcraft as we know it?

Call us destructive, but we're kind of hoping for the second.

On October 23, the first phase began. Items called Conspicuous Crates and new NPCs called ‘Argent Healers’ appeared in Booty Bay, a small cross-faction city. Any player who touched the crates had ten minutes to reach a healer, or they would be turned into a ghoul. They would gain the ability to kill any players or NPCs, and their hotbar would be replaced with a new set of abilities, most notably the power to infect other players by vomiting up clouds of infectious air. Successfully infecting an NPC or player healed you, so it was in your interest to do it. Since the timer was so long, and the healers so plentiful, the plague remained under control.

The next day, more crates appeared throughout the capital cities of the game. Plagued Roaches began crawling the streets, infecting any player who stood on one. The timer for players to find an Argent Healer halved to five minutes. It was definitely a challenge to stay on top of, but still manageable.

On day three, NPCs started to transform into Plagued Residents and would wander the streets attacking any player or NPC they came across. The damaging abilities of Ghouls increased dramatically. They gained the ability to control nearby zombie NPCs.

Every morning, players woke up to find their cities more overwhelmed by the scourge. On the fourth, NPCs appeared in capital cities, handing out quests for players to investigate the plague, with the goal of stopping it. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. But meanwhile, it grew harder to avoid. The incubation period dropped from five minutes to two, and infected NPCs became far more powerful. They could explode, killing themselves but infecting everyone around them. The number of Argent Healers halved. Zombie bosses began to appear throughout the world. Necropolises began to fly across the questing zones, dropping off clusters of infected enemies as they went. Even in the forums, player avatars became zombies.

On day five, the incubation period shortened to just one minute and the Argent Healers were almost completely gone. The zombies dealt drastically more damage. But there was hope – players were finally able to combat the infestation. Horde players could accept quests to cure the plague, and Alliance players developed a weapon to destroy the Necropolises.

At midday on 27 October, the cure was found, and the invasion came to an end. Zombies could no longer spread the plague, and once killed, would not respawn. It was over.

Despite only lasting a week, the infection left a long-lasting mark on the game.

One of the most interesting things about becoming a zombie was that it allowed for cross-faction communication.

Zombie status is its own faction. Even on a PvE server you will be attackable by both Horde and Alliance players. Attacking guards and players will flag a PvE player even after reviving as your living counterpart. Both Horde and Alliance players can talk together as zombies. Non-zombie players will see /yell messages as a combination of "..." and "brains".

In addition, zombies could use portals in Shattrath to travel to any city, even one from the opposite faction. Horde zombies could easily reach the streets of the Alliance capitals, and vice versa.

Here are a few recollections of the event from players around Reddit. This comes from /u/lolplatypus

God I loved that event. A friend and I were just finishing up in Outland when it happened. We both hit 70, high-fived, and hearthed back to Stormwind. It happened almost like a movie. Trade chat was full of people going "Why the hell is there a Ziggurat outside SW?" and "Need help at the bridge, there's zombies!"

We got stoked, and ran to defend Stormwind with our newfound 70-ness. It was a bloodbath. It was the marines in Aliens getting overrun, the opening of Red Dawn, and all the best zombie movies rolled up into one. The line kept getting pushed back, everyone was getting infected. First we tried to hold them at the gates, then the bridge, then the tunnel, and then we finally got infected ourselves and joined the undead army streaming through Stormwind's streets.

And then the tears, oh god the tears. Everyone in SW was so mad. I really wish something like this would happen again.

Player DJDaring had this to say:

It was honestly one of my favorite events of all time. It started off mild, a new boss to farm in Kara with the guild and some boxes in neutral cities with occasionally ghouls. Then some invasions with some sweet loot and the rate at which the plague spread grew faster exponentially.

Finally, all the capitals were either battlefields or ghost towns as all NPCs and poor infected players (A fair number of instigators too.) fell to the plague. Quest givers, vendors, guards, trainers, it didn't matter. They all turned to ghouls.

I remember a battle lasting for a few brief days as horde and alliance gathered in the upper ring of Shattrath and cleansed fleeing players while acting as a bulwark against the undead. Blood knights and other Horde, stood along side me and the Alliance Paladins and Priests in solidarity. Then it cleared and we charged the boats and sailed to Northrend.

And another:

WoW's greatest world event ever. Would you defend your city against an endless onslaught of the walking dead, or join the dead and chew on your friends' brains (bonus points if you took out the aid station)?

And another account from /u/c_corbec

I loved it. Me and some guildies holed up at the Orgrimmar bank (I think it was the bank, anyway...) Shaun of the Dead style, with everyone who had a 'remove disease' spell cleansing as many people as they could.

An account from /u/_Drakkar (LINKS TO REDDIT)

When I saw the first couple of ghouls come at me, I immediately started spamming my anti undead abilities like turn undead & the likes. When I hit the one that lets me track undead on the map, I saw this mob & looked to then see the wave hit me. 0FPS & ten minutes of lag later, they had killed me & I was a ghoul now. Also they made it inside orgrimmar.

And /u/Tequilashot360

I recall getting infected in STV I think, got spanked by a couple of other players. Was part of a very large social guild at the time, called in the regular 'nothing better to do' crew, so we started off with about 5-6 infected. From there we made tracks all the way up to Ironforge, having an absolute blast chasing lowbies anywhere we seen them. By the time we got to IF there must of been about 50-60 people in our group...to say all hell broke loose when we came across the regulars duelling at the gates. After we made our way inside we decided to camp the battlemasters and AH (can't remember if the AH guys were killable though).

To say people were unimpressed is an understatement! Got to think of all the people who only get their 2-3 hours of wow every evening and they have to spend it being slaughtered in their own base of operations.

However not everyone enjoyed it. In fact, the event was rather controversial at the time. The WoW economy totally shut down, and so did all progression. Raids didn’t happen, trading didn’t happen, players couldn’t even approach cities without getting sucked in.

It's funny because as someone that was a hardcore raider at the time; I remember this event just being kind of annoying lol. It'd be great for them to bring it back, as in retrospect, it was fun, but at the time it was honestly kind of annoying.

You couldn't go about your routine without getting ganked by PC zombies hiding in the green slime in the Undercity, or right next to a flight master, or.....everywhere, really.....

Great event, but it really put a damper on anyone trying to just play normally, when it happened. I gold to grind out for consumables....and couldn’t.

Nowadays, most processes in the game can be done through the user interface, but back then, everyone relied on NPCs. If you wanted to queue for a battleground or buy materials or sell something, you had to speak to an NPC to do it – and the NPCs were all busy trying to gnaw on your head.

Nonetheless, the Zombie event is remembered fondly by most players. And it would be a fitting introduction to one of the most beloved expansions in the game’s history.

The Torture Quest

In an expansion full of death, undeath, disease and pestilence, it’s really no surprise that one quest involved torturing a character for information. ‘The Art of Persuasion’ is a short and sweet quest in which you torture a captured enemy with an item called the ‘Neutral Needler’, which has the description ‘Inflicts incredible pain to target, but does no permanent damage.’ Each time you use it, the character screams and begs for you to stop, and on the fourth, you successfully extract the info you’re looking for.

The Quest text is suitably foreboding.

The Kirin Tor code of conduct frowns upon our taking certain ‘extreme’ measures – even in desperate times such as these.

You however, as an outsider, are not bound by such restrictions and could take any steps necessary in the retrieval of information.

Do as you must.

The quest caught the attention of Richard Bartle, a revered MMO pioneer and general industry boffin. He posted a rant on his blog, which you can read here.

I'm not at all happy with this. I was expecting for there to be some way to tell the guy who gave you the quest that no, actually I don't want to torture a prisoner, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that. Worse, the quest is part of a chain you need to complete to gain access to the Nexus, which is the first instance you encounter (if you start on the west of the continent, as I did). So, either you play along and zap the guy, or you don't get to go to the Nexus.

I did zap him, pretty well in disbelief — I thought that surely the quest-giver would step in and stop it at some point? It didn't happen, though. Unless there's some kind of awful consequence further down the line, it would seem that Blizzard's designers are OK with breaking the Geneva convention.

Well they may be, but I'm not. Without some reward for saying no, this is a fiction-breaking quest of major proportions. I don't mind having torture in an MMO — it's the kind of thing a designer can use to give interesting choices that say things to the players. However, I do mind its being placed there casually as a run-of-the-mill quest with no regard for the fact that it would ring alarm bells: this means either that the designer can't see anything wrong with it, or that they're actually in favour of it and are forcing it on the player base to make a point. Neither case is satisfactory.

Bartle’s comments caused a stir in the community, who had largely ignored the implications of the quest up until then. It circulated around blogs, before making it to Kotaku – one of the largest gaming news sites. And it only gained traction from there.

For the most part, the playerbase reacted with ridicule.

The enemies in question, Malygos and his blue dragonflight, have declared war on all spellcasters, and kidnapped and murdered a ton of them, while threatening to destroy the planet with some pretty hardcore stupidity. They also threaten to kill the families of wizards if they don't join his cause. You are complaining about torture? Whether you play alliance or horde, you have been killing thousands upon thousands of creatures, a lot of them innocents. A 30-second torture session is worse than that? You would probably kill him if the quest was to execute him, so go jump into a well, Mr Bartle.

Another commenter mocked Bartle for trying to apply the Geneva convention to a fantasy game.

Ah, yes. The Geneva located right next to Booty Bay.

This seemed to be a common sentiment.

Guess this guy would be surprised to learn that what he has done countless times in games, aka killing people, is actually prohibited by the law.

One user simply responded with “Don’t be a little bitch.” Others directed him to Hello Kitty online instead. Within the game, the consequences of not torturing the character are global destruction. Some players argued would be more unethical to skip the quest. One fascinating response was from a player who disagreed with the torture, but only because their Roleplay character wouldn’t like it.

Playing on a Roleplaying server (Cenarion Circle) my ridiculously Lawful-Good priest would have had a huge problem with it. I would have much rather found another way to deal with it to work with my character's backstory, habits, etc. but there really isn't.

Other pundits were more even-handed.

Scott Jennings of Brokentoys.org pointed out that there were other quests in Wrath of the Lich King which involved torture, but justified it with the fact that this was a Death Knight quest, and Death Knights are evil by nature.

Jennings entertained the idea of giving the player the option of refusing to participate in ‘The Art of Persuasion’, but that this would mean making the quest far more political than it was ever designed to be. And of course, World of Warcraft is all about slaughtering animals to take their stuff, so torture isn’t really that extreme when you think about it.

Writing for Wired.com, Clive Thompson argued that not only is the torture fine, there should be more of it in games. He argued that video games are the perfect vehicles for helping people inhabit complex scenarios. Players love choices and consequences. Adding torture to a game, and writing it realistically, would be a great way of demonstrating how bad it is – how often it generates totally false information (because victims will say anything to make it stop), how it can have crushing psychological effects on the person inflicting it, how it can cause you to lose your moral high ground and can push people to the side of your opposition.

In Thompson’s opinion, the problem with ‘The Art of Persuasion’ was the lack of consequences like these. If the torture had caused other NPCs to refuse to speak to you, or neutral characters to become aggressive – and on the flip side, what if it made the game easier, because future opponents were scared of the player.

From my perspective, Americans aren't thinking very seriously about those consequences. The torture at Guantanamo Bay, in overseas CIA prisons and at Abu Ghraib has all gone by with relatively little public outcry.

Why? Partly because U.S. officials refuse to describe or admit clearly what they're doing. But equally important, I think, is that our mass culture is filled with wildly misleading ideas about how torture works.

Bartle responded to all of this controversy with another post. In reply to the comments about the Geneva Convention, he said, “Blizzard could put a quest to rape characters in there: real life anti-rape laws wouldn't apply. Nevertheless, a lot of people would be very disturbed by such a quest.”

When it comes to the discussion of killing in the game, he had this to say.

I am aware that playing WoW means you get to kill thousands of creatures. I am aware that murder is a worse crime than torture. Murder is a worse crime than anything (other than mass murder). However, previous quests have not exactly asked you to commit murder (at least for the Alliance — I don't know about Horde). It's always been for some morally justifiable purpose (self defence, most of the time).

There's a contradiction between "you have to torture this guy because if you don't then the Blue Dragonflight will destroy the world!" and "if you don't like it, don't do the quest". If I don't do it and the world isn't destroyed, that means it wasn't necessary in the first place, right? So why do the guys want me to torture him?

It’s worth noting you can skip the whole questing experience if you want, and just level through dungeons instead. But that doesn’t mean the quests are unnecessary.

He also argued that it broke the covenant between game and player by defying expectations. He went in expecting thievery and killing, but not torture. "It's as if you were reading the new book 8 of the Harry Potter series and Harry turns to drugs and uses his magic powers for sport to blind people. […]I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture."

Overall, Bartle lays out a number of points which you can read for yourself here.

Once again, the topic took off and circulated back into the gaming media, even reaching The Atlantic.

Players were quick to mock the idea of the quest as ‘gratuitous’:

Gratuitous torture? For a second there I thought you just clicked a button and watched swirly lines shoot out at a cartoony douchebag. I must have missed the bit where you beat the living shit out of him, cut off his fingers one by one and make him eat them, and then slowly remove his organs until he talks.

There was also a lot more mockery, with an entire article (on a now defunct website) called ‘Richard Bartle is a pussy’.

Look at me! Look at me! I invented muds and I'm still relevant! READ MY BLOOOOOOOGGGGG!

There was really no ‘climactic moment’ in this situation. It sort of fizzled out. Among the wash of WoW controversies and discussion, it faded out of relevance. But it’s interesting to look back on, as yet another example of WoW provoking discussions about far greater topics than wizards and dragons.

The Wintercrash Update

Wrath of the Lich King was ambitious. In some ways, too ambitious for its own good. The sheer scope of the expansion meant that Blizzard had less time to polish it. Bugs were rampant. A number of patches came out shortly after the expansion’s release in an attempt to fix its problems, but often these only succeeded in making it worse.

Enter Patch 3.0.8. It released on 20 January 2009 and brought a slew of new bugs with it. This post attempted to list them all. Players were unable to create Death Knights, human women were clipping in and out of their weapons, mail had gone missing without a trace, arenas were broken, there was unbearable lag, and dozens of little problems appeared all across the game. More importantly, there was a major glitch with Wintergrasp that could break the whole server.

Wintergrasp was one of the big selling points of Wrath of the Lich King. It was a zone dedicated entirely to world PvP. Even on non-PvP servers, any player who strayed into Wintergrasp for too long would automatically have their PvP enabled. There were siege engines, ranks, enemy buildings to destroy, scheduled battles, and rewards for the victors.

Whoever won control of Wintergrasp would defend it next time around, and in the mean time, would be able to complete daily quests or access a short dungeon. You can read more about the process of fighting over Wintergrasp here.

It was well received. But after 3.0.8 came in, every time Wintergrasp changed hands, the entire continent would collapse. As soon as it started back up, the battle would reset, fighting would resume, someone would win, and the continent got knocked offline again. Over and over and over. The whole thing was a disaster.

There was speculation that Blizzard released the patch before it was ready because Wrath of the Lich King had pushed the subscriber numbers to never-before-seen heights, and they desperately wanted to keep their new players happy.

the massive number of quite big bugs for a patch that has been on the PTR for quite a while really stunned me.

One player wrote.

You all bitch and bitch and bitch for them to put the patch out, they rush it out, and you bitch some more.

Blizzard quickly acknowledged the issue. The thread is full of players begging them to disable Wintergrasp so that they could play the game without being constantly disconnected.

Jesus, yes. For the love of all things holy turn the GD thing off. Can't do ANYTHING in northrend.

Later that day, Wintergrasp was gone. Whichever faction had last controlled the zone would retain control until the problem was fixed, which caused problems of its own. Players who weren’t on the winning side complained that they were unable to do the Vault of the Ancients (that dungeon I mentioned).

In the meantime, players took to calling the zone Wintercrash.

There’s a lot more to this disaster of a patch than I’ve mentioned, but I won’t go into too much detail.

The Power of Martin Fury

This is my favourite incident from Wrath of the Lich King, just because it’s so bizarre (and relatively inconsequential). In April 2009, the website Wow Insider received a tip off about an enigmatic guild which was shattering the Ulduar raid achievements at a suspicious rate. They got them all done in a single day – an almost impossible feat for even the most skilled guild. Based on their gear and experience, they had no business even attempting Heroic Ulduar.

There was the possibility that players were hacking the game, but everyone assumed such a feat would’ve gained more attention, and so the early suspicions were dismissed. The forum post about it had so many deleted replies that it was impossible to follow.

But the tip-offs kept coming.

The guild was The Marvel Family, on the US server ‘Vek’nilash’. Inquisitive players quickly narrowed in on one specific member of the guild, called Karatechop. His gear was fine. Not great, not terrible. But WoW displayed fun stats on each player, which were publicly available, and this is where the breakthrough happened. At some point, Karatechop had dealt 353,892,967 million damage. in a single hit.

Players puzzled over how anyone could do that. There were a number of scripted story quests that let players deal huge damage, but nothing even close to that number. Then someone noticed that 353,892,967 was the maximum health of the Flame Leviathan.

Players were able to destroy towers throughout the raid in order to reduce the Flame Leviathan’s health before taking it on. Defeating it without destroying any towers was insanely difficult, and would net players with a rare achievement called ‘Orbit-uary’.

There was another achievement associated with the Flame Leviathan called Shutout. The boss had four turrets on top of it, and players could destroy them in order to slow the boss down and increase damage. Shutout was rewarded to raid groups who managed to defeat the Flame Leviathan without destroying any of his turrets.

Not only did Karatechop have both of these achievements, he got them at the exact same time. In case it wasn’t obvious, that was borderline impossible.

The natural conclusion was that Karatechop had found some way to one-shot the Flame Leviathan. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, the evidence indicated he had one-shotted every single boss he came across.

As this information came to light, the entire community turned its gaze on Karatechop. Every single crumb of information was carefully analysed and cross-analysed, until players noticed something strange. On his profile (which showed what gear a player was wearing), he had an item in his shirt-slot, but it wasn’t loading.

The witch-hunt ended here. Item #17, a shirt called Martin Fury.

Use: Kills all enemies in a 30 yard radius. Cheater.

Got him.

Somehow, Karatechop had gotten hold of a piece of gear which should never have found its way into his hands. It wasn’t unusual for game-breaking items to be used by developers and programmers to help them put the game together or test bugs. The fact that it was only the 17th item to ever be created (out of tens of thousands) proved it originated some time in WoW’s early development. Even items from the earliest parts of the game had at least four digit numbers.

As soon as this news came to light, it exploded through the entire WoW player-base with a force and speed that was impossible to ignore. Everyone on every server and every forum was talking about it, speculating on how it could have happened, and on what they would have done in Karatechop’s place.

Such is temptation. With infinite power at your fingertips, could you resist using it? Karatechop couldn't, apparently. As the saying goes, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That can certainly be applied to Karatechop here, but what of the person who awarded it to him? If this is an accident, it's on the list of most unlikely accidents ever.

Every single member of The Marvel Family was banned, even those who hadn’t participated in the raids. Karatechop made public the email he received from Blizzard, which said the following:

The character, "Karatechop," on the realm "Vek'nilash" was found to have obtained an item (inaccessible by standard game play) from another player and trivialized the World of Warcraft raid contents with the exploitive use of this item. Consequently, this character was able to assist with the accumulation of items and achievements through the use of this item that is not obtainable by "normal" means.. The character's actions gave the account an unfair advantage over all other players. As a result of the violation of the World of Warcraft Terms of Use, this account will be permanently closed.

One of the members made a blog post about it, which got hit with so much traffic that the site collapsed.

I had no idea that for a week, my guild was in possesion of a legendary chest piece given to one of us via in game mail from a GM. The person who got it in the mail had their account hacked a few weeks earlier, and petitioned blizz for about a month before everything was restored, not sure if this has any relevance. It was not bind on possession or equip or anything, so the person who got it in the mail traded it to our guild master.

It was called Mathin’s something, or Martin’s something, but it basically had 99 charges to kill anything within a 30 yard radius. They chose to try it out in Ulduar.

I wasn’t there, but they apparently downed Flame with this item and our guild master got a huuuge hit registered on the armory, everyone got achivements which we had only dreamed of getting before. The next day when he tried to log in his account was banned (suprise!) and trade chat was absolutely merciless towards anyone with the Marvel name over their heads.

I got whispers from countless level ones, obviously alts from different servers, asking me how we did it, why his armory was so whacked, etc. One was offering me "thousands of USD" to give him info. Ignored.

Everyone had open tickets, and then more bans. Guildies were going offline and vent was nuts with everyone all like "This WoW account has been closed and is no longer available for use…" and getting really mad. One by one the entire guild was slowly getting their accounts locked, eventually I got mine ( I have never been in Ulduar, let alone in the group that night.) Threads are being closed on the forums, our vent info was compromised at some point, and a 12 year old joined cursing and talking about chicken.

The post led to the theory that a GM had tried to restore a player’s lost items, and had accidentally only typed the first two digits, thereby sending Martin Fury by mistake. But there was a not-insignificant faction who suspected this had all been deliberate. They questioned whether Karatechop had some connections within Blizzard, or if there was corruption involved. Or perhaps someone at Blizzard got fired and decided to go out with a bang.

Blizzard has rarely restored any toon I've seen hacked to its former glory. They seem to give you some random stuff and just leave it in one of these multiple in-game mails. On his level 13 warlock, I believe, was Martin Fury. […]I honestly thought it was something Blizzard gave to one of Leroy's alts for four months of ignoring the problems with his account.

A poll found that only 48.6% of players would have messaged the GMs (Game Masters) if they had received Martin Fury. 33% would have done exactly what Karatechop did, 11.4% would have used it to mop up PvP, 10% would have saved it for future use, and 28.8% would have used it sparingly.

On 30th April 2009, WoW Insider would interview the man, the myth, the legend, Karatechop himself. He confirmed he was not a hacker, and didn’t work for Blizzard (as some rumours had claimed).

I don't believe banning is fair, especially since this would be my first infraction in the 4+ years I've played the game. But it's Blizzard's game and they are the ones calling the shots, so fair is relative. Up until the bans, I honestly didn't think I was destroying the World of Warcraft.

We were given a 'You Win' button and it was something we used.

The interview once again caused a stir, with many players angry at Karatechop.

You broke the EULA. You hurt your guild. Blizzard is just following their protocol for cheaters like you. And your little dog-and-pony show is pathetic too.

However he did have his defenders.

The guy got a freaking Dev item by mistake! He could of done a lot worse damage than what he did! He could of gone into Wintergrasp and killed every horde member in sight!

[…]

in terms of the EULA, please show me where it says that you cannot use an item given by BLIZZARD?! If you fail to give me evidence of this then your posts are nothing but trolling.

[…]

I hope the Blizzard employee who f'd up (if that's the case) got the sack as well, otherwise to ban only the player is unfair and excessive.

34
 
 

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.


This is the second part of my World of Warcraft Hobbydrama series. I recommend reading the first part, which covers Beta and Vanilla, before moving onto this post. But if you don’t want to do that, you should have no trouble understanding anything.

Part 2 - Burning Crusade

World of Warcraft’s first expansion ‘The Burning Crusade’ released on the 16th January 2007, to enormous hype and acclaim. Other MMOs had released expansions before – most notably EverQuest had already released twelve by that time – but nothing to this detail, and scope. Players journeyed to the broken planet of Outland, the original homeland of the Orcs.

The continent had scorched red deserts, storm-beaten cosmic hellscapes, spiked mountains straight out of a medieval torture fantasy, and even a drained sea full of giant mushroom cities. But by far the most popular new area was Nagrand, a relative paradise with floating islands and calm music. BC truly offered every kind of experience, and it was clear that a lot of thought had been put into making it as alien as possible.

WoW had a huge catalogue of lore to fall back on, so it would be almost a decade before Blizzard had to start coming up with new concepts from scratch. Players had heard of Outland before, and many of its leading characters were old faces. That only added to the excitement.

BC cemented the idea of what a WoW expansion should contain: a continent to play around in, many new raids and dungeons, ten new levels, and a new class or race.

Even though many people look back on BC with a critical eye, WoW continued gaining new players throughout the expansion, and it revitalised the existing audience, so it’s hard to say it wasn’t a success. Everything from the level design to the writing to the end game was a step up from Vanilla. Its most iconic dungeons are fondly remembered today – such as Karazhan and Black Temple.

But don’t worry; there was plenty of drama too.

The Space Goats and Gay Elves

Burning Crusade gave us not one, but two races, and both of them managed to piss off some section of WoW’s playerbase.

The Horde were going to get Blood Elves – a race of civilised, fancy, sexy snobs. This made no sense to a lot of players. They were a Horde after all. They were meant to be savage and bestial and gruesome and primitive. The delicate Blood Elves had no place among their ranks, and would be better suited to the Alliance, they thought. Sure, the Blood Elves were sort of ‘evil’, but they weren’t the right kind. They were the ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ kind of evil, not the noble, misunderstood kind of evil from the Evanescence songs.

I’ll try to give a VERY brief explanation of the lore so that we can pin down exactly why they’re evil.

It started with the Trolls. A small group of trolls settled near the ancient Well of Eternity (a fount of infinite power at the centre of the world), and used it to fuel their rise, gradually turning into Night Elves in the process. Stuff happened, the Well of Eternity went boom, and the continents of WoW were made. A small group of Night Elves took a vial of water preserved from the Well of Eternity and used it to create the Sunwell, which gradually turned them into High Elves. Stuff happened (it does that a lot), the Sunwell went boom, and the remaining High Elves found themselves desperately addicted to its power, but with no substitute. They found an alternative in Outland, using demonic energy which turned their eyes green and gave them a somewhat evil disposition. They renamed themselves Blood Elves in honour of the people who died when the Sunwell went boom, which was most of them.

So long story short, they’re evil because they used evil energy – which should have satisfied the crowd who wanted the Horde to be the bad guys (since using that same evil energy is how the Orcs turned green). But on the other hand, the Blood Elf men were wonderfully, stupendously camp. And that really was a deal breaker.

Here we can see a prototypical conversation on the topic. In a 2014 poll, 36% of MMO-Champion users considered Blood Elf men to look/act ‘gay’.

I love Belf Males casting animations and thinking of using my free 90 boost for a belf priest. However, they do seem a bit gay e.i. there emotes/stance

Don't get me wrong, I'm not the slightest bit homophobic. Just curious of your opinions.

There were users who pointed out the deception here.

You might not be afraid of homosexuals, but you have a strong enough stigma against them to both stereotype them as well as avoid being associated with them... Which means you're pretty much afraid of homosexuality.

So it is, indeed, homophobic. :P

Here’s another

For christs sake how homophobic and sterotypical are you.

Does it look like a bear? an otter? a twink? a jock? a cub? metro? chubby? or you know the infinite spectrum of body types that gay people can be, just like straight people.

What the hell is wrong with you? The fact that this is even a "dilema" for you pretty much tells me all I need to know about you.

And another.

Gay? No, but, I've known a lot of homosexual people that are of many different body types, attitudes, etc, so I tend not to really pay any attention to the stereotypes.

Feminine/"Metro"sexual? Yes. They're characterized as prissy and vain, which is an attribute most commonly seen as gay, however, I've known more straight men that act like that than gay.

And also… whatever this is.

Well, if my Blood Elf Rogue looks gay, then it's because he is gay. Well, more omnisexual. He still remembers that one night where he got drunk and tried to mount one of those statues in Dalaran in the horde area. You can still see the dent.

This is just one conversation on one forum. During the period of Burning Crusade’s release, the topic was everywhere, and held a lot of controversy.

After all, they had perfectly sharp eyebrows, almost impossibly beautiful hair, fine chiselled jaws that looked a bit like Brad Pitt if you squinted and turned your head a little, with the most elegant cheekbones, a gorgeous slender frame with just a hint of pec poking out from their v-neck robes, an absolutely flaming swagger, cat-like delicate eyes, and such kissable lips, God…

“Wait,” several million young men cried out in unison, just quiet enough to avoid waking their mothers upstairs. “Do I want to fuck a blood elf? No. No, it’s not me! I’m not gay! I’m manly as fuck! It’s Blizzard’s fault! How could they do this to the Horde!?!”

Hmm.

Anyway, they were not the only ones unhappy at the evil actions of Blood Elves. There were others who insisted they were too evil to be allowed to join the Horde (who were, lest we forget, honourable in their savagery). This debate tended to spiral into long, drawn out arguments about collective responsibility and the subjectivity of demon magic. The Blood Elves we played never used upper-level demon blood, they said, only demonic pests and mana beasts – the equivalent of rats and lesser rodents. They were practically vegan.

Then there was an angry contingent of Alliance who proposed that they should have Blood Elves, rather than the Horde. The High Elves had long been their allies, with continuous calls for them to be added as a playable race, and the whole idea of Blood Elves had clearly been contrived to create an excuse to alienate them from the Alliance. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Blood Elf women were a lot better looking than human women, and would no-doubt look even better gracing a table at the Goldshire Inn.

The had some fair arguments. For example, Blood Elves traditionally spoke the same language as humans, known as Common, and frequently talked to them in non-game material like the books, but due to WoW’s rules on cross-faction communication, they would never be able to communicate with humans. The response to this was that there is no evidence all Blood Elves spoke Common – maybe it was just officers, delegates and diplomats – and players happened to control Blood Elves who didn’t. But also, Blood Elves could be Paladins. Up until their introduction, only Alliance races had been Paladins, never Horde races.

In retrospect, perhaps they were simply afraid of monster Blizzard had unleashed.

Indeed, before long Blood Elves became the most popular race in the game, with Blood Elf women in number 1 and Blood Elf men in number 2. It was a golden era for ERPers. The Horde finally had a race they could wank off to, and they took to it with gusto. On RP servers, Silvermoon City became the Horde hub for any and all roleplay. While the Wayfarer’s Rest Inn was its heart, almost every single building became the home of this guild or that guild. Silvermoon was so out of the way that non-Roleplayers never bothered going there, so it was the only city in the world wholly dedicated to Roleplay.

But that would not be the last we heard of our metrosexual blood boys. In 2015, Blizzard decided to update the models for them, and players quickly noticed that the new models were a lot more masculine. They had thicker frames, bigger muscles, and better posture.

A Community Manager by the name of Nethaera confirmed that the change was done to make Blood Elf men look more intimidating and manly, which drew heavy criticism. To those who played Male Blood Elves, their waifish figures were part of the charm. Hell, they had actually become very popular among feminine gay men. They were furious that Blizzard was forcibly bulking up their characters, citing a culture of machismo and stereotyping. Defenders of the change pointed out that by making Blood Elf frames more similar to humans, less work was needed to make sure that outfits didn’t break or tear. Also a lot of WoW’s promotional art has historically been done by Sam Didier, who always portrayed Blood elves as quite muscly, so there was a precedent for it.

Regardless of their controversy, Blood Elves were here to stay. The true irony is that by the standards of Final Fantasy 14, the new MMO on the block, Blood Elf men are positively masc for masc. The gays would win in the end.

So we’ve gone over what the Horde got, but what about the Alliance?

The new race given to the Alliance was the Draenei, a motley crew of tall goat-people with blue skin and tentacles. They arrived in Azeroth on a crashed space-ship made of giant crystals, led by a 25,000 year old prophet who could see the future, and guided by giant floating light gods. The community found them a jarring addition, more sci-fi than fantasy, and there were complaints they didn’t really fit with the aesthetics or themes of WoW. No matter how you look at it, Burning Crusade was audacious.

Of course, Blizzard never skimps on the lore, and they had plenty of backstory in Burning Crusade. The cliff notes are these: The Draenei had originally been Eredar, a race of powerful aliens who lived on the planet Argus and mostly stood around smelling flowers and praying, until they were corrupted by an even more powerful alien Sargeras, who himself had been corrupted by some particularly capricious Old Gods, who were, at the time, trapped under the surface of Azeroth. A small group were able to escape the corruption of the Eredar and named themselves Draenei. They fled to a planet full of Orcs and Ogres, which they called Draenor, where they set up shop for a while alongside the Orcs. But the Eredar found them and weaponised the Orcs against the Draenei. Stuff happened. The planet exploded, becoming Outland, and the surviving Draenei then fled to Azeroth in their space-ship, while the Orcs built a giant inter-dimensional gateway called the Dark Portal, through which they would go on to invade Azeroth, which made a lot of people angry and has widely been regarded to be a bad move.

Got all that? Good.

Chris Metzen apologised for the difficulties in the new lore, which contradicted the old law in more than a few ways. He dismissed the idea that the space ship was sci-fi, because space-ships fly through space, and the Exodar didn’t fly, it teleported, which was totally different and not at all sci-fi. After all, mages teleported all the time, and no one went around calling them sci-fi.

For some reason, this perfectly flawless logic didn’t convince players.

It didn’t help that no one quite knew how to pronounce this race’s name. In Warcraft III (the game which preceded WoW), it was pronounced ‘dra-neye’ with an accent on the first syllable. But in an official forum post in October 2006, it was ‘dran-eye’. Lead designer Scott Mercer used the pronunciation ‘dr&’ni’, and community manager Tseric (remember that name) claimed it was ‘dray-neye’, and another lead designer pronounced it as rhyming with ‘man eye’, and all this didn’t exactly fill the community with confidence.

In the end, the Draenei would never capture the attention of players the way the Blood Elves had, despite the fact that – as many noted – the female Draenei more closely resembled female Blood Elves than male Draenei. A spectacular example of the sexist dimorphism of WoW’s character design.

Unlike Silvermoon, Roleplay never really took off in their zones, and their little corner of the world remains largely empty. They would see a brief resurgence in the Warlords of Draenor expansion, as well as in the final patch of Legion, but that’s all.

The Issue of Flight

During Vanilla, the world was strategically dotted with flight masters. Every time a player interacted with a new flight master, they unlocked the ability to fly from that point to any other flight master on the map, for a small fee. And in a world where the alternatives were walking or a very slow ground mount, flight paths were considered cool.

One of the most consequential changes to come with the Burning Crusade was the introduction of flight.

It was a huge promise, but no simple task to deliver. Blizzard couldn’t just give players the ability to move vertically. Vanilla’s zones were not designed with flight in mind, and that allowed Blizzard to cut corners. When designing a building, tree, or mountain, they never bothered creating the whole model as a single object, they would only create the parts the player could see, and leave the rest behind. From the ground, everything would look complete, but when viewed from above, the illusion would become clear. The flight paths had been carefully planned to avoid revealing anything.

Outland was the first part of the game designed to maintain its structural integrity when players flew above it. And at first, it was incredible. The ability to fly cost 900 gold, and a flying mount cost another 100, which made it incredibly costly at the time. On top of that, players could only fly once they reached max level. But it was a worthy sacrifice. The moment players first took off from the ground and flew around Outland, it was like a whole new game had opened up to them. Players could let the world fall away, sweeping over monsters or natural obstacles without a care. The floating islands of Outland which sat tantalisingly out of reach were now easy to visit, and a lot of max-level content in Outland was only doable with flight.

But after a while, the cracks started to show. Players began to voice their concerns on the forums, and in the game, that the community aspect was disappearing. The chance encounters and group activities that had kept WoW’s world so exciting became a rarity, because everyone was in the sky. The change was even more pronounced on PvP servers. Players would idle in the safety of the stratosphere, where nobody could find or touch them. And the long, perilous journeys from one end of the continent to the other suddenly became a breeze that took no more than a few minutes to complete. This had a massive impact on the social fabric of the game.

“The world feels a bit more populated when everything is at a slower, smaller scale,” says Hazzikostas. “You can see someone next to you. They’re not 50 yards above you. So there’s no question that adding that extra dimension has the effect of making some of our cities feel a bit emptier.”

Wow’s Developers often compared flight to Pandora’s Box. No one predicted the consequences of adding it, and once it was there, it became such a pivotal tool that it was extremely difficult to remove in future expansions. Once players had flown, they would need to fly everywhere. They couldn’t go back to flight paths. They were now a crutch. And often they were badly planned so that they took inefficient, slow routes. But as long as players could fly, the game would suffer. Ever since this reality became clear, WoW’s playerbase has been fiercely divided on the issue. It’s a dilemma which would infect every MMORPG in the industry going forward.

Blizzard continued integrating flying into new expansions. Wrath of the Lich King prevented players from flying until they had out-levelled all but the final two zones – both of which were built with flying in mind. The next expansion, Cataclysm, had flying baked in from the start. The plus side was that this gave Blizzard a free reign to design the most extreme geography and architecture they could imagine, because none of it had to be traversable by foot. Flight was so necessary to those zones that when players died, their ghosts would appear on flying mounts, presumably because otherwise it might be impossible to reach their corpses to revive.

After that, there was a gradual attempt to phase flying out, with controversial results. We’ll get to them in a later post.

The Bot Lawsuit

Like every MMO that came before it, WoW relied on grinding. That’s the term we use to describe repetitive, low-skilled work in order to gain resources, experience, or gold. One form of grinding might be running between five pre-determined points in an area and clicking a piece of ore every time it appears, or killing the same animal over and over for its skin. Grinding is generally awful and easy to automate, which led to the rise of ‘botting’. Players would use programmes to do the work for them.

The bots were sold to normal players, but most of their customers were sweat shop workers – a topic we’ve already covered. One such bot creator was a certain Michael Donnelly, whose programming skills birthed the WoW Glider. It sold for $25 online, with the option of a 5$ subscription that provided additional functionality. The Glider website included this:

"Getting a bunch of characters to 70 is a pain. Getting money to equip them is a pain. Doing big instances, Battlegrounds, raids, and generally socializing in the game is fun. We use the Glider to skip the painful parts and have more fun. Someone suggested we sell it, so.."

Blizzard reached out to Donnelly’s company (MDY Industries) to ask them to stop. MDY Industries responded by pre-emptively suing Blizzard, to which Blizzard responded with a counter-suit in Feb 2007. They claimed he had infringed upon their copyright, broken World of Warcraft’s End User License Agreement, and made more than $2.8 million in the process. By knocking the game’s economy and gameplay out of whack, he was costing them money.

"Blizzard's designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time,"

For the most part, the lawsuit is a long, tangled jumble of legalese. If you want to read about it in detail, you can do so here.

There are two parts to Blizzard’s case. The End User License Agreement (EULA) part and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) part. The EULA is the agreement players make upon buying the game, and the DMCA is a US law which ensures that owners retain control of their works.

Blizzard argued that the EULA prohibits bot use and therefore if a player used Glider, they were breaking the EULA, which constituted copyright infringement. They held MDY responsible for distributing the Glider in the first place. The court agreed that the bot broke the EULA, but did not agree that it was breaching copyright.

This was a major win for DMY, because it hugely reduced the potential penalties Blizzard could seek against them. However, Blizzard won the DMCA argument. The court found that since Glider was specifically designed to evade Blizzard’s control over their client, it broke the anti-circumvention laws in the DMCA.

Much smarter people than me have gone into great detail on the precedents set by this decision, and how they would affect games going forward. But if all you want to know is the outcome, Blizzard demanded $6 million in damages. Donnelly couldn’t pay that, so the judge granted Blizzard all the profits made from the WoW Glider. Blizzard didn’t think that was enough, so it asked for Donnelly’s entire life savings and even the title of his car. The judge declined. For a company with a value in the hundreds of millions, this came off as a bit malicious.

As usual, the forums had a lot to say. There were the hard working ‘sweat of the earth’ resource farmers who had felt the bots cutting into their profits, and they supported Blizzard wholeheartedly. But at the same time, some players pointed out that bots made the experience better, and may have kept customers from ending their subscription with Blizzard out of sheer boredom. By using a bot, they were able to play the parts of the game that appealed to them, and skip the annoying bits. Blizzard argued that the bots caused them to lose subscribers, when the actual result may have been the opposite.

Blizzard would go on to sue many creators and distributers of bots, and would use patches to try and undermine them. But whenever they destroyed one, two more took its place. Botting is still a common thing in WoW to this day – and it’s present in every other MMORPG. It’s a simple fact of life.

The Broken Mod

This particular fiasco takes place on World of Warcraft’s forums. Players have dozens of different places to talk about the game nowadays, but in the early years, the official forums were the place to be. The moderators were known as ‘Community Managers’, and tended to be a lot more up front and personable than the ‘unseen hands’ who patrol most modern social media. Even so, they were vastly outnumbered by the overwhelming userbase. Keeping it in order was an impossible task.

There was one CM who stood out from the others. He was known as Tseric. At first, Tseric would rebuke players who had broken the rules, or respond with frank honesty about their suggestions. He was friendly, hilarious, and respected, though he didn’t put up with bullshit.

After two years on the job, however, it was starting to get to him. In May 2007, tweaks to the Enhancement Shaman class left them severely underpowered, and players took to the forums to make their anger known. Tseric was there to read their posts, console the weary and confront the abusive. It was too much for any man. When one user created a thread called “Tseric = Dou chebag”, Tseric responded.

At least I don’t circumvent the profanity filter to try and call someone out.

I guess you can’t help it. You’re an e-thug.

This sparked a controversy that soon spiralled out of control. You can read the whole thing yourself, but to summarise, users started asking about where they could report Tseric for inappropriate behaviour. Tseric replied ‘Good luck with trying to get me fired, or whatever…’ It reached the point (LINKS TO REDDIT) where Tseric was complaining about his job in the form of poetry.

Can't help it.

Posting impassionately, they say you don't care.

Posting nothing, they say you ignore.

Posting with passion, you incite trolls.

Posting fluff, you say nonsense.

Post with what facts you have, they whittle down with rationale.

There is no win.

There is only slow degredation.

Take note. It is the first and only time you'll see someone in my position make that position.

You can be me when I'm gone.

It was remarkably candid for a Blizzard employee. This only riled up the playerbase more, and strengthened the calls for Tseric to be removed. He lashed out, describing how ‘a group of beligerent and angry posters can drive people away from this game with an uncrafted and improvisational campaign of miery and spin-doctoring.’ Some players began to support him at this point, and it was certainly clear he was suffering. The sense of banter was gone, and Tseric had fallen into despair. A lot of users took Tseric’s side – they were sick of the behaviour on the forums, and were thrilled that someone at Blizzard had finally acknowledged it.

Understand that this moment will be fleeting, and that there is a hard crash of self-esteem to follow. You'll try to feed it again, and fill the void, but it will never be enough.

You've backpeddled into the troll excuse. You have no point. You have no meaning. You have no significance.

You will be forgotten.

Godspeed.

The thread was deleted after that. But the abuse continued. Trolls are like sharks – even a drop of blood is enough to draw them from miles around, and Tseric was a wounded animal thrashing in the water. His rant went viral, drawing attention to Blizzard’s moderation, to the toxic environment on the forums, and to Tseric. After one final post, he was never heard from again. Blizzard quietly announced that he had left the company, though they declined to state whether he quit or had been dismissed.

And so ends the ballad of a broken CM.

The Pedophile Guild

Let’s move on to something a bit more juicy. In September 2007, one of World of Warcraft’s most famous guilds hit the spotlight – Abhorrent Taboo. They were an ERP guild on the server Ravenholdt, who marketed themselves on scandal. You could entertain any and all proclivities among their ranks, but the biggest draw was politely described as ‘extreme ageplay’.

And yes, that probably is exactly what you think it is. We’re talking about pedos again today, folks.

While ageplay is legal, it’s not the best sign if someone is into it. Very quickly, Abhorrent Taboo found themselves in forums, and plastered over Digg. This all suited Abhorrent Taboo just fine. They were actually branching out to other servers. And when they did, their Guild Master introduced themselves on the server’s local forum with this charming statement.

"Role-playing is legal. Even if you are role-playing something that would be considered deplorable and highly illegal IRL, it's still just role-playing and isn't subject to any form of disciplinary action. Negative publicity is still publicity. Make a Digg or website about how sick we are. Report us to PervertedJustice. All it does is bring in more members. In fact, the Digg the guy on Ravenholdt made about us was so effective, several people signed up for WoW just to be in our guild. The bottom line is: We're allowed to do what we do on any server we please and no one can do anything about it."

The guild also posted their recruitment policy, which explained exactly what these ‘highly illegal’ activities were. "NOTE: Be advised that we frequently ERP in guild chat and often engage in even potentially offensive kinks such as (Extreme) Ageplay, Bestiality, Child Birth, [something that is censored by the WoW forums so I can't tell what it is], Watersports, or any other kink those playing may wish to explore. If you are easily offended or upset by others using kinks you may not personally enjoy, this is not the guild for you. Furthermore, we are a guild based on freedom of love and sex. Monogamy of any kind runs counter to this, and so, all sexually exclusive relationships are prohibited." The guild denied insinuations from a whistle-blower that they purposely avoided checking the ages of applicants.

The behaviour of the guild was so extreme that other erotic roleplayers started investigating, and they quickly came across real under-18 players roleplaying sex with adults, the youngest of which was a 12 year old girl. As soon as this got out, the WoW forums exploded in talk. Everyone kind of knew there was something like this going on in the game, but most hadn’t seen such a blatant display of it before.

[Guild] [Lilith]: See, what pisses me off is… I can’t decide who to defend when people call us pedophiles

[Guild] [Celenia]: Do elaborate.

[Guild] [Genidaron]: Just say, we are not, then leave the forums

[Guild] [Lilith]: I want to defend us. But I also want to defend the pedosexual community.

[Guild] [Genidaron]: I put on my robe and wizard hat, and cast level 3 eroticism

Lilith would later clarify that she meant to defend pedophiles who are only attracted to children, but who do not molest them, and that she herself hated kids. This was, as we say in the entertainment industry, ‘a bad look’. The whole fiasco quickly drew attention from Blizzard, who forced the guild to disband. Their statement on the forums boiled down to ‘it’s gone, now please never speak of this again’.

This topic is no longer suitable for conversational purposes. We understand there is immense interest in this subject due to the changes that it may cause on your server. However, this matter is not one Blizzard takes lightly in any way, shape or form, and we do not wish to have this topic continue circulation.

Those who were part of the offending guild should not post information sent to you on this forum or any other, as it is prohibited by our forum rules to discuss such matters.

Let it finally be said that we appreciate those of you who brought this particular issue to our attention and that we will continue to follow up with this matter in the future to ensure the safety of all parties concerned.

Of course, getting out of a bind was something the members of Abhorrent Taboo enjoyed greatly, so they were up and running again almost immediately under the name ‘Vile Anathema’. The Guild Master, Lilith, suggested that they were given a free reign to reform because one of their members was a Blizzard employee, which caused another huge stir. After all, reforming so publicly under a name which was almost identical to Abhorrent Taboo was almost like a challenge to Blizzard.

I promised I wouldn’t give out their name, since they could lose their job. But let’s just say that not everyone at Blizzard is as uptight about what we do as the people who banned us.”

Whether Lilith was being truthful or stirring shit (probably one of her many fetishes), we may never know. But this incident once again raised a conversation in the wider WoW community about extreme ERP, and whether it was ever acceptible in the game, even when contained to private channels. A lot of players wanted it gone completely – they considered any pornographic chat to be too much. But other players were more even handed. Some ERP was innocent. And who decided what counted as ERP, anyway. A lot of players chose to blame the parents.

You know who's to blame? The parents of this 12-year-old for letting their kid play an online game which clearly states in its ESRB that content may change online. Parents -- please be parents, and don't leave the job up to video games.

Was a simple romance erotic? What about a kiss?

There were also legal quandries. Is it the player’s responsibility to verify the age of another player before performing erotic roleplay? What if the other player lies? Does the responsibility lie with the user of the platform, or the platform itself? Should video game age verification be more complex than simply ‘clicking’ if you’re above a certain age?

For once, World of Warcraft was not leading the conversation. The epicentre of all this nonsery was Second Life. And that’s how we got ‘Aschroft v Free Speech Coalition’, which confirmed that criminalising virtual child pornography was unconstitutional in the USA. However ageplay was explicitly banned in other countries, specifically Germany and Israel. Since these game worlds were accessible world-wide, the result was that every player had to adhere to the laws of the strictest nation.

If one country banned something, it was banned throughout the digital world. This whole thing prompted further discussions about where virtual worlds stood in relation to real-world countries. A number of American political minds were concerned that this could be used to ban otherwise legal speech, during a period where the online world was becoming ever more dominant. And that risked causing the opposite problem – a tort.

The proposed solution was to split players up by country, or even by province/state, and enforce separate rules for each, so that every player could be guaranteed the maximum possible freedoms under their local laws. Obviously, this never happened. But it could have, and perhaps the precedent would have changed online gaming forever. Blizzard elected to avoid splitting up their playerbase, and chose instead to tread the fine line of legality, dealing with issues as they arose.

That turned out to be a bad decision, because as we have seen (and will continue to see), Blizzard is terrible at dealing with sensitive issues.

35
 
 

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.


In this series I'll be covering most of WoW's biggest controversies, dramas and scandals, as well as plenty of smaller, weird little tales. Any one of these is worthy of its own write-up, but I assume no one wants to see 50+ different World of Warcraft related posts. By the time I finished writing up all the weird shit from WoW's first release, I had double the character count of a single post. And WoW has nine expansions and several spin offs, not to mention drama at its parent company, Activision-Blizzard. So I have decided to split this post up into parts. As for the entries in this post, I’ve tried to put them in chronological order, but there are some dramas that stretched out over many years – and in those cases, I placed them where they started.

What is World of Warcraft?

While I’m sure almost everyone has at least some idea of what WoW is, I’ll give a little overview. World of Warcraft is an MMORPG developed by Blizzard Entertainment – a fantasy game which takes place in the colossal online world of Azeroth, where players can quest, fight, and interact with other players. There are two factions – the Horde and the Alliance – each had separate playable races, separate cities, economies, questlines, politics, backstories, and attitudes. The factions acted as the cornerstone for the game’s PvP.

WoW was an immediate hit when it first came out in November 2004. It followed on the heels of games like Everquest and Ultima Online, but completely reinvented the formula, with more player conveniences, far greater variety, graphical fidelity, and storytelling. It was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stagnating genre, and went on to dominate the MMORPG genre for two decades. Here is a video beginner’s guide to those who need it.

EDIT: Here's a great video essay which came out just after this series ended which gives a good introduction to the history of WoW.

Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

‘Vanilla’ is the term players use to refer to the game upon its release. The game was unpolished, its community a wild west where anything went. The rules and expectations of MMORPGs hadn’t really been figured out yet, and so this is when a lot of WoW’s strangest dramas took place. We won’t be touching crazes like the hilarious Onyxia Wipe or Leeroy Jenkins or The Talisman of Binding Shard, because there isn’t really enough meat on the bones there. But they’re fun to go back to anyway.

The Goldshire Inn

TW: Sexual abuse, Rape, Pedophilia

Let’s jump right in at the deep end.

From the start, one of WoW’s most niche (and enduring) attractions has been roleplay. The dominant RP (Roleplay) servers are Moonguard (US) and Argent Dawn (EU), and it is in these communities that we lay our scene. Over the years, many areas and races would be added to the game, giving players loads of different options for where, how and who they could roleplay. But in WoW’s early days, one building would develop a reputation for which it still lives in infamy today. A picturesque little tavern in a snow-white esque woodland. The Goldshire Inn.

One large aspect of RP is ERP (Erotic Role Play). After all, Roleplayers need love too. In case it wasn’t obvious, this is the process of meeting up with other players and roleplaying out sexual encounters.

Dwarves and Gnomes don’t do it for most players (not everyone can appreciate the taste of fine wine), so many ERPers would create a human character (or recreate one with a different appearance/sex) to get their digital rocks off. New humans started in Elwynn Forest at Northshire, and as you can see from the map, the nearest settlement is Goldshire. And Goldshire has an inn. With a bar, bedrooms, and a dark basement full of cobwebs. You can see where this is going.

Goldshire Inn quickly became the hub of roleplay debauchery on WoW. A hive of the blackest scum and villainy. On a good evening, the inn heaved with the pixellated bosoms of naked women dancing on railings, the ‘thip thap thip thap’ of steps as players awkwardly move back and forth, clipping through each other’s bodies. Of course, not all of the roleplay falls into what we would consider ‘legal’. There are plenty of adults roleplaying as children, children roleplaying as adults, abuse, bondage, rape, vore, furry, scat – no matter what you’re into, there’s always someone at Goldshire who shares your degenerate sexual proclivities.

The dwarf chases after an orc who runs through the inn with his snow cannon. Seconds later, a chat window pops up: "You horny? What's your number?" Those who spend time in the tavern quickly run into various characters, such as the night elves, who scurry across the screen in their lingerie, intensely eyeing them before announcing in all caps: "I'm going to fuck you unconscious!"

Various Addons have been created which allow players to create RP profiles, detailing everything about them from age to gender to height to their no-doubt tragic backstories. But these profiles are only visible to other people with the Addon. So there’s often an entire subtextual layer beneath the obvious roleplay, only visible to those in the know.

There’s a slight problem here, however. Humans are the most popular race for first-time players, and for many of them, their first interaction with the greater WoW community is at Goldshire (LINKS TO REDDIT). There are even important quests which force them into the inn, where they are bombarded with booties and breasts, whispered offers of sexual bliss, and confronted with sights that will stay with them forever. This has resulted in a lot of scarred psyches and a lot of awakened fetishes over the years.

Aside from the obvious memes and jokes, Goldshire Inn has provoked discussions of ditigal consent, and child safety online. WoW has a minimum age rating of 12 and is available for free until level 20. For some ERPers, chasing and hunting down non-consenting players across the game-world is part of the fun. For others, they try to move the situation out of the game ASAP, offering to exchange pictures, meet up, or do video calls. In 2010, Blizzard announced it would ‘patrol’ Goldshire Inn and sanction players who infringed upon community guidelines, but that never seemed to do much.

"It was supposed to be a nice evening. I created a mage and went straight to Goldshire. The tavern was packed. All the guests were wearing either fancy costumes or nothing at all. I've never seen so many purple breasts. I thought I'd landed in a real sex club," Klara said.

"A female human really wanted to 69 with me as a few paladins watch and simulate ejaculation through spells that emit white light."

As the old saying goes, what happens in Goldshire stays in Goldshire.

The Warrior Indalamar

This is actually a story from WoW’s beta, but I’m including it here.

For WoW’s entire lifespan, it would see disputes, jokes, and complaints over which class is overpowered and which is underpowered. Before the game, one thing was certain – Warriors were the worst. A lot of players avoided them entirely, and refused to group up with them because they were so ineffective in battle. There were widespread demands for them to be buffed (made more powerful).

But there was one man who sought to prove that Warriors weren’t so bad after all. This was Indalamar. He went against the consensus, insisting that Warriors were, if anything, overpowered. No one believed him. So he posted a video which tore through the community like wildfire.

In the video, Andalamar ran around, downing enemies one after another in two hits or less. It turned out, the Warrior’s abilities held a power that no one had worked out yet. It all had to do with an ability called Bloodthirst – it became active after killing an enemy, and dramatically raised the damage of the next strike. As soon as you hit the next enemy, you would deal massive damage and raise your haste (attack speed) by 35%. The enemy would die almost immediately, activating Bloodthirst for the next enemy, and the next.

Indalamar had been right. Warriors hadn’t been weak, they’d been the strongest class in the game. But before the video had even finished making the rounds, Blizzard nerfed them. The fact that a player had singlehandedly forced Blizzard to change the game made him a household name in the community, beloved by some and hated by others (mostly other Warriors). In fact, he received huge amounts of abuse online from players who felt he had made an already weak class even weaker.

But this story has a happy ending. Indalamar was hired by Blizzard, and they have paid homage to him a number of times. He had his own card in the WoW Trading Card Game, and his own item in a raid named ‘Ramaladni’s Blade of Culling’ (Ramaladni is, of course, Indalamar backwards).

To this day, Indalamar is a legend among WoW players. He was one of the first to reach the heights of stardom – but he would not be the last.

The Suicide Scandal

We’ll continue our morbid theme with a particularly upsetting story from China. The Chinese relationship with World of Warcraft is long and complicated, and I’ll be returning to it periodically throughout this post. Perhaps this event is an omen of things to come.

On 27 December 2004, a thirteen year high school student named Zhang Xiaoyi logged onto his night elf and said his goodbyes to his fellow players. Then he leapt from a 24-storey window in Tianjin. He had just played World of Warcraft for a 36 consecutive hours. Players were quick to link his suicide to the trend of WoW Basejumping, in which characters jump off tall buildings or natural features and compete to see how far they can fall without dying. His suicide note said he wanted to join the heroes of the game, and he left behind a diary in which he obsessed over it day and night. The hospital in Beijing where Zhang was declared dead had this to say:

"Zhang had excessively indulged in unhealthy games and was addicted to the Internet."

Zhang’s parents sued Blizzard at Chaoyang District People’s Court in Beijing, requesting 100,000 yuan ($12,500) in compensation, which seems a paltry amount. They claimed the game was inappropriate for young people, due to the way it trapped them in a cycle of addiction, and they called for a warning label to be added to WoW’s marketing and packaging which said ‘Playing games excessively can harm health’. At the time, a report issued by the China Youth Association for Internet Development stated that up to 13.2% of young people were addicted to computers.

The incident led to a massive outcry, both in the West and China, about the potentially harmful effects of video games. At the time, China had no age ratings like the US, where WoW was rated ‘T for Teen’. Zhang Chunliang, a Chinese expert on game addiction, called for ratings to be established.

Many foreign countries have established strict game classification systems to help parents determine which games are suitable for their children. China should also establish such a system."

The Chinese government refused. Several attempts have been made to push a ratings system, first in 2004 by the Chinese Consumer Association, then again by the Communist Youth League in China, then again in 2010 by the Institute for Cultural Industries, then again in 2011, then again in 2019. Critics accuse China of being too covetous over control.

"The government is not willing to let go of the [market] control," Zhang Chundi, gaming analyst at London-based research firm Ampere Analysis, told Protocol. He explained that most rating systems involve an industry association that designated age-based labels for games, but Chinese regulators are wary of transferring such power to a private organization.

This was WoW’s first taste of the dangers of video game addiction – and it was one of China’s too. But it was really just the start. World of Warcraft would go on to shape the conversation on video game addiction for years to come. It was compared to crack cocaine and overplaying has been associated with numerous health issues. In June 2018, the World Health Organisation listed “gaming disorder” as a disease which impairs control and causes victims to lose interest in other daily activities or hobbies.

China would go on to create multiple laws combatting video game addiction, from limiting how long minors can play games, to banning all games on school days. They would even instate military-style boot camps to break video game addictions.

Critics of these laws have called them authoriarian, and insisted that it is a parent’s responsibility to control their childrens’ access to online games. Many have pointed out that video game addiction is often not a disease, but is rather a symptom of other issues, and tackling these issues should be the main priority.

To most, this seemed like a non-issue. What kind of idiot would get addicted to an online game?

They would change their tune soon enough.

The Million Gnome March

Time to lighten things up a bit.

This was one of WoW’s strangest dramas. Just two months after the release of the game Blizzard was still making drastic changes left and right to the balance of the classes. Players were eager to make their opinions known, because any change, however bad, could be the one Blizzard chose to stick with. But WoW had a huge playerbase, even then, and it took a lot to get Blizzard’s attention. Not everyone was an Indalamar.

Only collective action would do.

The date was 29th January 2005. It was a Friday evening on the server Argent Dawn, and the halls of Ironforge were bustling with players, all of them still new to the game, excitedly trading, looking for groups to tackle dungeons, discussing what new features might be on the way, and roleplaying in what would go on to become the game’s biggest RP server. Perhaps some of them knew about the thunderous anger boiling away on the official forums about nerfs to Warriors, but to the ignorant masses, what happened next came as a total surprise.

A few level one gnomes waddled through the city’s colossal gate. That in itself wasn’t weird. But then a half dozen more followed. And a dozen after that. And then a hundred. And then a thousand. The gnomes kept coming, rushing through the Commons in a fleshy, knee-high torrent of pigtails and low-quality shields. Most of them were naked. In the words of one witness:

”I cannot adequately describe how horrifying a vision that is.” Said one liveblogger

Ironforge was the main hub for Alliance players at the time, so they were welcomed by an audience of hundreds, which swelled uncontrollably as they were joined by other onlookers who wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and possibly join in the gnomery for themselves – first it was members of the Horde on Argent Dawn, then players from other servers. Nothing like this had ever been done before. Some of the locals demanded the protesters go protest somewhere else, and were presumably rewarded for their humbuggery with some nasty headbuts to the shins. But the Million Gnome March could not be stopped.

It began to hit critical mass.

The servers started to lag, players started falling through the world or being knocked out of the game. WoW couldn’t keep up. The Argent Dawn server was great at processing industrial amounts of elaborately emoted porn, but it had never handled crowds like this.

Xanan appeared at the gates. He was a GM – a Game Master. They were WoW’s in-game moderators, reachable only through a reporting tool. To see one in person was an anomaly. It never happened. But the protest had called and Blizzard had answered.

"omg omg, there's an actual GM character here now in Ironforge near the bridge," he wrote. "In 50-some levels, I have never seen an actual GM character EVER in this game.”

But Blizzard wasn’t there to parley. Xanan’s first request was polite. "This is severely impacting other players' gaming experiences. Please be advised failure to disperse can result in disciplinary action." He said, to much derision. The gnomes refused. They would not be moved. The revolution had come and they would rather die on their adorable little feet than live as slaves.

Meanwhile, Argent Dawn continued collapsing around them, to the point where many protesters couldn’t leave even if they wanted to. Blizzard manually restarted the server, knocking everyone offline, but they were back the moment turned on again. Xanan made one final warning.

Attention: Gathering on a realm with intent to hinder gameplay is considered griefing and will not be tolerated. If you are here for the Warrior protest, please log off and return to playing on your usual realm.

We appreciate your opinion, but protesting in game is not a valid way to give us feedback. Please post your feedback on the forums instead. If you do not comply, we will begin taking action against accounts.

Please leave this area if you are here to disrupt game play (sic) as we are suspending all accounts.

Shit had gotten real. A large swathe of protesters took this as acknowledgement of their goals, and logged off before the ban hammer started falling. Argent Dawn locals fled Ironforge in droves. And in a moment of uncompromising brutality that would foreshadow Blizzard’s treatment of protesters and unions for years to come, the suspensions began. The length of the bans varied from a few hours to multiple days, but the end result was the same. A desolated Ironforge.

The Gnomes had fallen.

They vented their anger on the forums once again, but the Million Gnome March had ironically pushed the plight of Warriors to the side. There was a far bigger debate going on now – the rights of players to assemble online, virtual protests, synthetic statehood and the ethics of Blizzard’s response. For its part, Blizzard claimed it had taken necessary action to protect its servers and to keep Argent Dawn running, and that repeating the protest would result in permanent bans. Did that make it acceptable? The protesters pointed out that disrupting society was the entire point of collective action. It was designed to force higher powers to pay attention.

Much like the issue of Goldshire Inn, [people were beginning to realise that online worlds often the same political dilemmas as the real world, but unlike the real world, there were no protections or guidelines in place. These were lawless lands. Years would pass before governments truly began to create and enforce policy on how people and companies can act online.

In the end, Warriors remained weak. Game Designer Tom Chilton wrote a totally separate post about the virtues of Warriors and their unique abilities, but outlined no plans to change them. Players had wide-ranging opinions on the protest.

MMOGs are suppose to be virtual playgrounds, or at least that was the original ideal. However Blizzard doesn't seem to be able to handle that kind of abstract thinking.

Others condemned the protest

Blizzard does the right thing by breaking up the congregation and sending people away to reduce lag. It's not like the CEO and his cronies are sitting around Dun Murogh waiting to be impressed by your 'show of solidarity', the only people who are noticing what's going on are the people who suddenly can't loot their kills, pick their herbs, etc. because the servers are starting to meltdown.

Another had this to say

a MMORPG isn't a democracy. You do not have freedom of speech, you do not have the freedom to assemble. The Constitution does not apply to a virtual world that is owned by a company. The ToS you signed pretty much waive your rights in the real world.

Frankly, assembling a mass to cause lag and crash a server is an idiotic way to voice your opinions. There are the forums, there is email, there are phone numbers, and there is the allmighty credit card you use to make your payments.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow put it best

...real life has one gigantic advantage over gamelife. In real life, you can be a citizen with rights. In gamelife, you're a customer with a license agreement. In real life, if a cop or a judge just makes up a nonsensical or capricious interpretation of the law, you can demand an appeal. In gamelife, you can cancel your contract, or suck it up.

Regardless of ethics or effectiveness, many protests would follow throughout WoW’s long history. From the Druids United protests to 2021 Stormwind Sit-in. When all else had failed, players would always return to collective action.

The Menethil Ganker

This is one of my absolute favourite stories from WoW. Legend tells of an orc Rogue who crippled his server for months in early 2005, slaughtering anyone foolish enough to step into his domain. His name was Angwe, and the server was Decethus (PvP).

At this time, Azeroth was made up of two great continents, Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. There were only a few ways of getting between them. Members of the Mage class could teleport, Warlocks could summon, and all players had a hearthstone which would take them back to a place of their choosing, though it had a long cooldown. But the bulk of player traffic went by the ships, which would round-robin back and forth from select points. On the Eastern Kingdoms, your options were Booty Bay in the south, or Menethil Harbour in the Wetlands (just above Ironforge on the map I linked).

Since it linked to two of the three routes, Menethil was the pressure point of the game world. He who controlled the Harbour controlled the world (of warcraft).

Enter Angwe. He spotted a part of the zone leading to Menethil which bottlenecked players, and slaughtered every Allaince player who tried to pass through. He controlled the path day and night in his determination to stop anyone from reaching the harbour.

Angwe quickly rose into infamy, receiving more threats, insults and accusations than most people could imagine, but they only made him more determined. In fact, he lovingly collected them to preserve for future generations. That site has literally hundreds of messages.

Players speculated on when he might sleep, or work, or do anything other than massacring noobs. They wrote extensive guides on the alternatives to going through the pass, such as sneaking under the water along the coast or creating sacrificial clones to distract him. In some cases, max level players would organise convoys to shepherd groups of newer players through the pass. Large groups of PvPers charged the bottleneck to wipe him out, but as a Rogue, he could simply disappear from sight, waiting for individuals to break away from the pack so that he could pick them off one by one. A particularly intrepid sore-loser tried to doxx Angwe but only ended up with his girlfriend’s name – so they assumed he was a woman (because he couldn’t possibly have a girlfriend).

But Angwe was one step ahead of them. He created an Alliance character, inconspicuously named ‘Angwespy’, and used it to monitor his enemies, or taunt them after death. He infiltrated the forums of major guilds in order to intercept their comms.

But where some men see ruin, others see opportunity. Players approached Angwe with offers of gold if he agreed to gank certain other players. To many, he was a celebrity with near mythical status.

[Ancience] whispers: Can’t we make some sort of agreement, so that you can at least stop killing me? Gold? Armour? Exp? Something?

[Angwe] whispers: no

In October 2012, Angwe held an AMA, in which he finally revealed his secrets.

It was just me, typically 8-10 hours a day. I didn't raid, level alts and only rarely did dungeons after 60. My goal was to get on average 100 honor kills in a day (this was before battlegrounds), which would put me either 1st or 2nd place weekly in the honor grind.

For context, an ‘honor kill’ is a reward for killing a player of the same level. Of course, Angwe would also kill any low level players passing by ‘to kill the time’, even if he didn’t get anything for it. Good murder is its own reward.

In 2006, the iconic South Park episode ‘Make Love Not Warcraft’ released, and while nothing has been publicly confirmed, there are those who speculate that the episode is based on Angwe’s reign of terror.

"All the lowbies would wait back there, and I'd usually be fighting whoever is trying to kill me to get on the boat," Angwe explains. "And as soon as I'd die or whatever, you'd see a flood of people run for the boat. Even if the boat came [and I was still alive], they'd just try to get on the fucking boat. A lot of times, the goal wasn't to kill people at that point. I just wanted to make sure none of these fuckers made it toward the boat. If they did, everyone would lose interest in being there and I wouldn't be able to kill anybody anymore."

Ultimately, it was not boredom that killed off Angwe, or defeat by combat. It was Blizzard. They introduced the new ‘Battlegrounds’ feature, which allowed players to fight in separate arenas. To get to a battleground, you had to go to its physical entrance, and the most popular of these was Alterac Valley – just north of Menethil Harbour. As a result, this once-remote zone was now throning with high level PvPers at all times of the day.

Angwe has spoken out many times over the years. After Battlegrounds dropped, he left the game and went to study game design. He now works as a programmer for MMOs, but does not play them himself.

The Kazzak Massacre

One of the highest level zones in the game was ‘Blasted Lands’. In order to give it a sense of danger, Blizzard like to place extremely powerful bosses in questing areas and make them walk around, so that players were forced to be wary of their surroundings. One such boss was Lord Kazzak.

Normally, it took forty max-level players to defeat Kazzak. He had many powerful abilities, including a shadowbolt attack that could hit anyone within a long range, as well as a skill called ‘Capture Soul’, which raised his health by 70,000 every time he killed. This meant that every player death made him considerably harder to defeat.

Due to how WoW’s combat worked, enemies could be kited. Kiting is when a player allows an enemy to attack them, holding onto that enemy’s attention, and gradually runs away, but never fast enough that the enemy stops chasing them. Through this trick, any enemy could be kited to any part of the map. And it just so happened that Kazzak’s little corner of the Blasted Lands was tantalisingly close to Stormwind – one of the largest cities in the game.

Kiting any boss to Stormwind would be an immense task, and Kazzak was no exception. Simply staying alive that long required entire groups working in unison. The trip from the Blasted Lands, up north through the Swamp of Sorrows, then across Dead Wind Pass, around Duskwood, and up into Elwynn Forest to Stormwind could take up to an hour, and Kazzak would continue unleashing fierce attacks the whole way.

But once he arrived at Stormwind’s pearly gates, a chain reaction took hold. The low level players amassed in the city were instantly swept away by his shadowbolt, and every one of them added 70,000hp to Kazzak. He was also able to kill NPCs, who would quickly respawn and die again and again. His health rapidly spiralled into the tens of millions, then the hundreds of millions, as he feasted on a never-ending supply of noobs. A famous video from 6th March 2005 shows him wrecking the city and leaving devastation in his wake.

Kazzak was unstoppable. Once he reached Stormwind, he became an invulnerable wrecking machine. Corpses filled the streets. There was no-where to hide – Kazzak’s shadowbolts went through buildings. The only option was to flee for the safety of the woods.

All seemed lost.

But those massacred players would come for Kazzak.

You see, Paladins had an ability called reckoning. After being the victim of a critical strike, their next attack hit twice. But this ability could be applied any number of times, without limit. If you got two critical strikes, your next hit would do 3x the damage, and so on. Players were quick to exploit this.

All it took was two people - a Paladin and a friend. The two would duel, and the Paladin would sit down while their friend hit them over and over. Hitting a player while they’re sitting down guarantees a critical hit, which meant they could trigger Reckoning as many times as they wanted. The highest recorded number of Reckonings at once is 1800 – that takes hours. But at that point, your Reckoning Bomb could instantly kill any enemy in the game with a single hit. Any player, any monster, and any boss.

Even Lord Kazzak.

And to this day, this is to be the only recorded way players were able to one-shot Kazzak. They never had a chance to try it out once he reached the city, because within 24 hours of the killing, the ability was nerfed.

But it wasn’t enough. Eventually, Lord Kazzak was removed from WoW, and Reckoning was nerfed. Blizzard began clamping down on the many ways players were able to exploit the game.

The Corrupted Blood

This particular incident began on 13 September 2005. Patch 1.7.0 had just released, and with it came Zul’Gurub, a 20-man raid into a troll infested jungle. The final boss went by the name ‘Hakar the Soulflayer’, and had a spell called ‘Corrupted Blood’, which would inflict gradual damage to players, and spread to anyone within a certain radius. It disappeared from players who left the raid, and wasn’t meant to least more than a few seconds. But there was an oversight.

The Hunter class are able to summon pets to fight for them in battle, and if a pet got afflicted with the Corrupted Blood and was dismissed, they would still have the curse when they were summoned again. Even if they were outside the raid.

The first outbreaks were accidental. Hunters brought out their pets in the game’s major cities, only for the Corrupted Blood to spread like wildfire, infecting everyone nearby. Low level players were almost immediately killed off by the plague as it ate away at their healthbars. Many never got the chance to flee – and those who did flee often simply created new outbreaks elsewhere. Before long, these curiosities had developed into a full-blown pandemic.

Much like a real virus, the Corrupted Blood was spread by animals. The NPCs could catch and spread the plague, but were almost impossible to kill, turning them effectively into asymptomatic carriers. Skeletons began to pile up in the streets of Ironforge and Orgrimmar. Dying causes gear to degrade, which is expensive to fix, so many players fled the cities to find safety in the wilderness. Others fuelled the chaos, deliberately causing new outbreaks wherever they could. These individuals were compared to biological terrorists. On the flipside, there were the ‘first responders’, who waded into the epicentres and attempted to heal the sick – though they often caught the Corrupted Blood themselves, and became spreaders in turn.

Many of WoW’s 2 million players would log on just to see what was happening (and then get infected), or log off to isolate themselves. The economy of the game totally shut down as the cities became ghost towns.

There were many parallels with how a real world virus would spread. To the powerful, it was just an inconvenience, so they went about their daily routines, whereas to low-levelled players (comparable to the weak and elderly), it presented an incredible danger.

Blizzard tried to impose a quarantine rule on players to stop the spread, but many refused to obey or didn’t take it seriously. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of WoW players, common sense snuck in at number 79. In the end, it took several hard resets and patches to stop the spread. The virus was contained to Zul’Gurub on 8 October.

Academics at Ben Gurion University in Israel published an article in the journal Epidemiology in March 2007, describing the similarities between the Corrupted Blood and SARS and avian flu. The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention contacted Blizzard and requested statistics for research. One factor that simulations at the time did not consider was curiosity – players put themselves at risk to see what all the fuss was about, in the same way journalists might do in the real world. Nina Fefferman, a research professor of public health at Tufts University, co-authored a paper in the Lancet Infectious Diseases discusing the implications of the outbreak, and spoke out for MMOs to be used to simulate other real world issues.

It should come as no surprise that many people have compared the Corrupted Blood to Coronavirus. Epidemiologists used research from the incident to understand the spread of COVID-19, specifically how societies respond to these kinds of threats.

In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Dr Eric Lofgren is quoted as saying the following:

"When people react to public health emergencies, how those reactions really shape the course of things. We often view epidemics as these things that sort of happen to people. There's a virus and it's doing things. But really it's a virus that's spreading between people, and how people interact and behave and comply with authority figures, or don't, those are all very important things. And also that these things are very chaotic. You can't really predict 'oh yeah, everyone will quarantine. It'll be fine.' No, they won't.”

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The first post here has 15 upvotes visible to me. Next post is in the 300s. I’m glad to see hobbydrama regaining its community but I’m curious where the influx of users came from.

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Today, we're going to dive into a forgotten corner of TV and comedy history. In 2002, Chevy Chase was roasted for the second time in the Friar's Club. Despite being largely forgotten, this event would have massive ripple effects. If you've ever watched a roast in the past two decades, especially on Comedy Central, chances are you've seen those ripples. Not to mention, the roast was enough to make Chase break down in tears, and reconsider his entire life. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll get to the roast in good time. But to understand what happened there, it's important to understand why all of it happened (and on the plus side, there's a whole lot of tasty side drama in the comedy world). First, we have to answer the question "Who is Chevy Chase"?

I'm Chevy Chase, who the hell are you?

Born in 1947, Chevy Chase is a world renowned American comedian. Well, maybe not world renowned, but at least famous in America. Maybe not famous per se, but at least still decently well known. You've seen him in something. Probably.

Chase started his career like many comedians, running around and trying everything he could. Writing satirical articles, founding a comedy ensemble, working for a satirical radio show, etc. Finally, his work paid off. He became a writer for a show called "Not Ready For Prime Time Players", better known by its later title: Saturday Night Live.

Because a sudden rise to fame has never gone to anyone's head.

Shortly before the show first aired, Chase was added to the cast, and joined rehearsals. This became his big break, putting him squarely in the spotlight. He introduced every show but two, and was the anchor for Weekend Update, one of the show's longest running bits. His catchphrase "I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not" became extremely famous. He even claimed that his Weekend Update style was the direct inspiration for later comedy news programs like the Daily Show. During the show's run, Chase won two Emmy awards and a Golden Globe for his work on the show, and many have argued since that he "defined the franchise". Chase was a hit at the time, and was shortlisted by many as one of the funniest rising comedians in America. Someone even suggested that Chase could be the only person to replace the beloved Johnny Carson (although Carson disliked Chase, and replied that "He couldn't ad-lib a fart after a baked bean dinner").

Live from New York, it's literally anyone but Chevy Chase!

Chevy left SNL a few episodes into the second season, the reason for which is still unclear. Chase 's official story claims that his girlfriend didn't want to move out to New York, so he decided to move out to LA and marry her. That story is somewhat backed up by the fact that he'd negotiated out of most of season 2 in his contract with NBC, surprising producer Lorne Michaels (who hadn't been informed). However, there's still suspicion surrounding the episodes he was in. Supposedly, he injured his groin doing a pratfall in the first episode, forcing him to be hospitalized for the next two episodes. However, as eagle eyed fans noticed, the "injured" Chase was very clearly seen at the end of the first episode dancing around without any issue. Many have theorized that the episodes were a test run, to see if the show could work without Chevy, in anticipation of him leaving. Years later, an anonymous SNL cast member mentioned that he only used his engagement as an excuse to pin it on his (now ex) wife. In reality, he'd left the show purely out of a desire to make more money.

But why would the show want to see one of it's most popular actors gone? Well, as it would later come out, Chase was a massive pain to work with. Egotistical, cruel, and petty, he burned a lot of bridges with his fellow cast members, as well as producer Lorne Michaels. When he returned to host in Season 3, Chase reported the atmosphere felt "poisoned" against him, and he certainly didn't help himself by ordering people around, and trying to reclaim his spot on Weekend Update, all while using a frankly terrifying amount of drugs. Bill Murray (Chase's replacement) was antagonistic towards him, telling Chase frankly that no one there liked him, leading to a shouting match. Murray then told Chase "Go fuck your wife, she needs it" (Chase was having public marriage issues at the time). All of this culminated into Chase hunting Murray down minutes before the show, and challenging him to a fight. If you look closely at Chase's monologue, you can see some marks on his face from where Murray hit him. Chase would go on to host eight more times, racking up more and more problems every time. He'd harass female writers, make cruel jokes (like telling an openly gay cast member he should do a sketch about dying from AIDs) and generally just be a jackass to everyone involved. This came to a head in 1997, when he slapped Cheri Oteri hard in the back of the head, causing a furious Will Ferrell to bring the issue to Lorne Michaels, who banned Chase from the show. Chase was the 12th person to be banned from SNL, and the only former cast member to ever be banned from hosting. Although he's made a few guest appearances on SNL since, they're kept few and far between, and the hosting ban has been enforced.

You win some, you lose thirty or forty others.

Chase would initially find success striking out on his own, starring in a number of classic comedies like Caddyshack (alongside Bill Murray funny enough), Three Amigos, National Lampoon's Vacation, and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. However, Chase's success wasn't for long. He has been in a total of 62 different movies and TV shows, most of which are... they're bad. There's just no other way to put it. He milked National Lampoon's Vacation for six total movies, with the quality going downhill each time. He also tried to launch his own celebrity talk show, which bombed and was cancelled just four weeks in. His most recent movie in 2021 was Panda vs Aliens, which is... I mean, it's exactly what you'd expect. After Chase's initial success, he made bomb after box office bomb, with the failures seriously damaging his ego. He'd reportedly talked a lot of shit at SNL about how everyone else had no chance at a career, so seeing his former castmates all become more famous than him had to sting.

Chase's one big hit later in life was Community, a show where he played a self centered egotistical old man with some seriously dated views. It's like the role was made for him. Members of the cast have been frank about how they only got a celebrity like Chase for such an unknown show was because of how far Chase had fallen, and as the show turned into a surprise hit, it seemed like it might be his ticket back to the top. However, Chase had serious issues on set. His toxic behavior continued, and he had serious issues with director Dan Harmon. At one point, he even refused to do a pivotal scene on the last day of filming, which required scrapping the entire scene. Harmon then made fun of Chase at the wrap party, playing some of the angry voicemails Chase had left him. Chase then left another angry voicemail, which Harmon played at a live event. Eventually, Chase was forced to leave the show after yelling the N-word during a heated argument on set. Later, costar Donald Glover would confirm that Chase would make frequent racial jokes or insults between scenes, trying to get Glover to crack or perform poorly.

The ~~best~~ worst hits

The behavior that cost Chevy both SNL and Community was present throughout his entire career (and frankly, his personal life too). It'd take too long to go through every single instance, but some include:

  • Chris Columbus quit directing National Lampoon's Vacation before a single day of filming, because he had one dinner with Chevy where he was "treated like dirt".

  • On the cast of Community, he told a female cast member "I want to kill you and rape you".

  • His wife Jacqueline Carlin divorced him after just over a year, due to him making violent threats against her

  • During a stunt in Three Amigos, Chase made a joke about director John Landis's lax safety precautions after his last film. The film in question? The Twilight Zone, where a stunt gone wrong killed a man and two children.

  • Kevin Smith met with him to discuss relaunching the popular Fletch series, where Chevy "went on to claim he invented every funny thing that ever happened in the history of not just comedy, but also the known world". That one lunch ended any possibility of the series.

  • Rob Huebel, a fan of Chase's approached him backstage to shake his hand, upon which Chase slapped him hard across the face

  • Yvette Nicole Brown was asked who she would kick off of Community if she could, and answered with "Chevy Chase" before the interviewer even finished the question. She, along with Glover, has noted Chase's stream of racism towards them even before yelling the N-word.

TL;DR

Chase is known for being incredibly difficult to work with, making cruel, insensitive, and bigoted comments towards those around him. Combined with a massive ego, and a career that tanked just a few years after it took off, Chase has a lot of issues both personally and professionally.

Just a bit more backstory, I promise.

Before we get to the big event, there's just two important pieces of the story left: The Friar's club itself, and Chase's first roast.

What is the Friar's Club?

The Friar's club is a 118 year old New York club whose membership includes some of the best known American comedians of all time, along with a number of other celebrities. There's too many to list, but reading through their members, it was harder to find a famous person in entertainment that wasn't one of them than to find one who was. It's gone a bit downhill in recent years, but at the time, it still had a massive cultural impact. They also essentially invented what we now know as the roast, starting it as an in-house tradition in 1950, which they would later record and air on Comedy Central. The tagline was always "We only roast the ones we love", and you had to be a member to participate in the roast (as well as usually being a good friend of the roastee). Their list of roasts includes some truly iconic names, all of whom were trashed by some of the best comedians of the era. And also Chevy Chase.

In 1998, Comedy Central signed a contract with the Friar's club to air their roasts. Now, the jokes and insults were no longer the subject of speculation and gossip, known only by the elite few who could witness it, everybody got to see the roast. This also marked a shift from some of the more classic comedic roasts to more modern content: swearing, sex jokes, etc. Once again, the Friar's club sent out ripples that would shape the future of comedy.

The first roast

Chase had been roasted once before in 1990, and apparently enjoyed the experience. The roastmaster was Dan Akroyd, with Clint Eastwood, Neil Simon, Larry King, Robin Leach, Richard Lewis, Gilbert Gottfried, Rita Rudner, Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz, Dennis Miller and Lorne Michaels doing the roasting. The guests and audience included many of his close friends (along with celebrities like Rober DeNiro and Richard Pryor), who poked fun at Chase and his career. There's no recording of it, but reportedly, Chase's enjoyment of the experience was why he would agree to come back a second time.

At this point, Chevy was still 100% a douchebag, but his douchiness hadn't peaked yet, and his career was still looking good. He was riding the high of Christmas Vacation, and the end of his career wouldn't come until 1991, when three of his big films all flopped in a row. He hadn't yet been banned from SNL, and while many of the people who worked with him were aware of his reputation, it wasn't quite as publicly known.

Finally, the big roast

If you want, you can watch the full roast here. I highly recommend that you do, just because words can't really convey the atmosphere of it (and also 'cause it's funny to watch Chevy Chase get mocked). If you don't, no worries, the whole thing will be recapped below.

The roastmaster (picked by Chase) was Paul Shaffer. The roasters were Todd Barry, Richard Belzer, Stephen Colbert, Beverly D'Angelo, Al Franken, Greg Giraldo, Lisa Lampanelli, Nathan Lane, Marc Maron, Steve Martin, Laraine Newman, Randy Quaid, Freddie Roman, and Martin Short.

Who the fuck are these guys?

If you read through that list of names and barely recognized anyone, you wouldn't be alone. Besides Colbert (who was still relatively unknown at the time) and Al Franken (who's famous for... other reasons now), there were no really famous people present. Steve Martin and Martin Short didn't even show up, they just sent in a pre-recorded video, as did Randy Quaid.

Not only were most of the roasters unknown to the audience, but to Chase himself. As they repeated throughout the roast, most of them were younger, and knew Chase only through watching him. They'd never worked with him before, or even met him before they were asked to tear him apart on TV. The only three that really had any connection to Chevy were former SNL castmate Laraine Newman, SNL's band member Paul Shaffer, and Beverly D'Angelo, who had played his wife in National Lampoon's vacation. (I'm aware that Al Franken had a connection, but I'm refusing to acknowledge his existence).

Reportedly, Chase would later ask one of the producers for the show why they hadn't invited any famous people. The simple answer was that they had... and everyone refused the invitation. "We only roast the ones we love" stopped being a sweet message, and became a condemnation. They didn't show up to roast him because they didn't love him.

The jokes varied, but most of them focused around a few main topics:

  • Chase's failed career, and the number of terrible movies he'd done.

Paul Shaffer: You made us laugh so much. And then inexplicably stopped in about 1978. Marc Maron: At least I am a nobody at the beginning of my career.

  • The fact that none of Chevy's former friends or co-stars were willing to show up, so much so that they literally had a song and dance number called "We couldn't get anybody good". The song included the line

An OJ roast would have drawn more star power!

Martin and Short also joked in their video that they couldn't come because were filming the Three Amigos sequel without Chevy... a joke that probably would have been a lot funnier for Chase if the two of them weren't actually making a number of movies together without him.

  • Chase's drug addiction, which he had struggled with for years, and went to rehab for

Greg Giraldo: Chevy is living proof that you could actually snort the funniness right out of yourself

  • Chase generally being a dick

Laraine Newman (reading from her "diary" about the first SNL cast): Danny is hilarious, and has invited everyone up to his bar in Canada. Belushi is a little gruff, but it's obvious he's a sweetheart. Chevy said to me "You know, the Holocaust never really happened".

That joke was in response to Chevy's reputation for antisemitism, which another roaster would mock by chanting in Hebrew during the roast.

Hobbit said knock you out

However, probably the most brutal roast of all came from Stephen Colbert. If you watch only one part of the roast, make sure it's these few minutes. Unlike the others, Colbert didn't swear much, or rip into Chevy's personal life. He even joked about how shocked he was by people's cruelty towards Chevy. Colbert tore Chase apart by getting deep into his insecurities, joking about his washed up career, with lines like:

The only thing I think of when I look at this man is there but for the grace of God go I. Why would I tempt the comedy gods to strike me down like this?

A comedy lamprey, just sucking the joy out of everything I touch.

But for some of these people, [fame] went to their head ... but this man never forgot what got him wherever he thinks he is.

Before you attack him, think: There may come a day in your darkest hour when you are a shadow of your, albeit paper-thin self. And when that day comes, I hope that you are cheered up by something that Mr. Chase so famously said, "He's Chevy Chase and you're not." If that doesn't cheer you up, then I don't know what will.

Turning Chase's most iconic line into a burn against him had to sting, but Colbert's entire speech impacted Chase pretty heavily. With the others, the jokes were almost too over the top, it was easier to laugh them off. Imagine the difference between someone telling you "I fucked your mom" vs "You have been nothing but a disappointment to your mother. You'll never be good enough for her." Colbert tore Chase apart with the precision of a surgeon, all with a pleasant grin on his face.

I hope this doesn't awaken anything in me

After Colbert was "Sir" Randy Quaid, whose poetry tribute to Chevy was... it's an experience. This has basically no relation to any of the rest of the drama, but it's too bizarre for me to not mention it here. It features a swimsuit-clad Quaid frolicking in a pool, moving into various sexual poses as his voiceover recites a Shakespearean poem. Eventually, he moves towards a pair of women's legs spread wide... which have a picture of Chevy Chase over the genitals.

You may now pause reading to go scrub your eyes with bleach.

The grand finale

As the last roaster left the podium, and as Chase was thanked for being a good sport by the head of the Friar's Club, all eyes turned to him. This was his big moment, his time to strike back at everyone. You can say a lot of things about Chevy Chase, but lacking the ability to insult people isn't one.

Chevy took the podium, and... not much happened. He kicked it off by saying "I agree with everything that's been said", threw back a joke or two, then left. His voice broke as he noted that this would be the time the roastee got even with all the other comedians, "but there just fucking aren't any". In total, the whole thing took around 80 seconds, much of which Chevy was silent for. When he did speak, his trademark arrogance and bravado was gone.

And he cried like a baby coming home from the bar

Chase himself admitted that after the show, he went back to his hotel room and had a breakdown. He reportedly cried for hours in a depressive state, with Paul Shaffer coming to comfort him. According to Chevy, the roast was the moment he hit rock bottom, when he truly realized how badly he'd fucked up with his former friends. The roast truly devastated Chevy, and would haunt him for years to come.

Looking back through the broadcast, you can see an almost linear progression of Chevy's reactions, growing more and more stolid as it went on. He'd barely react to jokes beyond the bare minimum, or sometimes not react at all. He just sat there stone faced with sunglasses on.

The show was supposedly pretty uncomfortable for everyone else. Looking back at past Friar's club roasts, it's hard to not notice the difference in the atmosphere. Members of the crew, audience, and cast have all expressed some levels of discomfort with what happened, and many of them just wanted to move on and act like it never occurred. Even in previous roasts, no matter what was said, you could fall back on the fact that people liked you. The sad fact is, nobody in that room really liked Chevy all that much, and a decent number of them hated him.

Reportedly, Chase even insisted that certain jokes be cut entirely from the show before it was broadcast. I was unable to find proof of if Chase was specifically involved, but the broadcast has clearly been edited. There's shots where Chase seems to transition from his sunglasses to his regular glasses quickly, and some of his roasters seemed to have vastly different speaking times. Some of them barely even mentioned Chevy, so the idea that some of their jokes got cut isn't too far fetched. Compared to the other Friars Club roasts that aired, this one ran on the shorter end, suggesting there could be around 5-8 minutes of cut footage. And considering what actually made it onto the broadcast, you have to wonder how truly gut wrenching those insults must have been.

Regardless of editing, Comedy Central would only ever air it once before shelving it.

What comes next?

At some points during this writeup, you may have wondered where the big sweeping changes were. After all, a roast of a celebrity by a bunch of strangers, many of whom aren't comedians, who use extremely personal jokes and attacks? That's not anything special, it's pretty much every major roast, especially on Comedy Central.

The thing is, this roast is a large part of what created all of those. Obviously, it's less shocking to us now, because it has become the norm, but at the time, this was an entirely new experience. And it was an experience that Comedy Central jumped on with enthusiasm. After Chase's roast, their five year contract with the Friar's club ended, and it was not renewed. Some suggested that Chase personally sabotaged the deal, although more likely it just represented the end of a short experiment. Comedy Central then started producing their own roasts, following the new model. Turns out, people are a lot more entertained by celebrity drama than close friendships, and they're happy to see someone famous knocked down a peg or two. Plus, you don't need to actually get comedians if you just hire a writing team for all the celebrity guests, and star power attracts a lot of viewers.

Roasts have since become a classic part of comedy culture, with Comedy Central firmly at the peak, and Chase's legacy enshrined forever -- just maybe not the way he'd want it to be.

Believe it or not, Chase is still an asshole. He has gone in and out of retirement, currently stating that he's only semi-retired. He also tried to convince Lorne Michaels to let him host SNL again... just minutes before he walked his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. Priorities man. If you want to take the time, there's a good Washington Post article that dives into Chevy, and discusses the nuances, exploring his abusive childhood without excusing his current behavior.

Also, the roast was spoofed by American Dad, sunglasses and all. Funnily enough, that's how I learned about this, and decided to make a writeup.

I guess the moral of the story is simple: If you're an asshole, a narcissist, a bigot, a douchebag, a sexist, a failure in every conceivable way... at least you're not Chevy Chase.

This is a repost from reddit. Credit goes to /u/EquivalentInflation. Read the original here

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Watch collectors are kind of an odd bunch. I'm talking about "dumb" watches specifically - watches that only tell time and don't have any sort of smartphone connectivity or biometric tracking. Some of the fancier models might have a timer on them, but you're certainly not going to be getting text notifications. Watches have evolved over time from being a tool to basically men's jewelry. A few key terms to know first:

  • Mechanical - a watch that keeps time and is powered by a complicated series of springs and gears (this is called the movement). Due to the relatively high amount of niche skilled labor involved in making them, even the most basic mechanical watches can be fairly expensive.

  • Quartz - a watch that keeps time via a quartz crystal oscillator and is powered by a battery. They are much less expensive AND more accurate than mechanical watches, but are frequently looked down upon by watch collectors as not being "real" watches (they don't have a mechanical soul or some dumb shit like that).

  • The Swatch Group - the Swiss watchmaking industry was seriously threatened in the 70s and 80s by the "Quartz Crisis", when significantly cheaper quartz (mostly Japanese) watches began to completely dominate the market. Several Swiss companies survived by merging together to form the Swatch Group. Mechanical watch brands moved even more upscale, with a greater focus on luxury, artisanal craftsmanship, and brand heritage. They also launched a new brand, Swatch, which made inexpensive, but still Swiss-made, quartz watches in an attempt to the re-capture the entry level market share they had lost.

  • Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch Professional - the "Speedy" is one of the most popular watches made by Omega, a luxury brand owned by the Swatch Group. It's notable for being the watch that was given to all Apollo mission astronauts and was heavily used in the early NASA days, so the majority of its branding is based around the fact that the Speedy has been to the moon.

In early 2022, the Swatch Group announced a new watch model that was going to be a collaboration between two of its brands - the Omega X Swatch Bioceramic MoonSwatch. The MoonSwatch would have the same appearance and dimensions as the Speedy, with a few key differences:

  • The Omega X Swatch branding.

  • A quartz movement instead of a mechanical one. The Speedy is known for having an especially complex movement since it's a chronograph (i.e. an analog stopwatch).

  • The casing would be made of "bioceramic" (basically plastic) instead of stainless steel.

  • Price would be $260, compared to the $6000+ of the Speedy.

Immediate reactions were heated. While some people loved the idea, a loud contingent hated it. The main complaints:

  • It was quartz and thus not a real watch.

  • It was made of plastic and thus not a real watch.

  • The MoonSwatch devalued the real Speedy, since it was effectively an officially sanctioned counterfeit made of cheaper materials.

  • The watch devalued the entire Omega brand, since they were putting their logo on a watch that even the poors could afford (the least expensive Omega is around $2500, which is actually on the low end for luxury watches).

The MoonSwatch came out shortly afterwards, and it turns out that demand far exceeded supply. The watch was only available in select Swatch boutiques (for example, only 11 stores in the USA carry it), so if you didn't live near one of those stores you were SOL. People were lined up for hours to buy one. The MoonSwatch also came in 11 different colorways (themed after the planets, the sun, and the moon), and some of the models were limited to certain stores or even countries. A lot of the watches immediately ended up on Ebay with huge markups. Since it was sold out everywhere, that ended up pissing up the people who actually liked the watch. Some of the things they were upset about:

  • It was easier to buy the real Speedmaster than the MoonSwatch. Speedy sales actually increased by 50% immediately after the launch.

  • The distribution model meant you had to live in a major metropolitan area or be okay with buying one from a scalper online.

  • The different colorways not being available everywhere upset the completionists who wanted to have one in every color.

  • Accusations of favoritism where a few Swatch stores were taking bribes to let people have access to them early (favoritism is an issue with the watch industry in general).

Anyway, it's been a year since the launch of the MoonSwatch. Hype has died down a bit, but they're still hard to buy (Swatch stores will sell out in an hour whenever they get new stock). Swatch has said they aren't planning on doing online sales, but it's not intended to be a limited edition watch. There's still criticism (I've seen complaints that the plastic feels cheap), but even the detractors had to admit it was the hottest watch of 2022.

TL;DR - Watch brand releases a watch that's kind of a copy of a way more expensive watch made by the same parent company. This angers half of the watch collecting community. The other half is angered because the watch is sold out everywhere and a pain in the ass to buy.

Credit where credit is due; This is a repost from reddt

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This writeup was originally posted to /r/hobbydramma in October 2022, and has since been deleted. This version has been slightly edited for improved clarity and to add some new details that have developed since I made the original post.

Some Background on Digital Audio

This section might get a bit technical, but it’s essential for understanding the nature of this controversy. I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible.

Audio, like most forms of media, can be encoded digitally in a number of different ways. One of the key distinguishing features when comparing digital audio formats, is whether the encoded audio is lossy or lossless. Lossless audio formats store encoded audio signals in their entirety. When decoded, lossless audio is indistinguishable from the original unencoded signal. By contrast, lossy audio formats produce a signal that is close, but not quite identical to the original, hence they “lose” information. This loss is usually intentional, and is done in order to reduce file size at the cost of sound quality. Here is an image showing the difference between .flac (lossless) and .mp3 (lossy) files of the same recording. It should be noted that even the tiniest difference between encoded and decoded audio signals make a format lossy. True lossless formats must always produce a 100% identical signal to what was originally encoded. Unsurprisingly, audiophiles tend to have a strong preference for lossless audio formats.

Not all lossless audio is equal however. Audio from a standard music CD plays 16-bit samples at 44.1KHz. This is very good quality, and has become something of a lowest common denominator for lossless digital audio. Exceeding CD-quality audio is possible, and it’s something audiophiles are often keen to do. This “Hi-Res” audio almost always uses 24-bit samples, which are played back at anywhere from 48 to 192KHz. You can think of these different standards as being sort of like the difference between 1080p and 4K for video. Ideally, Hi-Res lossless files should always be created directly from an original studio master, which is the highest quality version of a recording that will ever exist. These “master quality” files, are preferred over all others by a large number of audiophiles.

MQA

MQA stands for Master Quality Authenticated. It is a digital audio format designed by Bob Stuart and his company Meridian Audio. MQA was released under MQA Ltd., a company founded specifically to manage this new format. The goal of MQA was to improve sound quality for the average listener, and set an industry-wide standard for the storage and distribution of high resolution digital audio.

The idea behind the MQA format is that high frequencies, such as those found in 24-bit Hi-Res audio files, are compressed or “folded” into a lower resolution, 16-bit audio stream. According to MQA Ltd., MQA encoded audio will work with just about any digital audio decoder, and will play at the same quality as a normal CD. However, if the audio is played back with a special MQA decoder, the audio stream will be “unfolded” up to three times, with each unfold adding resolution and depth to the reproduced sound. Allegedly, this technique allows MQA to achieve “studio quality” and “retain 100% of the original recording” The folded 16-bit audio stream can be used to create special MQA CDs that are still compatible with regular CD players. Additionally, MQA technology allows music download and streaming services to serve up 24-bit Hi-Res audio, while keeping data usage about the same as what’s needed for regular CD-quality lossless.
The real selling point though, is in the “authenticated” part of Master Quality Authenticated. Using sound signature testing and watermarking of the audio signal, MQA can, at least theoretically, compensate for distortion and other artifacts introduced in the recording, mixing and mastering process. In an ideal scenario, MQA should be able to make audio sound identical to how it does in the studio, as if there are no recording or playback devices in between. This process is also meant to validate the authenticity of MQA files, ensuring they have not been changed or tampered with at any point between the mastering studio and the listener.

MQA was first revealed to the public in December 2014. By mid-2016 Warner Music Group had struck a deal to license MQA for their releases, and the first audio hardware with built-in MQA decoding was hitting the market. Around the same time as the Warner Music deal, the RIAA gave MQA it’s official Hi-Res certification, allowing MQA releases to feature the Hi-Res MUSIC logo. In the following months, more record labels, including Sony and Universal, signed on to release their music in MQA. The biggest boost for MQA however, came in January 2017, when Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming service announced that it would soon support the format. Tidal was already popular with audiophiles for being among the first to offer lossless music streaming, and now they were set to be at the forefront of this emerging Hi-Res standard. With superior sound quality, the backing of big record labels and manufacturers, a major streaming service on board, and loads hype from the Hi-Fi press, it looked like MQA would soon be a staple of the high-end audio world.

Initial Backlash

Despite it’s apparent advantages, and some claiming that MQA encoded files sound better than their vanilla 24-bit counterparts, there were a number of people firmly against MQA from the start. Early criticism mostly came from individuals within the music industry, who noticed a number of concerning things surrounding MQA and it’s business model, and their sentiment slowly spread to the wider audiophile community.

The biggest concern with MQA early on was the proprietary nature of the format. MQA is defined and controlled entirely by MQA Ltd. Unlike most other Hi-Res audio formats, hardware manufactures, software developers, record labels, and streaming services all have to pay licensing fees if they want to support MQA. Now, the music and Hi-Fi industries are no strangers to this business model. Charging a licensing fee for music formats dates back at least as far as the CD, however, MQA’s licensing structure is incredibly restrictive and controlling compared to most others. To start with, any product that supports MQA has to be certified by MQA Ltd. for compliance. This can be hard on equipment manufactures, who sometimes have to redesign hardware, or rewrite firmware to get MQA’s blessing. On top of that, MQA audio won’t unfold to it’s full resolution unless every stage of the audio supply chain, from mastering, to distribution, all the way to the end-user’s hardware are MQA certified, and you better believe MQA is collecting royalties every step of the way. If that wasn’t all bad enough, MQA hardware licenses are sold per-unit, so economies of scale can’t help to offset licensing costs. Even worse, is that third party software decoders are charged per decoded track. As a result, products that support MQA are invariably more expensive than their non-MQA counterparts.

Due to these licensing issues, Schiit Audio issued a statement explaining that they would not be supporting MQA, and several other small manufacturers took a similar stance. Another company, PS Audio, did add MQA support to their hardware, but later released a video that was very critical of the format. This video reveals that MQA support was added entirely due to customer demand, so it’s clear the format had a good number of supporters, at least early on.

Excessive licensing costs weren’t the only concern surrounding MQA though. MQA is touted as being DRM free, with audio streams able to be stored in the very popular, open source FLAC format. Only the lower resolution 16-bit audio is truly DRM free however. MQA’s authentication watermarking must be present in the file, and properly validated at playback, otherwise MQA decoders will refuse to unfold the audio to it’s full resolution. In this way, MQA acts as a sort of “soft-DRM”, that prevents recordings form being played at their maximum quality without both permission from the rights holder, and validation from MQA Ltd. All the issues surrounding MQA’s licensing and copy protection are explored in more detail in this article from 2017.

The Problems Run Deeper

If licensing and DRM were the only problems that plagued MQA, the format would still have it’s detractors, but it would probably be able to maintain a certain level of support amongst artists and music fans. As MQA hardware made it’s way into the hands of reviewers and audio technicians however, it became clear that there was something fishy about this new format.

When it comes to digital audio formats, even propitiatory ones, standard practice is to give reviewers and other people within the industry access to an encoder, or even release one publicly. This is so that people testing out the format can encode whatever they want with it, and compare the output side-by-side with the input. The results of these tests are important for a format to build trust and gain adoption within the high-end audio community. It might come as a surprise then, that MQA Ltd. did not make an encoder available to anyone at launch, and still hasn’t released one to independent third-parties to this day.

The lack of an encoder raised a few eyebrows, and suspicions about MQA only deepened once people realized that the format had been made as difficult as possible to validate. For example, MQA’s license terms forbid sending unfolded MQA data over a digital connection. A digital output could be used to capture raw audio samples and check them against a non-MQA source, but all MQA decoders send unfolded data straight to an internal DAC that only outputs analog signals. People, of course, figured out other ways to capture MQA audio signals, and began noticing some very odd things about them. There’s a great article that goes in-depth about various MQA test results, but the upshot is that audio signals derived from MQA files appear to contain all manner of excess noise and artifacts that should not be present in a lossless format.

MQA is lossless? Right?

Well, MQA’s official website plainly states that the format is lossless, as does their original logo. On top of that, in a 2016 interview about MQA, Bob Stuart was quoted as saying “...we focus solely on strict lossless delivery” and “...the [packing] process is losslessly reversible for the encapsulated audio and even at the lowest transmission rate”. Also, remember how the RIAA gave MQA it’s “Hi-Res” certification? Well, that certification is only supposed to be given to lossless formats. The RIAA defines high resolution audio as “lossless audio capable of reproducing the full spectrum of sound from recordings which have been mastered from better than CD quality music source”. Given all that, MQA had damn well better be lossless.

The Real Controversy

Now this may come as a shock, but MQA is not a true lossless format, of course this wouldn't be a hobby drama post if it was. The technique MQA uses to pack high frequency data is not without side effects, the most obvious one being ultrasonic “reflections” of audible sound in some unfolded tracks. Taking a look at this graph, we can see a gap in the audio data at around the 22KHz mark. That gap should not exist, because none of the data on the right side of the gap was present in the original track, it was all added during the MQA unfolding process. Other side effects include aliasing, ringing, and a higher noise floor. Even if you don’t understand what all those things mean, just know that they’re generally not good. It was also revealed that MQA’s folding process always causes these side effects to some degree, regardless of the source audio’s sample rate, or whether or not it’s unfolded during playback. That means that CD-quality recordings will always sound worse when encoded in MQA, and file sizes are often larger than their regular FLAC counterparts.

In addition to not being lossless, A user on the Audiophile Style forums discovered that MQA’s authentication mechanism doesn't even validate the whole file. Up to a third of the audio data can be completely removed from an MQA file, and an MQA decoder will still authenticate it. This means that MQA’s authentication scheme is effectively worthless. Theoretically, a streaming service could truncate MQA files to save on bandwidth, and an MQA decoder would still report the audio as coming from an authentic, Hi-Res file that has not been modified.

Once all this information started coming out, MQA became a target of ridicule for a certain portion of the audiophile community. A thread on the Audiophile Style forums titled MQA is Vaporware currently sits at over 1,000 pages, and contains comments such as “If they want a scam that the consumers might go for, how bout a streaming service that streams from original source vinyl?” and ”Maybe TIDAL and MQA can merge and get an executive from Sears to mismanage the whole thing into the abyss.” It was also around this time that some music piracy communities started imposing bans on MQA sourced content. Following the backlash, MQA Ltd. quietly removed any mention of the format being lossless from their website, but a handful of angry audio nerds wasn’t a large enough controversy to halt MQA’s slow, but steady adoption across the industry.

The Drama Intensifies

Rocky Mountain International Audio Fest was an annual audio industry trade show. At RMIAF 2018, Chris Connaker, an audio manufacturing consultant, gave a talk on MQA, in which he aimed to discuss the pros and cons of the format in an impartial manner. This wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy, if it weren’t for the fact that multiple MQA executives were in the audience. Once Chris starts talking about how MQA is not a lossless format, Ken Frosythe, the marketing director of MQA Ltd., chimes in to try to discredit his source. This completely derails the presentation, as Chris and Ken proceed to argue back and forth for nearly five minutes. Eventually, Derek Hughes, an MQA proponent with no direct ties to to the company, speaks up to ask his own clarifying questions. Chris can’t even finish responding before Mike Jbara, the CEO of MQA Ltd., jumps in. Mike berates Chris for intentionally misrepresenting the MQA standard, and criticizes him for not including Bob Stuart’s responses to the points he’s brought up. During his diatribe, Mike makes the bizarre assertion that “...trying to represent an objective end-to-end review of MQA on a spectrum, is just a silly representation of your own opinions.” There’s more back and forth, and by the time Chris finishes responding to Mike, the presentation is almost halfway over and has gone entirely off course. Chris tries his best to continue, but he is repeatedly interpreted by these same three individuals. They take issue with nearly all his criticisms of MQA, and throw out accusations of bias until he eventually gives up. This absolute shit show was recorded in it’s entirety ,with the highlight being a clip of Derek Hughes banging on a table while shouting about DRM. This became a minor meme following the event. Derek later tried to defend his actions, but ultimately apologized for his behavior.

The RMIAF presentation was not the last time Chris Connaker would butt heads with MQA representatives. Chris also runs the Audiophile Style website, which is home to multiple in-depth articles and discussions about MQA, several of which have already been linked in this post. In May 2019, Chris revealed in a forum comment that people from MQA Ltd. had attempted to have content on the website removed on at least one occasion. The post’s conclusion reads ”Some people have expressed an interest in censoring content here and can you believe one's name is Bob Stuart?” One particular user was not happy about this revelation, not because of the alleged attempts at censorship, but because Chris was encouraging a “hate fest”. His comments were called out by other users, and eventually marked “off-topic”. At this point, the consensus among most forum members was that MQA did not live up to it’s claims, and that the people behind it would go to great lengths to try to hide that fact.

While MQA continued to be adopted, and it’s detractors slowly grew in number, the next major development in this story wouldn’t come until 2021. At the beginning of that year, musician Neil Young announced that he was having his work removed from Tidal. Tidal had labeled Neil Young’s albums as “Masters”, a designation given to high resolution MQA releases on the service. The problem was, that Tidal had never been supplied with high resolution versions of those albums, CD-quality lossless should have been the only H-Fi option available. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that Tidal had taken the 16-bit lossless files they were given, converted them to MQA, and made them available to stream as “Masters”. They then removed the superior 16-bit lossless versions from their service, all without the knowledge or permission of the artist. This wasn’t an isolated incident either. It turns out Tidal had quietly replaced albums from hundreds of well known artists with inferior MQA versions. What’s worse, is that end users had no easy way of telling which tracks had been converted from CD-quality, and which were actually sourced from a Hi-Res master. Even people who were on board with MQA, now had zero assurance that anything encoded in the format was in any way master quality. A number of smaller artists joined Neil in having their work removed from Tidal once this all came out.

Enter GoldenSound

GoldenSound is YouTuber who makes videos covering high-end audio equipment and related topics. In April 2021 he uploaded a video about MQA. The video is very well produced and goes over much of the same information I’ve covered here so far. The thing that made GoldenSound’s video stand out though, is that he found a way to fully validate MQA, despite not having access to an encoder. Tidal, like most streaming services, has an automated submission system for independent artists. People using this system can get their music published in MQA on Tidal if they submit a high resolution master. GoldenSound took a bunch of high resolution test signals and submitted them though this process. Initially, Tidal rejected his tracks, presumably because they had a system to check for test tones, but after combining them all into a single track interspersed with actual music, his submission was accepted. GoldenSound was then able to stream the MQA tracks from Tidal and compare the signal output to the master he submitted. What he found was 100% confirmation of what people already knew; MQA was a lossy format, who’s encoding process added all manner of distortions and a substantial amount of noise, even in completely silent portions of tracks. He also found that MQA created from a CD-quaily source sounds audibly different than MQA created from Hi-Res, even with the exact same audio data in the source files.

GoldenSound actually sent his findings to MQA Ltd. prior to uploading his video. What he got back was a ban from Tidal, and a lengthy e-mail that consisted mostly of marketing copy and weak attempts to refute his results. The parts of this e-mail worth addressing are fairly technical, so I won’t get into them here, but GoldenSound does a good job going over them in the final part of the video. The main takeaway form this response is that MQA Ltd. continues to react with extreme hostility towards anyone criticizing their format.

GoldenSound’s MQA video quickly spread throughout music and audiophile communities, and the Streisand effect went into full-swing. Articles were written, memes were made, and many discussions were had. There was also a disclaimer added to that previously referenced Bob Stuart interview that reads “Most of Bob Stuart's answers have been debunked and the MQA technology is now seen as lacking any benefit for anyone other than record labels and MQA Ltd.” People who had never heard of MQA before were now decrying the format and canceling their Tidal subscriptions. A bunch of new people found Chris Connaker’s RMIAF talk, and were outraged by the behavior of the MQA executives. MQA Ltd. went into full damage-control mode, with Bob Stuart himself issuing a public statement that was clearly a response to GoldenSound’s video, despite never directly addressing it. Press outlets that had been previously been positive on MQA also began publishing new articles talking up the format.

MQA Ltd. went one step further with their attempted damage-control, when someone, presumably tied to the company, tried to edit the MQA Wikipedia page to downplay criticism of their format. These edits included removing references to GolenSound’s MQA video, removing any mention of the format being lossy, removing information about DRM concerns, changing information about how MQA works, and even publicly doxxing GoldenSound. These changes were all sensibly reversed by Wikipedia’s editors, and none of them remain on the MQA page today.

About a month after his MQA video, GoldenSound posted a followup, in which he address the public response made by Bob Stuart. GoldenSound handled each point of criticism in an extremely clear and professional manner, and throughout the video, he makes pleas for increased transparency and further testing of MQA. The most interesting nugget from this video, is that, according to Bob Stuart, MQA is optimized to only work well with “natural sounding” music, which is why GoldenSound’s prior tests had such poor results. Even if this is true, it’s not a good look for a format that’s meant to be studio quality, especially when you consider that it’s likely to be used for things like electronic and industrial music. The video concludes with the promise of another followup, if anyone from MQA Ltd. follows through on the requests for more transparency. A second followup video has never materialized, and most audio enthusiasts have remained firmly opposed to MQA in the time since.

Aftermath

While MQA is still around today, and you can still buy new Hi-Fi equipment with MQA support, it’s much less of a selling point than it was a few years ago. A large portion of audiophiles have sworn off MQA, or just never used it in the first place. There are still a few MQA die-hards who have doubled down in their support of the format, but they seem to be in the minority. The controversy has damaged the reputation of just about everyone involved with MQA Ltd., particularity Bob Stuart, who was respected by those familiar with his work prior to MQA. Conversely, GoldenSound has become a well respected figure among audio enthusiasts, and has more than doubled his YouTube audience off the back of his two MQA videos. Today, MQA is often seen as a “snake oil” product, in the same category as things like CD demagnetizers and audiophile ethernet cables.

In June 2021 Apple Music added a lossless option to their service. This move has made lossless and Hi-Res audio a less viable niche for smaller competitors like Tidal, given Apple’s larger catalog and better brand recognition. Apple is using their well established ALAC format for steaming, a decision which effectively killed MQA as a competitive option for streaming services. In June 2023 Tidal announced that they will be switching to FLAC for Hi-Res audio streams, and the future of MQA Ltd. looks uncertain as a result. In a few more years MQA is likely to join HDCD and DVD Audio in the pile of dead Hi-Res audio formats.

The ultimate irony in all of this, is that due to the limits of human hearing, Hi-Res audio probably doesn’t provide a tangible benefit to listeners in the first place. But, that’s an entirely separate debate that has been raging in the audio community for decades at this point.