Today's GMMORE

What Celebrity Doppleganger Is This?

Today's GMMORE

Are These Movie Sequels Real Or Fake?

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

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• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

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.

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

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

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

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.

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 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

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.

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.

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

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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