From the very beginning, questions were asked about WoW’s relationship with race. Often, fans laughed them off, or responded with aggression, but these conversations continued well into the present.
Every race has a different backstory, a different home, and most importantly, a different set of abilities. Undead (who had once been humans) could originally speak to humans – the only race who could communicate across the faction boundary – but that was removed because it was being rapidly abused. Certain races could only be certain classes – the nature-oriented Tauren could be shamans and druids, but never warlocks or mages, whereas the more civilised humans could be hunters, but couldn’t be druids.
But what drew the most attention was the real-world people these races were based on. Cultural borrowing is nothing new to MMOs or the fantasy genre, with Tolkien directly comparing his Dwarves to Jews and his orcs to ‘Mongoloids’. Tauren, Humans, Dwarves, and Trolls were caricatures of real world cultures.
Dwarves, taking a leaf out of the Lord of the Rings movies, were Scottish Human architecture was generically European, though they spoke with American accents. Many players pointed out that there was a distinct lack of non-white humans in the story, and while it was possible to create a dark-skinned human, none of the face options had non-white features. So even the blackest human looked like a white person with a tan.
There are no non-white human heroes or NPCs as far as I am aware, I certainly cannot think of a single one off the top of my head.
A lot of players asked Blizzard to add more variety to the character designs, but it would take an astonishing 16 years for that to happen
When you grow up as a Native American, you grow up seeing your culture used as a plaything by the mainstream. We are constantly reduced to a caricature and commodified. Blizzard has perpetuated this history in American media with their massively successful and long-running MMORPG.
Their developers gave the borrowed elements a fantasy paint job and stripped them of their real world cultural identifiers. In doing so they created a race that is instantly identifiable as Native American to its users, while retaining nothing directly belonging to an actual tribe. The Tauren are thus doubly offensive to me for being blatant cultural appropriation for the express purpose of commercial gain, while also continuing the erasure of actual real life natives in the popular consciousness. Hundreds of distinct cultures amalgamated into one group of bull people and their “braves”.
…Lean predators, they’re as tall as night elves when they stand fully erect, but normally bob along, hunched over, coiled and ready to spring. While Warcraft players know them by their Jamaican accents, voodoo-flavored culture and wild hairstyles, the trolls are also cruel, sadistic and evil…
This description neglects to mention they were also cannibals. They hobble around with scabbed knuckles, pock-marked skin, tusks, skull adornments, and wild shaggy hair. They were heavily inspired by Haiti/Jamaica, with Zulu influences thrown in for good measure. This portrayal in particular ruffled a few feathers, because it’s not a positive one. A significant subset of fans found the game’s trolls offensive, and demanded change.
But if Blizzard even noticed this outcry, they didn’t care. Later expansions would introduce more races based on stereotypes – far stronger ones, in fact. Worgen are a pastiche of Victorian cockneys, Goblins are Jewish-Italian New Yorker mob bosses with some unsettling antisemitic references (huge noses, disgusting skin, accents, obsession with wealth, absolute psychopathy, con aritsts and crooks). Draenei are vaguely Eastern European refugees from another world, and Pandaren are literally just Chinese pandas with fake accents – but we’ll get to them later.
In the essay “Multiculturalism in World of Warcraft”, Christopher Douglas examines the issue in enormous detail, and long story short, he agrees that the portrayals in the game are racist.
In Azeroth, of course, race is not understood as socially constructed, but rather to be a biological fact. Composed of inherited, immutable, essential differences, race in Azeroth is the old-fashioned (which is to say, nineteenth and early twentieth-century) notion that the outward packaging signifies an inner reality, where the differences are.
WoW has an incredibly complex backstory, with vast amounts of worldbuilding, so it would be wrong to say these races are just thrown lazily together. But the fact remained that there were overtones of racism in many of them. If anything, the story sometimes supports this, such as the time Humans locked up Orcs in internment camps and used them as slaves, which apparently had the positive effect of reducing their desire to kill. Those based on non-European ethnic groups went in the Horde (the faction associated with chaos, primitivism, bloodthirst, barbarism, and savagery), those based on Europeans went in the Alliance. And a large part of the game involved taking allegiance based on your race and killing members of the ‘enemy’ races.
If you are a member of one race, you hate and are hated by this “other” race. We’re literally fighting race wars here, and it’s more than a little unsettling how much it’s just accepted.
Blizzard has tried to undermine the idea that the Alliance is good and the Horde are evil many times, over multiple years. But they would fail again and again, and seem to be inexplicably drawn to portraying them as absolutely vile. Many players like to imagine WoW as a utopian society where – despite the clear connections between certain races and real-life cultures – all players can be whoever they want without prejudice. But it doesn’t take a very close look to see that isn’t true at all.
It doesn’t help that the WoW community long had its own issue with real racism toward players.
We are all Mexican and had really strong accents. One of my friends couldn’t quite speak much English at all. We got a lot of bad responses from guilds and got kicked out or resigned because of reactions to our accents and stuff like that. Eventually we found one that was really awesome about it and we would even feel comfortable talking to each other in Spanish during raids in order to not distract anyone else." Said Hernandez in an interview with NPR.
These problems seem to have improved over the years, as WoW’s userbase has grown older and become more open, but in many ways they have not. And this is just race. WoW has always had a similarly strange relationship with sexuality and gender. Speaking of which…
Gamers have long had a querulous history with homophobia. You couldn’t get through a single conversation in Vanilla without someone calling you a fag, and it still pops up a lot now. Blizzard themselves have denounced prejudice toward the LGBT community many times, but this may be a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’. .
When a woman named Sara Andrews set up a guild marketed toward being LGBT inclusive, she was threatened with a ban from administrators, due to the language she was using. They claimed ‘advertising sexual orientation is not appropriate for the high fantasy setting of World of Warcraft’. That’s pretty rich considering the kind of things WoW players say every day – in a much worse tone. The controversy was so great that – once again – WoW ended up in the headlines.
To publicise her plight, Ms Andrews visited many discussion sites and forums where Warcraft players gather. The debate that followed largely criticised Blizzard for its heavy-handed treatment.
Many pointed out that Warcraft has a thriving community of gay players, or gaymers, and that it made no sense to censor talk about players’ sexuality outside Azeroth.
Gay pride marches are known to have taken place in Warcraft and there are many other guilds in the game that are known to be friendly toward the gay community.
Two such guilds, Stonewall Champions and The Spreading Taint wrote an open letter to Blizzard criticising its policy.
At first, Blizzard tried to defend their stance. “Topics related to sensitive real-world subjects – such as religious, sexual or political preference, for example – have had a tendency to result in communication between players that often breaks down into harassment”, they said. Quite simply, their police on sexuality was ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’, and that only amplified the rage aimed their way. Discussions began to stir of possible legal challenges. They eventually backtracked and publicly apologised to Andrews, promising that its GMs would be given more thorough training on how to handle LGBT issues, but this would be far from the last incident.
Blizzard landed in hot water again in 2011 as one lesbian gamer pointed out during a Q&A session at Blizzon there had not been a single LGBT character in any Blizzard game or property – ever. Creative Director Chris Metzen responded that LGBT characters were ‘certainly a possibility’. The woman who asked about diversity was then harassed on the WoW forums afterward.
Metzen’s open-ended statement would soon turn sour. Blizzard had collaborated for years with the band Cannibal Corpse, who was recorded during an interview at that same convention saying, “Go fucking cry in a river and tell me about how you’re going to slit your wrists you Night Elf f*****.”
Blizzard’s art director, Sam Didier, endorsed the video and invited the band to play on stage. It took a week of negative press for Blizzard president Mike Morkaime to apologise.
A year later, Blizzard turned the profanity filter on by default, and players suddenly noticed that the words ‘transsexual’ and ‘homosexual’ were filtered out, but not ‘fag’ or ‘faggot. Blizzard was quick to change the filter, but the damage was done. The community wanted to know why those words had been blocked in the first place – someone at Blizzard had to have made the decision. Unfortunately, that thread seems to be lost now, but I can tell you it was an absolute clusterfuck that spun rapidly out of control. Members of the Gaymer.com forums had tried on previous occasions to force Blizzard to address the use of homophobic slurs in the game, with no success.
I emailed Blizzard and asked them to do something, Blizzard’s response was “just ignore em, they’ll go away”, riiiiiiiiight, like that’s ever worked with a gay basher. So my retort was why would other slurs against minorities go punished, yet calling someone a faggot in open forum is to be “ignored”…
When asked again about diversity at a 2015 MIT Media Lab event, then-chief creative officer Rob Pardo dismissed the idea, stating:
I wouldn’t say that’s really a value for us. It’s not something that we’re against either, but it’s just not … something we’re trying to actively do.
For this gaff, they received an open letter which spoke on behalf of LGBT players, stating they no longer felt valued by the company.
The comments made by Mr. Pardo and Mr. Browder, speaking as employees of Blizzard Entertainment, seem to imply that representing people like me will never be a priority to the company. They seem to be suggesting I go elsewhere.
Sadly it would take a few more years for Blizzard to learn how to not hate the gays.
Just recently in 2019, there would be another controversy over LGBT guilds. A pro-homosexuality guild called ‘GAY BOYS’ was reported “an inappropriate number of times” by other players until Blizzard forcibly removed the name. The guild had been warned before by a forum moderator in 2016, who said, “Picking a name that you can identify with without also using words that would illicit [sic] a reaction from other players would be far more beneficial.” Indeed, members of GAY BOYS claimed they had received abusive messages for their guild name over the years, such as “Fuck the gays, reported.”
The Guild Master blamed rampant homophobia within the WoW community, and accused Blizzard of kowtowing to this subset of players. An in-game pride march was held in protest of the decision, and they were able to successfully appeal it.
“To say there is anything inappropriate about the words GAY or BOYS is, in and of itself, inappropriate, childish, and discriminatory,” Jilani said.
No sooner had WoW developed an economy than pernicious capitalists began to exploit it. Sites opened up, offering gold, rare items, and accounts with powerful characters in exchange for real money. Where these sites acquired it, no one knew for sure, though there were rumours. Most assumed they just bought it from players at a low price and then sold it at a mark-up, and that definitely happened. But the owners of these sites sought to maximise profits, and minimise costs. The solution was to set up sweat shops in China. Dozens, if not hundreds of them.
Multiple interviews have been done with Chinese gold farmers. They all described it as mentally exhausting, with working days of at least 12 hours, often spent killing a single enemy over and over. The value of farmed gold is different across the world. A day’s worth of gold could sell in China for $4 dollars, but could fetch triple that amount when sold to Americans.
“It’s a very labor-intensive job. I don’t see it any different from low-cost Chinese workers working in Guandong, producing Nike shoes, and for Nike to be sold eventually - sold at retail stores for maybe 600 percent margin.”
Yet it is different because gold farming is a gray area. Gaming companies like Blizzard, which owns World of Warcraft, see gold farming as cheating, and regularly ban the accounts of suspected gold farmers. Robin admits he’s been closed down four or five times, losing thousands of dollars each time. However, there’s always a market for gold farmers. Surveys show 20 percent of gamers admit to buying gold.
According to the New York Times, while some gold farmers enjoyed playing games all day, they nonetheless had strict quotas and were constantly supervised. They estimated that there were between 100,000 and 500,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, earning less than a quarter an hour. It’s true that this practice did not originate with WoW. But WoW is perhaps the first time it became a major issue due to the sheer size of the playerbase, and the overwhelming demand for black market gold.
For its part, Blizzard has tried to crack down on black markets, but arguably their most successful attempt was by creating the WoW token, effectively creating a legal avenue to sell gold via Blizzard. That has its own controversy, which we’ll get to later.
In an interview with Jared Psigoda, a market leader in virtual trade, he states that originally, these black markets were regionally exclusive. Europeans worked in the European black market, Chinese players in the Chinese, and Americans in the American, which resulted in dramatically different prices. It was in the early 2000s that the use of Chinese labour was used across the board, undercutting western currency exchanges, in order to make further profit.
Perhaps the most infamous group of gold farmers were the Devilsaur Mafia. They realised killing devilsaurs in Un’Goro Crater had the potential to return the highest profits out of any creature in the game. While devilsaurs didn’t drop much, they could be skinned to get Devilsaur Leather, a material from which a number of powerful pieces of hunter armour could be made, such as the Devilsaur Leggings and Devilsaur Gauntlets. Outside of raiding content, this was the best gear you could get in Vanilla wow. All in all, a single devilsaur could net its killer 20 gold – a kingly sum at the time.
On PvP servers, these cartels had teams on both factions working as security – if a Horde player tried to step on the Mafia’s turf, the Alliance security team would be alerted and sent to hunt them down, kill them, and keep killing them every time they resurrected at a graveyard. Technically speaking, cross-faction communication was against the Terms of Service, but it was almost impossible for Blizzard to prove players were communicating using third party apps (LINKS TO REDDIT). The only way to get close to a devilsaur on any PvP server was to submit to the whims of the mafia, which meant selling at regulated prices and handing over a cut of the spoils. All-out turf wars were known to occur when multiple cartels came up against each other.
This was not remotely the only instance of farmers banding together to control resources and manipulate the economy – that happened every single day. But it may be the most well-known. And when Classic Wow came about, players eagerly worked to recreate the Devilsaur Mafia.
It’s an interesting case study, but the Mafia disappeared as WoW’s economy grew and changed. The gold farmers did not. For years, WoW’s economy would be driven by a black market that depended on sweat shop labour from China (and later other countries like Mexico, the Philippines and India). It never stopped, but the practice of online black markets for virtual currencies expanded far beyond WoW, to encompass many of the biggest games in the world. Blizzard still hasn’t been able to get rid of it. No company has.
No one had ever made a world as big as Azeroth before. It had been a massive undertaking, a wonder of programming and code which cost $64 million ($94 million accounting for inflation) before it ever even began to see returns – making it comfortably the largest and most expensive game at the time. Thousands of hands left their mark on its world, and while Blizzard would spend years polishing them away, they would never succeed completely. Even now. But it was a lot more obvious in Vanilla and that was part of the charm. For many players, it wasn’t the erotica or the world events or the combat or the gold that drew them to WoW, it was the world itself. As you might expect from a world that big, it was full of oddities. Little holes in the world, carefully hidden in spots players weren’t meant to see, written messages under the borders of the world, slabs of random environment thrown together in private areas, unfinished or rejected zones, exclusive locations for the developers and game-masters. An entire community grew up around investigating these curiosities, unravelling their meanings, and showing other players how to reach them.
Looking at this map, you can see large empty patches between zones, or on the coast. Below Silithus lay the inaccessible land of Ahn’Qiraj (meant to contain the city of temples we covered earlier), north of the Eastern Plaguelands is the elf nation of Quel’Thalas, somewhere in the inaccessible west of Eastern Kingdoms lay the Twilight Highlands, and then there was the blocked off city of Stratholme, the focus of an iconic moment in Warcraft Lore. Players would agonise for years over the islands in the sea, and what they might be. The challenge became all the more tantalising when players discovered that many of these areas did exist in some form, sometimes mostly finished. Sometimes the reward was standing on a platform or tower in a major city, where no other player could get, and becoming a minor celebrity for the day.
But Blizzard had hidden their secrets well. It wasn’t possible to just ‘go to’ these areas. Explorers had to break the game to do it. A game of cat-and-mouse arose, with players discovering new ‘exploits’ and Blizzard racing to patch them out. There were techniques to fall through the world, climb vertical walls, teleport to a specific graveyard upon death, or overcome fatigue (a timed effect that begins when players move too far from the coast, which rapidly drains health).
To detail all of these hidden spots and how to reach them would take literally hours. To those who want to delve into this topic, I present a quick-fire montage. To the rest of you, let me elaborate on a few of the best ones.
[1] By far the most famous secret area in the game was GM Island, designed to serve as a ‘lobby’ for Game Masters. For years, the island was located north-west of Kalimdor, way off the map. To get there, players had to overcome vast distances of nothingness – a land without texture or direction, which made it totally impossible to reach the island without exploits. So many stories have been penned about GM Island that it has taken on an almost mythical status.
Members of the company were cagey about the island. An image of the island was visible on Blizzard Europe’s Career Opportunities page, but Blizzard rarely spoke publicly on it. Before patch 1.8, players could add GMs to their friends list, and their locations would be listed as ‘GM Island’. A forum moderator ‘Zarhym’ explained in 2010:
The game masters who respond to you in the game are doing so through a separate chat/support tool. They’re not actually using the game client to whisper you, however, logging into the chat client means the character they use to contact players with is logged into all of the realms they need to. While GM invisibility exists, it makes it safer and easier to have a simple storage/port point to keep all of these characters out of the normal game world.
The island itself was small and round and covered in dense vegetation, with a tall peak on one side. It included a mansion (taken from Stormwind City), a wall, and a graveyard. There were two NPCs, a Gnome named Ari and Tuskfyre the Troll. Embedded within the lower structure of the island (about 100 yards below the surface) was a hidden room known as ‘The Prison Chamber’. It’s textured with large blank white tiles and lit with a single light source. The only object in the room was a single chair, right in the middle. Players could enter, but can never leave without the help of a GM. Its walls couldn’t be climbed, teleport/hearthstone spells did not work, and it was the only place in the game where players could not be located using the /who command. While the room had no official purpose and seemed to have been added by a programmer purely for their own amusement, it is said that in the early days of the game, before an out-of-game chat interface was added, GMs would take offenders there to discuss their crimes.
GM Island was one of those things you spoke about in a hallowed whisper, hunched in front of a blurry youtube video in 3x4 ratio with an ‘Unregistered HyperCam 2’ watermarked across the top. Those who could reach the island were legends. Most fans would only ever be able to reach it on private servers, which allowed them to teleport straight there – and that is where we get most footage of it today.
The first adventurers to come across GM Island got there by swimming (there was water back then), constantly casting spells to heal themselves from the fatigue damage. It took an hour, and if the player’s direction was even slightly off, they would be forever lost in a seemingly endless ocean. Blizzard removed the water, so players tried manipulated the models in the game files to let them cross. This back and forth process went on for a while. Players found a new way, blizzard patched it out, players found a way around the patch, and so on. When all other attempts failed, the island was moved into an instance, effectively placing it in a separate world upon itself, and then eventually it was removed from the game completely. (LINKS TO REDDIT)
Other locations created for developers include Designer Island and Programmer Isle. Neither was ever accessible in live version of the game – only on private servers. Both are filled with stock assets, written messages, and a few test quests. The regions of Programmer Isle are named after some guys called Jeff and Patty Mack, and there are even a few test NPCs.
Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that so few players ever reached GM Island on a live server, and also due to its mysterious origins, it is still one of the most iconic places in the game. Even years after its removal.
[2] Another famous location was ‘Old Ironforge’. Canonically, Ironforge is a colossal warren of tunnels and halls under the mountains of Dun Morogh. When it was first realised in-game, its scale matched that vision, but it was so big that it seemed unfair – the Horde had no cities that big. So the lower half of it was gated off (though it remained in game). Players were able to reach it by clipping through the world. It was never much of a secret – and even came to hold a more and more important position in the story.
[3] Mount Hyjal was another major test for explorers. It had always been extremely important to the lore of the game, and Blizzard left it out because they wanted to save it for a later expansion. Positioned right in the middle of Northern Kalimdor, its main defence was being a plateau so tall that players had no chance of climbing it. But as we have learned, nothing can stop bored WoW players. Players came up with various ways of slowly, painstakingly clawing their ways to the top, and once they reached it, they found a surprisingly complete zone, with forests, caves, temples, lakes, and an early version of Nordrassil, the World Tree. At the foot of the tree were ‘Blizzard Construction Co.’ barriers.
[4] There’s also the Island of Doctor Lapidis and Gilijim’s Isle – two small islands off the coast of southern Eastern Kingdoms. They’re visible in early maps and seemed to have existed in the WoW alpha, but were taken out after that. It’s possible their names were a reference to the Island of Doctor Moreau and Gilligan’s Island. Minimaps exist from that time and we evenhavea few screenshots. Almost nothing more is known about the islands, but they nonetheless intrigued fans for years.
[5] The biggest unreleased area is Emerald Dream, which had a number of distinct regions with their own unique design. Players speculate that this was the early version of a planned expansion or raid.
A Blizzard representative said in December 2003:
Actually, we have some pretty cool stuff planned for druids. They will definitely have a link to the Emerald Dream. […] I was running around the Emerald Dream last Thursday… you guys are in for a real treat. The level designers are doing a killer job.
However, by September 2006, the developers had clearly changed their minds – either they had soured on the idea completely, or had decided it would be revisited in a later expansion. A statement by Nethaera says:
As for the Emerald Dream, there are no plans for anything as of yet but it is a consideration for the future. The Emerald Dream opens up a lot of different opportunities and the Burning Crusade is definitely not oing to be the last of the expansion packs.
True to their word, the Emerald Dream would surface many times over the course of the game’s life, in the form of instanced or dungeon/raid content, but the original zone was never made accessible.
[6] My personal favourite secret area is the Forgotten Crypt, hidden under the cemetary in Karazhan. Based on its shape, it was originally intended as a dungeon, and I went there once myself For the intrepid explorer, it was one of the easier places to visit. Part of the area includes the infamous ‘Hall of Upside Down Sinners’, which features underwater corpses hanging from hooks. Players speculated that the area was never implemented because it was disturbing, and may have unsettled younger players. However Community Member ‘Bashiok’ commented on the Crypt in 2014, confirming that it was simply an area Blizzard changed their minds on.
Oh yeah, I remember that! Haven’t seen a screenshot in quite a while. Not sure I know the story on it but knowing our development processes back then there tended to be a lot more stuff made that we just didn’t use. I can’t imagine the game rating rumor is accurate, because if it was content we wanted to use we’d just take out the upside-down sinners or whatever the issue was and use it for whatever it was we wanted to do with that space. It’s not like they’re permanent fixtures. Fun rumor though! :) More likely we just changed our minds.
The area was actually partially opened for players in the Legion Expansion in 2016.
[7] Gilneas was canonically a small peninsular kingdom sticking out of Silverpine Forest in the Eastern Kingdoms, cut off from the rest of the continent by the huge ‘Greymane Wall’. Behind the wall was an incomplete land with no definition, bordered by mountains and ending in a beach. Getting on top of the wall, or finding a way around it was a test for any explorer. Gilneas was fully added as a zone in Cataclysm, in 2010.
WoW has always fostered speculation, theorycrafting and conspiracy among its most ardent fans. Players have spent hundreds of hours piecing together developer ideas from Vanilla, including playable ogres, potential zones in the South Seas, and player housing.
So where’s the drama?
It comes in Blizzard’s ‘hot and cold’ relationship with these explorers. Any player found reaching hidden areas of the game through exploits is deemed a cheater and is banned, as a matter of policy. This is despite the fact that Blizzard clearly leaves hints to incentivise explorative behaviour.
Ultimately, players are still finding new tricks, and Blizzard continues to hunt them down. A lot of fans are against exploration because they don’t want to encourage other players to develop exploits which could be used to give them a leg up in the parts of the game that matter – progression and pvp. During Vanilla, the forums were often full of players complaining about others using exploits, which was part of what motivated Blizzard to monitor them so carefully.
When Classic was released, players leapt at the chance to recreate the iconic exploits of Vanilla. But once again, we will have to wait until later for that.
Right now, we are nearing the end of our time with Vanilla, and the release of World of Warcraft’s first expansion, the Burning Crusade. I really appreciate anyone who took the time to read this far, and I hope to upload the next part of this series in a few days.
One of the most famous guilds in Azeroth is Method, on the server ‘Sylvanas’ – that was the case then, and it is now. Over the years, they’ve been the first to take down a number of final raid bosses. During Burning Crusade, their best Rogue was a player called Zeuzo. He was perfectly kitted out from head to foot, and even had the Warglaives of Azzinoth – the best melee weapons in the game (and the most iconic for the expansion) They were one of only four ‘Legendary’ weapons available at the time, and Zeuzo was the first person on his server to get them.
Every other player looked at him with seething envy. And one decided it wasn’t worth working to get the glaives himself, when he could simply buy them. But the glaives were bound to Zeuzo – he couldn’t give them away even if he wanted to. This mysterious buyer could only get his hands on the glaives and the gear by convincing Zeuzo to sell his entire account.
So what’s what he did.
Zeuzo began to receive whispers offering money in exchange for his account. He said no, so the whispers came back with an even greater offer. Zeuzo persisted, and as he did, the offers grew and grew. By September 2007, the sum was 7000 Euros - $9500 at the time. Zeuzo was encountering financial difficult times in life, and found himself unable to resist.
The sale went ahead. Zeuzo’s account changed hands, and the character was renamed to Shaks.
Buying and selling accounts is nothing new. It happens all the time, with accounts going for about $300 on average. It’s often easy to spot a bought account, because their skill doesn’t match the gear they’re wearing.
“The problem is,” said Ms Vaughan, “you have no idea how to play the character properly.”
“Within a short space of time, you would be subject to the embarrassment of other players noticing your lack of skills, and it would be very apparent that you had either bought your account, or had paid to have your character levelled,” she said.
It became immediately obvious to everyone on the server what had happened. It was obvious to Blizzard, too. The best-geared Rogue on the server had spontaneously changed his name, left his guild, moved to another server, and become astonishingly bad at his class. Word spread like wildfire. After a paltry five days, Shaks was banned.
In a panic, he turned to Zeuzo in hope of a refund, with no luck. He stated he had plans on suing both Blizzard and Zeuzo (who had just created a new Rogue and re-joined Method), but nothing came of that either. I suppose if their goal was to headline on the BBC News, they achieved it.
But at what cost?
The Misled Moose
This isn’t really a drama, but I wanted to include it just because I thought it was cool.
World of Warcraft once again hit the headlines in December 2007, and for once it wasn’t due terrible reasons. According to the Norwegian news site ‘Nettavisen’, 12 year old Norwegian player named Hans Jørgen Olsen was saved from a life or death scenario due to his knowledge of WoW. Hans and his sister enraged a local moose during a walk near their home, and after using the ability taunt to attract the moose’s attention away from his sister, Hans did what his Hunter would do – he used feign death.
In World of Warcraft, feign death causes the hunter to appear to die, dropping their health bar to zero, and all non-player enemies instantly lose all aggression toward them. Apparently it works in real life too, because the moose decided he wasn’t worth pursuing, and both siblings were able to get away safely.
For once, World of Warcraft had done something good.
This is another story of how players can be corrupted by the tempting shine of a legendary weapon.
This surrounds ‘Sunwell Plateau’, the final raid of the final patch of the Burning Crusade. In this 25-man raid, the game’s best players would delve into the Isle of Quel’Danas to find the Sunwell, and stop the evil Kil’Jaeden from stepping through into Azeroth.
Exciting, right?
Back then, raids were a big deal. Guilds would carefully select their team members, work tirelessly to get them the best gear, practice and research every fight, and set aside entire evenings or even multiple days to get the raid cleared. Every boss dropped loot – armour, weapons, resources, or if you were extremely lucky, mounts. Some rare pieces only dropped once in a dozen, a hundred, a thousand raids. Players worked for years in pursuit of the most coveted drops.
Control over the loot went to the raid’s leader, who would distribute it as he or she saw fit. This has resulted in a lot of internal guild drama over the years. When multiple players wanted an item, the one who missed out might cause a scene. But in the summer of 2008, there was a loot scandal so great that it shook the forums to their core.
The guild was Vicarious, on the server ‘Area 52’. They had just defeated Kil’Jaeden, and were rewarded for their hard work when their loot flashed up on screen. Thor’idal appeared. Its orange text indicated it was a legendary item – the fifth to be added to the game. It dropped for only 6.5% of raids.
Why was Thor’idal such a big deal, I hear you ask.
At the time, Hunters had to maintain a stock of ammunition because every bow used up arrows, and every gun used bullets, and that all cost money and took up storage space. But Thor’idal magically generated its own ammo. Not only was it the most powerful Hunter weapon in the game, it was incredibly cost effective. Plus it looked really cool. Any Hunter would have killed to wield it.
And there were two Hunters in that raid group.
But neither of them got Thor’Idal. It was given to a Rogue named Analogkid.
Rogues could equip bows, and would enjoy their stat bonuses, but couldn’t actually use them. The idea of handing such a game-changing Hunter weapon to a Rogue was absolutely unimaginable. And to make matters worse, Analogkid already had a Warglaive of Azinoth in each hand. So he didn’t need the bow anyway. No matter how you slice it, it was an astonishing snub to the Hunters in the group.
right. screw a class out of their ONE legendary to someone who wont make 1/10th of its potential just because hes been in the guild longer. riiiiight.
Wow, I’m speechless. Giving a ranged weapon to a rogue when two hunters are present? I don’t care who you are and what situation you’re in, this is a r****ded decision.
Vicarious had been a major raiding guild before the incident took place, but afterward, their name was dirt. No one wanted to raid for a guild that might give a vital drop to someone else – perhaps someone who had no use for it. The guild’s members bled away over the following days, some leaving in protest, some leaving to preserve their reputations as serious raiders, some leaving simply so they could walk the streets of Shattrath City without a dozen players using the /spit emote on them.
All in all, on behalf of the rest of the hunters of Azeroth, we agree not to ninja anything else if you don’t ninja this bow. Please. We beg of you. PLEASE! That means you rogues! Youre a meelee dps class! You don’t need this!
There were members of Vicarious who tried to defend the decision, but they were rapidly shouted down.
Though I can’t speak for Kharhaz on this matter I can see why he would want to give Analogkid priority on this over Tums and Zzerg. Analogkid has been raiding with us since we rerolled here and were doing kara and gruuls lair. He has had an excellent attendance and has given his best using full consumables alot of the time, even on farm content throughout all of raiding from t4 to sunwell and in this respect deserves loot, especially legendaries over people who transfered to our guild after we killed pre-nerf M’uru, a fight which i might add that was very trying for our guild.
Many of the responses were something along these lines:
One would only do that out of pure disrespect and arrogance. Is the GM 5 yrs old or an idiot or both?
You don’t trick people into spending months of their time to help you and others get gear (of course they gear up some too but still…) and then f*** them over by giving their most coveted, well earned item (98% attendance, etc.) to the wrong class.
If GM called that crap a “loyalty test”, that’s just a flat out lie or he’s f****** re*****d. What the GM did was just plain disrespectful and childish.
If I was a director in my company and said “let’s work hard everyone and you’ll get a bonus from your completed MBOs” and then decided to slash salaries or not give the bonus to the employees after they did everything they were expected to…as a loyalty test, everyone would leave the company or I’d get fired immediately.
I feel sorry for those who tried so hard only to get mistreated. I don’t blame you for being less loyal after this sad incident.
But no one received more hatred than Analogkid. He had committed the cardinal sin of taking Thor’idal. He had been offered the bow as a gesture of loyalty, but the consensus was that he should never have actually accepted it. And perhaps if he had taken a moment to think it through, he would have politely declined. But he didn’t, and once equipped, a piece of loot can never be traded away.
Even if he had said no, and one of the hunters had gone on to wield Thor’idal, I’m sure they would remember being passed over. That kind of rejection can scar a person.
and after talking to both the hunters present, they feel that it was a sign of pure disrespect towards them to be called disloyal to the guild and have them be pretty much negated from the equation.
To this day, Analogkid is the posterchildren loot ‘ninja’ – a term to describe players who sneakily take loot they don’t need from other group-members. As for Thor’idal, it was just one of many legendaries that ended up being defined more by its controversy than its value as a weapon.
Luckily for the members of Vicarious, there was a new expansion on the way.
By November that year, Thor’idal would be obsolete.
I recommend reading this comment (LINKS TO REDDIT), which goes over a drama from BC that I totally missed. It’s interesting.
Indeed, while the community was divided over Karatechop, they were united in their anger against blizzard.
It’s easy to be very holier-than-thou and say YOU wouldn’t have used it, but I think past history shows that a vast majority of players would have not only used it, but used it to a much greater degree.
Blizzard screwed up.
Blizzard got embarrassed by their screwup
Blizzard overreacted by blanket-banning an entire guild, most of which had nothing to do with the screwup
Blizzard tried to cover up their over-reaction by purging all references to it from every site that they have sway over.
Karatechop didn’t seem to mind the condemnation. In another interview, he said this:
"We never meant to upset people, anyone, by personal gain of loot or achievements. That’s never how TMF rolled. It was simply a ridiculous amount of fun. That’s all.
"I cheated. I know this. The item said ‘Cheater.’ I justified it, to be sure, and it was an easy thing to find justification for.
However, it didn’t stop at condemnation. You probably know enough about the WoW forums by now – it never stops there. Karatechop received enormous amounts of abuse online, personal attacks, and threats.
Martin Fury is still visible on a number of wow databases. It’s the lowest-numbered item in the game. Its use has been changed to instantly kill the wearer, to prevent the same mistake from ever happening again.
On 8 December 2009, Blizzard released the final patch of the expansion: Fall of the Lich King. The day approached with frantic excitement, as the first players entered Icecrown Citadel. Its spire had loomed in the distance for the entire expansion, and loomed large in the lore of Warcraft going back a decade. Its final boss was the titular Lich King himself.
When they first come out, bosses can take days or sometimes weeks for the best players in the world to take down. But once they do, the encounters are gradually toned down to give more causal players a chance. The Lich King first fell on 3rd February 2010, and the coveted world-first title went to a guild called Ensidia.
And then it was taken away again.
Blizzard’s design team would often watch (invisible and from afar) as guilds took down bosses for the first time, to make sure everything went to plan. Whatever they saw with Ensidia, it clearly upset them. They come to the conclusion that the guild had cheated. All of the members of the group were banned for three days, and they were stripped of the achievements and loot from the fight. Since they couldn’t complete the Raid that week, they were unable to unlock the Heroic (hard mode) version of the raid the following week, putting them firmly behind their competition. The decision proved immediately controversial.
So what had Ensidia done wrong?
Blizzard’s official reason for the ban was, “Abuse of in-game mechanics or glitches with intent to exploit or cheat in World of Warcraft.” If that seems vague, let me explain.
The problem came down to a Rogue named Naihiko, who used Saronite Bombs throughout the fight. Saronite Bombs were a kind of grenade item that helped guilds do little more damage. However in this case, the bombs caused the fight to glitch. As you progressed through the Lich King’s stages, the arena was meant to get gradually smaller, giving players less and less room to move. If you watch this tutorial, you’ll see the platform shrink around 3:05, and again at 5:15. During the final phase, the Saronite Bombs caused the stage to glitch back to its larger size, making the fight easier.
Blizzard claimed that the raid group knew about this glitch and exploited it. They deliberately brought the Lich King to the edge of the platform to make him easier to defeat. And that once the platform glitched, they should have stopped their playthrough and reported it.
The members of Ensidia spoke out extensively about the perceived unfairness of this ban. Their website is long gone now, but I’ve dug up a copy here. Almost all of the banned members made their own responses, some more polite than others. Here they are, from Poptisse, Ekyu, Muqq. Kungen, Tjani, Jinxarn, and Eoy.
Ekyo’s post is the longest and most coherent of the bunch, and reads a lot like a HobbyDrama post itself.
The entire progress on this was pretty chaotic due to 10 people actually knowing what to do and the others going with the flow.
Ekyo said “…we realized something was actually wrong with the floor respawning. […] We didn’t actually know what was causing it and we actually had one […] try without it.
Now some will say that seeing this bug we should have stopped and wait for an hotfix before proceeding for a kill. But would anyone actually have done that really ? Not only would you waste tries in the meantime, but what if another guild killed it before you. We are talking about a race against other people there after all. And what proof do we have that the dev team didn’t actually find out this bug BECAUSE we happened to trigger it
Muqq was kind enough to include a full copy of the letter he received from Blizzard. Among other things, it said, “It is with regret that we take this type of action, but it is in the best interests of the World of Warcraft community as a whole, and for the integrity of the game. The use of these items bypassed a major portion of the encounter, significantly reducing the difficulty in a clear abuse of game mechanics.”
The rest of Muqq’s post is a ‘leaving note’ of sorts, in which he promises to quit World of Warcraft when his month’s subscription runs out. “Anyway, back to the subject. This was as good time as any to drop this game and move on. Had been considering it for a while, and I always said to Buzzkill and the gang that I was just waiting for the sign. A sign from heaven to guide me on my way. Today, I received it.” It gradually gets angrier and angrier from there. It’s quite a read, honestly. And it caused a stir of its own.
“the way Muqq has ranted doesn’t put Ensidia or himself in a good light.” One player commented. “He seems to think he’s the end-all and be-all of WoW and that him quitting will end this game. I’m sorry chester, but you’re a nobody outside the game and you’re not a puppetmaster. He could have taken the high road and at least constructively posted something when he didn’t agree with the suspension, but this rant is embarrassing.
Finally, Dear Blizzard.
Fix your goddamn buggy bullshit half-assed encounters. The amount of time and effort we dedicated to get through Wrath of the Lich king and Icecrown to see this guy die and take a turn at Arthas is just sick. To finally see him die only to have the ENTIRE raid banned is simply an insult. It’s cheap enough to make a bugged fucking encounter, but to ban people when they do not know what’s causing the bugs is just a fucking joke.
Tjani claimed, “ I have never before felt so brutally insulted without being able to defend myself.” Most of his post is bullet-pointed dismissals of the points held against him.
Kungen’s contribution was a list of all the bugs from WoW’s raid bosses, and how they could be exploited. His point was that these were the rule in WoW, not the exception.
What I’m trying to say is that EVERY SINGLE end boss since Vanilla has been bugged. Sometimes it has made the boss harder, sometimes easier. But it’s something all the top guilds during these periods have been dealing with the same way. All of us were still pushing to kill it first. We’re not the ones who control these things. We play the game to advance and to kill bosses for loot and glory. While Blizzard even have a team that get paid to test these bosses and we get punished because they can’t do their job?
I recommend going through the pages I linked, especially if you enjoy seeing some vintage, finely aged rageposting.
The question of Ensidia’s guilt or innocence became public discourse. Numerous sites debated the scandal.
Every argument, every scrap of information was taken into account. There was a truly wide range of takes, from ‘the ban was completely unwarranted’ to ‘I’m real happy. Even if this doesn’t affect me directly, I must say I am quite satisfied with what blizzard has done.’
Most players took Ensidia’s side, arguing that Blizzard should have fixed the bug before releasing the raid, that Ensidia didn’t know they were breaking any rules, and that this was all very unfair.
It’s standard at high-end for rogues to use the bombs, and Ensidia had no way of being able to tell this was an exploit, since they had no way of knowing what was supposed to happen. The ban is unfair, taking away the achieves is unfair, and Blizz should have to take it back with a lot of egg on their faces.
However a lot of users were skeptical (LINKS TO REDIT) of all this. During previous raids, they had also gotten a world first by ‘accidentally’ exploiting glitches. It seemed to be a running habit of theirs. It had happened with C’thun, the final boss of Ahn’Qiraj. It had happened with Kael’Thas, the final boss of Tempest Keep. It had happened with Yogg-Saron, the final boss of Ulduar, and Blizzard had even intervened to reset a fight with Illidan (final boss of Black Temple) and warned them to do it again without cheating. This all seemed like one step too far, and the cries of victimhood were falling on deaf ears. Ensidia was finally receiving their comeuppance and they were glad to see it.
Remember, these are the people who managed to figure out that summoning a disgusting oozeling 16 times in a row would break the C’thun fight. They’re the ones who figured out how to use Divine Intervention to cut half of Lady Vashj’s health off. They’re the ones who figured out that sychronizing JoLs allowed them to get twice as much healing on Firefighter. And now we’re supposed to think that they didn’t figure this out, when all the evidence points to them knowing something?
If you’re interested in learning more about Ensidia and Nilihum (their old guild name), someone wrote up an absolutely absurdly long essay on the dynamics of the group.
The Dungeon Finder
Releasing on the same day as Icecrown Citadel was the new ‘Dungeon Finder’ feature. Players could queue up for any dungeon based on their level and role, be randomly assigned with other players from any server, and would be instantly teleported inside the dungeon.
Prior to this, players would have to either [A] form groups with members of their guild, or [B] use regional/city chats to cobble groups together. The Dungeon Finder was envisioned as a massive improvement in speed, convenience and accessibility – and it was. To sweeten the deal, Blizzard introduced daily bonuses for using the Dungeon Finder.
But it was not without controversy.
Grouping up for dungeons was a large part of the WoW experience – it was how communities formed. If a player was a dick, he would gain a reputation on his server and no one would work with him. That kept people on their good behaviour (some of the time, at least). But the Dungeon Finder effectively eliminated consequences. You would rarely see other players from your own server. Even if you did, you were in the dungeon by the time you had the chance to do anything. No one expected the Dungeon Finder to have such an enormous impact on the culture of the game – no one even realised it was happening until long after the fact.
On top of that, the Dungeon Finder was so convenient that it made questing obsolete. A majority of players didn’t bother levelling through the game’s zones anymore, because dungeons were quicker, so the game-world became a lot emptier, which had already been a problem ever since flying was introduced in Burning Crusade.
At the time of its release, Dungeon Finder was actually quite popular. It was seen mainly as a tool for casuals, since established guilds were hesitant to move away from the old system. But over time, players would pin-point the Dungeon Finder as the harbinger of WoW’s decline. Yet others point to it as a sign of WoW adjusting to the convenience of modern gaming.
Here’s an example of that criticism.
The bottom line is all these features changed the game from vanilla to BFA so much that it’s undistinguishable. Have they made it better? For me - hell, no. I would always prefer a game with social interaction and memorable stories than a “massively multiplayer” game that most play without saying a word in 10 years judging by modern experience in guilds and dungeons. Has it become better for players who enjoy playing like this? Probably, so good luck to them if they can’t tell shit from good.
Here’s a pro-Dungeon Finder view.
I see a lot of people crying that the dungeon finder ruined WoW. Not at all. Rossi is right that the dungeon finder vastly improved the accessibility of 5 mans and later raids and made “quick” dungeons possible, but at the end of the day you zoned back out to your own server. You existed in the same world as always and there were plenty of other server-specific things to do with the folks in your own neighborhood. Which you got to pick, by the way.
And another.
Hands-down the best thing about the dungeon finder is that you can get on with doing other stuff whilst you’re queued. Sitting around in Org/SW spamming that you were looking for a group kinda sucked a lot of the fun out of the game
This isn’t as dramatic or scandalous as the other items in this post, but it’s something worth talking about. It still divides fans to this day.
While we’re here, let’s talk about the controversial addon that lost much of its popularity with the release of Dungeon Finder.
GearScore was a player-made addon (like a mod) that collected together all of a player’s statistics and boiled them down into a number. The idea was that instead of carefully examining other players to decide whether they were good enough to join a raid or dungeon, you could simply look at their GearScore instead. And they were pretty hard to fake, so players trusted them.
You might be asking where the drama is here.
On some servers, every single ‘pug’ (a group put together by players) would expect a GearScore of over a certain number. Everything else about you was tossed out of the window and only that number mattered. Your skills and experience were irrelevant. A player levelling/gearing up an alt (a separate character from their main character) might struggle to get into groups, despite being perfectly competent. And unlike ilvl (a system built into WoW which gave a number based on the quality of a person’s gear), GearScore changed based on how well a player’s gear complemented their Class and Spec.
As GearScore’s website said:
GearScore represents the maximum potential for a player to perform. The higher your GearScore the higher your potential to heal/dps/tank. Remember however, that is is up to the player’s skill to match that potential.
It was never a ‘scandal’, exactly, but it was always divisive. It took a lot of players by surprise (LINKS TO REDDIT) and they weren’t fond of the idea.
The bottom line though is gear score doesnt mean jack. All it can be and should be used for is for a basic idea of were the player has been based on the gear they have. It tells you nothing else. I cant tell you if they died on every pull spent every boss fight face planted for 99% of the fight or paid a guild to carry them and gear them.
As far as my stance on gearscore is concerned I’m all for it. It does really help in building >pugs my logic is: If you have determination you get pre-raiding gear if you get pre-raiding gear you can get into first tier raids if you can get into first tier raids you can go into further raids which ends up in you getting a good gearscore
Community gating in any form should be frowned upon and broke ASAP. Gearscore in wrath is a prime example.
The Sparkle Pony
During the beta for Wrath of the Lich King, players eagerly dived through the game files in search of anything spicy. Hints at the story, patch content, that sort of thing. Blizzard have always done their best to disguise anything important, with mixed results.
It was through this method that players discovered a heading labelled ‘Paid Character Customisation’. There were whispers that Blizzard might be introducing microtransactions into World of Warcraft, but these were quickly dismissed. After all, it was a subscription-based game. Players paid full price for each expansion, on top of a monthly fee, specifically to avoid the ads and in-game shops that were beginning to plague the free-to-play genre. The mere idea of adding microtransactions was so audacious, no one could believe it at first.
But this was Blizzard. They had long forgotten what shame felt like.
At Blizzcon 2008, WoW’s lead producer J. Allen Brack revealed exactly what ‘Paid Character Customisation’ was. By putting down cash, players could change the way their character looked, in a manner similar to the in-game barber shops (which run on in-game gold). There was no inherent reason why Blizzard had to charge for this – it didn’t cost them a penny to change how a character looked. It was purely a profit-driven exercise. Many players were (rightly) worried where this could lead. If WoW could sell character appearances, what was stopping them selling mounts or gear?
Blizzard had always had an online store. It sold books, merchandise and WoW subscription cards – that sort of thing. But in November 2009, new products were added which whipped the community into a drama. These were the Pandaren Monkand Lil’KT. They were pets – non-functional NPCs that follow the player around. And at $10 each, they weren’t cheap either. To smooth things over, Blizzard announced they would donate 50% of the profits of the Pandaren Monk to the Make-A-Wish foundation (a scheme they quietly ended a month later).
That thread can be viewed here. The most obvious thing is that most of the comments were positive. Most people saw it as harmless. For the most part, the talk of slippery slopes was hand-waved away. After all, it was for charity!
These are companion pets… they have no effect other than a status symbol. Not really that different from shelling out $10 extra for a collector’s edition of an xpac (getting you an exclusive pet).
Here’s another post made in response to complaints that Blizzard were taking this too far.
Since when did pets and mounts become game breaking items? If people want to spend money on this stuff let them what right do you have to say how people spend their own money? Fair enough if it was some kind of game breaking item (eg legendary item or whatever) but its not it’s a mount… I could just as easily argue “Oh my god Blizzard are selling WoW Mousemats! How long till they start selling epics?”
They would come to rue those words.
Thank you for spending precious production time on money grabs instead of content which I’m already paying $15 a month for!
Said one user, to which another responded: “They’re a business, and are in business to make money.”
It’s hard to convey to a non-player how significant mounts were to the people who collected them (which was most players). There were some mounts you could get cheaply and easily, some you could only get through in-game events or seasonal quests, some through achievements, some through PvP, some through reputations (usually by completing daily quests for weeks).
But the rarest and most prestigious mounts of all came from drops. Each expansion usually had one mount you could get by killing an incredibly rare enemy that only spawned very irregularly, such as the Time Lost Proto Drake, and usually the final boss of each raid had a microscopic chance of dropping a mount too (in some cases we’re talking a drop rate of 0.1% or less). Players would work for years to get their hands on one. I know people who ran through a raid every week for over a decade in the hope of getting The Ashes of A’lar or Invincible’s Reins. What I’m trying to say is that mounts were a huge part of the game, massive status symbols, and were often the motivator that kept people playing.
Pets were negligible, but now Blizzard was selling something integral to World of Warcraft. And at what cost? The price tag of $25 would have been high in a free to play game, for what amounted to an art asset. In WoW, it drew shocked reactions from every corner. It didn’t help that the Celestial Steed was absolutely fucking fabulous, so naturally everybody wanted it.
Downloadable content is something which has worried gamers for a long time. There has been examples of developers charging for content that’s already on the disc, and allegations of some companies deliberately removing content so they can charge a premium for it post release. But for all the overpriced horse armor and expensive map packs out there, Blizzard’s latest offering on their online store really takes the biscuit.
The response from Palisade is probably the most coherent:
I think it is extremely unfortunate that we are starting to see F2P (Free To Play) microtransactions in a game that we already pay a service fee for, not to mention the upfront costs of purchases the base retail game and its following expansion packs. 2009/2010 is certainly the era of DLC. Quite frankly I think any game or service that requires upfront retail costs as well as perpetual service fees to use the service should not include microtransactions or paid downloadable content. Period.
How long have some us been playing and paying for your product. Those who have been here for years have shelled out an insane amount of money to play a “video game”. While I think server transfer fees and the such are a little expensive, I can understand the need for such a service and why it should cost. But for actual in-game content, there is no excuse for paid DLC. You might as well promote purchasing RMT gold, because that’s essentially same mentality you are promoting here. Give us your money, get something in game.
As a Blizzard follower since Warcraft: Orcs & Humans back in the day, this company sure has changed a lot. Customer loyalty has been replaced with corporate greed. It’s unfortunate.
But this was a controversy with two sides. That forum thread is full of players excitedly talking about buying the mount. And within three hours of the Celestial Speed’s debut, it had already generated $3.5 million in revenue. They became immediately visible around the game world and glittered in their dozens in the skies above Dalaran.
The mount you rode said a lot about you. It was your way of showing off your accomplishments to the people on your server. It might set you apart as a great raider, a distinguished PvP-er, a passionate roleplayer, or a fanatical quester.
This sentiment echoed around the internet, with one Kotaku commenter saying, “umm no thanks… i appreciate cool mounts and pets… but not for real money. gotta earn that stuff in-game or its not cool.”
The communitystarted derisively calling them ‘Sparkle Ponies’, sharing memes about My Little Pony, and coming up with various other ways of shaming anyone who bought the mount. Those buyers responded with comics and memes of their own.
For Blizzard, this was the start (and nowhere near the end) of their gradual decline in the public perception. People started to see them as money-grubbing and exploitative of their faithful audience – which they were. Much of this monetisation was blamed on the influence of Bobby Kotick’s activision, who controversially merged with Blizzard in 2008.
The message this sends to the business minded portion of the gaming industry is disappointing at best and alarming at worst - gamers don’t want good content, instead they’ll elect for anything shiny, a trend which seems especially apparent in the MMO genre. Why would the makers of World of Warcraft ever want to push the creative boundaries when something like this four-legged waste of space allows them to make so much money?
The biggest concern for most fans was that the Celestial Steed had proven so profitable, it guaranteed Blizzard would try something like it again. And they did. As of right now, there are no less than 24 mounts available to buy, each for a similarly high fee.
You’re actually hurting the future of the game if you support this.
With this stuff taking off the way that it is, it won’t be long before Blizzard starts charging for things that carry an in-game advantage.
But we’ll be returning to the store during the Warlords of Draenor write-up, so I’ll leave this topic here.
The Real ID Controversy
Out of all the scandals to afflict WoW during Wrath of the Lich King, by far the biggest concerned Blizzard’s Real ID system. Basically, it was an optional feature which attached your real name to your account. In addition to befriending other characters, you could become Real ID friends with other players, and could communicate with them no matter what character they were playing, or what Blizzard game they were on.
Real ID friends would appear to you under their real names, would be able to see each other’s entire Real ID friends lists, and would see exactly what each other were playing, and where, at all times. The system was gradually upgraded so that two Real ID friends could enter a party and play together, regardless of what server they were on, as long as they were both playing the same faction.
So far, so good, right?
Well on 6th July 2010, Blizzard announced plans to integrate Real ID into the World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo forums. Players would appear – to everyone – under their real names. The idea was that if Blizzard stripped away the anonymity, it would discourage ‘flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness gone wild’.
“Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before,”
If you’ve been reading my other write-ups on WoW, you’ll have an idea of what to expect from World of Warcraft’s forums at this point. They’re absolute hives of discrimination, doxxing, abuse, and harassment, and it is perhaps their saving grace that all users are shielded from real-life targeting by their character personas.
You can imagine the reaction to this announcement, but I’ll outline it for you anyway.
People lost their fucking minds.
I’ve dug up the main thread for you, which stretches out into literally thousands of pages. But if that’s not enough, don’t worry. The conversation didn’t end there. It overflowed onto every fan site, every forum, and every server of the game. People were genuinely terrified of Blizzard attaching their names to all future forum posts, and perhaps even worse, all past forum posts too. To those who had participated in scummy behaviour, their names – and real-life reputations – would be destroyed. To those who had been the victims of scummy behaviour, their very safety was at risk.
”I’ll just stop posting on the official forums,” posted one person, “When someone googles my name they get me as the first hit. I really don’t want some overzealous HR toady taking me out of consideration because my name is also associated with an MMO. It has a negative connotation for the majority of the corporate world and I certainly don’t want to have a game hurt my ability to provide for my family.”
There were those with valid reasons to want to keep their names hidden. Some women or ethnic minorities worried about being the victims of discrimination. Others had more specific issues:
I’m in witness protection for testifying in a trial that sent a man to death, and his family swore to send me to my death too, so I will be deleting every single post I’ve ever made in FEAR for MY VERY LIFE.
This has been a discussion we’ve been long due to have. The Internet is at a crossroads right now, with the Facebook argument that all personal data is more or less public nowadays coaxing us towards one path and the mootean argument that anonymity is essential to online discourse coaxing us towards the other.
In a demonstration of confidence in the new system, Blizzard employee Bashiok revealed his name in the forums – Micah Whipple. That thread was never preserved, but we know from articles that users immediately responded by posting enormous amounts of personal information about him, including his phone number, address, and the names of all his relatives. Bashiok received a shower of death-threats and abuse. What’s worse, some of the information first posted about him was incorrect, which resulted in the possibility that a totally random person was harassed because of this – and that was blamed on Whipple too. His attempt to endorse Real ID had come crashing down upon him with such ferocity that it took on a life of its own and became a news story in itself.
There was blood in the water. In order to fully drive home how easily this real-name system could be manipulated, forum users began to doxx every Blizzard employee they could find. This information was collected and categorised for easy access. I recommend you spend a few minutes just scrolling through that site, because it’s difficult for me to explain how horrifying this all was.
In hindsight, it’s possible that these kinds of tactics were necessary to make the risks clear to Blizzard. The question has been tacklednumeroustimes.
However there were those who spoke out in favour of the change. Nicholas Deleon of techchrunch.com dismissed player concerns.
Why does your boss give a darn what you do on your own time—provided it doesn’t impair your ability to produce widgets while on the clock? Is it really so detrimental to your social standing to be seen asking where to find a certain mob, or reporting a bug in the new five-man dungeon? What planet do you people live on that this is a big deal?
And let’s not forget the fact that we live online nowadays, and that many of you claiming “INVASION OF PRIVACY~!”, I’m sorry, don’t have a leg to stand on. How many of you have Twitter or Facebook accounts? How many times does Twitter have to suffer a massive security breach before you say, “Hmm, shouldn’t be there”? How many of you post photos of you and yours on Facebook for the whole world to see—unless, of course, you take the massively pro-active step of locking your account down?
Do you really think 4Chan (or any other group, or person) is going to get away with harassing people who post on the new forums, a common complaint I’ve seen? “Now people will annoy me in real life!” That sounds like a one-way ticket to a lawsuit, courtesy of Activision Blizzard. Just because your name is “out there” doesn’t mean people are allowed to threaten you. Surely you recognize this?
Another proponent of Real ID in Wow’s forums was Krystian Majewski. In his blog, she wrote:
Maintaining a community where the only way to prevent people from physically assaulting is each other is to put everybody under a witness protection program doesn’t seam like a healthy thing to do. If real-life stalking and verbal abuse is indeed such a big problem, maybe we should start thinking about limiting user interaction in WoW in general.
It seems like a missed opportunity. Implementing Real ID in a large forum such as the WoW would have been a great test to test the Greater Internet Fuckward Theory. A lot of the protesters argued that it wouldn’t improve the post quality. On the other side, I think we shouldn’t underestimate the role of anonymity plays in ALL the mentioned problems.
Majewski’s main point seemed to be that using real names on the Starcraft forums would make it seem more legitimate as a sport.
I think introducing Real ID into the StarCraft 2 can vastly improve the quality and professional appearance of that game. If new e-Sport players are bred from a pool of anonymous Internet trolls, it’s difficult to get that mentality out once the players reach a professional level. This has detrimental effects on the appearance of e-Sports in general. Even among gamers, StarCraft’s reputation is not that of a civilized and mature game.
There are many players who, in hindsight, think that it was a good idea.
Virtually all the problems that we experience now all stem from anonymity and the ability to socially misbehave without repercussions. Every single problem that is associate with bad behaviours, trolling, being jerks, etc, etc, all comes down to lack of accountability that Real ID would have provided.
This wouldn’t have happened with Real ID tying your account to your character and providing an entity in which you would have had to represent yourself. Having an account associated with your character would have also eliminated the need for Raiderio because you could just link you Real ID for gear score and achievements…
The crazy thing is that if Real ID was introduced nowadays it would be accepted without question. We have social media accounts everywhere now, it’s no big deal these days. It simply failed back in the day because it was a new concept to have a social identifier associated with a “video game”.
Regardless of its supporters, the overwhelming opposition won out. After just three days, Mike Morkaime – Blizzard’s CEO – made a statement in which he cancelled the idea.
We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.
For most of the community, it was a massive victory. However as many journalists pointed out, Blizzard had no intention of dropping Real ID, they firmly planned on integrating it more and more into their games. It was just this specific change which had been aborted.
But perhaps that was for the best.
If you want to read about this in more detail, someone wrote a whole essay about the shitstorm, examining its sociological implications.
But I will leave you with the words of one eloquent user:
possibly the worst idea in the history of bad ideas
There are a number of other controversies we could go over: the bizarre YouPlayorWePay site, which tried to insure players for World of Warcraft server downtime, or the overly easy dungeons in Wrath, or the player anger over the disappointing ‘Call of the Crusade’ patch. And I’m sure plenty could be written about the Activision-Blizzard merger. But with my personal experience, I struggled to bulk these topics out enough to justify including them. Perhaps some other users here might be able to do that better.
The worst things about WoW during these years happened off screen. Some of them got pretty grim. I felt the need to include them.
World of Warcraft made headlines in July 2012 when an argument over the game in an Ontario neighbourhood ended with one man being stabbed in the chest. You can view the wound here (NSFW). The attacker, Justin Williams, was having an enraged argument with guildies over his headset. Jordan Osborne visited to see what was going on, and tried to de-escalate the situation.
“I was telling him, there is no need for you to be freaking out about ‘World of Warcraft.’ It’s just a game,” Osborne told QMI.
Williams responded, “It’s not just a game, it’s my life.” He then assaulted Osborne, grabbing him by the throat, punching him in the face, and stabbing him in his sternum.
‘I was sitting in my house today thinking I could be dead - and it’s all over a World of Warcraft game. It’s true, it takes over your life.’
Osborne was taken for treatment and made a full recovery. He later told the ‘Peterborough Examiner’, “'The doctor said he could fit his whole finger in my chest.”. Williams faced arrest and was charged with ‘aggravated assault with a weapon’.
The game had already earned its reputation for inspiring extreme and sometimes violent behaviour. But it wasn’t until 2012 that the global media began to question the effects of World of Warcraft in greater depth. Not because of the stabbing of Jordan Osbourne, though that didn’t help. But because of something much more severe.
On 22 July, just a week after the Ontario incident, a Norwegian man named Anders Behring Breivik detonated a van bomb in Oslo, right next to the Regjeringskvartalet - a collection of government buildings. 8 people were killed. By the time the dust settled, he was halfway to the island of Utoya, where a summer camp was taking place for the Worker’s Youth League, a political group associated with the Norwegian Labour Party. Breivik proceeded to hunt down and kill 69 participants, most of whom were children. 318 people were injured. It paralysed Norway. The deadliest lone-wolf attack in history would come as a shock to any country, but Norway was one of the most peaceful, prosperous nations in the world. This was unimaginable.
As more information surfaced, the world scrambled to draw a profile of the perpetrator. Breivik had them covered. He had taken a leaf out of the Unabomber’s book and distributed a number of texts called ‘2083: A European Declaration of Independence’. Long story short, he was your standard far-right fascist wannabe. His shitty little book would inspire murderers for years to come.
Among other things, he attributed his success to World of Warcraft.
Breivik said in court, “Some people dream about sailing around the world, some dream of playing golf. I dreamt of playing World of Warcraft.”
Breivik professed to playing the game non-stop (as much as 16 hours a day at points), describing it as a ‘martyr’s gift’ to himself, and using it as a smokescreen to mislead his mother while he planned his attack. Researchers found he had led three guilds, all of which focused on hardcore raiding. He played a human female mage named ‘Conservativism’ and a tauren female druid named ‘Conservative’, though his main was called ‘Andersnordic’. When the prosecution displayed a picture of his character in court, Breivik smiled.
He made multiple attempts to distance himself from the game, perhaps because he felt it damaged the ‘legitimacy’ of his message, but it was gradually becoming clear how core World of Warcraft had been to his identity.
“I know it is important to you and the media that I played this for a year,” he told the court in response to Mr. Holden’s questions. “But it has nothing to do with July 22. It is not a world you are engulfed by. It is quite simply a hobby.”
Breivik would occasionally post on the forums. In one reply, he defended a Scandinavian cyberbully who he said ‘works against the Islamisation of Sweden’. The news shook the WoW community to its core, especially on the servers he had played (Silvermoon-EU and Nordrassil-EU). Players reacted with horror and disgust.
Some of his past guildies discussed their relationships with Breivik, which gave an insight into what he was like as a person.
My memories of Anders are very good, and the atrocity was so incredible that I suppose I simply refused to see the pictures as Anders at first.
One of the replies was from a fellow Norwegian.
This is surrealistic, as an Norwegian it is hard to even comprehend what he has done and even harder to fathom his motives. The killer portraited in our news papers and on television seems so far out that it is easiest to judge him as a rabbit psychotic. To know that i have been guilded and chated with him for over a year in Virtue, at least back then he seemed pretty normal, makes this even more uncomprehensible.
The general consensus was that while Breivik had been unpleasant at times, it was difficult to imagine him doing something so evil.
Yes offler I do indeed remember him. He an I had quiet a public barney. I did think he was a jerk and a petty control freak but not true evil as he has shown himself to be. Although I did think of him from time to time in a very negative way, I really did dislike that man.
It has really affected me these last few days how I had contact with someone who was truley a monster. He is a true coward, parking a car bomb, attacking children with a automatic riffle. I do hope he suffers in prison.
“It was a sickening feeling when I realized I had played for two or three hours with the man who tried to kill me,” Fred Ove Løtuft told local newspaper Bergens Tidende. “I’ve played a lot of shooting games where you have to get away and hide,” he said.
Passing himself off as a Finn, Breivik led a clan in World of Warcraft called the Knights Templar, Løtuft said. In his manifesto, Breivik claimed he belonged to an “anti-Jihad” terrorist organization of the same name. Chatting to Breivik at the time, Løtuft said he had formed a positive impression of his fellow player. “We only talked about the game. He didn’t seem like a guy who would run amok and gun down young people, to put it mildly,” Løtuft told Bergens Tidende.
The debate over whether video game violence caused real-world violence had played out dozens of times, usually in response to the revelation that some American shooter played Call of Duty or Battlefield or something like that. I’m not American so correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it has something to do with gun lobbies looking for scapegoats so that they don’t have to ban guns.
But this time, the conversation focused entirely on World of Warcraft. The media, both in Norway and throughout the world, questioned whether WoW was a safe place for children. All of the game’s past incidents came back with a vengeance, and were held up to the light as examples of its danger.
Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen claimed that Breivik was unable to distinguish between World of Warcraft and reality. It was part of the fictional world he had created around himself, in which he was a knight defending Europe from invaders, and not an unsuccessful Norwegian neckbeard.
Norwegian gamers responded that Jens Stotenberg, leader of NATO and ex-Prime Minister of Norway, had played online games too, and even used his KGB codename Steklov as a username.
The topic rippled out across the game’s servers, its forums, and public discourse too. Studies had already been done on video game violence and found that they had no real impact on behaviour. Time Magazine weighed in, saying that Breivik’s relationship with WoW probably meant nothing at all.
Blame video games — that’s the watch phrase these days when something tragic happens. The non-gaming media seem to enjoy zeroing in on video games that are highlighted in horrifying crimes, invoking the rhetorical question: Do video games screw people up?
When horrible things happen, we look for simple answers, for easy rationalizations — ways to essentially say, Oh, this is why so-and-so did such-and-such. We want the “why” right now, when the spotlight’s on.
Reality, of course, is far more complex, and the answers we’re after require patience and careful research. Preliminary studies that attempted to link violent video games with increased aggressive behavior failed to control for critical variables like family history, mental-health issues and gender (they also failed to contextualize increased aggression levels, e.g., more than aggression upticks caused by playing football, say, or drinking a cup of coffee?).
The most up-to-date research, according to academic and TIME contributor Christopher Ferguson, “has not found that children who play VVG [violent video games] are more violent than other kids, nor harmed in any other identifiable fashion.” In Ferguson’s own longitudinal studies, recently published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, he found “no long-term link between VVG and youth aggression or dating violence.” And Ferguson references another recent longitudinal study involving German children, published in Media Psychology, which similarly found no links between increased aggression and violent video games.
But to many players (and parents of players), none of that mattered. Shortly after all of this came to light, a lot of people left the game for good. Being associated with World of Warcraft had never been a grand thing, but in the wake of Breivik it became a black mark.
The WoW community was quick to defend their game. Some commentators were more reasonable, such as Reddit user /u/Saltybabe
While I personally don’t think all video games in all contexts are 100% harmless, they are usually only harmful when adults don’t supervise or explain to young kids what is ok and what’s not. We have an 8 year old here who loves castle crashers, one of the moves is to throw a guy down and jump on him… this was tried once at the play ground. It’s not a violent game and we told him that’s not ok people could get hurt, and problem solved.
WoW isn’t even a violent game, it’s cartoonish and fanciful. This isn’t really any gore to speak of and for the most part unless a person has a 2 handed axe or a huge mace there aren’t any weapons in the game short of a gun/bow and arrow, and lets face it none of the guns in WoW look even remotely realistic that one could link to real life violence.
I let our 6 year old run around the blood elf starting zone and smite things on her priest, she loves using the map and counting how many bad guys we have to get and it’s challenging to her to use the mouse and keyboard. She’s supervised and it’s not like she’s going to go to school and conjure up some magic and kill people… WoW is an insane target for this whole “video games cause violence” because really, if even young kids can easily be guided into understanding there is no excuse an adult could not understand this, short of mental illness.
Others treated the whole conversation with derision.
I heard he also drank milk!
As one pundit pointed out:
If video games had anything to do with what people did in real life, more than half of the US population would be farmers by now.
I think that ended with the exact bang it needed, one that shut down random-ass speculation. I read no solid evidence of actual fraud anywhere in that entire account. Just some bad poker, which is admittedly fishy smelling, but only fools try to judge guilt based solely off smell. The internet is, of course, jam packed with fools as we all know very well. But that doesn’t mean she cheated.
Oh, and giving the money back was a terrible idea. So is interpreting it as some kind of solution for being caught cheating, which I don’t think many people would think of. When caught cheating people usually double down on their claims, not relent.
And tbf, of all the chars in media, imo WW makes one of the absolute best fascist dictators. She’s got that perfect blend of nobility, arrogance and actual power that just screams do as I say or I’ll cut your fucking head off. Not actually doing that is part of what makes the character kinda engaging. Much like how Supes walks around in a world of cardboard. Unless Snyder has ahold of him anyway. Then he plows through a world of cardboard.
What a ride. I’m definitely sending this to my wife, can’t wait to ask her why she’s never heard of that time WW went full dommy mommy and took over the world
I was fascinated by this when it was first happening and then got caught up in some things and forgot about it. Sad to see that they never really figured out if he was OTB cheating or not because I would have been interested in the method.
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