I thought I hallucinated this show for a while, remembering bits and pieces of it. The episode where they butchered the chickens stands out in my mind to this day.
how would someone mess up so much on that conversion… 100 yen is like 3/4’s of a us dollar, so all you really need to do is move a decimal two spaces for a rough estimate.
I wonder if her friend was Korean. I used to live in Korea and the currency difference is about 10:1 with Japan. I spent a weekend in Japan and made the same mistake once. I saw a 10,000¥ wallet, mistakenly did the Korean mental math (1000₩≈$1) and thought it was $10 instead of $100. Luckily the cashier corrected me before I bought it.
I'm glad I stayed off r/headphones because that would have been dangerous for my wallet lol. I already hate that I spent $500 on my B&W headphones, but damn do I love them.
That was a long in-depth bringing me up to speed, and I loved it hahaha - thanks for taking the time to write all that up
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
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.
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.
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.
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