A couple of Campfire Audio’s flagship products turned out to be very inconsistent. A well-known reviewer/measurer (Crinacle) proved this publically.
The CEO of the company likely knew they were bad as he refused to give out measurements and very poorly attempted damage control, despite the company freely giving out measurements previously.
It’s a story about a company likely skimping out out QC, pretending it’s not a problem, and paying the price with their reputation.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Every zone in WoW has its own regional chat. Opon crossing the border, you will enter that chat and be able to talk to other players in the area. In most cases, these chats are silent and ignored, with one glaring exception.
The Barrens was a large, relatively empty zone where most new Horde players were funnelled after level 10, and where they would remain until level 20. It was a really boring zone, so players chatted to make it go quicker. Barrens chat became infamous for its juvenile and incessant nature, its bizarre conversations and memes, but players would sometimes find themselves talking about philosophy, physics, theoretical science, ethics, law, or whatever subject happened to come up. After out-levelling the Barrens, a lot of players would go back to hang out and make jokes about Chuck Norris.
One of the most popular Barrens memes was Mankrik’s Wife. You see, one quest tasked players with helping an NPC named Mankrik find his lost wife. But since the game didn’t indicate where she was, and there is no NPC called Mankrik’s Wife – she has the unfortunate name ‘Beaten Corpse’ - they often never found her. This all happened in a time before every single answer to every question could be found online. So naturally, newbies would consult the local chat. (LINKS TO REDDIT)
In 2010, the Cataclysm expansion released, and all of the Vanilla zones were revamped, Barrens included. Mankirk’s wife was laid to rest, but her name would live on forever.
Even today, Blizzard sells a shirt that says “I survived Barrens chat.”
This was, and remains the most well-known event from Vanilla WoW, and for good reason. The date was 3 January 2006, and Blizzard were releasing the much-anticipated patch 1.9.0. Food buffs would no longer stack, shard bags were introduced, and the Ahn’Qiraj world event would begin. It would affect every one of WoW’s six million (at the time) players.
Ahn’Qiraj is a huge complex of insect-strewn architecture in the south-western corner of Kalimdor, crowned by impenetrable mountains and only possible to enter through a monumental, hexagon-shaped gate in Silithus, to the north. Ahn Qiraj contained two raids, the Ruins and the Temple. But rather than simply throw open the gates to all and sundry, Blizzard created an event designed to unite entire servers around the goal of getting in. What followed was a clusterfuck of such enormity that it made headlines even outside of the gaming sphere.
Firstly, players on both factions would work for weeks to collect resources – hundreds of millions of them. Food, bandages, metals, herbs. Everyone chipped in. The economies across every server collapsed as resources were siphoned away to open the gates. Prices shot through the ceiling.
This part of the process could last from several weeks to half a year. Since each faction had a separate shopping list, it was meant to become a race to see who could get there first. However most servers had/have a major faction population imbalance, and so one finished drastically quicker and ended up waiting in frustration.
Then came a set of extremely long and challenging quests, which only the best guilds could even think of tackling. The reward was a legendary item – the Scepter of the Shifting Sands. To be the holder of the Scepter was a magnificent honour, with much political backstabbing and conspiracy to ensure it fell into the right hands. Only that person with the Sceptre could ring the Scarab Gong and open the gates (and once they did, they would gain a legendary mount to ride around on).
(Gong Ringer’s Name), Champion of the Bronze Dragonflight, has rung the Scarab Gong. The ancient gates of Ahn’Qiraj open, revealing the horrors of a forgotten war…
With the gates open, the real battle would begin. Obelisks appeared throughout the world, floating ominously in the sky. For ten hours, ultra powerful enemies flowed out out, swarming players and killing them off in droves. But the enemies dropped valuable loot, so thousands of players flooded Silithus to get a piece of the action. Many thousands. Too many, in fact.
More than had ever assembled in one spot, and it was enough to break the game. Servers saw rolling crashes and such colossal lag that players began to flee the battle ground in the vain hope that it might make the game more stable. Boats glitched out and disappeared with the players still on them, reappearing in a ghostly nonexistent space beneath the world, dead players got transported to cemetaries on another continent - it was utter chaos.
The server to open the gates first was Medivh, on the 23rd January (still an effort lasting twenty days), but others took months. Aside from the greater drama of the event itself, there were many smaller stories taking place within the insanity. Major guilds coveted the wealth of Ahn’Qiraj for themselves, and went to great lengths to get it.
Rather than slowly contribute to the resource pool, they would privately hoard them until they had enough to open the gates on their own. In some guilds, spies would sell information on when the gates were going to be opened. Players would try to steal the sceptre from other guild-mates.
And it didn’t end here. It needed to be repeated every time Blizzard opened a new WoW server – which they were doing a lot, as the game was leaping from strength to strength. It was only in February 2009 that a patch was implemented so that all new servers would release with the gates already open. Ahn’Qiraj was finally over for good. The world event entered into history.
History became legend.
Legend became myth.
And over many years, the gates passed out of all memory. They were still there, quietly seething in a dark forgotten corner of the world. But to many new players, they were nothing more than window dressing in an old zone that no one wanted to level through anymore.
But they were all of them deceived, for another gate was made. But that story will have to wait until later down our timeline.
This is one of the many strange and curious events that took place in WoW’s early days, back when guilds were more than a place to collect an XP boost. They were closely knit communities who stayed friends for years. These days, when a guild member logs off for the last time, it goes by without notice. But that was not always the case.
Fayejin was a well-loved player on the Illidan PvP server (we’ll get to that), where she played a horde mage. On 28 February 2006, she died of a heart attack. Her guildmates decided to honour her with a digital funeral. Fayejin loved fishing and snow, so they went with one of Vanilla Wow’s most atmospheric zones, Winterspring. It was one of her favourite places in the game.
The funeral was advertised online on all the popular forums of the time, with an open invitation to anyone who wanted to come along. There were dozens of respondents. When the time came, they were summoned to Winterspring. One of Fayejin’s friends was able to get onto her account, and logged on so that other players could say their final goodbyes. It was beautiful.
There were even characters from the Alliance present, in a cross-faction gesture of respect. Rather a lot of them, in fact. And they were all carrying weapons. If that struck anyone as odd, they never had time to contemplate it.
Within minutes, everyone was murdering each other and teabagging the corpses. As is tradition. Black tuxedos don’t do much against knives, and you can’t change your armour when you’re in combat, so the mourners were left defenceless. It was a slaughter.
The raid was the work of the ironically named Serenity Now, and would follow them for years. The organisers insisted that they were honouring Fayejin with one final battle – she was an avid PvP fan, after all. Perhaps the bloody violence that ensued was more fitting than a load of people standing around making sombre emotes at one another. But nonetheless, the forums reacted in anger, though many found it hilarious.
A video of the funeral survives to us from the time thanks to a youtuber named ‘Women Shouldn’t Vote Productions’. Here’s another video about it. And another. It made it to the gaming media, partly because of its climactic ending, partly because of the discourse over whether the raid was acceptable, and partly because nobody had ever held an event quite like it before. On the one hand, it was a funeral, and you can’t just attack a funeral. On the other hand, it was a PvP server and attacking was the whole point of the game. The ethical quandry still divides players today.
Fayejin’s Funeral is referenced in a 2009 academic paper by Stacey Goguen, titled Dual Wielding Morality: World of Warcraft and the Ethics of Ganking and submitted to the ‘Philosophy of Computer Games Conference’ in Oslo.
Regardless of ethics, the raid is what made the funeral famous, and gave Fayejin a place in WoW history. What more could you ask for?
As someone who grew up in the '80s, when I heard Swatch I immediately thought of those inexpensive wrist watches that had wildly colorful designs and interchangeable wristbands. They were hugely popular and if you didn’t have 40 bucks to spend on one, you were not with the “in” crowd, mainly dominated by yuppies.
Interesting read, not really into collecting watches but I appreciate beautiful timepieces - and this drama around the MoonSwatch actually piqued my interest in acquiring this watch. I’m liking some of the colorways they’re offering. I dabble more with smartwatch watchfaces, but this looks special.
Also understand the drama as people do get too involved in some of their hobbies. I just hope all this has died down and will allow me to look for a Mercury Mission MoonSwatch that’s not scalper-priced.
Thank you, OP, for an interesting and great write-up. I love this stuff, because even though I'm not an audiophile, it was written well and engaging enough to keep me interested. So thanks!
That was a hell of a ride. I got to the point that the CEO was slapping a table and screeching at a dude in public and thought surely that was as batshit as things were going to get. By the time we got to the Wikipedia talk page and doxxing a youtuber all bets were off on the level of batshit possible here.
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