Comments on: WoW hit by deadly plague

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 07:53:35 +0000

“Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing “hundreds” of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.”

I wonder if medical insurance will cover counselling for trauma from inside a game environment. I can see the gibering wrecks now:

“Oh my God it was horrible, there were bodies everywhere [sob]. My own Elven Wife, Klara, was infected and within minutes I watched the life slip away from her, I don’t think I will ever recover…”

On a more serious point, social dissidence in a game environment should make for particularly interesting sociological study.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 07:41:52 +0000

Many people have reverse engineered their software to create bots, hacks, and emulated servers.

While i don’t condone hacking per se, i myself have emulated some of their binary protocols in starcraft and diablo II. They simply can’t stop everyone doing it.

I think the main problem is, they don’t distingish between hacking and emulation. Emulation is designed to work in harmony with existing protocols, however hacking is usually used to circumvent some sort of protection or modify existing behaviour. The latter is of course inherently destructive in nature.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 21:32:50 +0000

If anyone deserves a plague, its Blizzard… those stupid fucks…

I can’t believe we live in a world were its illegal to make free software that works with someone elses software… v.v

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 19:26:28 +0000

This was not the first time that mass deaths occured in WoW. Each and every time the devistation has occurred, has been a deliberate act by players after discovering oversights in Blizzard’s design. For some of the battles in game, the high level monsters affect players trying to kill them with “debuffs” or magical effects that are detrimental to them. By design, the effects that can cause mass destruction usually occur immediately or in a very short time afterwards. However, do to the nature of the in-game virtual pets some characters have, they would allow their pets to recieve this debuff, then Dismiss Pet. This would make their pet disappear and freeze all of the effects in place, allowing them to travel wherever they wish, re-summon the pet, and allow the effect to continue to it’s bloody end in a high population area.

Prior to Hakkar’s Corrupted Blood, all the others effects have been one-time explosions, and players could only “suicide bomb” an area and that would be the end of it. The Corrupted Blood however, was designed even more deadlier as you could infect all nearby allies around you, and repeatedly infect players back and forth. Once “in-game terrorists” succeeded in transplanting it to the major population cities such as Orgrimmar, capital for the Horde, the sheer numbers of players in the area resulted in a sweeping spread to everyone. The persistance of the plague, for hours on end, was mostly due to the ignornance of the population and resulted in repeatedly reinfections in the huddled masses, as their eventual deaths.