ranzware
I want to open this article like a responsible adult and say that, generally-speaking, you shouldn’t be trying to exploit, break, or hack an online videogame. I mean, you’re (probably) an adult, you can make your own choices—it’s just inadvisable, unless you want to get banned. In some cases you might even be staring down the barrel of legal action so, seriously: Don’t.
That being said, RAoV Quality Assurance (or, I should say, “ecnarussAeR ytilauQ VoAR”) have been on a near-impressive spree of digital hooliganism. To put a long story short, this guild gained “world first” on WoW’s latest patch raid, Undermine(d), by taking advantage of some developer spells. They got banned, made new accounts, reversed their guild name, and did it again. Now, they’ve posted a video about it:
Look: My sympathies go out to WoW’s dev team, who have put together an otherwise pretty banger patch I’ve been thoroughly enjoying. I’ve less kindness for the wider machinations of a company that’s laid off literally thousands of employees (including QA devs) just after spending $69 billion to acquire Activision-Blizzard in the first place, all in the name of becoming lean, flexible, agile, and other adjectives I don’t care for, but that’s another matter entirely—and certainly not the fault of the developers themselves.
And yet, watching RAoV tear through The Liberation of Undermine has me feeling somehow nostalgic. Now, that might just be because I’m a millennial approaching 30. I grew up in a wild west internet, a time of Albino Blacksheep and Miniclip and Runescape, and only one of those things has survived to the modern era.
The World of Warcraft I grew up with, additionally, had a brimming underbelly of trolls: Ninja-looters, buff dispellers, party-crashers and flame-war starters. If the words “Serenity Now” ring a bell, you know the kind of behaviour I’m talking about—genuinely horrid nonsense that, despite it all, lends a game texture and character. We had to climb up the hill both ways, and usually with an undead rogue corpse-camping us the entire time.
These kinds of acts of public digital vandalism, a temporary embarrassment for Blizzard and an asterisk that’ll linger over this world race for months to come, just don’t happen in games that no-one cares about. They’re a sign that someone, somewhere, is invested enough in this 20-year old MMO to break it over their knee, consequences be damned.
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Kurt Indovina
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