Big Glitch at WoW Gives Away Season Gear Free

I got a report this evening about an incident in World of Warcraft that appeared to be historic -- correct me if I'm wrong. I know nothing about WoW except hearsay, as I once made a character for five minutes, hunted boars, then got bored or killed and left, not my thing.

But I'm told by those in the know that this was one of those massive free-for-alls you occasionally hear about in MMORPGs. Apparently there were server problems at Blizzard all day today. It's Maintenance Day, and they are supposed to come back on at 2 PM EST, but they didn't show up until 10:30 pm EST, and not all of them. The problems had something to do with the internal mail system.

When the gamerz got back on, some of them found to their delight that when they went to the Champions' Hall, which is the Alliance's PvP vendor area, some of the items were suddenly available for free (normally buy them with game gold, after playing for 3 weeks). Warlock and Priest Season 2 items were among the unexpected freebies. So it wasn't long before the server was mobbed with people, and the scene was a sea of nametags (reminds me of an SL event). Apparently Hunters and Warriors were also rumoured to be getting parts of Season 4 gear.

So what all this boiled down to is that you could make a level one character, like this Priestess shown here, and grab a bag of stuff that wasn't meant for her level, but was supposed to be obtained by hours, days, months, whatever of skill-grinding and mindless battle and bloodshed.

I don't get why people would want to take the fun out of their game and cheat like this, but they do. I also have to wonder if the Blizzard people can't log all their transactions, and if they see, say, a pair of Merciless Gladiator's Satin Gloves, in this princess' inventory, they'd ban her. I was also wondering if they wouldn't just remove all the inventory throughout the entire game, given this glitch, like the Lindens' do with copyright protected stolen items, on the rare occasion, but I'm told in fact they can't do this at Blizzard, because some people came by the gear honestly.

I had an argument with several people about just what this server shown here holds. I'm told 6,000 can log on, but only 3,000 really...but this isn't what you *see*. What you can render or see seems to be more like 200. Does anybody know?

The Blizzard folks must be in a bit of a panic over all this agida, because they are on the eve of a big roll-out of something called the Wrath of the Lich King. I was walking down Fifth Avenue this evening by the Best Buy in the 40s, and I saw police barriers and a big sign that said "22 Hours, 46 minutes, 2 seconds" until the release of this new WoW patch, or expansion kit. There was already some geeky dudes with backpacks standing around -- would they seriously wait all night for this thing?! Apparently the managers are going to have devs on hand to sign copies of the game at midnight on the 12th.

Comments

[melponeme_k]

My server missed that free for all.

The upgraded game gear gives an edge to players, especially in PvP, so I'm not surprised there was a run on this glitch. Usually advanced items can not be used by low level characters, so the problem indicates a larger bug in the system.

I believe Blizzard can log items in their mail system but I'm not sure about anything else. They don't run everything on one server but on shards. And WoW, like all VR worlds, runs on minimal customer service. Right now they have lost everything in their mail system due to the expansion upgrade. So more problems are in the pipe.

Yes, players do sit out all night for their new game expansions. Warcraft is the most popular game of its kind around the nets today. I think they make millions past their overhead.

[Timothy Zapotocky]

WoW does seem to be doing a much better job separating RL selves from RL money than SL is. I noticed a Google Adsense/Adwords ad placement on this blog advertising hand leveling services (where you pay a fellow geek in China some yuan to get your character established): prices started at 130 bucks and went on up from there. That's not much less than the cost of an old OpenSpace sim on SL. And that's almost two years of SL premium membership, which many SL community memebrs don't have because they think $72/yr is just too huge a sum of real money to spend on the game.

The cynic in me is speculating, BTW, that the "glitch" in WoW may have been deliberate. It does give causal players a taste of what they can enjoy if they get more obsessive about the game. It does break up the monotony. It does make people want thinsg they never knew they wanted. And finally it definitely shakes up the in-game economy a little.

One thing Linden Lab is good at is shaking up SL's inworld economy every so often; even though we avis bitch and moan about those changes, we need some changes every so often just to keep the game from getting even more stganant than it is already.

[Kate Fitz]

Blizard today says oops, and takes down the server again to delete the freebies from inventory.

All this gear will be outdated in a few months at most, anyway, at least at higher levels. The expansion will include better and higher level gear. So there was speculation that Bliz was giving away goodies as part of the run-up (not entirely implausible; there are lots of expansion-related events going on, and some do have epic gear for comparatively little effort.) But it was pretty obviously a bug when it turned out it was only selected items on each vendor that were "free..."

Lump this into the "if it's too good to be true...." category.

[Dirk Talamasca]

Well, there's a change. A gaming company fucks up and it benefits the residents instead.

I'm wondering why someone who doesn't play the game, and doesn't appear to understand how it works, is writing about it: (e.g., you do not "buy" PvP gear with regular game gold; you earn it with honor points or marks of honor). The author would do well to take an English Grammar course, as well, which might even be available in Second Life.
Narahchien (WoW) Alleria/Alliance
Cookie Kappler (Second Life) [WARNING: Second Life is a trademark owned by Linden Labs; for God's sake don't use it without letting everyone know.)

[Prokofy Neva]

You cannot post here without using your first and last recognizable SL, RL or blogger's name.

You sound like a typical royal asshole of a typical geeks forum. I can write about whatever the fuck I like. I chose to write about WoW because my son plays it, and because everybody in the neighbourhood was running over to the Best Buy to get in line for Wrath of the Lich King.

I asked my son to explain the bit about the gear. I thought he explained it as buying it with game gold at an auction if you couldn't go through the steps to earn it, but that the glitch meant you could just take it or buy it even if you weren't at the level to get it. So if I misunderstood, shoot me. So what? I said that ordinarily a level 1 character couldn't access it, that's the point; now what you normally had to get through skilling was available easily. My son also told me that the level 1 character couldn't use that gear right away but would then have it and skip the step to get it when up at that proper level.

If you can't legally skip steps by buying the stuff within the game at the auction house, which his what I thought you could do, well shoot me again, but they should have that, it would cut down on gold-farming.

As for grammar, I finished grammar school ages ago, and I don't need grammar instruction; I write as I please at this point. You need to have your wrist slapped with a ruler for being an ass.