The 5 Biggest Dick Moves in Online Gaming History (Part 5)
Stellar fusion, human dickery, and entropy: the three most abundant processes in the universe. And as soon as we build enough solar panels, that will be the exact sequence of the rest of existence. Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games allow people to screw each other over on more levels than an Escherian orgy. It'll be impossible to get more dick movies into video games until someone fits sexbots with high score tables.
So players will enter ASS on the high score table twice over.
But while assholes try to ruin video games for everyone else, awesome people do the opposite. Which is why I want to give you a free issue of RETRO magazine. I have a column in it, and so does Seanbaby, and these are two reasons to read it in ascending order. Go here, choose a digital option, and enter promo code crackedfreedigital to receive a free issue.
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Now, let's look at more gamers who reversed the polarity of electronic entertainment.
Calling Police on a Livestream (World of Warcraft)
World of Warcraft is now larger than many countries, and has a larger sports industry than many more. Because real countries aren't led by arcane superwizards able to conjure infernal fire from their palms (apart from North Korea). eSports have gone from oxymoron to multimillion dollar industry. Videogame livestreams can embarrass regular sports commentary, because the commentator is also the player, and every single person watching has been in the same situation. Though it can also be more heavy breathing between "ums" than a shy virgin trying to Rocky his way past premature ejaculation. "Swifty" is the former, despite sounding like the latter, and his channel has over one hundred thousand subscribers.
We got this cyberfuture instead of Neuromancer.
But if you've got more than one person watching you online, at least one of them definitely hates you. There's a certain species of scum floating with just enough energy to ruin anything they're in, but not enough to ooze off and find something they like. These are people who'd piss themselves just to distract from the itching of their bedsores. One of them called the police, claiming that someone was threatening people with a knife at Swifty's address. If only he'd mentioned they were the Twin Blades of Azzinoth there wouldn't have been a problem.
"Sorry, we don't have jurisdiction in the Outland. Try the Shadow Lord of the Naga department."
The police arrived during the livestream, which had to be cancelled when Swifty was asked to come down to the station to fill out forms. To help prosecute the goddamn felony, the criminal asshole phoned in to get a man off camera to do things he couldn't see, which would make things worse for the caller. He used the internet to create the exact opposite of a camgirl. I know everyone's upset with the NSA these days, but if they stepped in to reveal these assholes that would be some good PR.
"We are proud to serve the American people by sticking it to that jerk, DraperCock420."
Worse, this was the second time the police had arrived. And that was only after every delivery restaurant in 30 miles refused to deliver to that address anymore, which has to be the most meta resource denial strategy ever attempted.
Suicide Hunting (EVE)
They say that man is the most dangerous game, but that was before man invented video games, which are more fun, and made most men about as physically challenging to hunt as cushions. One group of hunters instead pursued their prey into this virtual world, leveling up their big game hunting to truly Titanic proportions by setting their sights on the largest starships in the largest video game universe in existence.
The big one is the Titan. The circled speck is your starting ship.
The Sniggerdly corporation kills Titans for the same reason people climb mountains: because they're there. But this mountain can fire massive murder-blasts; and if Mohammed won't come to it, it has gigantic jump engines to shoot across the universe in order to find out what his problem is. These people hunt volcanoes with warp engines for fun, and it is glorious. This is TRON and Running Man in space. I want you to remember that concept exists every time Hollywood releases bullshit about the galaxy's dumbest astro-scientists losing a game of hide-and-xeno.
"A murderous alien on the loose? I'd better go off on my own and use the Peripheral Vision Remover!"
One Titan hunt took almost two years. The chance detection of a jump drive field revealed the parked prey. Players found the pilot's name, traced it to that player's alternate characters, then stalked them for 20 months to find out when the big ship was coming out to play. They mounted a global watch with players on different continents and covering all time zones, and when the Ragnarok arose, they were ready: they hunted it, and they destroyed it. These gamers outperformed the Viking gods. Towards the end, they even slowed down their space murder just so that everyone on their team could score a hit to get their name on the killmail, crediting the attackers. That's so much teamwork they're awarding participation trophies for interstellar detonations.
Because you don't tell people, "I don't think you're good enough at exploding things."
Even the ex-pilot of the expired Ragnarok (real world value: three thousand dollars) was impressed, briefly chatting with the destroyers before warping away to high-security space and logging off, probably to avoid losing another thousand dollars to monitor punch-rage.
So they hunted him down and killed him, too.
In EVE, a pilot survives the death of their vessel in a small pod, allowing them to run off and get another ship without losing expensive implants installed in their character. But a Sniggerdly player followed our ex-Ragnarokee. In higher security space, the only way to take him out was a suicide strike, and that's exactly what the hunter did, destroying themselves in an explosion of dickery to wreck another hundred-bucks-worth of implants, which was just the yellow snow icing on the cake.
Though, if one hunter suicides at the end of every real hunt, it would soon fix the problem.
We only show them as arses. For obvious reasons.
Preventing Their Favorite Game (Minecraft)
Some people complain about getting free updates to their video games. They're the most ridiculously entitled beings outside the Prince Baron Duke's slapping people in the face for giving him blowjobs, which is probably something you can pay for in a Hamburg sex club ... and it's still less self-destructive than these assholes.
"Alas, for now I shall never sire an heir, and that peasant got a free sausage."
Markus "Notch" Persson created a finer world than God himself, because on average more people enjoy their time in Minecraft. In 2010, the whole thing was brought down by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack: thousands of computers hammering a server demanding to be let in, making sure that nobody can get in. It was launched by few players, screaming that they wanted more free updates. The free updates Notch had already publicly scheduled, updates he was already working on, were released on time two weeks later despite the interruption. All the assholes had done was ruin everyone's day by screaming for more free things they were getting anyway.
Artist's impression. Not the baby, the rattle: something that does nothing, but makes noise and alerts people to a pampered existence. The baby might mature into someone useful.
This wasn't inconveniencing a major corporation, this was viciously attacking a one-man band, but without justifiably improving the world like viciously attacking a real one-man band. (Sucking at more instruments simultaneously doesn't make it better.) These are people who decide they're not getting enough at the buffet and piss on it to annoy everyone else. The difference is that when people do that online, they then climb onto the salad bar to make a speech about their righteous crusade against the restaurant's criminal lack of ammonia.
"I'M DOING THIS FOR YOU! NOW, BRING ME MORE ASPARAGUS!"
Technology is a personality amplifier. One person and a computer started a multimillion dollar sensation and endless years of fun. If the best someone else can do with thousands more computers is stop people enjoying that for a few hours, they've got less to offer the future of the human race than an ant's penis.
Kiting Lord Kazzak (World of Warcraft)
World of Warcraft's smartest move was dividing the world into two competing factions, because people will fund the most appallingly self-destructive bullshit if they think they're defeating a bipartisan enemy
I wonder what this picture is doing here?
"THE REAL QUESTION IS REPEALING MEDICAL CARE!"
As with any protracted war you have the foot soldiers, and the geniuses working out how to use natural resources to destroy their enemies more effectively. And in the World of Warcraft, natural resources are giant demons instead of iron ore.
"I don't think I can smelt that."
Lord Kazzak was located in The Tainted Scar, winner of the Fantasy Kingdom's "Most Disturbingly Unintentional Euphemism" Award, and as you'd expect, going in without sufficient protection would hurt. This was located on the Blasted Plains, because Blizzard were experimenting with giving the players encounters that didn't mean grinding through a dungeon first. Players reacted to this offering the same way Hannibal Lecter reacted to being offered a pen: escape and slaughter.
Players lured the Lord of the Doomguard like a cat by using themselves as pieces of string, drawing him to the Alliance capital. Kazzak was designed to be a short encounter with a time limit that meant you either defeated him quickly or died. After three minutes he would enter "supreme" mode, where he became effectively unkillable. And the trip to Stormwind is longer than three minutes. So he descended on the city like a Death Star with a manhole cover welded over the exhaust port.
He stomped around the greatest concentration of Alliance players in the world firing volleys of Shadowbolts, murderous Omega beams made of screaming shadow skulls with eyes to find what they're killing. He hit that city like he was looking for the assholes who hurt his pet, Godzilla. He was only put down when a Game Master character arrived, because GMs aren't so much "Gandalf the White" as "Gandalf the Gamma Ray Laser," and a later update moved him further away from the city. And you're a spectacular dick when the Burning Legion warlock Doom Lords have to be rehomed to avoid your abuse.
Monumental Assholery (EVE)
One day I'll write an article where the evilest application of technology isn't in EVE Online. That day will be in 2047, with the return the Event Horizon. CCP Productions recently erected a real world monument to their player base, a stone and steel sculpture engraved with the names of every active player as of March 1, 2014, along with a tribute to dead players of the past. We like this idea of only letting video games escape into the real world as inanimate rocks incapable of hunting us down and killing us. It doubles as rock-solid proof that there's no such thing as ghosts, because every cenotaph in the world wasn't propelled into orbit by the spirits of the angry dead to merge and meteorite Reykjavik into a crater.
Mourning space-capsuleers and making the Ghostbusters obsolete.
It's an amazing effort to recognize the importance of their players, a touching tribute to their community, and it wasn't even a week before some assholes ruined it. And it only took that long because pudgy flesh travels slower than electronic impulses. If we redefined oxygen molecules as "nice things," these bastards would suffocate. They found the only physical expression of achievement or beauty from their entire virtual world, and then theny tweeted about vandalizing it.
Their target, "Xenuria," does seem to have been banned by more corporations than nerve gas, and is about as popular with many people, but their bullshit is on another level. These are people who cared so much that they traveled to find the most important monument of their lives, made an effort, and were then exiled from the heavenly world that they loved so much. These scumbags reversed the polarity of pilgrimage. They were permanently banned, with three people and seven accounts suspended, which means the developers got to virtually exile all of these herostratic scum at least twice over. Now we just need to invent jump drives so we can exile these assholes from our world as well. Hey, we know space is full of chest-bursting, salt-draining horrors. Might as well use the right people to find them.
And only in space might we find things even dickier.
Missing your favorite dick move? It might be in one of the previous articles: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. If not, let me know about it in the forum!
More video game goodness with It's a Wonderful World of Tanks, or face n00b Ramb0 in The Real Classes You Meet In Every Shooter.
Luke also writes for RETRO magazine, tumbles, and responds to tweets.
