7

The RuneScape Falador Massacre

RuneScape is a free MMPORG which anyone can access through a browser. Lowering the barrier of entry means that they have to create conditions to keep their game from devolving into a wasteland of constant murder and anarchy. There are various controls around combat -- players can fight each other, but only in designated places or as part of combat minigames. RuneScape had created a less violent, more honest society than the real world. The Falador Massacre originated at a house party which represented everything good about the game, beginning as a wacky accident and ending with the slaughter of hundreds. It's like that episode of I Love Lucy where it turns out Lucy's the Boston Strangler.

Player "Cursed You" was celebrating the fact that he'd maxed out on the recently added Construction skill by inviting people to a home he'd built with his hard-won expertise. At this point, you might expect a marauding gang of jealous players to tear his house down, since being constructive is generally not the internet's thing. But in RuneScape, where people apparently celebrate one another's achievements, Cursed You's party was the jam of the century. There were even combat minigames to provide some controlled ass-kicking to keep everyone entertained. So many players showed up to the party that the server started to buckle. Eventually the lag got so bad that Cursed You had to boot everyone back to the peaceful city.

As players milled around, presumably gossiping about who was making out with who before the cops busted it up, the players who'd been in the party's combat ring noticed something: They could still kill people, even if they weren't at a combat location or playing a minigame. They were the first and only people who to have this ability in the history of RuneScape. Of course, making use of the power would require them to slaughter innocent fellow players who had put hours into the online lives they'd be ending. What happened next says worse things about gamers than Jack Thompson.

runescape.wikia.com
Any discovery requires repeated trials.

6

An EverQuest Guide Gets Greek On Players' Asses

Online gamers are the most ludicrously entitled beings since Caligula made his horse a senator, and at least the horse never said anything stupid. I don't say that as an insult; I say it with plenty of self-depreciating love. Hell, almost everyone at Cracked is an online gamer, including me. But there are entitled gamers, and then there are ENTITLED gamers. EverQuest had an overflow of the latter, so they employed "Guide" characters to deal with them. Unfortunately, giving special powers to someone and then ensuring they are exposed to some of the world's most obnoxious gamers turned out to be a better recipe for supervillainy than dropping a criminal mastermind into a tank of chemicals.

A Guide on the Terris Thule server snapped and went full Prometheus on a bunch of players, summoning them to Veshaan's Peak and binding them in the stomping path of a giant dragon. Because eagles are for pussies. Even those who weren't bound found themselves stuck between the dragon and a pack of racnars, aka EverQuest velociraptors, making a rock and a hard place look like a threesome.

"Racnar (noun): Original monster design is hard."

5

The Ultima Online Ecto-Containment Unit

Slimes are how designers tell RPG players to screw themselves. "We know you're going to play anyway, loser, so if you want enemies we put effort into, you can just level up." But years ago, it used to be standard for slimes to split any time you hit them. This is a bigger problem than you might think. It allowed game designers to get away with an impressive amount of laziness by occupying more of your time with the most boring type of enemy. Plus you had to deal with the psychologically crippling realization that your heroic blows were just the foreplay in the slime reproductive cycle, and that you were probably more sexually involved with the amorphous blobs in a video game than you were with any real person.

"Sorry, was this getting in the way of all the oral sex you were having? Didn't think so."

And then one day, slimes in Ultima Online stopped splitting. You probably assumed game designers had decided to challenge themselves, if you noticed the change and know nothing about game designers. But in reality, their hand was forced when a player who went by "Chrae" stood up to make a difference. The first step of his plan was a plague that made God say, "I wish I'd thought of that." He trapped slimes in a house and started firing purple potions (weak alchemical grenades) at them. Since slimes regenerate health, split when damaged, and are able to stack (have multiple enemies in one spot), he generated a house full of exponential slime. Then he opened the door.

It was Steve McQueen's worst nightmare. The land was buried in slimes 100 deep, killing everyone on the server, and then killing the server too. The next day, Chrae demanded a ransom or he'd do it again. People laughed at him, which was pretty brave, given that their universe had crashed the day before ... So he did it again. The day after that, the developers announced that slimes would no longer split when struck. It was a rare case of one man's dickery making a virtual world a better place.

4

EverQuest's Fansy The Famous Bard Isn't Touching You, You Can't Get Mad

Online gamers are MacGyvers of murder. There is nothing they can't improvise into death and grief, an art perfected by Fansy the Famous when he inverted a rule preventing high-level players from bullying beginners into genocide. The Sullon Zek server was an infamous "no rules" haven of exploits until Fansy made it cry uncle. The server was 70 percent evil and 20 percent neutral, turning the usual epic battle between good and evil into a circle-stomp on good's weeping face. Every fight went the way combat between an army of evil and a few lone heroes would actually go.

Fansy was a Level 5 good bard -- in EverQuest, that meant he was barely potty-trained and at such a low level that other players couldn't attack him. His only combat ability was running faster than a group of lumbering Sand Giants. But Fansy had a plan. He realized that his simple, intimidating power could be turned into a devastating weapon to kill everyone, everywhere. In the middle of a battle that he had no right surviving for more than a minute, Fansy provoked two dozen Sand Giants into attacking him. This probably looked profoundly stupid to anyone who bothered to pay attention, since Sand Giants can kill everything. And then Fansy started running. What he'd realized is that Sand Giants can only kill what they can catch. And since he was one of the only things in the game that didn't fall under that category, he could kill everything by using the Sand Giants that were chasing after him. Fansy annihilated vast swathes of the server by running away at them.

http://www.notacult.com/fansynews.htm
You'll notice that one giant is 1) 20 times the size of a player and 2) screwing that entire building.

But Fansy's true exploit was making sure his victims deserved it. He'd wandered around the "no rules" server like a fantasy Forrest Gump: being nice to people, wearing bright colors, and being called Fansy, ensuring that everyone had called him a -- well, you know what they fucking called him -- at least twice. Then he unleashed vengeance with a vast conga line of burly giants pounding everyone's asses. At which point the cool evil players suddenly decided "no rules" was unfair and whined until moderators arrived. The first moderator to show up said "cool," reminded Fansy there were no rules, and enjoyed watching him do it.

3

Asheron's Call's Shard Of Harry

The entire history of mythology is unrelenting douchebaggery, from heroes deciding that murder is cool as long as the victims are a different race to gods bending cosmic forces to screw over someone who forgot to say thanks once. And on Asheron's Call's Thistledown server, one group transcended this divine dickishness to become legend. The game ran a year-long story triggered by players shattering precious crystals, because chasing shiny objects and killing things are all MMO gamers ever do. Unless you want them to, in which case they'll do the exact opposite.

The "Defenders of the Shard" set up camp around the sixth and final crystal, the Shard of the Herald, the prison of Bael' Zhaeron, Hopeslayer. Also, they nicknamed it Harry. 24 hours a day they defended it against other players and sacrificed themselves to it, because Asheron's Call monsters can level up by killing players. The Harry Krishnas impaled themselves on His Spikiness until He was practically invincible. This one group was holding up the next update for every server of the entire game. The developers, in the awesome manner of movie bad guys, stepped in to fight the players on their own level. Instead of simply rewriting the crystal as gone, they appeared in-game as mythical characters and called two high-level players to join their attack. These players had completed an earlier quest making them indebted to the story's cause, but brilliantly, one had already defected and was now a Disciple of Harry.

Emases Street, working together to make sure NOBODY plays.

2

Vaporizing A Thousand Real Dollars In EVE Online

Crowd Control Productions (CCP) infamously lives up to its name with EVE Online, a spacefaring game wherein people pay to plug into a computer to pretend to work for simulated corporations. You could say the company has a dedicated fanbase, but only because clicking on the player agreement means it's legally not slavery.

In an act of diabolical genius, CCP created its own currency without all the problems of being declared a rogue state or arrested by the Icelandic Ministry of the Interior. They set up PLEX (Pilot Licence EXtensions), with which you can convert fake game money into 30 days of extra playing time. With a cash value of $15. So now players can work in the game to be allowed to continue to work in the game. It's the closest humanity has come to the Matrix. They invented their own world and cash currency to use there. There are drug lords with less control over their customers. And if you think this was CCP's full evil plan, they haven't even started stroking their fluffy white cat yet.

The diabolical dick move was to introduce PLEX as in-game items, meaning you could trade it and carry a cargo of real money through a universe of players out to murder you. When you destroy a ship, there's a chance its cargo will turn up in the wreckage loot -- and the word "chance" in this sentence is pretty important. Players "slickdog" and "Viktor Vegas" found a lone cargo hauler carrying 74 PLEX (worth over $1,100), and promptly blew the shit out of it. Including every single one of the dollars. Not one PLEX survived.

Over a grand was electronically vaporized, because that grand had already been paid to CCP, which professionally doesn't give a shit what happens to money after that. They've set up a system whereby they make money when other people destroy it. You can't even Occupy Jita, because you'd have to pay them for the privilege.

1

The Man Who Won World Of Warcraft

There are two main types of MMO. In player vs. environment (PvE), everyone's in it together, fighting the monsters. Meanwhile, in player vs. player (PvP), you can kill each other, because everyone thinks they're going to be Mad Max instead of the guy who tried to catch the razor-boomerang.

World Of Warcraft player Angwe taught them the error of their ways. He was like dropping libertarians into Somalia -- killing them with the embodiment of everything they claimed to want. He camped a bottlenecked route into Menethil Harbor, the only path to a couple of mid-level Alliance destinations, and murdered every single person who passed, every single time they tried.

There was more online rage against Angwe than against everyone who's ever been compared to Hitler combined. There is no body part he hasn't been accused of sucking, eating, being, or enjoying his mother's. He received death threats, but World Of Warcraft death threats are less worrying than fireballs, which can at least pretend to hurt something. Since Horde and Alliance players can't speak to each other via in-game chat rooms, Angwe created an Alliance account so he could listen to his victims. And in an act of combat dickery worthy of the U.S. Army Psychological Ops division, it was called "Angwespy."

He was the incarnation of PvP. People asked if he ever worked. Some wondered if he even slept. They wrote entire FAQs on how to get past him involving teleportation stones, clone characters, and leaping from a boat and swimming along the shore instead of going through the port. Players regularly went through more hassle to get past Angwe than real people did to get into America. He was less a dick than a force of nature, a landscape-altering dick deforming the entire world, like Zeus or Odin. Beating him was an achievement back before that was a thing.

So mankind aren't just the real monsters; we make the best boss characters, too!

For more gaming dick moves, check out The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming (Updated) and A Gamer's Manifesto.

Luke McKinney's favorite tactic is maintaining Level 3 teleporters on Dustbowl while explaining how beer built civilization. He also tumbles and has a website.

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