The 7 Most Impressive Dick Moves in Online Gaming History

Feng thought that the relentless repetition of pointless death would force his son to stop playing World of Warcraft, proving that Feng really didn't understand what it's like to play World of Warcraft.

Blizzard
Even Orkin staff don't kill pests one at a time, and they're getting paid for it.

You couldn't be more passive-aggressive unless you meditated until the other person transcended existence. Pretending to hire a hit man is bad, but hiring a pretend hit man is even worse: You've spent the money but still have to deal with the asshole. Even worse, you've just taught your unemployed son that playing World of Warcraft can be a career.

Longtime Planetside player Raider05 died, probably not of originality, and his guild, HMX-1, decided to hold an in-game funeral in a player-versus-player zone where it's possible to kill each other. What happened next was so predictable, the only explanation is that they were trying to turn funerals into a group sport. They raised an energy shield that would instantly kill any enemy players, but they didn't spot the fatal flaw: It still allowed anyone on their own side to enter. Specifically, to enter with over a dozen heavy bombers and carpet bomb the entire funeral.

The Enclave guild arrived and blew the hell out of their own side for sheer hilarity. This wasn't like the World of Warcraft funeral massacre, where the targets were simply unprepared for fantasy combat. These funeral-goers were standing respectfully in large concentrations while their attackers rained explosive death from the skies. You'd swear that both sides were doing everything they could to create the perfect bombing run. Which was actually the case.

The only people who were even armed to fire back were the snipers present to fire a 21-gun salute, and even in video games, sniper loses against saturation bombing. The Enclave scored over 200 mourner kills in under two minutes. Somewhere in hell, a high score table had a new No. 1. This was a lifetime record, both because it was a ridiculously high score and because they were disbanded and permanently banned from the game shortly after. Although in fairness, they were probably still laughing.

Final Fantasy XI featured special super abilities players could only use every two hours. Absolute Virtue could use all of them, repeatedly, was immune to everything, had 100,000 hit points, and auto-healed faster than Wolverine. That's not a boss; that's the Pokemon your little brother designs on the back of his schoolbooks. It was about as fun and possible as trying to headbutt your way through the side of an elephant: Even if it doesn't attack and kill you, which it will, it heals faster anyway. Even attempting it both requires and bestows brain damage.

It regenerated at 500 HP per tick. By design it was telling most of the players hitting it that they were wasting even their virtual lives, then it repeatedly cast Benediction spells (which healed it completely) to tell all of them. Then the developers wrote the fact into the game code by weakening spells that worked against it, giving Absolute Virtue extra resistances to weapons players beat it with, and threatening to ban players who found ways to outwit it. Players spent three years trying to kill the thing. Guilds spent over 30 hours continuously attacking, with no success. We don't know whether the designers were practicing to program limbo or if the Rancor trainer from Return of the Jedi quit in grief to become a game designer and take his revenge on all whining nerds.

Lucasfilm
"Sleep well, sweet Rancor. I will make it so that they create their own filthy pits to die against monsters in!"

Videos of these attacks don't look like fun -- they look like Square Enix executives are sitting in a hive somewhere, hissing, "Let the flesh harvest begin!" Because they've found prey who don't move no matter how brutally they're being tormented and will never be missed. When players accused the developers of creating an impossible boss, they released a video with vague hints on how to defeat it, three years later.

It's hard to know who to root for in that battle: the assholes who made it, or the whiners who were still playing. Later that year, they reduced its abilities, although this was less "nerfing" than "tactical nuclear warheading." They also imposed a two-hour time limit on the fight, because they clearly didn't want the bad press of anyone dying during it (which is quite different from caring about whether anyone died during it). If they'd actually cared about lives, they wouldn't have programmed the gaming equivalent of a brick wall with "Bash your head off this 4,332,321 times" written on it.

The fire elemental boss Baron Geddon cast a Living Bomb debuff, which turned players or summoned pets into massive 10-second grenades. Ten-second grenades that were paused, not cancelled, if that pet was dismissed, allowing players to smuggle these living bombs into civilian areas of the game where attacks weren't normally possible and kill a room full of people by shouting, "Here, boy!"

The bomb hit for a basic 3,200 damage, amplified by any damage-increasing gear worn by the victims, and (like any attack) caused expensive durability damage on death. So dropping it in the auction house, packed with unsuspecting victims buying and trying out the most expensive and powerful gear they could afford, was more perfectly targeted dicking than rubbing the G-spot.

Blizzard
The only other place you can ruin so many people with imaginary numbers is Wall Street.

This utilized the same pet-debuff exploit as the corrupted blood plague, which exterminated entire servers. Man, you'd think if anyone understood that players will do the same things over and over again, it would be the developers of World of Warcraft.

But this is the Internet -- beginners should be able to be total dicks to everyone, too! And giving doofuses access to amazing abilities they never earned is technology's entire deal.

Creatas Images/Creatas/Getty Images
"This GPS system, which understands aspects of general relativity I can't even spell, is so slow and stupid!"

Scripts (or macros) are mindless programs that execute a set of boring, repetitive commands so that humans don't have to. They give MMO players great power, in the same way that combining matter and antimatter gives great power: You're combining total opposites to destroy the point of both.

Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images
BEEP BOOP YOU HAVE PROGRAMMED ME TO PLAY WITH MYSELF BEEP BOOP I WAS LESS UNCOMFORTABLE WHEN IT WAS ME WATCHING YOU MASTURBATE ERROR ERROR

Players wrote scripts to select and throw purple potions, alchemical grenades that exploded on contact. The script removed the hassle of inventory access and selection that normally made this a special weapon, turning it into a machine gun. A slow-firing gun, but a gun that fired exploding bullets in a world where everyone else had swords. Unlike intended combat abilities, it could maintain full damage output even when both parties were running at full speed, so shooting fleeing enemies in the back went from war crime to standard protocol.

This wasn't some obscure effect exploited for minor advantages. It was spammed by more online beginners than the Google search for "tits" -- a horde of nobodies running around unleashing alchemical fire on anything and everything that crossed their path. It drove expert players insane. You had some dumbass with a ludicrously lethal weapon insisting that it's absolutely legal according to the rules as they now stand, and you could do nothing to prevent them from just killing you at any time except hope they didn't. It was almost like meeting someone with a real gun!

In EVE, attacking people, hiring professional trolls, even destroying thousands of real dollars are all fairly regular occurrences. To stand out as a dick in this world, you have to take it to the next level, and Alexander "The Mittani" Gianturco was a giant dick on so many levels, he's rendered Dubai skyscrapers permanently obsolete.

Chris Jackson/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Beyond a certain point, it would have been cheaper and less blatant to grow a giant real penis.

As head of Goonfleet, one of the most powerful alliances in EVE space, he targeted a gullible miner called "The Wis" (as in "wizard"). (In EVE, miners are people who escape reality by pretending to be computer programs, repeating the same boring actions over and over to make a small number bigger.) Goonfleet annihilated the Wis so brutally and repeatedly that he sent the Mittani a personal message begging to be left alone, confessing that EVE was all that kept him going since his wife left him and pledging to stay out of Goonfleet's way.

By the way, it's a good rule to assume that anything you write online might be seen by the entire world.

The Mittani didn't just share this mail: He flew to Iceland to present it as a PowerPoint, grabbing a microphone and putting on a wizard hat to read it out in a whiny voice at the official EVE Fanfest 2012, which was being broadcast live around the world, closing by giving out the target's name and inviting everyone else in the game to target him and help drive him to suicide.

That is the Eiffel Tower of dickery, because it doesn't matter if you disapprove -- you still have to admire the sheer level of work put into the pointless gesture. That is more single-minded commitment to being a jerk than converting to Buddhism so you can reincarnate as a Caribbean chef's chicken. Van Helsing didn't travel so far or employ so much technology to destroy his target.

CCP,EVE FanFest2012

"I put on my wizard hat."

There was more fallout than Bethesda. Developers CCP banned the Mittani for a month and kicked him from his position as chairman of the player council -- this is the same company that OK'ed massive banking fraud and the outright destruction of tens of thousands of dollars of player money in-game. When you're such a dick that not only are you visible from space, but that space kicks you back to the real world for a timeout, you are without question the greatest dick in online gaming history.

Luke continues the gaming madness with The Craziest Video Game Patent Of All Time and The 5 Most Gratuitously Sexy Video Games Ever.

The other dick moves you're thinking of are probably in The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming, The 7 Most Elaborate Dick Moves in Online Gaming History, or The 6 Most Spectacular Dick Moves in Online Gaming History. If you've got another one, let Luke know by Twitter, on Tumblr, or in the comments below.