Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

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This is the seventh part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 7 – Classic and Legion

Classic was a separate game created to emulate early WoW. Legion was the sixth expansion for retail WoW, coming after Warlords of Draenor but preceding Battle for Azeroth. Since Legion was relatively uncontroversial, I didn't want to dedicate a whole post to discussing it, so I have added it to the end of this one.

“You don’t want to do that. You think you do, but you don’t.”

Those words, delivered by WoW executive producer J. Allen Brack, became immediately symbolic of the relationship Blizzard had with its community. The customer was not always right. In fact, the customer was a fucking idiot who needed to sit back, shut up, and keep paying. At least, that’s how it was seen. In the years since, Brack’s statement has only grown more infamous, more telling, and more painful for the company. It resurfaces whenever Blizzard shoots itself in the foot – an increasingly common occurrence these days.

It came in response to a question asked at the 2013 Blizzcon Q&A – had they ever considered creating legacy servers so that players could revisit old expansions? The answer wasn’t just ‘no’, it was a disgusted, emphatic, overwhelming ‘no’. It was a ‘no’ that said the developers were affronted that they had even been asked.

It wasn’t the first time, either. They had been refusing the idea for years. In February 2008 a community manager said, “We were at one time internally discussing the possibility fairly seriously, but the long term interest in continued play on them couldn't justify the extremely large amount of development and support resources it would take to implement and maintain them. We'd effectively be developing and supporting two different games."

Again in November 2009, they said no.

"We have answered these requests quite a few times now saying that we have no plans to open such realms, and this is still the case today. We have no plans to open classic realms or limited expansion content realms.”

And again in August 2010, Tom Chilton responded to requests with this,

"Currently, my answer would be probably not. The reason I say that is because any massively multiplayer game that has pretty much ever existed and has ever done any expansions has always gotten the nostalgia of, 'Oh God, wouldn't it be great if we could have classic servers!' and more than anything else that generally proves to be nostalgia. In most cases - in almost all cases - the way it ends up playing out is that the game wasn't as good back then as people remember it being and then when those servers become available, they go play there for a little bit and quickly remember that it wasn't quite as good as what they remembered in their minds and they don't play there anymore and you set up all these servers and you dedicated all this hardware to it and it really doesn't get much use. So, for me, the historical lesson is that it's not a very good idea to do"

Perhaps he was right. But the demand was clearly there. And since Blizzard failed to provide, players did the job themselves.

Enter the private server.

These were alternative copies of wow, hosted by a third party. Many private servers were simply replicas of the retail game, offering the same content for free. Others specialised, providing powers and mod commands, the ability to skip straight to max level, to gain items that might normally take weeks or months to get, or visit secret areas which were usually inaccessible.

Since private servers did not update along with the main game, they acted as a kind of time capsule. A private server created during Wrath of the Lich King would stay there long after new expansions had come and gone. Modern World of Warcraft bore almost no resemblance to its earliest form, not in its philosophy, its aesthetic, its gameplay, or most importantly, it’s community. As players became increasingly dissatisfied with WoW’s new direction, and began to hunger for return to the older instalments, these servers gained a new relevance. In some cases, private servers could be listed among the most popular MMORPGs in the world – quite the achievement for something technically illegal.

One of the most successful was Nostalrius, a server preserving Patch 1.12 – the sacred final patch before WoW’s first expansion. It was true to life in every possible way. Recreating the experience of vanilla WoW was easier said than done - not many servers had been able to crack it, but Nostalrius was one.

”Nostalrius is a living museum: a near-perfect record of a place, design choices and play styles that don’t exist anymore.”

What’s more, it was a totally non-profit endeavour. Its creators never asked for any kind of re-numeration, though they could have. They ran the server at a loss. Over its short lifetime (it was up for little more than a year) Nostalrius grew at a faster rate than Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, or Elder Scrolls Online.

"The heart behind all private servers, including Nostalrius, is to recreate a version of the game that many enjoyed and that Blizzard no longer provides," the team wrote in their AMA (LINKS TO REDDIT).

But it was not to last.

On the 10th of April 2016, Blizzard issued the Nostalrius administrators with a cease and desist letter. At that time, the server had 800,000 registered accounts, 150,000 of which were active. The creators had no choice. During its final days, users flooded onto the server. Those crowds, a seething mass of furious indignation and loss, reached a scale that hadn’t been seen in retail WoW for years. It was covered across gaming media.

Some players fired off /cry emotes, others mounted their most impressive horses, or spammed the chat with calls to protest, or made a last ditch attempt to advertise their guilds, and a few simply wished a fond farewell to the server they had come to call home. On the Horde side, hundreds of players marched the hour-long journey from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff, before leaping to their deaths from its highest peak. “ATTACK BLIZZARD SERVERS!! TAKE THEM DOWN!!”, one player screamed as he fell.

”THANK YOU NOSTALRIUS FOR THE GREAT MEMORIES THANK YOU AND GOODBYE! <3”

Time ran out, and the game reset to the login screen, where the black portal sat glittering in the background. ‘Disconnected from server’, said a popup message in yellow text. The buttons no longer worked. Nostalrius was dead.

And its community exploded.

All of Blizzard’s social media accounts were overwhelmed by angry messages, begging them to find some morsel of mercy and, in some cases, threatening them if they didn’t. Major gaming figures weighed in. The scandal broke into every forum, every subreddit, and every server. No private server had ever been the topic of such passionate discourse. But the Nostalrius scandal had come to represent more than a server, it was a martyr in the fight for the right of the consumer to preserve games. Vanilla WoW was not the first game to disappear because its owners no longer wanted to support it. Someday, all online games would face the same fate.

Across the video game industry, a conversation arose. Was modern World of Warcraft the same game it used to be, or something else completely? If Blizzard were not going to provide vanilla servers, did they have the ethical right to stop players from making them, just because they owned the IP? Was this new attempt to clamp down on private servers a desperate bid to reclaim players who had left the retail game? That last question provoked a backlash of its own.

”This is not stealing profits from your game”, declared Jontron. “These people weren’t even subbed. In fact, most of these people just don’t like your current game, so they’re trying to go back and play your old one.”

A petition was created on Change.org to resurrect Nostalrius following its closure. Ex-World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern pledged that if it gained more than 200,000 signatures, he would print all five thousand pages and deliver them to Blizzard President Mike Morhaime personally. It reached 279,000.

In June of that year, something remarkable happened. The team behind Nostalrius was invited to a meeting at Blizzard, where they met Morhaime and Brack, as well as Tom Chilton, Ion Hazzikostas, and Marco Koegler – all the men who held power over the future of Warcraft. For corporate executives to meet with people who had effectively stolen their game was unheard of. They didn’t even put them under a non-disclosure agreement – which Blizzard usually required for all visitors.

”People at key positions inside Blizzard attended the meeting. They were also all very interested, curious, attentive, and asked a lot of questions about all of the topics we mentioned.

We did everything we could to make this presentation & discussion as professional as possible, which was something that clearly was a pleasant unexpected surprise for the whole Blizzard team, Mike Morhaime included.”

It was planned to last two hours, but went on for five. It was summarised on the Nostalrius forum.

”One of the game developers said at a point that WoW belongs to gaming history and agreed that it should be playable again, at least for the sake of game preservation, and he would definitely enjoy playing again.”

The most important thing to come out of this meeting was a confirmation from Blizzard – they wanted legacy servers, but it would be a tremendous undertaking. At the end of the meeting, Blizzard promised to keep in touch.

But they didn’t. In fact, Brack wrote a letter prior to Blizzcon 2016 insisting that legacy servers would not be discussed at the event.

”We had invested our hearts and souls into this meeting, and we got some really good feedback while we were there. But after we left, we heard nothing from Blizzard for months - even after continuing to reach out. And so what were we supposed to do at that point? Were we supposed to just let the legacy server die? Is the dream dead? Well we took things into our own hands, and that’s when the Elysium project happened. We released the server code for the entire Nostalrius project to the Elysium team, Including the player databases for both of our servers.”

Elysium was a new project intended to take over from Nostalrius. A short while later, Nostalrius itself was re-created, but not for long. It shutdown and withdrew its code from Elysium under pressure from Blizzard. Elysium struggled on for a short while alone, until it was broken up from within by internal strife and embezzlement.

All seemed lost.

“I want to talk about ice cream.”

It was Blizzcon 2017. New adventures had been announced for Hearthstone, new maps for Overwatch, and StarCraft 2 was going free to play. The next World of Warcraft expansion was about to be revealed, and there was no doubt that ‘Battle for Azeroth’ would overshadow everything else at the convention. That was until J. Allen Brack stood on stage and started discussing food.

”Before we get to the big news, I want to take a minute. And I want to talk about ice cream. Ice cream is great. Ice cream is one of my favourite desserts. Personally, I love chocolate, and I love cookies and cream. Cookies and cream is actually my all-time favourite dessert. But I understand that for some of you, your favourite flavour… is vanilla.”

A trailer played, reversing through all of the expansions in order, before returning to the famous opening shot from when World of Warcraft first came out. The reaction was colossal.

”It brings tears to my eyes thinking of sitting down with my son and wife to show them WoW Classic.”

[…]

”Thank you blizzard for giving me the game i fell in love with back”

[...]

”THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN BLIZZARD ACTUALLY DID IT. STRAIGHT FROM THE GUY WHO GAVE US, "YOU THINK YOU DO BUT YOU DON'T".”

[…]

”No game has had me tear up before, that changed when I saw the announcement. And after rewatching this 40 times, I still get the same feeling.”

It wasn’t just a trailer, it was a landmark shift in Blizzard’s philosophy toward its games and its community.

With a quick two-minute trailer, Blizzard backpedaled on years of dismissal to finally offer fans an official, unblemished version of the world's most popular MMO as it existed in 2004. This is something they said they'd never do.

To this day, the trailer is the second most upvoted post on /r/wow (LINKS TO REDDIT).

”Amazing. I can now ruin my 30's in the exact same way as I ruined my teens.”

[…]

”This is not good for my career prospects”

[…]

”I'm legit crying right now. SO FUCKING PUMPED!”

[…]

”It took me a few seconds to get the ice cream bit, but when I got it my jaw fucking dropped.”

It’s really difficult for me to convey quite how shocked the community was. This wasn’t like any other announcement. It was spectacular to watch it all unfold.

There were a lot of questions asked in the following days.

Would this be covered by a normal WoW subscription, or separate service entirely? What version of Vanilla would be chosen? It had spanned two years and twelve patches, after all, each different in its own way. Which bugs, glitches and performance issues would be included for authenticity, and which would be left out?

No one at Blizzard knew the answers to most of these questions. The project was still in its early stages.

"We’re going to hire people specifically for this job, and we’re going to staff it with people who are interested in bringing back Classic WoW in the best, most authentic way," Brack says. "And that’s how we’ll be successful."

Even with the whole team focused on it, several years would pass before Classic went live. Blizzard has always loved deadlines – especially the whooshing noise they made as they went by. There were those who started asking why it was taking so long.

If you've been around the World of Warcraft ecosphere for a while, Blizzard's tentativeness might come as a surprise. There is no shortage of emulated vanilla servers on the internet. The official subreddit for the scene points to 15 of them, and there are dozens more holding crystallized copies of Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, or Cataclysm—wherever you happened to leave your happiness.

The reason was this: Blizzard didn’t want to just throw up an emulated Vanilla server. They wanted to fully integrate Classic into the modern game. Brack explained more in an interview with PCGamer,

"We think we have a way to run the Classic servers on the modern technical infrastructure. The infrastructure is how we spin up instances and continents, how the database works. It’s those core fundamental pieces, and running two MMOs of that size is a daunting problem. But now we think we have a way to have the old WoW version work on the modern infrastructure and feel really good."

Why did they bother? Well if they took the easy route, they faced a number of potential issues down the line. These servers were unstable, buggy and incredibly insecure to hacking. Anyone who had touched a private server could tell you so. The work required was immense.

”First, they DO have the source code for Vanilla WoW. Code version control systems are not something new, as it has been a standard in the industry for a long time. With these systems, they can retrieve the code at any given previous backup date.

However, in order to generate the server (and the client), a complex build system is being used. It is not just about generating the “WoW.exe” and “Server.exe” files. The build process takes data, models, maps, etc. created by Blizzard and also generates client and server specific files. The client only has the information it needs and the server only has the information that it needs.

This means that before re-launching vanilla realms, all of the data needed for the build processes has to be gathered in one place with the code. Not all of this information was under a version control system. In the end, whichever of these parts were lost at any point, they will have to be recreated: this is likely to take a lot of resources through a long development process.

In addition to the technical aspects of releasing a legacy server Blizzard also needs to provide a very polished game that will be available to their millions of players, something existing unofficial legacy servers cannot provide.”

A lot was still up in the air. Blizzard were clear, however, that it would be as authentic as possible. They sneered down their noses at the quality-of-life changes which had, according to fans, ruined the game. Guns and bows would need ammo, pets needed to be fed, and they even laboured to recreate the annoyances caused by early 2000s dial-up internet, like spell batching, which processed user inputs in clusters rather than instantly. But some changes remained, like the in-game clock (which wasn’t originally added until Wrath).

Dungeon Finder? Of course not.

Cross-realm grouping? Never.

Flying? Come on.

Achievements? Nope.

Unified Auction Houses? No Way.

”ITS FUCKING HAPPENING!”

On Tuesday 14th March 2019, the fandom awoke. News. Fresh news. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, thousands of nerds stopped on the spot, and scampered back to their mothers’ basements like they’d just won a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. They finally knew (LINKS TO REDDIT) when Classic would go live.

”I just have to stay alive for 3 more months.”

Another user wrote, “THAT'S THE WEEK OF MY HONEYMOON - WEDDING'S CANCELLED”, and he was reassured that if his fiancé was ‘the one’, she would understand. She did not.

”This is what I imagine a former junkie feels like when they’re offered an Oxy.”

Rather than start at 1.12, Blizzard decided to resurrect Vanilla from its first moment. It would begin with Onyxia and Molten Core - the two first raids to be added originally. From there, the patches of Vanilla would be added over the course of a year and a half, so that players could relive Classic as authentically as possible – and so they wouldn’t get bored and unsubscribe.

The days ticked slowly by, and the hype grew to astronomical levels.

”Fuck it's so close, SO GOD DAMN CLOSE

I've dreamt of this since I first got into private servers and I never thought they'd do it but the mad lads did it

Honestly half the fun right now is being part of they hype wave, it's like sitting at a starting line revving your engine”

[…]

”Shit, it's like being back in 2004 all over again, waiting for release. But the hype is deeper, I have so many memories I can't wait to re-live.”

[…]

”Never in my life have I been this excited to play a game.

AZEROTH, I'M COMING HOME BABY! JUST 11 MORE DAYS, 10 HOURS, 12 MINUTES AND 30 SECONDS!!”

Then all of a sudden, the day had arrived. On 26th August 2019, the Classic servers opened, and immediately collapsed due to high demand. But once players got past the hours-long queues, they rushed into the Azeroth of their childhoods. To many, it was everything they had dreamed of. They dived in with youthful abandon. Over a million concurrent viewers tuned in just to watch it on Twitch.

”WoW was essentially struck with a nuclear blast of nostalgia that sent the franchise back into the stratosphere, appropriately enough, for the first time since 2004.

Sixteen years after the game’s original release, WoW permeates the many spheres of online culture once more. What’s most impressive, though, is how the game has stayed resurgent. While the nostalgia surrounding Classic WoW was a driving force for the resurrection of the franchise in August 2019, that nostalgia has morphed into a sustainable platform for WoW.”

During an earnings call a few months later, J Allen Brack revealed the extent of Classic’s success.

“Given the content updates for modern WoW, and the cadence that we have for Classic, we exited our year with a subscriber base that was double what it was at the end of Q2.”

Stories immediately flooded out of the game. Screenshots showed players queuing up in their hundreds to kill mobs in busy areas. One player sent another a box full of mangoes following a conversation in a random battleground. A famous Guild sponsored a race (LINKS TO REDDIT) to be the world’s first max level character, only for a completely separate unrelated player to beat them to the punch. In one bizarre case, hackers discovered a way to leap between copies of the world, in order to get a PvP advantage. I would write about the political intrigue and guild drama surrounding the opening of Ahn’Qiraj, but someone has already done a good job of it (LINKS TO REDDIT).

The long and short of it is this: Classic was a resounding success. It re-vitalised the game and even prompted people to look at retail wow in a more positive light. That was a return to player driven adventures, bizarre encounters, and collective action. For the first time in many years, Warcraft was a community defined by its optimism, not it’s nihilism. And all this did wonders for Blizzards reputation at a time when they desperately needed some good PR.

”People were loving this recreation of the great massively multiplayer game's early days and lamenting what WOW had become in the 14 years since. Someone celebrated freedom from the tyranny of item levels. Someone mentioned the hushed sound design, noting that they could hear every footstep and clink of their chainmail. Someone else remembered how the community was so much friendlier back then, in so much less of a rush.”

”git gud scrub”

For some, Classic was a rude awakening.

WoW had been slowly replaced over the years like the ship of Theseus, piece by piece, patch by patch, until nothing remained of its original form. Those who noticed the change were often unable to pinpoint what exactly was happening, or why. But Classic peeled back all the layers to reveal the bones of Warcraft, and it suddenly became clear.

It wasn’t just that the game was buggy or janky or tedious – though it was all of those things. It was a product of a its time, built in the days of Ultima and Everquest, and that showed in its philosophy. What should be rewarded? What should be punished? How should players overcome challenges? What makes a game fun? Is it more liberating to have a thousand things to do, or nothing at all?

Blizzard answered these questions differently in 2004. Nothing came easily. The time and effort required simply to hit max level were crushing. And for every player the game captured in a cruel cycle of addiction, another bounced right off it.

Perhaps more than anything, Vanilla WoW had been designed for new players. That might sound contradictory, but stick with me. Vanilla had been a new game. Most of its players had never seen anything like it, and it was made with that in mind. While every new expansion brought along more and more features to help newbies find their feet, they gradually abandoned them as the target demographic. Rather than inspiring wonder, they opted for spectacle. The point was not to capitalise on Vanilla, but to depart from it.

The best example is when Cataclysm remade the two continents from Vanilla. Each zone became a sequel to its previous (lost forever) self. A new player wouldn’t understand the references or story threads, but that was okay. New players weren’t who Blizzard wanted to impress.

Vanilla had been awkward, unintuitive, confusing, unforgiving, and full of bizarre experimental edges, but it was only after Blizzard ironed out those wrinkles that players realised how much they lent the game its character.

“It’s bad, but it’s also really good? I mean, it’s still a lot of fun, but it’s also pretty garbage. It’s garbage, but it’s still a classic.”

[…]

”There can be no argument at all that quest design and storytelling were better in early WoW. They could be quite poor. There's an awful lot of mechanical drudgery, with endless culling of wildlife and troublesome local populations, low drop rates and high kill counts padding out the levels with makework. You can find grace notes, of course, like an amusing spat between rival goblin factions, but these could often end up fighting the game systems or poor design.”

It has always been difficult to pin down what made Vanilla great. Topics like design philosophy and historical context are complicated and difficult to explain.

”I logged into current WoW, and just looked at the character screen, wondering: How it was possible to start with such a great game, and end up here like this?”

A lot of people in the Classic community boiled it down to difficulty. Its leaders encouraged an almost cult-like obsession with ‘the grind’, because things had been better back in the day, before the game went soft. They thought suffering and inconvenience were part of what made WoW great.

”If there's no sense of challenge, there's no sense of reward (LINKS TO REDDIT)

In retail, challenge is only an optional way to see content, so there's much less incentive to actually do the challenging content”

Not everyone was unreasonable, and plenty of Classic fans (LINKS TO REDDIT) mocked those who took it all too seriously. But some were, and unfortunately they clung to the spotlight. To them, you weren’t a ‘true fan’ until you accepted Vanilla into your heart. And if you weren’t a true fan, you were the enemy.

Yes, rose-coloured glasses were involved, but you couldn’t say that to people in these circles. To suggest their feelings were the product of nostalgia meant implying they weren’t ‘real’. It was tantamount to an insult, and had been used by the fans and developers of modern WoW for years to dismiss calls for legacy servers.

”Nostalgia is, of course, an important part of the overall picture. WoW landed at a really formative time for a lot of people, a time when they were in high school or in college, had a lot of free time, and all their friends had a lot of free time, and their lives meshed well with the pace of the game, and the game became their shared social space. That is a potent element.”

[…]

When asked about the differences (LINKS TO REDDIT) between modern WoW and Vanilla, one user responded, “Vanilla didn't have people crying about how much better Vanilla allegedly was.”

Discussions of difficulty in games have always evoked strong emotions, and WoW is no exception. This Puritan style of thinking was nothing new – fans of the Souls games had been treading these waters for years. But in the lead-up to Classic, it gained a toxic edge.

Vanilla became an almost mythological entity. Its strengths made it great, they said, but its weaknesses also made it great. Criticism wasn’t just wrong, it was seen by some as actively harmful, borderline blasphemous. But a lot of the people who bought into this idea had never actually been around during WoW’s early days, and so when the first servers came online, they saw behind the curtain.

”For many, this complete lack of direction was clearly overwhelming. The global chat was a chaotic mess of players asking where to find gnolls and bandits, with many picking a random direction from the quest hub and striking out to explore the region, hoping to get lucky and happen upon the right kind of enemy.”

For a lot of players, that was the moment they realised this promised land had never been that great to begin with. They found themselves apostates, cast out of a fandom which was far too busy touching heaven to even notice them leave.

”Wow Classic is god awful. (LINKS TO REDDIT) I played the game at various stages and i have no idea how Wow even survived when it launched in this state. People shit on retail when its magnitudes superior to classic no matter its faults. Classic doesnt even do the basic things well at all.”

[…]

”There is a strong and passionate fanbase of folks for whom this is the best thing ever, but I think a number of people don't realize how many quality-of-life and mechanical changes have been made in the years since.

Blizzard may have strayed too far in some areas, but it's hard not to see some of the tedium reintroduced to WoW with Classic.”

Some weren’t sure if they loved it or hated it.

”Blizzard could not have picked a better zone to stir nostalgia and then skewer it on the truth of how boring the game could be.”

But everyone acknowledged there was something here.

”World of Warcraft Classic is compelling in ways that modern WOW isn't.”

[…]

”I think it’s true that Classic offers something for everyone that retail WoW cannot. They say it’s about the journey not the destination, and I definitely feel that’s the case with WoW.”

And veterans weren’t the only ones who loved it.

”I figure this is mostly for older gamers who have a rose-colored, nostalgic view of the game, but I'm a little curious, so I test it out.

Oh boy was I wrong.” (LINKS TO REDDIT)

It’s hard to have an impartial talk about Classic. The discourse has always been fraught. Classic actively fosters an in-group mentality, due to its emphasis on social dependency. You can't get by as a lone wolf. You can't dip a toe in the water and hope to remain competitive. Either you give everything to the game, or you get left behind.

”If you've only got a few hours a week to dedicate to an MMO, Classic may not be the game for you and you may be better off looking at modern Warcraft to fill that Azeroth-shaped hole.”

[…]

”You spent time together (LINKS TO REDDIT) and got to know each other. Maybe that still happens in small doses but it used to be the whole game.”

This aspect was so strong that for some players, Vanilla WoW was less a game and more a social network.

”WoW was so popular because it gave a sense of community (LINKS TO REDDIT) - something that wasn't really available elsewhere. Social media wasn't a thing, outside of MySpace(lol) and bare bones Facebook you needed a college email to sign up for. No Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, etc. So after a long hard day at work/school, you chilled with your guildmates, who were doing the same.”

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

This is the sixth part of my write-up. You can read the other parts here.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 6 – Warlords of Draenor

This might seem like a bizarre topic to start with, but stay with me here. It all links together.

The Warcraft Movie

On 9th May 2006, a Blizzard press release announced the production of a live-action movie set in the Warcraft universe, in partnership with Legendary Pictures. Fans were euphoric. Blizzard’s cinematic trailers had some of the best CGI in the world. Even today, they have never released a bad one. Fans wanted something like that, only 90 minutes long.

"We searched for a very long time to find the right studio for developing a movie based on one of our game universes," said Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. "Many companies approached us in the past, but it wasn't until we met with Legendary Pictures that we felt we'd found the perfect partner. They clearly share our high standards for creative development, and because they understand the vision that we've always strived for with our Warcraft games, we feel there isn't a better studio out there for bringing the Warcraft story to film."

However good their intentions may have been, the film would linger in production hell for a decade before seeing the light of day. It was scheduled to hit theatres in 2009 under the direction of Sam Raimi (of Spiderman fame), but it was still only in its early stages when Blizzcon 2011 came around..

Uwe Boll, grim reaper of video game adaptations, tried to get his fingers on the film. Blizzard’s response was emphatic.

"We will not sell the movie rights, not to you… especially not to you. Because it's such a big online game success, maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income, what the company has with it.”

Seven years into production, they settled on a director. Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) had directed three films and one of them had been somewhat successful – Moon. He immediately set about changing the story, which set the film back a bit, but they were finally able to make progress. A ‘sizzle reel’ was shown at San Diego Comic Con later that year, featuring a battle between a human and an orc. By the end of 2013, the film had been cast, and began shooting in mid-2014.

Warcraft finally premiered in Paris on 24th May 2016. It grossed $439 million, making it the most successful video game adaptation of all time, but the costs of production and promotion were so high that it still made a loss of up to $40 million for the studio.

The film was… divisive. The average Western viewer was alienated by the dense lore and confusing plot. In fact, it made most of its profit in China, where people flocked to see some CGI warriors smash into each other. Critics (most of whom knew nothing about the Warcraft franchise) absolutely hated it. Writing for Movie Freak, Sara Michelle Fetters said:

”Warcraft can't help but be a major disappointment, the game all but over as far as this particular fantasy franchise is alas concerned.”

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson had a similar opinion.

”Having sat through this baffling movie's grueling two hours, I can't in good conscience even recommend it to Warcraft devotees. There's nothing here for anyone --neither man nor orc”

The New York Post was very critical too.

”Jones ... is trying to deliver something like "The Lord of the Rings" minus the boring bits, but without the boring bits what you have is Itchy and Scratchy with maces.”

It’s true that the film was… a fixer upper. The CGI was impressive but often awkward, the accents were all over the place, the armour looked like bad cosplay, the tone was off, and the characters were hard to empathise with. Nonetheless, it found a following among Warcraft’s oldest fans. On Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, it has user scores of 76/100 and 8.1/10 respectively, which speaks to its cult classic status.

It was a thrill seeing the places and people they’d been playing alongside for years, rendered with such love and care on the silver screen. Stormwind City and Dalaran, the Dark Portal, Durotar and Thrall. It was a love letter to the fans.

The user ‘nerdlife’ had this to say:

”A truly work of love. As a diehard warcraft fan this movie was amazing. So many details, amazing art design and amazing sound design. It truly shows how disconnected the critics are to the everyone else. Me and everyone i know that went to watch the movie truly liked it.”

Here are some more responses.

”Simply a great movie, enjoyed every single bit of it as a Warcraft fan.”

[…]

”As a fan of Warcraft I went into this movie a little bit sceptical, but from ten minutes in I was already loving the film. The majority of critic reviews are pathetic and should just be ignored. The CGI is mostly fantastic, and the story while it is a little rushed at the start is also pretty good.”

In 2018, Duncan Jones would speak out about the issue he raced making Warcraft. It took place during a tumultuous time, both for his personal life and for the film. He said production was plague by ‘studio politics’, with Blizzard and Legendary picking the film apart and forcing multiple re-writes.

Despite all of its issues, rumours circulated in 2020 that a sequel was in the works. The rumours were picked up by Lore Daddy Chris Metzen, who helped create the story of Warcraft, though he has since left Blizzard.

"A new movie based on the huge video game series, World of Warcraft, is reportedly in the works at Legendary Pictures. According to relatively reliable scooper, Daniel Ritchman, Warcraft 2 is now in development, thanks largely to the game and first movie's popularity overseas."

Now, you might be wondering why I started a post about the next World of Warcraft expansion by talking about the film. You see, there was a problem. The movie focused on the ‘First War’, which played out in ‘Warcraft: Orcs and Humans’, the original Warcraft game from 1994. It was pretty light on plot, so most of its story was added retroactively in sequels and novelizations. Only the hardcore lore-nerds really knew much about it.

The most recent WoW expansion, Mists of Pandaria, took place thirty years later, and those years were full of incredibly dense plot. Blizzard were setting their film so far in the past and basing it on a game so few people played, they worried it would alienate fans.

Their solution was ingenious. And by ingenious, I do of course mean mind-bogglingly stupid. The next expansion would take players to an alternate universe, set thirty years in the past.

The Big Announcement

Blizzcon 2013 was a good one. Siege of Orgrimmar had recently come out, and players were loving it. They had seen four patches in the last year, and two of the best raids ever. Diablo III’s expansion was revealed, and it looked great. Blizzard also showed off Heroes of the Storm, their first foray into the MOBA genre, the movie was making strides, and the trading-card game Hearthstone got a beta release. In terms of content, it was one of the busiest conventions Blizzard had ever held.

With so much going on, Chris Metzen didn’t have to generate any hype when he took to Stage D – the audience was already excited. But he took his time warming them up anyway. When he promised a return to Warcraft’s roots, they practically foamed at the mouth. The trailer was a hit. You can watch it here.

People weren’t quite sure what they were looking at, but they liked it.

I need to cover quite a lot of lore to give you a sense of what’s going on, but I’ve boiled it down to its absolute simplest form. Feel free to skip to the next section it if you don’t care.

There were two planets: Draenor and Azeroth. Draenor was the homeland of the Orcs, Ogres and Draenei. Azeroth had the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and so on.

The Draenei were being pursued by the Burning Legion, an infinite army of demons. The legion didn’t find the Draenei, but they found the Orcs and began corrupting them, starting with Gul’Dan.

Gul’Dan manipulated the Orcs into uniting to form the Horde, and waged a war on the Draenei. In an iconic scene, the Orcs drank the blood of the demon Mannoroth, turning their brown skin green and making them fully subservient to the Legion.

Empowered with demonic magic, they easily overcame the Draenei, who fled (and eventually found Azeroth). In response to all the evil energy, Draenor began to die, and the Orcs were forced to kill each other for what little food remained.

While all this had been going on, an extremely powerful wizard named Medivh was born on Azeroth, with his own demonic corruption. He made contact with Gul’Dan and together they hatched a plan. Two Dark Portals were built, one in Draenor and one in Azeroth, and Orcs flooded through. They fought the humans and succeeded destroying Stormwind, one of the Seven Kingdoms. That concludes ‘The First War’.

The Second War followed the Horde as they moved north, conquering most of the continent. The remaining Human kingdoms united with the Dwarves, Gnomes and High Elves to form the Alliance. The Horde was defeated and most of the Orcs were locked up in camps. One of them, a baby called Thrall, would go on to liberate the Orcs, cross the ocean to Kalimdor, and create a new ‘honorable’ Horde. Here’s a helpful map.

Ner’Zhul, an important dude who I’ve mostly left out of this summary, was chased back through the portal into Draenor by the Alliance. He cast an extremely powerful spell which ended up destroying the planet, turning it into Outland.

Anyway.

Thirty (in-game) years later at the end of Mists of Pandaria, Garrosh is put on trial for all those War Crimes he did. Through some confusing plot shenanigans, he’s spirited away to an alternate universe version of Draenor, right before Gul’Dan convinces everyone to drink demon blood. Garrosh sees this as the moment everything turned to shit for the Orcs, so he intervenes and stops it, as we see in the Warlords of Draenor cinematic. Rather than serving the Legion, the Orcish clans unite to form the Iron Horde. Wrathion (from the Mists write-up) engineered all this to happen because he wanted to conscript the Iron Horde to fight the Burning Legion.

They still build a portal and invade Azeroth (our Azeroth, not an alternative Azeroth), but this time they’re just doing it to be dicks I guess. The leaders of each clan make up the titular Warlords.

If you’re interested in learning more, RUN. It won’t end well for you. You don’t want to get into Wow Lore.

But if you do, here’s a concise history of the entire Warcraft universe told by a friendly Dutch fellow. Go to 13:13 for the story I told above.

The bizarre concept wasn’t as controversial as you’d expect. At least not at first. The community was eager to leave Pandaria behind and return to the themes and characters that had made Warcraft great. Draenor offered limitless possibilities for creative storytelling.

Blizzard marketed it as a dark, cut-throat, visceral expansion. The word ‘savage’ was used so much that it became a meme. When the cinematic came out, Chris Metzen tweeted, “the age of the whimsical panda is over”. To help players overcome to premise of Warlords, they showed off detailed plans for zones, patches, the new ‘garrison’ feature, and even the end boss.

This was a mistake.

Death By A Thousand Content Cuts

The beta for Warlords of Draenor began on 5th June 2014, and by all accounts it was kind of a mess.

A bug caused female Draenei characters to ‘fail to display their default undergarments’, which made it possible to be fully naked. The female draenei population skyrocketed on the affected servers. Another bug warped Night Elf facial textures, which one beta tester described as ‘similar to the aliens from They Live’. The dungeons were ‘violently unstable’, and ‘the loading bar boss was reported to have defeated 99% of players’. All characters were wiped – multiple times. At one point the servers were knocked offline due to a fire at a substation near Blizzard’s offices. One of the servers was labelled [EU] when they were all actually US servers, so that server became overpopulated because all the European players were using it.

And that was just July.

In the PvP zone ‘Ashran’, Paladins were given an overpowered item that let them stun enemies and teleport them to the Stormshield dungeon. A group of Alliance roleplayers began abducting members of the Horde, keeping them stunned while they held trials, sentenced them to death, and summarily executed them. A developer discovered this and described it as ‘awesome’, but the item was removed.

WoW betas are best compared to the Wild West. They’re a chaotic storm of bugs and half-finished assets. It can be difficult to figure out what exactly is going on. But it soon started to seem like almost as much was being taken away from Draenor as was being added.

On 26 June, Blizzard cancelled the cities. The beautiful temple complex of Karabor had been promised to the Alliance, and the Horde had been offered Bladespire Citadel, a colossal and intimidating fortress. The buildings remained as empty shells where a few story quests took place, but were otherwise abandoned. Instead, players would get Warspear and Stormshield, small villages made from generic assets, nested on either end of Ashran.

The reaction was immediate. Complaints filled every forum. The main MMOChampion thread stretched out to well over six-hundred pages. There wasn’t much debate – everyone was pissed off.

"Yes I was positive about other changes in warlords, but this one makes me one to not play the game."

[…]

"This is absolutely horrible, why would they do this?! I don't understand. I was looking forward to these cities a lot. Please change it back."

The community speculated on why this had happened. Was Blizzard cramming the Horde and Alliance together to encourage PvP? Was there a lore reason? Did they have more important plans for Bladespire and Karabor? Some players believed the faction capitals were being made deliberately shitty because Blizzard were going to introduce new, cooler ones later (LINKS TO REDDIT).

Blizzard tried to create some story-based reason, which was immediately torn apart in a storm of mockery (LINKS TO REDDIT) and sarcasm.

As more information came out, it became clear that the truth was much less exciting. Blizzard was struggling for time. Bashiok, one of the developers, said ‘We saw how much time it would take, said that’s not reasonable, and went for a reasonable solution’.

But if you read my previous post, you would know why that explanation fell on deaf ears. Mists of Pandaria had the longest content drought ever, specifically due to the development of warlords taking so long. So this expansion was taking longer to make, but delivering less? (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"This is a huge part of every expansion (LINKS TO REDDIT) because it's where we spend the most time in the expansions lifetime. And after our previous lackluster faction hubs in MoP to have an even more lackluster faction hub in warlords puts a MAJOR damper on my excitement. I REALLY hope blizzard finds a way to give us what we want."

[…]

"Ice Mountain Tower would have been better. That's something new for a city. Instead we got Orc Camp 37G."

[…]

"Fuck the shattered capital, beacon of light in a dark world. Fuck the mystical floating city. Fuck the golden pavilion hidden away in the ancient grove.

We've got wooden huts with red roofs! Maybe get some sharpened logs jutting out everywhere. Slap some spikey iron on a couple of the important buildings. And the floor can stay dirt."

There was a subset of players who tried to defend the decision, pointing out that things can change during the beta of a video game and it doesn’t always constitute broken promises, or that it simply didn’t matter.

"People are making this a bigger issue than it is. (LINKS TO REDDIT) Your just going to use it for portals and the bank anyway so what is the problem?

Honestly, I'm fine with the change. Apparently the sky is falling circle jerk revolving around this change is so strong that someone trying to stay positive is treated as a pariah, though."

The outrage which flared in response to this logic was almost worse than the fury aimed at Blizzard. The fans began to turn on one another. It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.

"Suddenly the thread is full of people who never commented on the issue before, for some reason trying to support Blizzard's bullshit. Smells pretty bad in here. Lots of people aren't just going to follow along with blizzard on this one, fucking deal with it."

At first Blizzard had given the impression that the cities had been cancelled during development. It later came to light that though the exteriors were complete, there was ‘never any actual work done to build them into faction hubs’. It seemed Blizzard had known for a while that the cities were never going to materialise – perhaps even before Blizzcon - but they had chosen to avoid mentioning it until as late as the beta. It was never going to go down well.

"So they were teased specifically to get people to preorder the expansion with no intention of actually making them?"

This realisation only added more fuel to the fire.

"Thats not even changing their minds during the developing process, which they said they did, they just fucking lied when they told us Karabor would be a city."

The discourse was getting rough, but the cuts had barely begun.

Things were disappearing from the map. This included a large island at the bottom-left of the main continent and Farahlon - one of the main zones revealed at Blizzcon. The loss of Farahlon was particularly controversial because it was meant to become Netherstorm in Outland.

"It's such a shame (LINKS TO REDDIT), because it was the zone I was looking the most forward to, and now that it doesn't even exist on Draenor, Netherstorm feels out of place…"

[…]

"Not having Farahlon leaves the experience of seeing Draenor pre-shattering incomplete, IMO."

[…]

"Fucking half assed expansion."

The explanation Blizzard gave for abandoning the zone was rooted in a lack of direction - no one could agree on how Netherstorm should have looked before it was destroyed. In a later Blizzcon, the developers revealed that the zone was originally planned as a starting area for boosted characters, but the idea was abandoned. Whether that is true, or Blizzard was simply struggling with time and resources, we may never know. We can only be sure that it was scrapped early on, at a time when almost nothing had been built yet.

Since Farahlon was promised as patch content, nobody could be quite sure whether it had been cancelled or simply delayed. There was no big bombshell moment. Blizzard certainly weren’t offering one.

"I don't necessarily think it's confirmed it's not coming so I'm holding out a tiny bit of hope but I'm not too optimistic about it."

Time passed and the map stayed empty and players were left to draw their own conclusions.

The third blow came on the 24th of July when Blizzard cut Tanaan Jungle from launch. Once again this major announcement came in the form of a tweet from a developer, but at least this time they were able to offer a little clarity. It would still arrive in the form of a patch. As Tanaan was the base of the Iron Horde, Blizzard explained, it wouldn’t be practical for players to go there straight away. And it surely had nothing to do with the fact that the zone was so incomplete on the current beta that it could barely be recognised.

The excuse would have gone down more smoothly if it hasn’t accompanied yet another lie. Once again, Blizzard said:

"As to Tanaan, the rest of the zone has always been planned as patch content."

Players were quick to pick holes in that.

"For having been in and following the beta there has been no evidence or hint Tanaan would be pushed into another patch. I don't mind personally but there has been absolutely 0 hints on Tanaan being "intended" to be a patch."

[…]

"I feel if that's the case then this should have been clarified earlier. Today is the first day that its been mentioned that the rest of Tanaan is a patch zone, it's been months since WoD was announced. People have been thinking Tanaan in its entirety would have been with WoD launch.

I have zero issue with the rest of Tanaan zone being patch content, personally. If that was always the plan, then it is what it is. But the lack of communication is disconcerting."

[…]

"Their PR is horrible nowadays (LINKS TO REDDIT). How do they advertise a zone at BlizzCon and then act like we misinterpreted when it was coming out? We understood Farahlon's status as a patch content area easily enough. Tanaan was never presented that way."

To those players closely involved in the beta, it was impossible not to notice that this was a recurring issue. It was starting to draw attention.

"It seems like every week something is getting cut, gated or completely changed from what was announced and hyped people up at Blizzcon."

[…]

"They are getting caught with their pants down, time and time again now."

[…]

"Something is definitely going on behind closed curtains over at Blizzard, the amount of cut content is ludicrous."

[…]

"We can only speculate as to what caused so many issues inside Blizzard."

Then there was the Zangar Sea, which was implied to be a zone – it had its own music, its own enemies, concept art, and someone had clearly started building it. In fact the seas all around the continent were surprisingly detailed. But the Zangar Sea simply never materialised.

There was never any official statement on Zangar. After everything else that had been cut, no one held out much hope.

"Most likely scrapped."

At Blizzcon, developers discussed the Gorian Empire, the homeland of the Ogres. They heavily implied it might be explored in a patch. But like so much else, it was cut.

While we’re on the topic of cut content, I need to mention the Chronal Spire. This appeared in very early maps as the gateway from Azeroth to Draenor. For whatever reason, Blizzard changed their plans to have players enter through the Dark Portal instead. The only problem was that they had already paid Christie Golden to write the book leading into the expansion. Garrosh travelled to Draenor with the help a rogue bronze dragon (the ones with power over timelines).

By changing this plot point, they undermined the book’s narrative, and caused a number of plot holes to appear. By connecting the dark portal in Azeroth to Draenor, they effectively cut off access to Outland. And since players broke that new connection immediately after visiting Draenor, the Dark Portal was rendered useless. Nowadays when players step through, they are teleported to Ashran – which makes no in-game sense whatsoever.

This Bronze Dragon stuff is actually kind of important and cutting it is a huge issue, but I digress.

The player Kikiteno summarised it this way: (LINKS TO REDDIT)

"Blizzard stated they didn't want this to come across as a "time travel expansion" so they really toned down any and all elements of chronal/bronze/infinite anything.

The problem is WoD became a time travel expansion the moment they decided to use fucking time travel as a plot device. Honestly, I would have preferred a time travel expansion, as dumb as it would have been, to a goddamn orc expansion."

But goddamn orcs is what they would get.

A Promising Start

Gamers can be fickle. After all the cuts, all the convoluted plot threads, the bad communication, the messy beta, and after much of the community had begun to notice serious problems behind the scenes at Blizzard, all it took to turn the tide was one really good cinematic. We’ve talked about the trailer before, but I really need to emphasise just how popular it was. To this day, it remains the most viewed video on the World of Warcraft YouTube channel. It had an extraordinary effect. The hype hadn’t been this intense since just before Cataclysm.

There were also the shorts. To promote Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard had released ‘The Burdens of Shaohao’, a set of animations explaining the themes of the expansion. Warlords of Draenor established this as a tradition. If you’re interested in seeing them all, the other sets are, ‘Harbingers’, ‘Warbringers’, and ‘Afterlives’.

Even at this point, perceptive players were beginning to voice serious doubts, but they were helpless in the face of the expansion’s unstoppable momentum. When Warlords released, ten million players flooded its servers. No one in their wildest dreams had predicted numbers like these. Clearly Blizzard hadn’t either, because in the days that followed, almost every realm was brought low by rolling crashes and waves of lag. Most players could barely stay logged on, let alone make progress. Garrisons were totally unusable. Even moving near the garrison area caused the game to break.

It was a problem, but to Blizzard, it was a good problem.

And what’s more, fans loved it. The zones were beautiful, the stories were well-told and ended with lavish in-game cinematics, the dungeons were fun (though there were angry murmurs about how few there were), the garrison system was incredibly popular, and while there was only one raid available at launch, it was extremely good. The Warcraft renaissance heralded by Siege of Orgrimmar was a bust, but this felt real. WoW was back.

While we’re here, let’s just look at what the final product contained.

There were six questing zones, but one was exclusive to each faction. The introductory sequence involved players beating back the Iron Horde at the Dark Portal, passing through, and shutting it down from the inside. Trapped in this new world, players fled on boats to their starting zones.

The Horde started in Frostfire Ridge, a snowy region littered with jagged volcanoes and full of Orcish architecture. Players followed Thrall as he got to know some of Warcraft’s big-name Orcs, such as Orgrim Doomhammer and Durotan – Thrall’s dad.

The Alliance got Shadowmoon Valley, widely considered to be the stand-out zone of the expansion. It was a blue-tinted land full of willows, glowing fae creatures, and crystalline Draenei temples. Its focal character was Yrel, a young paladin trying to find purpose.

After completing their starting zone, players were sent to Gorgrond, a beautiful and wild zone based on Yellowstone park. It typified the ‘savagery’ Blizzard had promised. Then came Talador, a Draenei zone full of fantasy forests. Spires of Arak followed, a totally original zone which explored the origins of Outland’s Arrakoa. Cities were built into its twisted rock formations, and made for an impressive sight. Finally came Nagrand, a remake of the most beloved Burning Crusade zone. It was very similar to the original, and players wouldn’t have wanted anything else.

Blizzard had clearly taken liberties when they designed Draenor, creating zones that had no business existing and ignoring zones which should have been there, but the ‘tourist sights’ had been preserved. The Dark Portal, Black Temple, Auchindoun, Shattrath, Oshu’gun. Blizzard had become masters at exploiting the draw of nostalgia, and they did it excellently here.

Pandaria’s treasures, lore tidbits, and rare enemies had been so popular, Blizzard took them to the next extreme. Draenor was packed full of things to find. Exploring was half of the fun. These zones also saw the advent of World Quests - rather than follow the tightly-choreographed story, they offered broad goals which could be completed in numerous ways, and gave the player huge EXP rewards. It was a welcome change that made levelling alts easier than it had ever been.

Every zone offered the option of two unique abilities which would only be available in that zone. It might be a mount you could use while in combat, or a tank, or a second hearthstone, or the option to call in an airstrike. Each one opened up new gameplay options, and made every zone feel distinct. Players loved it. The idea of ‘borrowed power’ would be much more prevalent in later expansions, and much more controversial, but in Warlords it was beloved.

After reaching max-level, it all became about the garrison. The much-maligned dailies of Mists were almost completely gone, and what little ones remained were kind of pointless. Choosing which buildings to place, upgrading them, collecting followers, and sending them out on missions was incredibly fun. You could have your own inn, your own bank and auction house and farm and mine. It was the player housing that the community had begged for since the game began. The system was popular.

"It’s an interesting iteration of the Panda farms, but the garrisons are good enough at this point to make it interesting to think about how future expansions will incorporate the tech. Farm to garrison to...what? Your own city? Your own airship? It’ll be fun to see how they top this."

At this point, you might be starting to wonder why anyone hated Warlords at all.

Writing for Polygon, Phillip Kollar said:

"At launch, this expansion was a brilliant addition to an already massive game, brimming with new ideas and dozens of potential directions to take things in the future. But following release, Blizzard dropped the ball in a way so spectacular that it’s still hard to believe."

The Problems With Garrisons

It didn’t take long for the first cracks to show.

After a month or two, everyone finished getting their garrisons how they liked them, and settled in for the long haul. The entire end-game was built up around garrisons, and every commodity players could possibly need was within arm’s reach. They were simply too convenient. No one had any reason to leave. Rather than purely acting as a nice place to hang out (like player housing in every other game), Blizzard had needed to make them ‘practical’, and this backfired immensely.

Writing for Massively Overpowered, Eliot Lefebvre suggested that the problem with garrisons was Blizzard’s aversion to customisation for the sake of customisation.

"…the design choices were pretty much universally made with a strictly functional viewpoint. The stated goal of having WoW‘s version of housing fell away based upon the designer assertion that no one wants to play The Sims in WoW, disregarding that the two aren’t mutually exclusive goals. There’s space to argue that these were bad choices, but I think that ties in nicely with examining the other major complaint about Garrisons being an unpleasant chore.

When you can get better rewards from Garrisons than from doing anything else short of Heroic raiding, so to speak, you are naturally going to do that, because why would you not?"

Since every aspect of the garrison had to carry a clear practical purpose, Blizzard found themselves increasingly limited in the customisation options. The features advertised at Blizzcon gradually fell away. Players couldn’t choose which zone to build their garrison in, as they had been promised. They couldn’t choose between multiple layouts - that was scrapped in development. They couldn’t name followers or display trophies taken from enemies. They were very limited in which buildings could go where.

"I think the biggest misstep here is that Blizzard stubbornly refused to acknowledge that players don’t just want an identical castle to everyone else in the game, but that they craved their own personal space to customize.

There is virtually no room in garrisons to express individual creativity. Sure, you can place buildings slightly different and choose music and I think pick a tapestry here or there, but my garrison is going to look pretty much the same as every other alliance character’s place.

Look at how rabid players are with transmog — it’s because that’s pretty much the only way that the game allows them to express creativity and visual personality. Proper player housing in WoW could have been that to the nth degree."

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

In this series I'll be covering most of WoW's biggest controversies, dramas and scandals, as well as plenty of smaller, weird little tales. Any one of these is worthy of its own write-up, but I assume no one wants to see 50+ different World of Warcraft related posts. By the time I finished writing up all the weird shit from WoW's first release, I had double the character count of a single post. And WoW has nine expansions and several spin offs, not to mention drama at its parent company, Activision-Blizzard. So I have decided to split this post up into parts. As for the entries in this post, I’ve tried to put them in chronological order, but there are some dramas that stretched out over many years – and in those cases, I placed them where they started.

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

What is World of Warcraft?

While I’m sure almost everyone has at least some idea of what WoW is, I’ll give a little overview. World of Warcraft is an MMORPG developed by Blizzard Entertainment – a fantasy game which takes place in the colossal online world of Azeroth, where players can quest, fight, and interact with other players. There are two factions – the Horde and the Alliance – each had separate playable races, separate cities, economies, questlines, politics, backstories, and attitudes. The factions acted as the cornerstone for the game’s PvP.

WoW was an immediate hit when it first came out in November 2004. It followed on the heels of games like Everquest and Ultima Online, but completely reinvented the formula, with more player conveniences, far greater variety, graphical fidelity, and storytelling. It was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stagnating genre, and went on to dominate the MMORPG genre for two decades. Here is a video beginner’s guide to those who need it.

EDIT: Here's a great video essay which came out just after this series ended which gives a good introduction to the history of WoW.

Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

‘Vanilla’ is the term players use to refer to the game upon its release. The game was unpolished, its community a wild west where anything went. The rules and expectations of MMORPGs hadn’t really been figured out yet, and so this is when a lot of WoW’s strangest dramas took place. We won’t be touching crazes like the hilarious Onyxia Wipe or Leeroy Jenkins or The Talisman of Binding Shard, because there isn’t really enough meat on the bones there. But they’re fun to go back to anyway.

The Goldshire Inn

TW: Sexual abuse, Rape, Pedophilia

Let’s jump right in at the deep end.

From the start, one of WoW’s most niche (and enduring) attractions has been roleplay. The dominant RP (Roleplay) servers are Moonguard (US) and Argent Dawn (EU), and it is in these communities that we lay our scene. Over the years, many areas and races would be added to the game, giving players loads of different options for where, how and who they could roleplay. But in WoW’s early days, one building would develop a reputation for which it still lives in infamy today. A picturesque little tavern in a snow-white esque woodland. The Goldshire Inn.

One large aspect of RP is ERP (Erotic Role Play). After all, Roleplayers need love too. In case it wasn’t obvious, this is the process of meeting up with other players and roleplaying out sexual encounters.

Dwarves and Gnomes don’t do it for most players (not everyone can appreciate the taste of fine wine), so many ERPers would create a human character (or recreate one with a different appearance/sex) to get their digital rocks off. New humans started in Elwynn Forest at Northshire, and as you can see from the map, the nearest settlement is Goldshire. And Goldshire has an inn. With a bar, bedrooms, and a dark basement full of cobwebs. You can see where this is going.

Goldshire Inn quickly became the hub of roleplay debauchery on WoW. A hive of the blackest scum and villainy. On a good evening, the inn heaved with the pixellated bosoms of naked women dancing on railings, the ‘thip thap thip thap’ of steps as players awkwardly move back and forth, clipping through each other’s bodies. Of course, not all of the roleplay falls into what we would consider ‘legal’. There are plenty of adults roleplaying as children, children roleplaying as adults, abuse, bondage, rape, vore, furry, scat – no matter what you’re into, there’s always someone at Goldshire who shares your degenerate sexual proclivities.

The dwarf chases after an orc who runs through the inn with his snow cannon. Seconds later, a chat window pops up: "You horny? What's your number?" Those who spend time in the tavern quickly run into various characters, such as the night elves, who scurry across the screen in their lingerie, intensely eyeing them before announcing in all caps: "I'm going to fuck you unconscious!"

Various Addons have been created which allow players to create RP profiles, detailing everything about them from age to gender to height to their no-doubt tragic backstories. But these profiles are only visible to other people with the Addon. So there’s often an entire subtextual layer beneath the obvious roleplay, only visible to those in the know.

There’s a slight problem here, however. Humans are the most popular race for first-time players, and for many of them, their first interaction with the greater WoW community is at Goldshire (LINKS TO REDDIT). There are even important quests which force them into the inn, where they are bombarded with booties and breasts, whispered offers of sexual bliss, and confronted with sights that will stay with them forever. This has resulted in a lot of scarred psyches and a lot of awakened fetishes over the years.

Aside from the obvious memes and jokes, Goldshire Inn has provoked discussions of ditigal consent, and child safety online. WoW has a minimum age rating of 12 and is available for free until level 20. For some ERPers, chasing and hunting down non-consenting players across the game-world is part of the fun. For others, they try to move the situation out of the game ASAP, offering to exchange pictures, meet up, or do video calls. In 2010, Blizzard announced it would ‘patrol’ Goldshire Inn and sanction players who infringed upon community guidelines, but that never seemed to do much.

"It was supposed to be a nice evening. I created a mage and went straight to Goldshire. The tavern was packed. All the guests were wearing either fancy costumes or nothing at all. I've never seen so many purple breasts. I thought I'd landed in a real sex club," Klara said.

"A female human really wanted to 69 with me as a few paladins watch and simulate ejaculation through spells that emit white light."

As the old saying goes, what happens in Goldshire stays in Goldshire.

The Warrior Indalamar

This is actually a story from WoW’s beta, but I’m including it here.

For WoW’s entire lifespan, it would see disputes, jokes, and complaints over which class is overpowered and which is underpowered. Before the game, one thing was certain – Warriors were the worst. A lot of players avoided them entirely, and refused to group up with them because they were so ineffective in battle. There were widespread demands for them to be buffed (made more powerful).

But there was one man who sought to prove that Warriors weren’t so bad after all. This was Indalamar. He went against the consensus, insisting that Warriors were, if anything, overpowered. No one believed him. So he posted a video which tore through the community like wildfire.

In the video, Andalamar ran around, downing enemies one after another in two hits or less. It turned out, the Warrior’s abilities held a power that no one had worked out yet. It all had to do with an ability called Bloodthirst – it became active after killing an enemy, and dramatically raised the damage of the next strike. As soon as you hit the next enemy, you would deal massive damage and raise your haste (attack speed) by 35%. The enemy would die almost immediately, activating Bloodthirst for the next enemy, and the next.

Indalamar had been right. Warriors hadn’t been weak, they’d been the strongest class in the game. But before the video had even finished making the rounds, Blizzard nerfed them. The fact that a player had singlehandedly forced Blizzard to change the game made him a household name in the community, beloved by some and hated by others (mostly other Warriors). In fact, he received huge amounts of abuse online from players who felt he had made an already weak class even weaker.

But this story has a happy ending. Indalamar was hired by Blizzard, and they have paid homage to him a number of times. He had his own card in the WoW Trading Card Game, and his own item in a raid named ‘Ramaladni’s Blade of Culling’ (Ramaladni is, of course, Indalamar backwards).

To this day, Indalamar is a legend among WoW players. He was one of the first to reach the heights of stardom – but he would not be the last.

The Suicide Scandal

We’ll continue our morbid theme with a particularly upsetting story from China. The Chinese relationship with World of Warcraft is long and complicated, and I’ll be returning to it periodically throughout this post. Perhaps this event is an omen of things to come.

On 27 December 2004, a thirteen year high school student named Zhang Xiaoyi logged onto his night elf and said his goodbyes to his fellow players. Then he leapt from a 24-storey window in Tianjin. He had just played World of Warcraft for a 36 consecutive hours. Players were quick to link his suicide to the trend of WoW Basejumping, in which characters jump off tall buildings or natural features and compete to see how far they can fall without dying. His suicide note said he wanted to join the heroes of the game, and he left behind a diary in which he obsessed over it day and night. The hospital in Beijing where Zhang was declared dead had this to say:

"Zhang had excessively indulged in unhealthy games and was addicted to the Internet."

Zhang’s parents sued Blizzard at Chaoyang District People’s Court in Beijing, requesting 100,000 yuan ($12,500) in compensation, which seems a paltry amount. They claimed the game was inappropriate for young people, due to the way it trapped them in a cycle of addiction, and they called for a warning label to be added to WoW’s marketing and packaging which said ‘Playing games excessively can harm health’. At the time, a report issued by the China Youth Association for Internet Development stated that up to 13.2% of young people were addicted to computers.

The incident led to a massive outcry, both in the West and China, about the potentially harmful effects of video games. At the time, China had no age ratings like the US, where WoW was rated ‘T for Teen’. Zhang Chunliang, a Chinese expert on game addiction, called for ratings to be established.

Many foreign countries have established strict game classification systems to help parents determine which games are suitable for their children. China should also establish such a system."

The Chinese government refused. Several attempts have been made to push a ratings system, first in 2004 by the Chinese Consumer Association, then again by the Communist Youth League in China, then again in 2010 by the Institute for Cultural Industries, then again in 2011, then again in 2019. Critics accuse China of being too covetous over control.

"The government is not willing to let go of the [market] control," Zhang Chundi, gaming analyst at London-based research firm Ampere Analysis, told Protocol. He explained that most rating systems involve an industry association that designated age-based labels for games, but Chinese regulators are wary of transferring such power to a private organization.

This was WoW’s first taste of the dangers of video game addiction – and it was one of China’s too. But it was really just the start. World of Warcraft would go on to shape the conversation on video game addiction for years to come. It was compared to crack cocaine and overplaying has been associated with numerous health issues. In June 2018, the World Health Organisation listed “gaming disorder” as a disease which impairs control and causes victims to lose interest in other daily activities or hobbies.

China would go on to create multiple laws combatting video game addiction, from limiting how long minors can play games, to banning all games on school days. They would even instate military-style boot camps to break video game addictions.

Critics of these laws have called them authoriarian, and insisted that it is a parent’s responsibility to control their childrens’ access to online games. Many have pointed out that video game addiction is often not a disease, but is rather a symptom of other issues, and tackling these issues should be the main priority.

To most, this seemed like a non-issue. What kind of idiot would get addicted to an online game?

They would change their tune soon enough.

The Million Gnome March

Time to lighten things up a bit.

This was one of WoW’s strangest dramas. Just two months after the release of the game Blizzard was still making drastic changes left and right to the balance of the classes. Players were eager to make their opinions known, because any change, however bad, could be the one Blizzard chose to stick with. But WoW had a huge playerbase, even then, and it took a lot to get Blizzard’s attention. Not everyone was an Indalamar.

Only collective action would do.

The date was 29th January 2005. It was a Friday evening on the server Argent Dawn, and the halls of Ironforge were bustling with players, all of them still new to the game, excitedly trading, looking for groups to tackle dungeons, discussing what new features might be on the way, and roleplaying in what would go on to become the game’s biggest RP server. Perhaps some of them knew about the thunderous anger boiling away on the official forums about nerfs to Warriors, but to the ignorant masses, what happened next came as a total surprise.

A few level one gnomes waddled through the city’s colossal gate. That in itself wasn’t weird. But then a half dozen more followed. And a dozen after that. And then a hundred. And then a thousand. The gnomes kept coming, rushing through the Commons in a fleshy, knee-high torrent of pigtails and low-quality shields. Most of them were naked. In the words of one witness:

”I cannot adequately describe how horrifying a vision that is.” Said one liveblogger

Ironforge was the main hub for Alliance players at the time, so they were welcomed by an audience of hundreds, which swelled uncontrollably as they were joined by other onlookers who wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and possibly join in the gnomery for themselves – first it was members of the Horde on Argent Dawn, then players from other servers. Nothing like this had ever been done before. Some of the locals demanded the protesters go protest somewhere else, and were presumably rewarded for their humbuggery with some nasty headbuts to the shins. But the Million Gnome March could not be stopped.

It began to hit critical mass.

The servers started to lag, players started falling through the world or being knocked out of the game. WoW couldn’t keep up. The Argent Dawn server was great at processing industrial amounts of elaborately emoted porn, but it had never handled crowds like this.

Xanan appeared at the gates. He was a GM – a Game Master. They were WoW’s in-game moderators, reachable only through a reporting tool. To see one in person was an anomaly. It never happened. But the protest had called and Blizzard had answered.

"omg omg, there's an actual GM character here now in Ironforge near the bridge," he wrote. "In 50-some levels, I have never seen an actual GM character EVER in this game.”

But Blizzard wasn’t there to parley. Xanan’s first request was polite. "This is severely impacting other players' gaming experiences. Please be advised failure to disperse can result in disciplinary action." He said, to much derision. The gnomes refused. They would not be moved. The revolution had come and they would rather die on their adorable little feet than live as slaves.

Meanwhile, Argent Dawn continued collapsing around them, to the point where many protesters couldn’t leave even if they wanted to. Blizzard manually restarted the server, knocking everyone offline, but they were back the moment turned on again. Xanan made one final warning.

Attention: Gathering on a realm with intent to hinder gameplay is considered griefing and will not be tolerated. If you are here for the Warrior protest, please log off and return to playing on your usual realm.

We appreciate your opinion, but protesting in game is not a valid way to give us feedback. Please post your feedback on the forums instead. If you do not comply, we will begin taking action against accounts.

Please leave this area if you are here to disrupt game play (sic) as we are suspending all accounts.

Shit had gotten real. A large swathe of protesters took this as acknowledgement of their goals, and logged off before the ban hammer started falling. Argent Dawn locals fled Ironforge in droves. And in a moment of uncompromising brutality that would foreshadow Blizzard’s treatment of protesters and unions for years to come, the suspensions began. The length of the bans varied from a few hours to multiple days, but the end result was the same. A desolated Ironforge.

The Gnomes had fallen.

They vented their anger on the forums once again, but the Million Gnome March had ironically pushed the plight of Warriors to the side. There was a far bigger debate going on now – the rights of players to assemble online, virtual protests, synthetic statehood and the ethics of Blizzard’s response. For its part, Blizzard claimed it had taken necessary action to protect its servers and to keep Argent Dawn running, and that repeating the protest would result in permanent bans. Did that make it acceptable? The protesters pointed out that disrupting society was the entire point of collective action. It was designed to force higher powers to pay attention.

Much like the issue of Goldshire Inn, [people were beginning to realise that online worlds often the same political dilemmas as the real world, but unlike the real world, there were no protections or guidelines in place. These were lawless lands. Years would pass before governments truly began to create and enforce policy on how people and companies can act online.

In the end, Warriors remained weak. Game Designer Tom Chilton wrote a totally separate post about the virtues of Warriors and their unique abilities, but outlined no plans to change them. Players had wide-ranging opinions on the protest.

MMOGs are suppose to be virtual playgrounds, or at least that was the original ideal. However Blizzard doesn't seem to be able to handle that kind of abstract thinking.

Others condemned the protest

Blizzard does the right thing by breaking up the congregation and sending people away to reduce lag. It's not like the CEO and his cronies are sitting around Dun Murogh waiting to be impressed by your 'show of solidarity', the only people who are noticing what's going on are the people who suddenly can't loot their kills, pick their herbs, etc. because the servers are starting to meltdown.

Another had this to say

a MMORPG isn't a democracy. You do not have freedom of speech, you do not have the freedom to assemble. The Constitution does not apply to a virtual world that is owned by a company. The ToS you signed pretty much waive your rights in the real world.

Frankly, assembling a mass to cause lag and crash a server is an idiotic way to voice your opinions. There are the forums, there is email, there are phone numbers, and there is the allmighty credit card you use to make your payments.

Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow put it best

...real life has one gigantic advantage over gamelife. In real life, you can be a citizen with rights. In gamelife, you're a customer with a license agreement. In real life, if a cop or a judge just makes up a nonsensical or capricious interpretation of the law, you can demand an appeal. In gamelife, you can cancel your contract, or suck it up.

Regardless of ethics or effectiveness, many protests would follow throughout WoW’s long history. From the Druids United protests to 2021 Stormwind Sit-in. When all else had failed, players would always return to collective action.

The Menethil Ganker

This is one of my absolute favourite stories from WoW. Legend tells of an orc Rogue who crippled his server for months in early 2005, slaughtering anyone foolish enough to step into his domain. His name was Angwe, and the server was Decethus (PvP).

At this time, Azeroth was made up of two great continents, Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. There were only a few ways of getting between them. Members of the Mage class could teleport, Warlocks could summon, and all players had a hearthstone which would take them back to a place of their choosing, though it had a long cooldown. But the bulk of player traffic went by the ships, which would round-robin back and forth from select points. On the Eastern Kingdoms, your options were Booty Bay in the south, or Menethil Harbour in the Wetlands (just above Ironforge on the map I linked).

Since it linked to two of the three routes, Menethil was the pressure point of the game world. He who controlled the Harbour controlled the world (of warcraft).

Enter Angwe. He spotted a part of the zone leading to Menethil which bottlenecked players, and slaughtered every Allaince player who tried to pass through. He controlled the path day and night in his determination to stop anyone from reaching the harbour.

Angwe quickly rose into infamy, receiving more threats, insults and accusations than most people could imagine, but they only made him more determined. In fact, he lovingly collected them to preserve for future generations. That site has literally hundreds of messages.

Players speculated on when he might sleep, or work, or do anything other than massacring noobs. They wrote extensive guides on the alternatives to going through the pass, such as sneaking under the water along the coast or creating sacrificial clones to distract him. In some cases, max level players would organise convoys to shepherd groups of newer players through the pass. Large groups of PvPers charged the bottleneck to wipe him out, but as a Rogue, he could simply disappear from sight, waiting for individuals to break away from the pack so that he could pick them off one by one. A particularly intrepid sore-loser tried to doxx Angwe but only ended up with his girlfriend’s name – so they assumed he was a woman (because he couldn’t possibly have a girlfriend).

But Angwe was one step ahead of them. He created an Alliance character, inconspicuously named ‘Angwespy’, and used it to monitor his enemies, or taunt them after death. He infiltrated the forums of major guilds in order to intercept their comms.

But where some men see ruin, others see opportunity. Players approached Angwe with offers of gold if he agreed to gank certain other players. To many, he was a celebrity with near mythical status.

[Ancience] whispers: Can’t we make some sort of agreement, so that you can at least stop killing me? Gold? Armour? Exp? Something?

[Angwe] whispers: no

In October 2012, Angwe held an AMA, in which he finally revealed his secrets.

It was just me, typically 8-10 hours a day. I didn't raid, level alts and only rarely did dungeons after 60. My goal was to get on average 100 honor kills in a day (this was before battlegrounds), which would put me either 1st or 2nd place weekly in the honor grind.

For context, an ‘honor kill’ is a reward for killing a player of the same level. Of course, Angwe would also kill any low level players passing by ‘to kill the time’, even if he didn’t get anything for it. Good murder is its own reward.

In 2006, the iconic South Park episode ‘Make Love Not Warcraft’ released, and while nothing has been publicly confirmed, there are those who speculate that the episode is based on Angwe’s reign of terror.

"All the lowbies would wait back there, and I'd usually be fighting whoever is trying to kill me to get on the boat," Angwe explains. "And as soon as I'd die or whatever, you'd see a flood of people run for the boat. Even if the boat came [and I was still alive], they'd just try to get on the fucking boat. A lot of times, the goal wasn't to kill people at that point. I just wanted to make sure none of these fuckers made it toward the boat. If they did, everyone would lose interest in being there and I wouldn't be able to kill anybody anymore."

Ultimately, it was not boredom that killed off Angwe, or defeat by combat. It was Blizzard. They introduced the new ‘Battlegrounds’ feature, which allowed players to fight in separate arenas. To get to a battleground, you had to go to its physical entrance, and the most popular of these was Alterac Valley – just north of Menethil Harbour. As a result, this once-remote zone was now throning with high level PvPers at all times of the day.

Angwe has spoken out many times over the years. After Battlegrounds dropped, he left the game and went to study game design. He now works as a programmer for MMOs, but does not play them himself.

The Kazzak Massacre

One of the highest level zones in the game was ‘Blasted Lands’. In order to give it a sense of danger, Blizzard like to place extremely powerful bosses in questing areas and make them walk around, so that players were forced to be wary of their surroundings. One such boss was Lord Kazzak.

Normally, it took forty max-level players to defeat Kazzak. He had many powerful abilities, including a shadowbolt attack that could hit anyone within a long range, as well as a skill called ‘Capture Soul’, which raised his health by 70,000 every time he killed. This meant that every player death made him considerably harder to defeat.

Due to how WoW’s combat worked, enemies could be kited. Kiting is when a player allows an enemy to attack them, holding onto that enemy’s attention, and gradually runs away, but never fast enough that the enemy stops chasing them. Through this trick, any enemy could be kited to any part of the map. And it just so happened that Kazzak’s little corner of the Blasted Lands was tantalisingly close to Stormwind – one of the largest cities in the game.

Kiting any boss to Stormwind would be an immense task, and Kazzak was no exception. Simply staying alive that long required entire groups working in unison. The trip from the Blasted Lands, up north through the Swamp of Sorrows, then across Dead Wind Pass, around Duskwood, and up into Elwynn Forest to Stormwind could take up to an hour, and Kazzak would continue unleashing fierce attacks the whole way.

But once he arrived at Stormwind’s pearly gates, a chain reaction took hold. The low level players amassed in the city were instantly swept away by his shadowbolt, and every one of them added 70,000hp to Kazzak. He was also able to kill NPCs, who would quickly respawn and die again and again. His health rapidly spiralled into the tens of millions, then the hundreds of millions, as he feasted on a never-ending supply of noobs. A famous video from 6th March 2005 shows him wrecking the city and leaving devastation in his wake.

Kazzak was unstoppable. Once he reached Stormwind, he became an invulnerable wrecking machine. Corpses filled the streets. There was no-where to hide – Kazzak’s shadowbolts went through buildings. The only option was to flee for the safety of the woods.

All seemed lost.

But those massacred players would come for Kazzak.

You see, Paladins had an ability called reckoning. After being the victim of a critical strike, their next attack hit twice. But this ability could be applied any number of times, without limit. If you got two critical strikes, your next hit would do 3x the damage, and so on. Players were quick to exploit this.

All it took was two people - a Paladin and a friend. The two would duel, and the Paladin would sit down while their friend hit them over and over. Hitting a player while they’re sitting down guarantees a critical hit, which meant they could trigger Reckoning as many times as they wanted. The highest recorded number of Reckonings at once is 1800 – that takes hours. But at that point, your Reckoning Bomb could instantly kill any enemy in the game with a single hit. Any player, any monster, and any boss.

Even Lord Kazzak.

And to this day, this is to be the only recorded way players were able to one-shot Kazzak. They never had a chance to try it out once he reached the city, because within 24 hours of the killing, the ability was nerfed.

But it wasn’t enough. Eventually, Lord Kazzak was removed from WoW, and Reckoning was nerfed. Blizzard began clamping down on the many ways players were able to exploit the game.

The Corrupted Blood

This particular incident began on 13 September 2005. Patch 1.7.0 had just released, and with it came Zul’Gurub, a 20-man raid into a troll infested jungle. The final boss went by the name ‘Hakar the Soulflayer’, and had a spell called ‘Corrupted Blood’, which would inflict gradual damage to players, and spread to anyone within a certain radius. It disappeared from players who left the raid, and wasn’t meant to least more than a few seconds. But there was an oversight.

The Hunter class are able to summon pets to fight for them in battle, and if a pet got afflicted with the Corrupted Blood and was dismissed, they would still have the curse when they were summoned again. Even if they were outside the raid.

The first outbreaks were accidental. Hunters brought out their pets in the game’s major cities, only for the Corrupted Blood to spread like wildfire, infecting everyone nearby. Low level players were almost immediately killed off by the plague as it ate away at their healthbars. Many never got the chance to flee – and those who did flee often simply created new outbreaks elsewhere. Before long, these curiosities had developed into a full-blown pandemic.

Much like a real virus, the Corrupted Blood was spread by animals. The NPCs could catch and spread the plague, but were almost impossible to kill, turning them effectively into asymptomatic carriers. Skeletons began to pile up in the streets of Ironforge and Orgrimmar. Dying causes gear to degrade, which is expensive to fix, so many players fled the cities to find safety in the wilderness. Others fuelled the chaos, deliberately causing new outbreaks wherever they could. These individuals were compared to biological terrorists. On the flipside, there were the ‘first responders’, who waded into the epicentres and attempted to heal the sick – though they often caught the Corrupted Blood themselves, and became spreaders in turn.

Many of WoW’s 2 million players would log on just to see what was happening (and then get infected), or log off to isolate themselves. The economy of the game totally shut down as the cities became ghost towns.

There were many parallels with how a real world virus would spread. To the powerful, it was just an inconvenience, so they went about their daily routines, whereas to low-levelled players (comparable to the weak and elderly), it presented an incredible danger.

Blizzard tried to impose a quarantine rule on players to stop the spread, but many refused to obey or didn’t take it seriously. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of WoW players, common sense snuck in at number 79. In the end, it took several hard resets and patches to stop the spread. The virus was contained to Zul’Gurub on 8 October.

Academics at Ben Gurion University in Israel published an article in the journal Epidemiology in March 2007, describing the similarities between the Corrupted Blood and SARS and avian flu. The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention contacted Blizzard and requested statistics for research. One factor that simulations at the time did not consider was curiosity – players put themselves at risk to see what all the fuss was about, in the same way journalists might do in the real world. Nina Fefferman, a research professor of public health at Tufts University, co-authored a paper in the Lancet Infectious Diseases discusing the implications of the outbreak, and spoke out for MMOs to be used to simulate other real world issues.

It should come as no surprise that many people have compared the Corrupted Blood to Coronavirus. Epidemiologists used research from the incident to understand the spread of COVID-19, specifically how societies respond to these kinds of threats.

In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Dr Eric Lofgren is quoted as saying the following:

"When people react to public health emergencies, how those reactions really shape the course of things. We often view epidemics as these things that sort of happen to people. There's a virus and it's doing things. But really it's a virus that's spreading between people, and how people interact and behave and comply with authority figures, or don't, those are all very important things. And also that these things are very chaotic. You can't really predict 'oh yeah, everyone will quarantine. It'll be fine.' No, they won't.”

On Pieces of Garbage

Albert Fish

• Deranged, Harold Schechter

Andrei Chikatilo

• The Red Ripper, Peter Conradi

Belle Guiness

• Hell's Princess, Harold Schechter

Bloody Benders

• Candle of the Wicked, Manly Wade Wellman
• The Saga of the Bloody Benders, Rick Geary

Boston Strangler(s)

• The Boston Stranglers, Susan Kelly

Carl Panzram

• Panzram: A Journal of Murder, Thomas E. Gaddis, James O. Long

Charles Manson

• Manson in His Own Words, Nuel Emmons
• Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi, Curt Gentry
• Love, Sex, Fear, Death, Timothy Wyllie

Columbine

• Columbine, David Cullen

David Berkowitz/"Son of Sam"

• The Ultimate Evil, Terry Maury
• Son of Sam: The .44-Caliber Killer, George Carpozi Jr.

Dennis Nilson

• Dennis Nilsen, Russ Coffey
• History of a Drowning Boy, Dennis Nilson

Dennis Rader (BTK)

• My Boss was the BTK Killer, Mary Capps

EARONS

• I'll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara

Ed Gein (episide link, link, link)

• Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, Harold Schechter
• Ed Gein: Psycho, Paul Anthony Woods

Fred and Rose West

• The Corpse Garden, Colin Wilson

Gary Ridgeway

• Green River, Running Red, Ann Rule

Henry Lee Lucas

• Hand of Death, Max Call

H.H. Holmes

• The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson

John Wayne Gacy

• (John Wayne Gacy: Defending a Monster)[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9650142-john-wayne-gacy], Sam L. Amirante, Danny Broderick

Jeffrey Dahmer

• My Friend Dahmer, Derf Backderf
• The Man Who Could Not Kill Enough, Anne E. Schwartz
• A Father's Story, Lionel Dahmer

Joseph Kallinger

• The Shoemaker, Flora Rheta Schreiber
• Edge of Madness, Kim Cresswell

Marquis de Sade

• The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade

O.J. Simpson

• If I Did It, O.J. Simpson

Richard Ramirez

• Night Stalker, Clifford L. Linedecker
• Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez, Philip Carlo

Theodore J. Kaczynski (Unabomber)

• [Industrial Society and Its Future], (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/225468.Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future), Theodore J. Kaczynski
• Unabomber: A Desire to Kill, Robert Graysmith

William Pickton

• On the Farm, Stevie Cameron

Zebra Murders

• The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights, Prentice Earl Sanders, Bennett Cohen

Zodiac Killer

• Times 17, Gareth Penn

Profiling/Analysis

• Between Good and Evil, Roger L. Depue, Susan Schindehette
• Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, Bill James
• Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, David Levinson

True Crime History & Analysis

Axe Murders

• With an Axe, H. Paul Jeffers

Jon Bennet Ramsey

• The Death of Innocence, John Ramsey, Pat Ramsey
• America's Early Serial Killers, Mike Riley
• Serial Killers: Up Close and Personal, Christopher Berry-Dee

Occultism

Aleister Crowley

• Stealing Fire from Heaven, Nevill Drury
• The Book of Pleasure, Austin Osman Spare
• The Book of Law, Aleister Crowley
• Moonchild, Aleister Crowley

Chaos Magic

• Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic, Phil Hine
• Liber Null and Psychonaut, Peter J. Carroll

Madame Blavatsky

• A Secret History of Consciousness, Gary Lachman

Satanism

• The Satanic Witch, Anton Szandor LaVey
• Damned, Robert Muchembled
• The Satanic Bible, Anton Szandor LaVey
• The Temple of Set, Michael A. Aquino
• The Temple of Set II, Michael A. Aquino
• The Zohar, Nathan Wolski

Magick

• The Power Of Magic, Derek & Julia Parker
• Serpent of Light, Drunvalo Melchizedek
• EULIS! The History of Love, Paschal Beverly Randolph

Ouija Boards

• Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game, Stoker Hunt
• Aleister Crowley and the Ouija Board, J. Edward Cornelius
• Psychic Self-Defense, Dion Fortune

Aliens

• I Know Why The Aliens Don't Land!, Jeremy Vaeni
• The Utah UFO Display, Frank B. Salisbury
• Communion: A True Story, Whitley Strieber
• Secret Journey to Planet Serpo, Len Kasten
• They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, Gray Barker
• Flying Saucers and the Three Men, Albert K. Bender
• Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, Jacques Vallée
• Secret Cipher of the Ufonauts, Allen Greenfield
• Raechel's Eyes, Helen Littrell, Jean Bilodeaux
• Incident at Exeter, John G. Fuller
• The Armstrong Report, Virgil Armstrong

Roswell

• The Day After Roswell, Philip J. Corso