[Repost] [Games] World of Warcraft (Part 1: Beta and Vanilla) - dinosaur cartels, naked gnome protest marches, racist stereotypes, funeral massacres, and elf orgies in a tavern in the woods
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
No sooner had WoW developed an economy than pernicious capitalists began to exploit it. Sites opened up, offering gold, rare items, and accounts with powerful characters in exchange for real money. Where these sites acquired it, no one knew for sure, though there were rumours. Most assumed they just bought it from players at a low price and then sold it at a mark-up, and that definitely happened. But the owners of these sites sought to maximise profits, and minimise costs. The solution was to set up sweat shops in China. Dozens, if not hundreds of them.
Multiple interviews have been done with Chinese gold farmers. They all described it as mentally exhausting, with working days of at least 12 hours, often spent killing a single enemy over and over. The value of farmed gold is different across the world. A day’s worth of gold could sell in China for $4 dollars, but could fetch triple that amount when sold to Americans.
“It's a very labor-intensive job. I don't see it any different from low-cost Chinese workers working in Guandong, producing Nike shoes, and for Nike to be sold eventually - sold at retail stores for maybe 600 percent margin.”
Yet it is different because gold farming is a gray area. Gaming companies like Blizzard, which owns World of Warcraft, see gold farming as cheating, and regularly ban the accounts of suspected gold farmers. Robin admits he's been closed down four or five times, losing thousands of dollars each time. However, there's always a market for gold farmers. Surveys show 20 percent of gamers admit to buying gold.
According to the New York Times, while some gold farmers enjoyed playing games all day, they nonetheless had strict quotas and were constantly supervised. They estimated that there were between 100,000 and 500,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, earning less than a quarter an hour. It’s true that this practice did not originate with WoW. But WoW is perhaps the first time it became a major issue due to the sheer size of the playerbase, and the overwhelming demand for black market gold.
For its part, Blizzard has tried to crack down on black markets, but arguably their most successful attempt was by creating the WoW token, effectively creating a legal avenue to sell gold via Blizzard. That has its own controversy, which we’ll get to later.
In an interview with Jared Psigoda, a market leader in virtual trade, he states that originally, these black markets were regionally exclusive. Europeans worked in the European black market, Chinese players in the Chinese, and Americans in the American, which resulted in dramatically different prices. It was in the early 2000s that the use of Chinese labour was used across the board, undercutting western currency exchanges, in order to make further profit.
Perhaps the most infamous group of gold farmers were the Devilsaur Mafia. They realised killing devilsaurs in Un’Goro Crater had the potential to return the highest profits out of any creature in the game. While devilsaurs didn’t drop much, they could be skinned to get Devilsaur Leather, a material from which a number of powerful pieces of hunter armour could be made, such as the Devilsaur Leggings and Devilsaur Gauntlets. Outside of raiding content, this was the best gear you could get in Vanilla wow. All in all, a single devilsaur could net its killer 20 gold – a kingly sum at the time.
On PvP servers, these cartels had teams on both factions working as security – if a Horde player tried to step on the Mafia’s turf, the Alliance security team would be alerted and sent to hunt them down, kill them, and keep killing them every time they resurrected at a graveyard. Technically speaking, cross-faction communication was against the Terms of Service, but it was almost impossible for Blizzard to prove players were communicating using third party apps (LINKS TO REDDIT). The only way to get close to a devilsaur on any PvP server was to submit to the whims of the mafia, which meant selling at regulated prices and handing over a cut of the spoils. All-out turf wars were known to occur when multiple cartels came up against each other.
This was not remotely the only instance of farmers banding together to control resources and manipulate the economy – that happened every single day. But it may be the most well-known. And when Classic Wow came about, players eagerly worked to recreate the Devilsaur Mafia.
It’s an interesting case study, but the Mafia disappeared as WoW’s economy grew and changed. The gold farmers did not. For years, WoW’s economy would be driven by a black market that depended on sweat shop labour from China (and later other countries like Mexico, the Philippines and India). It never stopped, but the practice of online black markets for virtual currencies expanded far beyond WoW, to encompass many of the biggest games in the world. Blizzard still hasn’t been able to get rid of it. No company has.
No one had ever made a world as big as Azeroth before. It had been a massive undertaking, a wonder of programming and code which cost $64 million ($94 million accounting for inflation) before it ever even began to see returns – making it comfortably the largest and most expensive game at the time. Thousands of hands left their mark on its world, and while Blizzard would spend years polishing them away, they would never succeed completely. Even now. But it was a lot more obvious in Vanilla and that was part of the charm. For many players, it wasn’t the erotica or the world events or the combat or the gold that drew them to WoW, it was the world itself.
As you might expect from a world that big, it was full of oddities. Little holes in the world, carefully hidden in spots players weren’t meant to see, written messages under the borders of the world, slabs of random environment thrown together in private areas, unfinished or rejected zones, exclusive locations for the developers and game-masters. An entire community grew up around investigating these curiosities, unravelling their meanings, and showing other players how to reach them.
Looking at this map, you can see large empty patches between zones, or on the coast. Below Silithus lay the inaccessible land of Ahn’Qiraj (meant to contain the city of temples we covered earlier), north of the Eastern Plaguelands is the elf nation of Quel’Thalas, somewhere in the inaccessible west of Eastern Kingdoms lay the Twilight Highlands, and then there was the blocked off city of Stratholme, the focus of an iconic moment in Warcraft Lore. Players would agonise for years over the islands in the sea, and what they might be. The challenge became all the more tantalising when players discovered that many of these areas did exist in some form, sometimes mostly finished. Sometimes the reward was standing on a platform or tower in a major city, where no other player could get, and becoming a minor celebrity for the day.
But Blizzard had hidden their secrets well. It wasn’t possible to just ‘go to’ these areas. Explorers had to break the game to do it. A game of cat-and-mouse arose, with players discovering new ‘exploits’ and Blizzard racing to patch them out. There were techniques to fall through the world, climb vertical walls, teleport to a specific graveyard upon death, or overcome fatigue (a timed effect that begins when players move too far from the coast, which rapidly drains health).
To detail all of these hidden spots and how to reach them would take literally hours. To those who want to delve into this topic, I present a quick-fire montage. To the rest of you, let me elaborate on a few of the best ones.
[1] By far the most famous secret area in the game was GM Island, designed to serve as a ‘lobby’ for Game Masters. For years, the island was located north-west of Kalimdor, way off the map. To get there, players had to overcome vast distances of nothingness – a land without texture or direction, which made it totally impossible to reach the island without exploits. So many stories have been penned about GM Island that it has taken on an almost mythical status.
Members of the company were cagey about the island. An image of the island was visible on Blizzard Europe’s Career Opportunities page, but Blizzard rarely spoke publicly on it. Before patch 1.8, players could add GMs to their friends list, and their locations would be listed as ‘GM Island’. A forum moderator ‘Zarhym’ explained in 2010:
The game masters who respond to you in the game are doing so through a separate chat/support tool. They're not actually using the game client to whisper you, however, logging into the chat client means the character they use to contact players with is logged into all of the realms they need to. While GM invisibility exists, it makes it safer and easier to have a simple storage/port point to keep all of these characters out of the normal game world.
The island itself was small and round and covered in dense vegetation, with a tall peak on one side. It included a mansion (taken from Stormwind City), a wall, and a graveyard. There were two NPCs, a Gnome named Ari and Tuskfyre the Troll. Embedded within the lower structure of the island (about 100 yards below the surface) was a hidden room known as ‘The Prison Chamber’. It’s textured with large blank white tiles and lit with a single light source. The only object in the room was a single chair, right in the middle. Players could enter, but can never leave without the help of a GM. Its walls couldn’t be climbed, teleport/hearthstone spells did not work, and it was the only place in the game where players could not be located using the /who command. While the room had no official purpose and seemed to have been added by a programmer purely for their own amusement, it is said that in the early days of the game, before an out-of-game chat interface was added, GMs would take offenders there to discuss their crimes.
GM Island was one of those things you spoke about in a hallowed whisper, hunched in front of a blurry youtube video in 3x4 ratio with an ‘Unregistered HyperCam 2’ watermarked across the top. Those who could reach the island were legends. Most fans would only ever be able to reach it on private servers, which allowed them to teleport straight there – and that is where we get most footage of it today.
The first adventurers to come across GM Island got there by swimming (there was water back then), constantly casting spells to heal themselves from the fatigue damage. It took an hour, and if the player’s direction was even slightly off, they would be forever lost in a seemingly endless ocean. Blizzard removed the water, so players tried manipulated the models in the game files to let them cross. This back and forth process went on for a while. Players found a new way, blizzard patched it out, players found a way around the patch, and so on. When all other attempts failed, the island was moved into an instance, effectively placing it in a separate world upon itself, and then eventually it was removed from the game completely. (LINKS TO REDDIT)
Other locations created for developers include Designer Island and Programmer Isle. Neither was ever accessible in live version of the game – only on private servers. Both are filled with stock assets, written messages, and a few test quests. The regions of Programmer Isle are named after some guys called Jeff and Patty Mack, and there are even a few test NPCs.
Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that so few players ever reached GM Island on a live server, and also due to its mysterious origins, it is still one of the most iconic places in the game. Even years after its removal.
[2] Another famous location was ‘Old Ironforge’. Canonically, Ironforge is a colossal warren of tunnels and halls under the mountains of Dun Morogh. When it was first realised in-game, its scale matched that vision, but it was so big that it seemed unfair – the Horde had no cities that big. So the lower half of it was gated off (though it remained in game). Players were able to reach it by clipping through the world. It was never much of a secret – and even came to hold a more and more important position in the story.
[3] Mount Hyjal was another major test for explorers. It had always been extremely important to the lore of the game, and Blizzard left it out because they wanted to save it for a later expansion. Positioned right in the middle of Northern Kalimdor, its main defence was being a plateau so tall that players had no chance of climbing it. But as we have learned, nothing can stop bored WoW players. Players came up with various ways of slowly, painstakingly clawing their ways to the top, and once they reached it, they found a surprisingly complete zone, with forests, caves, temples, lakes, and an early version of Nordrassil, the World Tree. At the foot of the tree were ‘Blizzard Construction Co.’ barriers.
[4] There’s also the Island of Doctor Lapidis and Gilijim’s Isle – two small islands off the coast of southern Eastern Kingdoms. They’re visible in early maps and seemed to have existed in the WoW alpha, but were taken out after that. It’s possible their names were a reference to the Island of Doctor Moreau and Gilligan’s Island. Minimaps exist from that time and we evenhavea few screenshots. Almost nothing more is known about the islands, but they nonetheless intrigued fans for years.
[5] The biggest unreleased area is Emerald Dream, which had a number of distinct regions with their own unique design. Players speculate that this was the early version of a planned expansion or raid.
A Blizzard representative said in December 2003:
Actually, we have some pretty cool stuff planned for druids. They will definitely have a link to the Emerald Dream. […] I was running around the Emerald Dream last Thursday… you guys are in for a real treat. The level designers are doing a killer job.
However, by September 2006, the developers had clearly changed their minds – either they had soured on the idea completely, or had decided it would be revisited in a later expansion. A statement by Nethaera says:
As for the Emerald Dream, there are no plans for anything as of yet but it is a consideration for the future. The Emerald Dream opens up a lot of different opportunities and the Burning Crusade is definitely not oing to be the last of the expansion packs.
True to their word, the Emerald Dream would surface many times over the course of the game’s life, in the form of instanced or dungeon/raid content, but the original zone was never made accessible.
[6] My personal favourite secret area is the Forgotten Crypt, hidden under the cemetary in Karazhan. Based on its shape, it was originally intended as a dungeon, and I went there once myself For the intrepid explorer, it was one of the easier places to visit. Part of the area includes the infamous ‘Hall of Upside Down Sinners’, which features underwater corpses hanging from hooks. Players speculated that the area was never implemented because it was disturbing, and may have unsettled younger players. However Community Member ‘Bashiok’ commented on the Crypt in 2014, confirming that it was simply an area Blizzard changed their minds on.
Oh yeah, I remember that! Haven't seen a screenshot in quite a while. Not sure I know the story on it but knowing our development processes back then there tended to be a lot more stuff made that we just didn't use. I can't imagine the game rating rumor is accurate, because if it was content we wanted to use we'd just take out the upside-down sinners or whatever the issue was and use it for whatever it was we wanted to do with that space. It's not like they're permanent fixtures. Fun rumor though! :) More likely we just changed our minds.
The area was actually partially opened for players in the Legion Expansion in 2016.
[7] Gilneas was canonically a small peninsular kingdom sticking out of Silverpine Forest in the Eastern Kingdoms, cut off from the rest of the continent by the huge ‘Greymane Wall’. Behind the wall was an incomplete land with no definition, bordered by mountains and ending in a beach. Getting on top of the wall, or finding a way around it was a test for any explorer. Gilneas was fully added as a zone in Cataclysm, in 2010.
WoW has always fostered speculation, theorycrafting and conspiracy among its most ardent fans. Players have spent hundreds of hours piecing together developer ideas from Vanilla, including playable ogres, potential zones in the South Seas, and player housing.
So where’s the drama?
It comes in Blizzard’s ‘hot and cold’ relationship with these explorers. Any player found reaching hidden areas of the game through exploits is deemed a cheater and is banned, as a matter of policy. This is despite the fact that Blizzard clearly leaves hints to incentivise explorative behaviour.
Ultimately, players are still finding new tricks, and Blizzard continues to hunt them down. A lot of fans are against exploration because they don’t want to encourage other players to develop exploits which could be used to give them a leg up in the parts of the game that matter – progression and pvp. During Vanilla, the forums were often full of players complaining about others using exploits, which was part of what motivated Blizzard to monitor them so carefully.
When Classic was released, players leapt at the chance to recreate the iconic exploits of Vanilla. But once again, we will have to wait until later for that.
Right now, we are nearing the end of our time with Vanilla, and the release of World of Warcraft's first expansion, the Burning Crusade. I really appreciate anyone who took the time to read this far, and I hope to upload the next part of this series in a few days.
This was, and remains the most well-known event from Vanilla WoW, and for good reason. The date was 3 January 2006, and Blizzard were releasing the much-anticipated patch 1.9.0. Food buffs would no longer stack, shard bags were introduced, and the Ahn’Qiraj world event would begin. It would affect every one of WoW’s six million (at the time) players.
Ahn’Qiraj is a huge complex of insect-strewn architecture in the south-western corner of Kalimdor, crowned by impenetrable mountains and only possible to enter through a monumental, hexagon-shaped gate in Silithus, to the north. Ahn Qiraj contained two raids, the Ruins and the Temple. But rather than simply throw open the gates to all and sundry, Blizzard created an event designed to unite entire servers around the goal of getting in. What followed was a clusterfuck of such enormity that it made headlines even outside of the gaming sphere.
Firstly, players on both factions would work for weeks to collect resources – hundreds of millions of them. Food, bandages, metals, herbs. Everyone chipped in. The economies across every server collapsed as resources were siphoned away to open the gates. Prices shot through the ceiling.
This part of the process could last from several weeks to half a year. Since each faction had a separate shopping list, it was meant to become a race to see who could get there first. However most servers had/have a major faction population imbalance, and so one finished drastically quicker and ended up waiting in frustration.
Then came a set of extremely long and challenging quests, which only the best guilds could even think of tackling. The reward was a legendary item – the Scepter of the Shifting Sands. To be the holder of the Scepter was a magnificent honour, with much political backstabbing and conspiracy to ensure it fell into the right hands. Only that person with the Sceptre could ring the Scarab Gong and open the gates (and once they did, they would gain a legendary mount to ride around on).
(Gong Ringer's Name), Champion of the Bronze Dragonflight, has rung the Scarab Gong. The ancient gates of Ahn'Qiraj open, revealing the horrors of a forgotten war…
With the gates open, the real battle would begin. Obelisks appeared throughout the world, floating ominously in the sky. For ten hours, ultra powerful enemies flowed out out, swarming players and killing them off in droves. But the enemies dropped valuable loot, so thousands of players flooded Silithus to get a piece of the action. Many thousands. Too many, in fact.
More than had ever assembled in one spot, and it was enough to break the game. Servers saw rolling crashes and such colossal lag that players began to flee the battle ground in the vain hope that it might make the game more stable. Boats glitched out and disappeared with the players still on them, reappearing in a ghostly nonexistent space beneath the world, dead players got transported to cemetaries on another continent - it was utter chaos.
The server to open the gates first was Medivh, on the 23rd January (still an effort lasting twenty days), but others took months. Aside from the greater drama of the event itself, there were many smaller stories taking place within the insanity. Major guilds coveted the wealth of Ahn’Qiraj for themselves, and went to great lengths to get it.
Rather than slowly contribute to the resource pool, they would privately hoard them until they had enough to open the gates on their own. In some guilds, spies would sell information on when the gates were going to be opened. Players would try to steal the sceptre from other guild-mates.
And it didn’t end here. It needed to be repeated every time Blizzard opened a new WoW server – which they were doing a lot, as the game was leaping from strength to strength. It was only in February 2009 that a patch was implemented so that all new servers would release with the gates already open. Ahn’Qiraj was finally over for good. The world event entered into history.
History became legend.
Legend became myth.
And over many years, the gates passed out of all memory. They were still there, quietly seething in a dark forgotten corner of the world. But to many new players, they were nothing more than window dressing in an old zone that no one wanted to level through anymore.
But they were all of them deceived, for another gate was made. But that story will have to wait until later down our timeline.
#The Funeral of Fayejin
This is one of the many strange and curious events that took place in WoW’s early days, back when guilds were more than a place to collect an XP boost. They were closely knit communities who stayed friends for years. These days, when a guild member logs off for the last time, it goes by without notice. But that was not always the case.
Fayejin was a well-loved player on the Illidan PvP server (we’ll get to that), where she played a horde mage. On 28 February 2006, she died of a heart attack. Her guildmates decided to honour her with a digital funeral. Fayejin loved fishing and snow, so they went with one of Vanilla Wow’s most atmospheric zones, Winterspring. It was one of her favourite places in the game.
The funeral was advertised online on all the popular forums of the time, with an open invitation to anyone who wanted to come along. There were dozens of respondents. When the time came, they were summoned to Winterspring. One of Fayejin’s friends was able to get onto her account, and logged on so that other players could say their final goodbyes. It was beautiful.
There were even characters from the Alliance present, in a cross-faction gesture of respect. Rather a lot of them, in fact. And they were all carrying weapons. If that struck anyone as odd, they never had time to contemplate it.
Within minutes, everyone was murdering each other and teabagging the corpses. As is tradition. Black tuxedos don’t do much against knives, and you can’t change your armour when you’re in combat, so the mourners were left defenceless. It was a slaughter.
The raid was the work of the ironically named Serenity Now, and would follow them for years. The organisers insisted that they were honouring Fayejin with one final battle – she was an avid PvP fan, after all. Perhaps the bloody violence that ensued was more fitting than a load of people standing around making sombre emotes at one another. But nonetheless, the forums reacted in anger, though many found it hilarious.
A video of the funeral survives to us from the time thanks to a youtuber named ‘Women Shouldn’t Vote Productions’. Here’s another video about it. And another. It made it to the gaming media, partly because of its climactic ending, partly because of the discourse over whether the raid was acceptable, and partly because nobody had ever held an event quite like it before. On the one hand, it was a funeral, and you can’t just attack a funeral. On the other hand, it was a PvP server and attacking was the whole point of the game. The ethical quandry still divides players today.
Fayejin’s Funeral is referenced in a 2009 academic paper by Stacey Goguen, titled Dual Wielding Morality: World of Warcraft and the Ethics of Ganking and submitted to the ‘Philosophy of Computer Games Conference’ in Oslo.
Regardless of ethics, the raid is what made the funeral famous, and gave Fayejin a place in WoW history. What more could you ask for?
Gamers have long had a querulous history with homophobia. You couldn’t get through a single conversation in Vanilla without someone calling you a fag, and it still pops up a lot now. Blizzard themselves have denounced prejudice toward the LGBT community many times, but this may be a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’. .
When a woman named Sara Andrews set up a guild marketed toward being LGBT inclusive, she was threatened with a ban from administrators, due to the language she was using. They claimed ‘advertising sexual orientation is not appropriate for the high fantasy setting of World of Warcraft’. That’s pretty rich considering the kind of things WoW players say every day – in a much worse tone. The controversy was so great that – once again – WoW ended up in the headlines.
To publicise her plight, Ms Andrews visited many discussion sites and forums where Warcraft players gather. The debate that followed largely criticised Blizzard for its heavy-handed treatment.
Many pointed out that Warcraft has a thriving community of gay players, or gaymers, and that it made no sense to censor talk about players' sexuality outside Azeroth.
Gay pride marches are known to have taken place in Warcraft and there are many other guilds in the game that are known to be friendly toward the gay community.
Two such guilds, Stonewall Champions and The Spreading Taint wrote an open letter to Blizzard criticising its policy.
At first, Blizzard tried to defend their stance. “Topics related to sensitive real-world subjects -- such as religious, sexual or political preference, for example -- have had a tendency to result in communication between players that often breaks down into harassment”, they said. Quite simply, their police on sexuality was ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’, and that only amplified the rage aimed their way. Discussions began to stir of possible legal challenges. They eventually backtracked and publicly apologised to Andrews, promising that its GMs would be given more thorough training on how to handle LGBT issues, but this would be far from the last incident.
Blizzard landed in hot water again in 2011 as one lesbian gamer pointed out during a Q&A session at Blizzon there had not been a single LGBT character in any Blizzard game or property – ever. Creative Director Chris Metzen responded that LGBT characters were ‘certainly a possibility’. The woman who asked about diversity was then harassed on the WoW forums afterward.
Metzen’s open-ended statement would soon turn sour. Blizzard had collaborated for years with the band Cannibal Corpse, who was recorded during an interview at that same convention saying, “Go fucking cry in a river and tell me about how you’re going to slit your wrists you Night Elf f*****.”
Blizzard’s art director, Sam Didier, endorsed the video and invited the band to play on stage. It took a week of negative press for Blizzard president Mike Morkaime to apologise.
A year later, Blizzard turned the profanity filter on by default, and players suddenly noticed that the words ‘transsexual’ and ‘homosexual’ were filtered out, but not ‘fag’ or ‘faggot. Blizzard was quick to change the filter, but the damage was done. The community wanted to know why those words had been blocked in the first place – someone at Blizzard had to have made the decision. Unfortunately, that thread seems to be lost now, but I can tell you it was an absolute clusterfuck that spun rapidly out of control. Members of the Gaymer.com forums had tried on previous occasions to force Blizzard to address the use of homophobic slurs in the game, with no success.
I emailed Blizzard and asked them to do something, Blizzard's response was "just ignore em, they'll go away", riiiiiiiiight, like that's ever worked with a gay basher. So my retort was why would other slurs against minorities go punished, yet calling someone a faggot in open forum is to be "ignored"...
When asked again about diversity at a 2015 MIT Media Lab event, then-chief creative officer Rob Pardo dismissed the idea, stating:
I wouldn’t say that’s really a value for us. It’s not something that we’re against either, but it’s just not … something we’re trying to actively do.
For this gaff, they received an open letter which spoke on behalf of LGBT players, stating they no longer felt valued by the company.
The comments made by Mr. Pardo and Mr. Browder, speaking as employees of Blizzard Entertainment, seem to imply that representing people like me will never be a priority to the company. They seem to be suggesting I go elsewhere.
Sadly it would take a few more years for Blizzard to learn how to not hate the gays.
Just recently in 2019, there would be another controversy over LGBT guilds. A pro-homosexuality guild called ‘GAY BOYS’ was reported “an inappropriate number of times” by other players until Blizzard forcibly removed the name. The guild had been warned before by a forum moderator in 2016, who said, “Picking a name that you can identify with without also using words that would illicit [sic] a reaction from other players would be far more beneficial.” Indeed, members of GAY BOYS claimed they had received abusive messages for their guild name over the years, such as “Fuck the gays, reported.”
The Guild Master blamed rampant homophobia within the WoW community, and accused Blizzard of kowtowing to this subset of players. An in-game pride march was held in protest of the decision, and they were able to successfully appeal it.
“To say there is anything inappropriate about the words GAY or BOYS is, in and of itself, inappropriate, childish, and discriminatory,” Jilani said.
From the very beginning, questions were asked about WoW’s relationship with race. Often, fans laughed them off, or responded with aggression, but these conversations continued well into the present.
Every race has a different backstory, a different home, and most importantly, a different set of abilities. Undead (who had once been humans) could originally speak to humans – the only race who could communicate across the faction boundary – but that was removed because it was being rapidly abused. Certain races could only be certain classes – the nature-oriented Tauren could be shamans and druids, but never warlocks or mages, whereas the more civilised humans could be hunters, but couldn’t be druids.
But what drew the most attention was the real-world people these races were based on. Cultural borrowing is nothing new to MMOs or the fantasy genre, with Tolkien directly comparing his Dwarves to Jews and his orcs to ‘Mongoloids’. Tauren, Humans, Dwarves, and Trolls were caricatures of real world cultures.
Dwarves, taking a leaf out of the Lord of the Rings movies, were Scottish Human architecture was generically European, though they spoke with American accents. Many players pointed out that there was a distinct lack of non-white humans in the story, and while it was possible to create a dark-skinned human, none of the face options had non-white features. So even the blackest human looked like a white person with a tan.
There are no non-white human heroes or NPCs as far as I am aware, I certainly cannot think of a single one off the top of my head.
A lot of players asked Blizzard to add more variety to the character designs, but it would take an astonishing 16 years for that to happen
When you grow up as a Native American, you grow up seeing your culture used as a plaything by the mainstream. We are constantly reduced to a caricature and commodified. Blizzard has perpetuated this history in American media with their massively successful and long-running MMORPG.
Their developers gave the borrowed elements a fantasy paint job and stripped them of their real world cultural identifiers. In doing so they created a race that is instantly identifiable as Native American to its users, while retaining nothing directly belonging to an actual tribe. The Tauren are thus doubly offensive to me for being blatant cultural appropriation for the express purpose of commercial gain, while also continuing the erasure of actual real life natives in the popular consciousness. Hundreds of distinct cultures amalgamated into one group of bull people and their “braves”.
...Lean predators, they're as tall as night elves when they stand fully erect, but normally bob along, hunched over, coiled and ready to spring. While Warcraft players know them by their Jamaican accents, voodoo-flavored culture and wild hairstyles, the trolls are also cruel, sadistic and evil...
This description neglects to mention they were also cannibals. They hobble around with scabbed knuckles, pock-marked skin, tusks, skull adornments, and wild shaggy hair. They were heavily inspired by Haiti/Jamaica, with Zulu influences thrown in for good measure. This portrayal in particular ruffled a few feathers, because it’s not a positive one. A significant subset of fans found the game’s trolls offensive, and demanded change.
But if Blizzard even noticed this outcry, they didn’t care. Later expansions would introduce more races based on stereotypes – far stronger ones, in fact. Worgen are a pastiche of Victorian cockneys, Goblins are Jewish-Italian New Yorker mob bosses with some unsettling antisemitic references (huge noses, disgusting skin, accents, obsession with wealth, absolute psychopathy, con aritsts and crooks). Draenei are vaguely Eastern European refugees from another world, and Pandaren are literally just Chinese pandas with fake accents – but we’ll get to them later.
In the essay “Multiculturalism in World of Warcraft”, Christopher Douglas examines the issue in enormous detail, and long story short, he agrees that the portrayals in the game are racist.
In Azeroth, of course, race is not understood as socially constructed, but rather to be a biological fact. Composed of inherited, immutable, essential differences, race in Azeroth is the old-fashioned (which is to say, nineteenth and early twentieth-century) notion that the outward packaging signifies an inner reality, where the differences are.
WoW has an incredibly complex backstory, with vast amounts of worldbuilding, so it would be wrong to say these races are just thrown lazily together. But the fact remained that there were overtones of racism in many of them. If anything, the story sometimes supports this, such as the time Humans locked up Orcs in internment camps and used them as slaves, which apparently had the positive effect of reducing their desire to kill. Those based on non-European ethnic groups went in the Horde (the faction associated with chaos, primitivism, bloodthirst, barbarism, and savagery), those based on Europeans went in the Alliance. And a large part of the game involved taking allegiance based on your race and killing members of the ‘enemy’ races.
If you are a member of one race, you hate and are hated by this “other” race. We’re literally fighting race wars here, and it’s more than a little unsettling how much it’s just accepted.
Blizzard has tried to undermine the idea that the Alliance is good and the Horde are evil many times, over multiple years. But they would fail again and again, and seem to be inexplicably drawn to portraying them as absolutely vile. Many players like to imagine WoW as a utopian society where – despite the clear connections between certain races and real-life cultures – all players can be whoever they want without prejudice. But it doesn’t take a very close look to see that isn’t true at all.
It doesn’t help that the WoW community long had its own issue with real racism toward players.
We are all Mexican and had really strong accents. One of my friends couldn't quite speak much English at all. We got a lot of bad responses from guilds and got kicked out or resigned because of reactions to our accents and stuff like that. Eventually we found one that was really awesome about it and we would even feel comfortable talking to each other in Spanish during raids in order to not distract anyone else." Said Hernandez in an interview with NPR.
These problems seem to have improved over the years, as WoW’s userbase has grown older and become more open, but in many ways they have not. And this is just race. WoW has always had a similarly strange relationship with sexuality and gender. Speaking of which…
Every zone in WoW has its own regional chat. Opon crossing the border, you will enter that chat and be able to talk to other players in the area. In most cases, these chats are silent and ignored, with one glaring exception.
The Barrens was a large, relatively empty zone where most new Horde players were funnelled after level 10, and where they would remain until level 20. It was a really boring zone, so players chatted to make it go quicker. Barrens chat became infamous for its juvenile and incessant nature, its bizarre conversations and memes, but players would sometimes find themselves talking about philosophy, physics, theoretical science, ethics, law, or whatever subject happened to come up. After out-levelling the Barrens, a lot of players would go back to hang out and make jokes about Chuck Norris.
One of the most popular Barrens memes was Mankrik’s Wife. You see, one quest tasked players with helping an NPC named Mankrik find his lost wife. But since the game didn’t indicate where she was, and there is no NPC called Mankrik’s Wife – she has the unfortunate name ‘Beaten Corpse’ - they often never found her. This all happened in a time before every single answer to every question could be found online. So naturally, newbies would consult the local chat. (LINKS TO REDDIT)
In 2010, the Cataclysm expansion released, and all of the Vanilla zones were revamped, Barrens included. Mankirk’s wife was laid to rest, but her name would live on forever.
Even today, Blizzard sells a shirt that says “I survived Barrens chat.”
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is the best expansion (and game) I have ever played in my life.
I was so addicted that it affected my social life at the time, but it was a great time.
I was a teenager at the time and remember playing for hours.
I have no regrets and will never regret that I played too hard, although it would be better to keep it balanced.
Bottom line is, I had a lot of fun, have great memories, and felt the love of the community.
The fact that the nostalgia is still there all these years later is a testament to the hard work Blizzard put in during the golden era.
A huge thank you to all the game directors, developers, and designers.
We will never forget all the excitement and fun we had!