Gamer Dork
Murder in the Streets of Stormwind
A mass slaughter of World of Warcraft players has devastated the popular online roleplaying game.
Hackers were somehow able to gain control of the game and kill characters at will.
Normally players of WoW are unable to kill each other unless they each agree to a dual, but the hackers worked out how to override those protections.
The slaughter saw entire cities wiped out across Azeroth – the world of, well, Warcraft. The populations of Stormwind, Orgrimmar, Tarren Mill, Ragnaros, Draenor and Twisting Nether were put to the hackers’ sword.
Here is the video, via MMO-Champion:
Pretty funny. I liked it better when people just found exploits and kited world bosses into the city. Hacking the code has so much less panache.
Mid-Day Open Thread
The Ohio State Marching Band’s halftime tribute to video games is a must watch:
The horse at about 6 mins is awesome.
First They Came For the Orc Rogues
This is kind of bizarre. Apparently Republicans in Maine have decided to attack a Democratic candidate and DKOS participant for… playing World of Warcraft:
Maine state Senate candidate Colleen Lachowicz is not a witch.
She is, however, an orc assassination rogue with a potty mouth — and the Maine Republican Party believes that disqualifies her from public office.
In an unusual press release issued Thursday, the Maine GOP attacked Lachowicz for a “bizarre double life” in which she’s a devotee of the hugely popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft. In the game, she’s “Santiaga,” an “orc assassination rogue” with green skin, fangs, a Mohawk and pointy ears.
Lachowicz is a Democrat running against incumbent state Sen. Tom Martin in south-central Maine, a heavily Democratic district of about 80,000 people. Martin, elected in 2010, is the first Republican to hold the seat since the 1960s, and his seat is one Democrats are eager to flip back.
The guild in question is Wreck List on Garrosh, and it is a Daily Kos guild for the most part. The GM is a very sweet woman whose character is Dkosmama, a hunter. How do I know this? Well, because I am in Wreck List. I transferred my old UD mage that I used to just pvp with in 2008 or so over to just hang out and play casually. My toon’s name is Cankersore. And I can tell you, Wrekc List’s guild chat is the tamest environment I have been in since maybe doing leaf rubbings in pre-school.
What a truly bizarre avenue of attack- “YOU CAN’T ELECT HER, SHE PLAYS… VIDEO GAMES?” It’s like some shit out of Footloose.
To donate to her campaign, click here. Help a gamer dork out.
The Galactic Banks Refuse To Deal in Such Fiddling Small Change
From an economics nerd perspective, Brad Plumer’s piece over at Ezra’s joint on the team of Icelandic economists studying the inner workings of EVE Online’s player-based economy is a rather nifty read, as online massive multiplayer economies have gotten far more complex, and economics has gotten far more digital and networked, the crossroads of the two were destined to meet.
Eyjólfur Guðmundsson is just that economist. Working for the Icelandic company CCP Games, he oversees the virtual economy of the massively multiplayer video game Eve Online. Within this world, players build their own spaceships and traverse a galaxy of 7,500 star systems. They buy and sell raw materials, creating their own fluctuating markets. They speculate on commodities. They form trade coalitions and banks.
It’s a sprawling economy, with more than 400,000 players participating in its virtual market — more people, in fact, than live in Iceland. Inflation, deflation and even recessions can occur. Which is why, from his office in Reyjkjavik, Guðmundsson leads a team of eight analysts poring over reams of data to make sure everything in Eve Online is running smoothly. His job bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Ben Bernanke, who oversees the U.S. economy from the Federal Reserve.
“For all intents and purposes, this is an economy that has activity equal to a small country in real life,” Guðmundsson says. “There’s nothing ‘virtual’ about this world.”
And as these systems become more complex, they approach the scale necessary to serve as experiments in macroeconomics that model how the real world works, and these games are getting more and more academic study. More than anything however, it’s insight into the heart of economics: people. And people do stupid things when money is involved, frankly.
“Just for example,” [IU-Bloomington Professor Edward] Castronova says, “Facebook has an entire currency system that isn’t taxed or regulated. At what point does that threaten what the Federal Reserve does?”
It’s still a pretty good read, despite the occasional eye-rolling Glibertarian Paradise “Bernanke’s coming for your space hauler” nonsense. On a personal note, I liked EVE Online myself, but when the game turned into paying for a second career in long-distance trucking with lasers, I wandered off to do something else. If that’s your cup of tea, cool. Me, I play games to have fun, not to have a manifest.
Also, the “hell is other people” thing definitely applies.
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Gamer Question
Did the STEAM database just go completely tits up? I tried to install a Civ 5 expansion, and steam no longer recognized my username or email, which really honks me off, because I have multiple games that run through steam. If they have lost all of them, I am going to go ape.
Open Thread: No Respect for Others’ Property
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Thank you, Wonkette, for this:
ALIGNMENT: CHAOTIC EVIL
Rush Limbaugh Newsletter Hops Aboard Nerd Art Plagiarism Bandwagon
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Hey, so what’s the deal with right-wingers, huh? They’re always going on about how sacred PRIVATE PROPERTY is, how it’s all IMMORAL for anyone to benefit from SOMEBODY ELSE’S “hard work,” am I right?…So, yes, it turns out: they didn’t build that.
Click the link for more hilarity, and don’t miss the mouse-over legend on the image. Comments are pretty good, too also.
You’d think by now the fReichtards would have figured out that an image which stuck in their memories might be remembered by others just as well, but then “cluefulness” is not a stat on the rightwing gaming sheets…
Open Thread: No Respect for Others’ PropertyPost + Comments (24)