Put enough people in one place and sooner or later someone will test the boundaries. MMORPGs are no exception. Ranging from the hilariously frivolous to the monetarily disastrous, here are five stories of player-fueled negativity that have made an indelible mark on massively multiplayer gaming, plus a bonus interview of gamers taking extraordary steps to restore one MMORPG to its former glory.

The Assassination of Lord British

Ultima Online - August 8th, 1997

Memorable leaders are a part of the lore of just about every MMORPG. EverQuest 2 has Antonia Bayle and Lucan D’Lere, World of Warcraft has Thrall and Arthas Menethil, and Ultima Online has Lord Cantabrigian British. And behind the avatar of Lord British was the guiding force of the Ultima series and one of the first true rockstar developers (and one that continues to make headlines today), Richard Garriott.

And as Ultima Online approached launch, the in-game manifestation of Lord British was better established in the lore than even the sometime Lich King is in the WoW storyline of today, even taking into account Arthas’s famous cutscene, book deal, and eponymous WoW expansion. For as hopeful testers feverishly doled out shipping and handling to have the beta discs Ultima Online mailed to them, Lord British’s Arthurian-styled pedigree, legendary status, and player-aiding ways were firmly established through no less than seven iterations of the Ultima series.

Richard Garriott, like his counterpart Lord British, is in fact from outer space. He visits occasionally.

Be that as it may, players always sought ways to kill the character often referred to as LB. Raph Koster, a member of Origin’s team throughout most of glory days of the Ultima series and the “garage project” period before UO broke the then incomprehensible 100,000 subscriber ceiling - recalls that Richard Garriott took the attempts on Lord British’s life in stride. “He delighted in telling stories about how LB could be killed in all the standalone Ultima games. Once he’d been beaned by a falling plaque or sign at the offices, and of course, that got put into one of the standalone Ultimas as a way you could kill LB in the game.” [source]

Falling plaques aside, Lord British could be killed in earlier versions of Ultima but not without flawless execution and more than a little luck. One account described pulling Lord British from his throne and surviving the guards long enough to pull LB in range of mounted cannons across town [source]. Since these sorts of shenanigans couldn’t be attempted by anything less than a very advanced player character, no one expected that Lord British would fall to a two week-old character months before the official launch of Ultima Online.

On the night of August 8th, 1997, a series of server stress tests were scheduled, with Lord British making speeches in select locations around the Ultima Online world. Stress tests are used to measure server stability and lag when a large number of players are in a small area - the constant bugaboo of massively multiplayer games. It was hoped that Lord British and Lord Blackthorne (Starr Long) would draw a crowd to the first location, Blackthorne Castle, and he certainly did. Among his audience was Rainz, a nondescript thief played by a 23 year-old software development entrepreneur from Indianapolis, Indiana. Here’s what happened next, as described by Rainz in an archived interview conducted shortly after the event with the now-defunct Online Gaming Review:

Lord British arrives, but as many cheered, one waited for an opportunity.

“LB, Blackthorne, and their jesters were up on a bridge orating to the masses. Unfortunately I wasn't playing my mage character, so casting spells from a spellbook was out of the question. Luckily my character was a good thief who had high "stealing" skill. I desperately searched the backpacks of those around me and eventually came upon a fire field scroll.

“After that it was pretty simple, I just cast the scroll on the bridge and waited to see what would happen. Either LB or Blackthorne made the comment "hehe nice try", can't recall exactly who. It was a humorous sight and I expected to be struck down by lightning or have some other evil fate befall me. Instead I heard a loud death grunt as British slumped to his death. After that it was just pure mayhem, Blackthorne or another force summoned 4 daemons into the castle and people were dying left and right.... I hauled balls out of the region like there was no tomorrow.”

But Rainz couldn’t outrun Origin, and his account was promptly banned. “Origin considered my style of gameplay to be detrimental to the nature of the beta test. I had previously played a character of evil alignment who slaughtered hundreds, this type of role playing was denounced by certain OSI members. After they had a discussion with me I erased my evil "Aquaman" character that same day and nailed his coffin. I thought that this had brought an end to the whole ordeal. Instead, after slaying LB, an OSI member informed me that I had come to the "last straw" and was now banned from "all further Origin World Online games."”

No one could confirm that a second spell was shot from the grassy knoll.

For their part, Origin insisted that that last part might have been “said in the heat of the moment by a very tired and overworked Origin employee.” Instead, they’d been tailing Rainz for “deliberately going against requests” they’d made of him as a tester. From the official statement: “ This is the stuff of legend, kudos to him for not only attempting it but actually succeeding. He has now made quite a name for himself. The assassination merely provided us an opportunity to get his account information. We had actually been looking for him in order to ban him before this.” [source]

More than a decade later, we couldn’t track down Rainz for a follow-up, but Sean “Dragons” Stalzer, leader of the longest continuously running guild in existence, The Syndicate, was witness to the events. He confirms Rainz’s account: “ At the time it was initially assumed by many that a demon had been summoned that killed him. It was so incredibly laggy with dozens of people on very old code and very slow machines that it was incredibly hard to read the words much less see things happening. The overall series of events.. firewall.. LB dying.. demons.. people dying.. does look pretty accurate.“

As for the reaction at Origin and why Lord British was vulnerable to attack in the first place, Koster had this to say: “I recall that Scott Phillips came into my office all wide-eyed and laughing, like a mix of dismay and amusement, and told me what had happened… the whole thing happened because the little checkbox that said “invulnerable” had just never gotten set on the LB character. But of course, Richard assumed that it had.”

“I think I was a little taken aback by how much press the incident got afterwards – it was, in retrospect, one of those times when the expectations of single-player games collided with the expectations of multiplayer gaming. Lots of people probably realized for the first time what sort of experience an online world might be when they saw that someone had killed Lord British.” [source]

Stalzer viewed the event in a more negative light for Ultima Online: “The aftermath, for those who were following it, did negatively affect perceptions. I don’t think those perceptions were long lasting. I have long since forgotten about it and still play UO many years later. But at the time I think it was a bit of a black eye.”

Anshe Chung Says Hello to w-hat’s “Little Friend”

Second Life - December 2006

A moment later, and this screenshot would have become profoundly not safe for work.

Ailin Graef’s avatar, Anshe Chung, has been featured in Business Week, Fortune, and on numerous CNN segments as the first “virtual millionaire”, amassing an estimated $2 million in the space of 30 months as a virtual real estate broker in Second Life. [source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anshe_Chung ] At the height of the SL media frenzy, news organizations like CNN and CNet maintained news bureaus inside the Second Life world, and Chung appeared on an interview in one such venue.

Unfortunately for her and CNet, so did elements of w-hat, a Something Awful splinter group known for its share of Second Life hijinx (reference the skywriting incident of a few months before). According to an unnamed source that was a part of w-hat at the time, a “particle emitter” - an item which spawns flying textures - could be worn on a character. Security settings for land in Second Life could be set to “no scripts / no build”, which was almost assuredly the case inside the CNet Studio. But avatars trump land settings, and a specially customized particle emitter - the so-called “dong gun” - was smuggled in with one of the live studio audience members.

The rest played out just as you might imagine... or probably wouldn't want to imagine. The interview had barely begun when a parade of floppy elephantine male genitalia entered stage left. After a few horrified moments, the host, Daniel Terdiman, admitted that he couldn’t regain control of the room and Chung beat a hasty retreat, teleporting away. You can find a set of completely not safe for work images and a video, as well as a somewhat... shall we say, stylized retelling of the events, in this Something Awful article.

As is the case with almost all griefing occurrences, the aftermath was almost as noteworthy as the initial incident. Graef’s husband issued takedown notices to YouTube, where the inflammatory video was posted, claiming copyright infringement of the Anshe Chung avatar. Graef later changed his protest to claim that the videos did not constitute a copyright violation, but were nonetheless clearly defaming and in fact constituted a sexual assault. In the end, the video was re-published on YouTube, albeit with an age restriction.

Martin Fury Does Ulduar

World of Warcraft - April 2009

In a game with over 250 servers (not to mention 12 million players) it takes a lot for one player to grab everyone’s collective intention. Leeroy Jenkins is about the only household name that comes to mind among MMO players. But late last month, just about every WoW player was discussing the exploits of one particular gnomish warrior in a nondescript Vek’nilash guild.

It's pretty hard to argue with Martin Fury.

More often than not, YouTube-enhanced claims of finding a GM item lead to someone getting his or her jollies on a private server. Not so in this case. All accounts show that our protagonist, Karatechop, wasn’t looking to make a show of his win button. But in an Armory-powered, achievements-driven game, it’s hard to keep a secret. Almost immediately the leaderboard-attuned were wondering how The Marvel Family guild had achieved numerous world-firsts and how one player in particular had scored a hit of over 350 million damage. (By comparison, one of the toughest bosses currently in the game, Yogg Saron, clocks in at just over 55 million hitpoints on heroic.)

Karatechop told his side of the story to WoW Insider, but whatever the course of events that granted him a shirt with 100 charges of “kill all enemies in a 30 yard radius”, the odds of him hacking or exploiting the game with malicious intent seem incredibly low. More than likely, an error was made in restoring items to a friend’s hacked account, or maybe it can be traced back to a GM’s last day antics.

Whatever the case, Karatechop’s sin of omission in not reporting or deleting Martin Fury has cost him a warrior decked out in epic gear. Whether or not regular players should be able to wield GM weapons period, the causal linkage (to use an analogy: if you give the homicidal maniac the gun he wants desperately, don’t you bear a big share of the responsibility for the shooting spree?), or any number of ethical arguments simply don’t matter when Blizzard wields the ban hammer lightly.

The Great EIB Bank Heist

EVE Online - August 20th, 2006

EVE has had its share of controversies, from dev intrigues to underhanded corporate takeovers to massive battles that turn on a single well-placed spy. The good news is you can read about all of that and more weekly in our Sins of a Solar Spymaster column. Any massive single shard sandbox must have it’s dustups from time to time. But nowhere are these dustups more avoidable than in EVE’s completely unsecured and unregulated banking system.

On the face of it, EVE players stockpile ISK like hotel shampoo, so why not make that ISK work for you while you’re out-of-game training for long periods? If you’ve got 30 days of training before you can fly a battleship, why buy that battleship today? Invest your money with EIB and have money left over for that Tech 2 turret you’ve always wanted. Operators are standing by!

“The usual customers of 'EVE Banks' are people who live in the protected area of EVE,” The Mittani, leader of Goonswarm and our resident Spymaster explained. “They tend to be less acquainted with how the game really works, and expect that CCP would step in to bail them out much like a GM in World of Warcraft does after a scam.”

It's been three years, but Dentara Rast / Cally still has quite a bounty on his head.

And no help was forthcoming when the head of EIB decided to cut and run. In a painfully rambling video, Cally a.k.a. Dentara Rast owns up to his lightning-fast extortion of the alleged 790 billion ISK in deposits EIB had accumulated. If the total held up (and CCP believed it was somewhat less [source]), it equates to over $100k in real money, and that’s just using the CCP-approved channels. Selling ISK through direct sales websites, a.k.a. goldsellers, could net much more.

“Banks offer nothing to anyone in EVE.” The Mittani adds. “They offer crap returns compared to other ways one could make money in EVE... In the real world, you need a bank because cash can be robbed or lost, and is unwieldy. In EVE, you have a wallet that can only be taken from through your own gullibility.”

Nor are EVE’s banking problems completely in the past. As recently as this January, Dynasty Banking lost some 80 billion of its equity balance when a key officer decided to pull a runner. Surely the community would learn its lesson and turn its back on the concept of an EVE bank, right? Wrong. EVE’s largest player-run bank, EBank, reports that it's currently holding nearly 8.5 trillion (with a ‘t’) in deposits from some 5,800 depositors [source]. Dynasty Banking is still alive and kicking, as well.

But, for better or worse, the EVE banking industry continues to grow. Are player trust and bank trustworthiness on the rise too? The Mittani has a different outlook: “There's an investor born every minute.”

Glider Takes Flight, Then Crashes

World of Warcraft - March 10th, 2009

If there were a Fortune 500 list for third-party types who could live very comfortable off of their virtual world earnings, the aforementioned Ailin Graef would probably be near the top of the list. But MDY Industries and Michael Donnelly would have soared like dancing dildos above even Anshe Graef in early 2009. Court documents disclosed that the developer of WoW Glider, a WoW botting program designed to farm reputation and experience while you wait, has made an estimated $2.8 million from the illicit product.

Glider wasn't the first botting program, nor will it be the last. But at $6.5 million, it's the priciest.

Bots, programs that play a game for you, are as old as the first attempts at artificial intelligence, which is to say Pong. It’s hard to imagine an MMO developers that wouldn’t use player-emulating bots extensively for testing purposes as part of a “simulation layer” to measure performance and balance of content when it’s impractical or undesirable to involve actual players. But, like GM items, such tools were never meant for players' hands, and in the “carefully balanced competitive environment” that is the MMORPG, one legitimized cheat could break the game for everyone.

Donnelly amassed a fortune from Glider because it not only beat Blizzard’s most strident attempts to detect and eliminate it, it served its purpose as well as could be expected. "I used it," admitted one anonymous source. "After a guild split, we were long on tanks and short on healing. I volunteered to level up an alt priest, but I was really sick of the pre-BC [Burning Crusade] areas. Combat is pretty long, simple, and boring for level-up priests, so I tried Glider. The glides I set up worked, but it felt way too noticeable. Someone rides past on a quest and you're killing dozens of murlocs with, you know, an inhuman passion, then they ride back 15 minutes later and you're still in the same place doing the same thing, either you're botting or you're having sh*t luck with a random loot quest. On a PvP server some players hate botters so much they'll report you either way and let Blizzard sort it out, like its its own game," he noted. "I didn't want to fall prey to the witch hunt types."

A YouTube video ostensibly posted by Glider developers confirmed that the biggest threat to players running Glider wasn’t detection by Blizzard, but being reported by other players. But while Glider easily evaded WoW developers, it couldn’t escape Blizzard’s legal team.

On March 10th, 2009, MDY lost a critical first round legal battle when a US district court judge ruled against Glider’s creator for wrongful interference in the contract between Blizzard and WoW players, copyright infringement, and Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations. Blizzard was awarded a permanent injunction (meaning MDY cannot continue to sell or support WoW Glider) plus $6.5 million in damages, pending appeal.

What made Blizzard v. MDY something of a landmark case in digital rights law wasn’t the broad interpretation of the notoriously muddled doctrine surrounding copyright infringement. Plus, it marked the first time that a US court ruled on the injurious nature of a third-party bot program.

WoW is said to be so accessible, it almost plays itself.

As for Blizzard’s copyright claims, that the court ruled that Glider knowingly aids players in breaching the WoW End User License Agreement (EULA) seemed to hang on something of a technicality: that Glider makes an illicit copy of the game in RAM to avoid detection by WoW’s native anti-cheat program, Warden [source]. Previously it was assumed that online gamers purchased the software and licensed the service (see the SWGemu discussion below, as an example). Blizzard v. MDY not only took what was, to many gamers, a fairly laughable document extraordinarily seriously, it allowed Blizzard to adjust the scope of the license to dictate how the game runs on your machine.

The court also found MDY liable for harmful ("tortious") interference in the EULA between Blizzard and the players. “The Court found MDY and Donnelly’s conduct to be
improper because (1) they profit from the sale of Glider knowing that its use constitutes a
direct breach of Blizzard’s legitimate and substantial contract rights, (2) their interference
causes Blizzard to lose customers and revenue, and (3) the use of Glider by WoW users
upsets the carefully balanced competitive environment of WoW.”

What follows this ruling is anyone’s guess, but MDY’s chances on appeal seem pretty bleak. From the judgment, “MDY and Donnelly... would likely be put out of business by the permanent injunction. Even if the permanent injunction ultimately is eliminated on appeal, MDY and Donnelly likely will have lost all of their market share to competitors during the duration of the appeal and will be unable to regain their business.” As it stands, WoW Glider (now MMO Glider) has suspended operations.

As for gamers, this is something of a pyrrhic victory. Glider is in all probability eliminated from WoW, yes, but the majority of botters - small-scale developers not out for retail success but as a link in the supply chain (such as powerlevelers and goldfarmers) and certainly those bot developers without deep pockets will likely stay under the radar.

Clearly the most interesting aspect of the ruling was its almost reverent regard of Blizzard’s EULA. While the most paranoid among us might fear a “hand over your firstborn” clause in the small print of future EULAs, the ramifications of this ruling, if upheld, is as one commentator noted, “a bit disturbing.” For example, could you write a EULA that stipulates that a game could only be played on a machine running Nvidia GPUs? Could a EULA trump the fair-use doctrine and stretch copyright infringement to prevent unflattering screenshots from being posted on third-party sites, or prevent your game from being criticized on third-party forums on the basis that ad-supported forum sites are making money off of defaming your game? Other laws and precedents would weigh in on these rather extreme examples, of course, but time will tell if this case is as precedent-shaping as it seems to be.

Hacking to Restore

A Q&A with SWGemu developer Ramsey

SWGemu developers want to set back the Star Wars Galaxies to April 2005, then see where the game takes them

We've spent a lot of time looking at ways gamers have behaved badly, but to wrap things up on a more positive note, let's look at an upstart project that seeks to hack and reverse engineer Star Wars Galaxies to undo what they view as the widespread damage of several unpopular patches.

Private servers have a long history dating back to the days of MUDs and BBSs, when rulesets for a particular game might differ from one server. Only when Ultima Online introduced the mainstream to a public Internet server did private servers start to develop a seedy reputation as wretched hives of cheaters and freebooters. One volunteer team had a different goal, however: to restore what they felt was the long lost, pre-Combat Upgrade glory of their favorite MMORPG. Ten Ton Hammer asked one of the founding members of the project, Ramsey, to share a bit of the SWGemu story and why this particular project doesn’t share the same stigma with other private server projects.

Ten Ton Hammer: How did the project begin? Who were the key developers in the early days, and how soon after the Combat Upgrade (CU) did you know that you wanted to make SWGEmu a reality?

Ramsey: I was involved with various emulation projects and was asked to take a look at Star Wars Galaxies in December of 2004. I have never played the game on an SOE server even during the PreCU, which wasn't so much of a problem for the research/code I was reponsible for. In the beginning, a lot of time an effort was spent on research by Ultyma, Xenozephyr, and myself. When we started to write the actual code for our current software, 'Oru' and 'TheAnswer' spearheaded the underlying architecture (called 'Engine3'). SWGEmu has been surrounded by a lot of passionate, talented, developers that not only care about restoring the great MMO - but for paving the way to future projects.

The initial vision was not to protest the changes SOE made to the game - it was simply a hobby. We never realized how big the project was until people like John Smedley (President of SOE) openly stated the impossibility of us ever achieving our goal (late 2006). What has kept us together for so many years is not fueled by hate for SOE. We love doing what we do and building an MMO that the community wants to play.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you view what your team is doing as a hack of the SOE's Star Wars Galaxies?

Ramsey: Not at all. The software that we are developing, called "Core3", is a platform that can be scaled to meet the needs of any computing environment for MMOs. The only hack-like portion of Core3 is the implementation of the network protocol used to communicate with the PreCU Clients. In other words, it knows how to speak in an encrypted "language" using some proprietary protocol developed at SOE. Researching, reversing, and documenting this language is what has taken most of the development time. Once we figured out the majority of the proprietary SOE protocol (granting the ability for us to "speak" to the client), the rest of the code is crafted and written as our own implementation. Core3 is running our own code that is written to mimic the behavior of the old SOE PreCU servers. It, of course, does not have to be this way and we allow huge portions to be changed either through script or the code itself.

Missions and creature handling recently made their re-introductions to the game

Ten Ton Hammer: How much of the game had to be recreated to avoid copyright infringement and other legalities? Could you salvage art assets, animations, any part of the graphics engine?

Ramsey: Contrary to the belief of newcomers, what we are doing is perfectly legal. The software we develop uses no code from SOE, it just knows how to "talk" to the old PreCU clients. Nothing on the visual side has to be recreated since Core3 is essentially telling the client "spawn model ____ at x,y,z then do action1,2,3". The client understands these commands and loads all of the same artwork available during PreCU. What the server IS responsible for is to make sure the game world runs as intended by synchronizing all of the expected events. These "normal" events can be manipulated with ease since it is our code, we simply chose to make the world function like it did during PreCU. It is easier said than done, which is why the codebase is huge and continues to grow.

The limits of what we can do with PreCU SWG are only bound by the commands the protocol supports. Going forward, after restoring the PreCU SWG, the community as a whole can expand upon the vast Star Wars universe without the intervention of hardliners at Sony. For example, we have a group within the SWGEmu Team that is working to restore an additional planet to the game - opening up a wide variety of exploration options that would otherwise never be available to players on SOE's service. The SWG client loads the custom assets like any other file while our server manipulates them throughout the game world. We also plan to develop in the near future a web interface to track statistics of players, the economy, items etc. galaxy wide, similar to the WoW-Armory. All of this is legal (as long as we do not use SOE artwork to create the new assets) because everything is our own original work and opens up exciting pathways for future expansion of the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: You've taken great pains to ensure that SWGEmu doesn't encourage piracy by ensuring your gamers have purchased a copy of Star Wars Galaxies and not allowing players to play on trial accounts. And while you welcome donations, you don't charge a fee. Nevertheless, has SOE or LucasArts given your team any grief? What's been their response to the project?

Ramsey: The SOE/LucasArts response to the project is not what most would expect. The team did engage in a conference call with a few people over at SOE & LA about 2 years ago. The impression I've gotten from them, over and over again, is that they simply do not care. It may seem almost trivial for SOE to simply switch back to PreCU after the huge subscription deficit since the NGE, the community outcry, bad press...whatever. However, the people that have the ability to make the necessary changes at SOE in the interest of the player base will remain silent. The company is not willing to sit down and say, "Alright, we've made a mistake, how do we fix the mess we created" with their own customers. I suspect they are just doing the bare minimum to maintain the NGE version of SWG until their Star Wars contract runs out with LucasArts and SW:TOR by BioWare launches.

Ten Ton Hammer: How large of a volunteer team have you assembled, and are you looking for more help at present?

Our current roster has about 30-40 active staff members. Not all are developers - we've had to create subgroups within the staff to handle various responsibilities such as Development, Quality Assurance, Community Services, Event Coordination etc. The problem with volunteer projects over the internet is that not everyone can be active on a daily basis and it is especially hard to compensate when the realities of life hit hard. We are, in fact, short on Developers that can contribute code on a regular basis. The talent in this area is very thin even in the industry, which makes finding people that can devote time without pay extremely difficult.

Ten Ton Hammer: Many gamers view emulators of games and consoles long past their prime as essential to preserving the golden age of gaming, before just about every game went the way of mainstream appeal. Do you view SWGemu as part of a growing movement? Do you think other MMOs will see their own *emus in time?

Ramsey: Emulators in general are not very successful. SWGEmu is an exception because SWG PreCU was such a unique experience and was a game unlike any other. The drastic changes that have been made to the live version of SWG have driven thousands in the community to pursue the vision of this game. There is nothing else on the market that has matched it since, and the newer games continue to follow safe WoW-like formulas. I do believe that the preservation of an MMO will be sought through the means of an emulator if the behavior of SOE is, for the lack of a better word, emulated :p.

What I find most comforting, in terms of the future for SWGEmu, is that expansion has no limit. After the golden age of PreCU is restored, we have the option of taking the game much further by adding new content (all within the bounds of what is server controlled). There isn't a single MMO out there where the GMs of the game can say, "How does the community feel about _____", call a vote, and within a few DAYS the changes can be implemented.

Learn more about the project at http://www.swgemu.com/ .

A big thank you goes out to the many personalities that shared their knowledge and helped put this article together!