Feb 20
Massive WoW Bribery
Update: Interesting comment down below the cut. If it was indeed all meant in good fun, it’s a pretty good joke. More player control is something I and my chums have jawwed about often when we talk of the problems facing the MMOG industry.
Update: The guild has come back with the claim that it was all a joke. I amend my statement to ‘clueless asshats with no backbone’.
Kotaku linked to a demand by ‘The Imperial Order’ on the Detheroc server. If this is the same TIO I knew from SWG, this surprises me not at all. They’re demanding 5000 gold pieces before they bang the gong and release the AQ content. All so they can be ‘remembered’. I’m not dignifying this with a Slashdot post, but I’m going to record the post here for posterity. The post is after the cut.
I’m just going to go ahead and call these guys ‘clueless asshats of the day’.
Unsurreal
Level 60 Night Elf Rogue
Guild: Imperial Order
Realm: Detheroc
1. So about these gates | 2/19/2006 6:47:37 PM PST
It’s obvious that the responibility of opening these gates lies soley on us, Imperial Order. We are not ignorant to the notion that without our champion Nimic ringing the gong, it will take a lot longer than everyone had intended for the gate to open.
How much longer remains to be seen, maybe as long as TKT or Phoenix takes to grind carapaces? I don’t know their plans, so it may be even longer than that.
So why not now? This is a common and valid question. The gates CAN be opened right now, but we’re not going to.
Why not? The most natural and unhelpful answer is that we choose not to. It won’t happen today, it won’t happen tomorrow, after maitenence, and it probably won’t happen the day after that.
So when? We can’t answer that, for the answer lies within all of you. We do want to see this new content, but we also have many other plans in mind. Like any guild, we like being notorious, remembered.
Nobody remembers the fair and quietly intelligent people we meet in their daily lives, but everyone remembers those who ruin their day.
We’ll have plenty of time to conquer this new content, but for now we see an endless novelty in holding it hostage. And this is what we will continue to do: Hold it hostage.
So now the gates truly lie in your hands. In order to open the gate, we are demanding 5,000 gold. Please send it to Aqransom, one of our banks, and we will tally up the money. Once we gain this money, we will open the gates.
If you are horde, use the nuetral bank to transfer your money. We don’t want to have to pay the bank cut.
We would apologize for this great injustice on the server, but I personally feel it would fall on deaf ears.
So get farming. The next step in this new content is purely up to you.
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Prior to your update, I was going to challenge your claim that they were clueless. Asshats, yes, but not clueless. However, their stupid reversal definately lumps them (or at least the author of the original note) into clueless; he or she should have known how poorly that would go over.
Pretending that their previous claim in fact honest, they’re not terrorists (as Kotaku labeled them), nor engaging in bribery (as you labeled them), nor clueless. Just greedy assholes. Despite their own claims, it’s not held hostage; they’re just refusing to be helpful. As I understand it, another group is free to meet the requirements and unlock the content. If that’s too expensive in time, they’ll offer the same result for cold, erm, “hard” cash.
Indeed, like it or not, this is player generated content, a new storyline that organically grew beyond what Blizzard provided. Those people who are huge into simulation could herald it a great step forward. Those against pure simulation can herald it as an example of how stupid players are and why you shouldn’t put such power in their hands. Either way, it certainly was interesting.
This also taps into one of my pet peeves: the “tell a plausible lie” prank. People who think telling a plausible lie about something bad and think it’s clever need to be kicked in the balls repeatedly.
The irony is that it actually went over quite well. A vast majority of MMO theorists enjoyed the living hell out of it, people from other servers in WoW overwhelmingly came out in support of it, and obviously…the media picked it up because it was an entertaining story.
Fact of the matter is thus: It came up as a joke in guild and someone ran with it.
The joke itself wasn’t funny. The reactions *are* however. The media response. The terrorism claims. The fact that we’re now making it into newspapers and traveling across the web and having an actual, be it small or large, impact on gaming; these are all very rewarding feelings.
And we have not, and will not screw anyone over in regards to this. We opened the gates when we planned to. We never lied to anyone, and everyone who was on the server who worked to get the scepter was let in on the joke and *played along* with it.
Also, the fact that this is generating intelligent dicussion (not dismissiveness as with the newspost and reply here. See clickable culture), means we’ve had a beneficial effect on MMOs in general. The distiction of “too much player control” vs “Player controlled content” is becoming more defined and this will become a factor in all MMO content eventually.
Sir, if you are telling the truth my hat is definitely off to you.
As an active member of Imperial Order, I just want to affirm that it was meant as a joke that got taken a little out of control. All parties involved (the three other major guilds (Obvious Assasins, End Gus, and Phoenix) that had helped us form the sceptre) were fully aware that we were not changing the plans we had already made to open the gates. Which were posted on our private forums on the 15th of February. We had the date for the opening of the gates to tuesday, 21 Feb, and were not going to change that without an incredibly good reason. Unsurreal, heard some stuff going on, and just took off with the idea of this post. It was something that people were joking about in our Ventrilo Server, and he went and posted it. Nobody knew he was going to post it. We were all pretty caught off guard when we saw the post.
Having seen it, all the folks that were in our four guilds, just played along with it. Phoenix did an incredible job by actually going out and starting up the chain to start working on another sceptre. It was all a joke. When the posts became too violent, and Blizzard actually removed the original post by Unsurreal, he quickly posted an apology, and said it was a joke.
The joke itself was in bad taste, and I was appalled by it when I saw it. However, the responses to it were utterly hysterical. I laughed long and hard while reading over that stuff late sunday night.
The media responses to this calling us Terrorists, well, that is going a bit far. Opportunistic capitalistic scum is more accurate. But even then, it was still just a joke. One that went too far perhaps, but still a joke. Nobody really knows just how badly we (Imperial Order) wanted into that dungeon (AQ). We had been chomping at the bit for new content for a long time now. In fact, most people did not even want to wait until tuesday to open it up…
Just wanted to say thanks for the insightful posts, and the good read. Hope you all got a good laugh out of this little “event”.