For the World of Warcraft players out there, this player here named Lume wrote an angry piece here about the zombie invasion of the past week that got picked up by big Warcraft blogs like WoW Insider (yes, the game IS that big that it has lots of dedicated news media–tens of millions of players!). Lume said,
Do we really want to give so much power to people like this? Especially on a PvE ruleset? I sure hope not. Notice how he tries to berate me for killing him by justifying that the event is for killing people. “y u kill me fagg” definitely reeks of maturity and social validity. I’m only doing what a lot of people would do on a PvP server when someone griefs and camps lowbies. There are repercussions for being a dick!
What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be any purpose to becoming a zombie other than to kill and infect other players and NPC’s. If there was actually a quest to perform as a zombie, and if lowbies could actually defend themselves, I’d be a whole lot more forgiving and inclined to view the event in a positive light. I definitely think it has its place as a fundamental concept. But the specifics are broken.
The short version of what happened in-game, is that these multi-player games often have persistent universes that rarely change significantly in-game. They get expanded, or grown periodically with new content (new characters, new areas and places, new “quests” and things to do). World of Warcraft is unique in that it’s a shared universe (think Star Wars, between the films, novels, comics, etc.) that began with the original Warcraft video game in the 1990s. The story has progressed forward, and one of the “big moments” in the Warcraft game story was when one of the biggest heroes in the game world, a certain Prince and Knight of All Things Good And Holy, basically totally lost his shit in the face of a massive Zombie Apocalypse happening in his homeland (its much more involved and complex than that, of course).
This now growing crazy Prince, like Darth Vader–although this story actually predates Star Wars Episode 3–ends up giving into the Zombie Dark Side, and aligns with/becomes the supernatural force that was making all the people in his homeland die and rise up to eat their neighbors. The Good Prince killed his father and left the world, and became the Lich King. Hence why the second for-sale World of Warcraft expansion ever, due out November 13th this year, is called Wrath of the Lich King. The new king of all the very nasty undead fled to lick his wounds way back in the Warcraft III video game, in 2003, and is now back to, well, kill all life on the world.
The in-game Zombie Apocalypse event was basically the story-driven warning shot. It felt like a nice, simple analogy to what happened to the United States (although that could be my reading into it too much) back in 2001 with our being attacked. The Lich King expansion will show the retaliatory war on the undead, at long last. This event, that the guy is so mad about (and a LOT of people in-game were very upset about it) was simple: the Lich King baddie took out the various nations before with a plague that killed you, and made you a flesh-eating living dead monster. Story-wise it ran it’s course swiftly, and was a highly transmissible magical disease. Five years later in-game, they came back with an even more virulent version this week. The trick, though, was that they made it so that PLAYERS had the opportunity to play the bad guys this time. A neat twist–I was a zombie, running around, eating people, and spreading plague. I loved it, and it was a hoot playing arguably the worst bad guys in the entire history of the game universe–in a Star Wars context, this is like getting to play evil Sith, dark Jedi, and just running around lightsabering everything in sight. It lasted just less than one week of real time. And boy oh boy, were people upset. People didn’t want to “participate”. People didn’t want to walk into some city, or town, or village, and immediately be set upon by dozens and dozens of zombies, all trying to eat them.
Well… duh. What exactly were all these people complaining about? It’s been a key component of the entire story mythology, in-game universe, and action for over FIVE years. Of course you’re going to have to deal with it when they do these once-in-a-lifetime special events. That’s the point–they’re advancing the story of their game in a major way, which has only happened in such a major way when they moved from the old Warcraft III game to World of Warcraft in 2004, when the Burning Crusade (the first major expansion, in 2006, came out–demons invaded the world then, zombies now), and now, when they get ready for their second big expansion in 2008. Heaven forbid–you had to run away in fear a couple times per day for less than a week because of a story-based event that they let players run. It wasn’t abuse or “griefing” if a player zombie bit you and you died (which, important safety tip for non-players: dying by zombie meant you became one yourself, which you could instantly abort out of to escape, causing you to lose perhaps a whopping 30-60 seconds of your time). It was exactly what happened in the story non-stop a couple years ago, and it was back for a special story event. Would it have been acceptable if they just had non-player controlled zombies swarm the cities by the hundreds, as if it were a George Romero film?
This is why some game players can’t have nice things. I’m glad I bit all of you.
