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I find it immensely hard to believe that going through character saves and removing the disease or disabling the effect altogether was not an option. I do have

I find it immensely hard to believe that going through character saves and removing the disease or disabling the effect altogether was not an option. I do have a feeling that there was an incentive to not do that and milk the attention the outbreak generated and to profit from the collective equipment damage, leading to more gameplay and in-game currency purchase.

duskwuff 3y ago
> ... and to profit from the collective equipment damage, leading to more gameplay and in-game currency purchase. I don't think Blizzard profited from either of those. As far as I'm aware, their only paid WoW product at the time was monthly subscriptions to the game -- there was no officially supported way for players to buy in-game currency, and players paid Blizzard the same amount regardless of how much time they spent in game.
kej 3y ago
There was no first-party currency purchase at the time, and they weren't hurting for attention back then, either, so I'm inclined to go with Hanlon's razor on this one.
shadowgovt 3y ago
World of Warcraft was one of the pioneer MMORPGs. My knowledge of how things go here is thin on the ground, but anecdotally from discussions of others who worked on other contemporary MMORPGS: it's easy for us in this era of distributed-everything to overestimate how easy doing anything in these systems was. I'm aware of one circumstance where a known buffer-overflow bug was delayed for weeks in fixing in another game because devs simply released changes to the codebase in exhaustively-tested integrated batches; in the meantime, they relied on "game masters" to monitor the bug and fix it by hand when it manifested.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  I suppose they put the second "M" on that, but in terms of MORPGs, even graphical ones like Everquest were latecomers when compared to the thriving world of MUDs that sprung up, starting in the late 80s or before. In fact, I worked on server code for TinyMUCK, and Jonathan Blow was a prominent player in those days, going by the name of Stinglai. Stinglai actually helped create the first TinyMUCK-based worm in the Forth language. We had added this nifty feature where, in addition to static strings as fields such as descriptions, you could run a program instead. So it was like "#!/bin/bash" in a shell script; we called it "@#" because you just entered "@#xxx" where xxx was the database ID of the program you wished to call. So it was really flexible and programmers enjoyed generating dynamic strings instead of the static ones from before. Of course we had no authentication or permissions system to protect players from one another. Every program ran under the credentials of the user who called it. Now by putting this in descriptions, a player could unwittingly call a program just by looking at something or someone. Needless to say, this was ripe for abuse and immediately turned into a pernicious worm, where anyone who looked at anyone else became infected with the same "@#" description which was designed only to propogate itself through setting of descriptions. If I remember correctly, it only propogated among players, and not objects or rooms, because it needed to be actively called by someone "look"ing at a description. I can't remember if, when or how we settled on a solution for that, but it sure was a wakeup call.
veave 3y ago
This was 2005, there was no attention to sell and they would gain nothing from equipment damage since there was no in-game shop.
elliotto 3y ago
Adding to the other comments about it being 2005, I suspect they did not have the modern devops procedures in place to easily write and distribute a patch like you would today. Old games are hacked together, and I think WoW invented a lot of the MMORPG netcode strategies that are used today.

duskwuff 3y ago

> ... and to profit from the collective equipment damage, leading to more gameplay and in-game currency purchase. I don't think Blizzard profited from either of those. As far as I'm aware, their only paid WoW product at the time was monthly subscriptions to the game -- there was no officially supported way for players to buy in-game currency, and players paid Blizzard the same amount regardless of how much time they spent in game.

kej 3y ago

There was no first-party currency purchase at the time, and they weren't hurting for attention back then, either, so I'm inclined to go with Hanlon's razor on this one.

shadowgovt 3y ago

World of Warcraft was one of the pioneer MMORPGs. My knowledge of how things go here is thin on the ground, but anecdotally from discussions of others who worked on other contemporary MMORPGS: it's easy for us in this era of distributed-everything to overestimate how easy doing anything in these systems was. I'm aware of one circumstance where a known buffer-overflow bug was delayed for weeks in fixing in another game because devs simply released changes to the codebase in exhaustively-tested integrated batches; in the meantime, they relied on "game masters" to monitor the bug and fix it by hand when it manifested.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
I suppose they put the second "M" on that, but in terms of MORPGs, even graphical ones like Everquest were latecomers when compared to the thriving world of MUDs that sprung up, starting in the late 80s or before. In fact, I worked on server code for TinyMUCK, and Jonathan Blow was a prominent player in those days, going by the name of Stinglai. Stinglai actually helped create the first TinyMUCK-based worm in the Forth language. We had added this nifty feature where, in addition to static strings as fields such as descriptions, you could run a program instead. So it was like "#!/bin/bash" in a shell script; we called it "@#" because you just entered "@#xxx" where xxx was the database ID of the program you wished to call. So it was really flexible and programmers enjoyed generating dynamic strings instead of the static ones from before. Of course we had no authentication or permissions system to protect players from one another. Every program ran under the credentials of the user who called it. Now by putting this in descriptions, a player could unwittingly call a program just by looking at something or someone. Needless to say, this was ripe for abuse and immediately turned into a pernicious worm, where anyone who looked at anyone else became infected with the same "@#" description which was designed only to propogate itself through setting of descriptions. If I remember correctly, it only propogated among players, and not objects or rooms, because it needed to be actively called by someone "look"ing at a description. I can't remember if, when or how we settled on a solution for that, but it sure was a wakeup call.

veave 3y ago

This was 2005, there was no attention to sell and they would gain nothing from equipment damage since there was no in-game shop.

elliotto 3y ago

Adding to the other comments about it being 2005, I suspect they did not have the modern devops procedures in place to easily write and distribute a patch like you would today. Old games are hacked together, and I think WoW invented a lot of the MMORPG netcode strategies that are used today.