I like you. You're interesting.

Hilarious. YTA.

This is a relief. Thank you.

Thank you very much. The welcome for all us reddit refugees has been really warm and it's deeply appreciated.

I'm still a little confused but it's sinking in. The difference between an instance and a "sub", as well as how to join or interact with other "subs" without having to join each individual instance, was the part that was toughest to adapt to. I love it, though. Lemmy is giving me the feeling Reddit did when I first joined it a long, long time ago on my first ever account. It feels organic.

NTA, just a miscommunication of some kind.

Enjoying the Reddit self-destruction but the content doesn't have much with the lemmy.world server. Maybe post to [email protected], ![email protected] or ![email protected]?

I'll start us off!

In the MUDding world, specifically the Iron Realms brand of MUD, two games (Imperian, Starmourn) have been put into "legacy mode" by the company, which means that a lot of the more useful, grabby, and/or addictive features typically found in IRE games will be unsupported going forward, as well as disabling the ability for characters to retire INTO Starmourn or Imperian, while retiring OUT of them is still doable. Everyone's expecting mass exodus. Vitally, entering legacy mode means that the administration of these games will no longer be paid by IRE, so if they intend to stay and keep the games going they'll be doing so out of the goodness of their hearts - it can't be their job anymore, so their time will by necessity be focused elsewhere, at least a fair amount of the time.

Starmourn's population in particular is panicky, as it's very new in comparison to other IRE games and has a dedicated playerbase. Among other things like the literal end of the world looming on the Starmourn horizon, rumors abound that entering legacy mode will mean Starmourn, which already has a problem with over-indulgence in PK, to become fully "open PK," because if the administration isn't present then there will be no one to enforce the rules. The administration has countered this claim, but the panic continues.

Meanwhile, on more popular IRE games with ostensibly less tOxIc playerbases, people are dreading an influx of undesirables from Imperian. I guess people don't like those guys.

This is a weird hobby.

Yeah absolutely. An instance is kind of your home group. It's not a "subreddit," more just a sorting method for links. The "subreddits" are the boards inside the instances, and the instances work to determine their addresses.

On Reddit you might have /r/nfl, /r/actualnfl, /r/realnfl, for example, while here you would have [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].

(People better at explaining or who are further along the process of understanding please feel free to correct me and chime in!)

Yeah, no. Phones on students are vital, particularly the United States, where a shooter might just mosey on in any time and open fire. Phones play a huge role in active shooter situations, which unfortunately show no sign of slowing down.

The Devilsaur Mafia

No sooner had WoW developed an economy than pernicious capitalists began to exploit it. Sites opened up, offering gold, rare items, and accounts with powerful characters in exchange for real money. Where these sites acquired it, no one knew for sure, though there were rumours. Most assumed they just bought it from players at a low price and then sold it at a mark-up, and that definitely happened. But the owners of these sites sought to maximise profits, and minimise costs. The solution was to set up sweat shops in China. Dozens, if not hundreds of them.

Multiple interviews have been done with Chinese gold farmers. They all described it as mentally exhausting, with working days of at least 12 hours, often spent killing a single enemy over and over. The value of farmed gold is different across the world. A day’s worth of gold could sell in China for $4 dollars, but could fetch triple that amount when sold to Americans.

It's by exploiting the differences and selling to cash-rich, time-poor gamers that Chinese gold farms prosper. Former Wall Street banker Alan Chiu founded an online trading platform for virtual currency, a virtual stock exchange, if you will. And he sees videogame work as another opportunity for outsourcing.

“It's a very labor-intensive job. I don't see it any different from low-cost Chinese workers working in Guandong, producing Nike shoes, and for Nike to be sold eventually - sold at retail stores for maybe 600 percent margin.”

Yet it is different because gold farming is a gray area. Gaming companies like Blizzard, which owns World of Warcraft, see gold farming as cheating, and regularly ban the accounts of suspected gold farmers. Robin admits he's been closed down four or five times, losing thousands of dollars each time. However, there's always a market for gold farmers. Surveys show 20 percent of gamers admit to buying gold.

According to the New York Times, while some gold farmers enjoyed playing games all day, they nonetheless had strict quotas and were constantly supervised. They estimated that there were between 100,000 and 500,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, earning less than a quarter an hour. It’s true that this practice did not originate with WoW. But WoW is perhaps the first time it became a major issue due to the sheer size of the playerbase, and the overwhelming demand for black market gold.

For its part, Blizzard has tried to crack down on black markets, but arguably their most successful attempt was by creating the WoW token, effectively creating a legal avenue to sell gold via Blizzard. That has its own controversy, which we’ll get to later.

Gold farming was known to evoke a strong reaction. It was seen as violating the spirit of the game, and players looked down on those who used these sites. There was a sense that if you had suffered to reach where you are, then everyone else should have to as well. Others defended it as yet another part of the free market, which catered to players who wanted to sacrifice money to ‘get ahead’.

In an interview with Jared Psigoda, a market leader in virtual trade, he states that originally, these black markets were regionally exclusive. Europeans worked in the European black market, Chinese players in the Chinese, and Americans in the American, which resulted in dramatically different prices. It was in the early 2000s that the use of Chinese labour was used across the board, undercutting western currency exchanges, in order to make further profit.

Perhaps the most infamous group of gold farmers were the Devilsaur Mafia. They realised killing devilsaurs in Un’Goro Crater had the potential to return the highest profits out of any creature in the game. While devilsaurs didn’t drop much, they could be skinned to get Devilsaur Leather, a material from which a number of powerful pieces of hunter armour could be made, such as the Devilsaur Leggings and Devilsaur Gauntlets. Outside of raiding content, this was the best gear you could get in Vanilla wow. All in all, a single devilsaur could net its killer 20 gold – a kingly sum at the time.

But where most enemies constantly reappeared, devilsaurs did not. They regenerated sparingly, and could appear anywhere in the zone. Players would spend their whole day in the zone, waiting for one to spawn. And so, a group of sellers decided to coordinate their efforts. They completely took over the crater (LINKS TO REDDIT), using their organisation to out-compete other farmers, and this indirectly gave them total control over the Devilsaur economy.

On PvP servers, these cartels had teams on both factions working as security – if a Horde player tried to step on the Mafia’s turf, the Alliance security team would be alerted and sent to hunt them down, kill them, and keep killing them every time they resurrected at a graveyard. Technically speaking, cross-faction communication was against the Terms of Service, but it was almost impossible for Blizzard to prove players were communicating using third party apps (LINKS TO REDDIT). The only way to get close to a devilsaur on any PvP server was to submit to the whims of the mafia, which meant selling at regulated prices and handing over a cut of the spoils. All-out turf wars were known to occur when multiple cartels came up against each other.

This was not remotely the only instance of farmers banding together to control resources and manipulate the economy – that happened every single day. But it may be the most well-known. And when Classic Wow came about, players eagerly worked to recreate the Devilsaur Mafia.

It’s an interesting case study, but the Mafia disappeared as WoW’s economy grew and changed. The gold farmers did not. For years, WoW’s economy would be driven by a black market that depended on sweat shop labour from China (and later other countries like Mexico, the Philippines and India). It never stopped, but the practice of online black markets for virtual currencies expanded far beyond WoW, to encompass many of the biggest games in the world. Blizzard still hasn’t been able to get rid of it. No company has.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

I feel you. For me it's my Dad and far right propaganda via talk radio, all day every day. He's gone from a rational thinking person, conservative in that '80s kind of way (wasn't a huge fan of that either, but it was at least rational and could be engaged and/or debated with; nothing like today), to a full-blown paranoid rage-monster that will believe even the most batshit, provably false "facts" as long as they come from someone claiming to be on his team. It's honestly heartbreaking, feels like we've lost a whole generation of parents/older folks to madness.

Thats gorgeous RE: the Draco Shawl, would love to see pictures when it's finished.

Currently working on a sweater.

Podcasts. Lately, a lot of Ear Biscuits.

That was a hell of a ride. I got to the point that the CEO was slapping a table and screeching at a dude in public and thought surely that was as batshit as things were going to get. By the time we got to the Wikipedia talk page and doxxing a youtuber all bets were off on the level of batshit possible here.

MQA sounds like a total scam.

[2] Another famous location was ‘Old Ironforge’. Canonically, Ironforge is a colossal warren of tunnels and halls under the mountains of Dun Morogh. When it was first realised in-game, its scale matched that vision, but it was so big that it seemed unfair – the Horde had no cities that big. So the lower half of it was gated off (though it remained in game). Players were able to reach it by clipping through the world. It was never much of a secret – and even came to hold a more and more important position in the story.

[3] Mount Hyjal was another major test for explorers. It had always been extremely important to the lore of the game, and Blizzard left it out because they wanted to save it for a later expansion. Positioned right in the middle of Northern Kalimdor, its main defence was being a plateau so tall that players had no chance of climbing it. But as we have learned, nothing can stop bored WoW players. Players came up with various ways of slowly, painstakingly clawing their ways to the top, and once they reached it, they found a surprisingly complete zone, with forests, caves, temples, lakes, and an early version of Nordrassil, the World Tree. At the foot of the tree were ‘Blizzard Construction Co.’ barriers.

[4] There’s also the Island of Doctor Lapidis and Gilijim’s Isle – two small islands off the coast of southern Eastern Kingdoms. They’re visible in early maps and seemed to have existed in the WoW alpha, but were taken out after that. It’s possible their names were a reference to the Island of Doctor Moreau and Gilligan’s Island. Minimaps exist from that time and we even have a few screenshots. Almost nothing more is known about the islands, but they nonetheless intrigued fans for years.

[5] The biggest unreleased area is Emerald Dream, which had a number of distinct regions with their own unique design. Players speculate that this was the early version of a planned expansion or raid.

A Blizzard representative said in December 2003:

Actually, we have some pretty cool stuff planned for druids. They will definitely have a link to the Emerald Dream. […] I was running around the Emerald Dream last Thursday… you guys are in for a real treat. The level designers are doing a killer job.

However, by September 2006, the developers had clearly changed their minds – either they had soured on the idea completely, or had decided it would be revisited in a later expansion. A statement by Nethaera says:

As for the Emerald Dream, there are no plans for anything as of yet but it is a consideration for the future. The Emerald Dream opens up a lot of different opportunities and the Burning Crusade is definitely not oing to be the last of the expansion packs.

True to their word, the Emerald Dream would surface many times over the course of the game’s life, in the form of instanced or dungeon/raid content, but the original zone was never made accessible.

[6] My personal favourite secret area is the Forgotten Crypt, hidden under the cemetary in Karazhan. Based on its shape, it was originally intended as a dungeon, and I went there once myself For the intrepid explorer, it was one of the easier places to visit. Part of the area includes the infamous ‘Hall of Upside Down Sinners’, which features underwater corpses hanging from hooks. Players speculated that the area was never implemented because it was disturbing, and may have unsettled younger players. However Community Member ‘Bashiok’ commented on the Crypt in 2014, confirming that it was simply an area Blizzard changed their minds on.

Oh yeah, I remember that! Haven't seen a screenshot in quite a while. Not sure I know the story on it but knowing our development processes back then there tended to be a lot more stuff made that we just didn't use. I can't imagine the game rating rumor is accurate, because if it was content we wanted to use we'd just take out the upside-down sinners or whatever the issue was and use it for whatever it was we wanted to do with that space. It's not like they're permanent fixtures. Fun rumor though! :) More likely we just changed our minds.

The area was actually partially opened for players in the Legion Expansion in 2016.

[7] Gilneas was canonically a small peninsular kingdom sticking out of Silverpine Forest in the Eastern Kingdoms, cut off from the rest of the continent by the huge ‘Greymane Wall’. Behind the wall was an incomplete land with no definition, bordered by mountains and ending in a beach. Getting on top of the wall, or finding a way around it was a test for any explorer. Gilneas was fully added as a zone in Cataclysm, in 2010.

WoW has always fostered speculation, theorycrafting and conspiracy among its most ardent fans. Players have spent hundreds of hours piecing together developer ideas from Vanilla, including playable ogres, potential zones in the South Seas, and player housing.

So where’s the drama?

It comes in Blizzard’s ‘hot and cold’ relationship with these explorers. Any player found reaching hidden areas of the game through exploits is deemed a cheater and is banned, as a matter of policy. This is despite the fact that Blizzard clearly leaves hints to incentivise explorative behaviour.

Ultimately, players are still finding new tricks, and Blizzard continues to hunt them down. A lot of fans are against exploration because they don’t want to encourage other players to develop exploits which could be used to give them a leg up in the parts of the game that matter – progression and pvp. During Vanilla, the forums were often full of players complaining about others using exploits, which was part of what motivated Blizzard to monitor them so carefully.

When Classic was released, players leapt at the chance to recreate the iconic exploits of Vanilla. But once again, we will have to wait until later for that.

Right now, we are nearing the end of our time with Vanilla, and the release of World of Warcraft's first expansion, the Burning Crusade. I really appreciate anyone who took the time to read this far, and I hope to upload the next part of this series in a few days.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

lmfao they nailed it.

Thank you!

The Game-breakers

No one had ever made a world as big as Azeroth before. It had been a massive undertaking, a wonder of programming and code which cost $64 million ($94 million accounting for inflation) before it ever even began to see returns – making it comfortably the largest and most expensive game at the time. Thousands of hands left their mark on its world, and while Blizzard would spend years polishing them away, they would never succeed completely. Even now. But it was a lot more obvious in Vanilla and that was part of the charm. For many players, it wasn’t the erotica or the world events or the combat or the gold that drew them to WoW, it was the world itself. As you might expect from a world that big, it was full of oddities. Little holes in the world, carefully hidden in spots players weren’t meant to see, written messages under the borders of the world, slabs of random environment thrown together in private areas, unfinished or rejected zones, exclusive locations for the developers and game-masters. An entire community grew up around investigating these curiosities, unravelling their meanings, and showing other players how to reach them.

Looking at this map, you can see large empty patches between zones, or on the coast. Below Silithus lay the inaccessible land of Ahn’Qiraj (meant to contain the city of temples we covered earlier), north of the Eastern Plaguelands is the elf nation of Quel’Thalas, somewhere in the inaccessible west of Eastern Kingdoms lay the Twilight Highlands, and then there was the blocked off city of Stratholme, the focus of an iconic moment in Warcraft Lore. Players would agonise for years over the islands in the sea, and what they might be. The challenge became all the more tantalising when players discovered that many of these areas did exist in some form, sometimes mostly finished. Sometimes the reward was standing on a platform or tower in a major city, where no other player could get, and becoming a minor celebrity for the day.

But Blizzard had hidden their secrets well. It wasn’t possible to just ‘go to’ these areas. Explorers had to break the game to do it. A game of cat-and-mouse arose, with players discovering new ‘exploits’ and Blizzard racing to patch them out. There were techniques to fall through the world, climb vertical walls, teleport to a specific graveyard upon death, or overcome fatigue (a timed effect that begins when players move too far from the coast, which rapidly drains health).
To detail all of these hidden spots and how to reach them would take literally hours. To those who want to delve into this topic, I present a quick-fire montage. To the rest of you, let me elaborate on a few of the best ones.

[1] By far the most famous secret area in the game was GM Island, designed to serve as a ‘lobby’ for Game Masters. For years, the island was located north-west of Kalimdor, way off the map. To get there, players had to overcome vast distances of nothingness – a land without texture or direction, which made it totally impossible to reach the island without exploits. So many stories have been penned about GM Island that it has taken on an almost mythical status.

Members of the company were cagey about the island. An image of the island was visible on Blizzard Europe’s Career Opportunities page, but Blizzard rarely spoke publicly on it. Before patch 1.8, players could add GMs to their friends list, and their locations would be listed as ‘GM Island’. A forum moderator ‘Zarhym’ explained in 2010:

The game masters who respond to you in the game are doing so through a separate chat/support tool. They're not actually using the game client to whisper you, however, logging into the chat client means the character they use to contact players with is logged into all of the realms they need to. While GM invisibility exists, it makes it safer and easier to have a simple storage/port point to keep all of these characters out of the normal game world.

The island itself was small and round and covered in dense vegetation, with a tall peak on one side. It included a mansion (taken from Stormwind City), a wall, and a graveyard. There were two NPCs, a Gnome named Ari and Tuskfyre the Troll. Embedded within the lower structure of the island (about 100 yards below the surface) was a hidden room known as ‘The Prison Chamber’. It’s textured with large blank white tiles and lit with a single light source. The only object in the room was a single chair, right in the middle. Players could enter, but can never leave without the help of a GM. Its walls couldn’t be climbed, teleport/hearthstone spells did not work, and it was the only place in the game where players could not be located using the /who command. While the room had no official purpose and seemed to have been added by a programmer purely for their own amusement, it is said that in the early days of the game, before an out-of-game chat interface was added, GMs would take offenders there to discuss their crimes.

GM Island was one of those things you spoke about in a hallowed whisper, hunched in front of a blurry youtube video in 3x4 ratio with an ‘Unregistered HyperCam 2’ watermarked across the top. Those who could reach the island were legends. Most fans would only ever be able to reach it on private servers, which allowed them to teleport straight there – and that is where we get most footage of it today.

The first adventurers to come across GM Island got there by swimming (there was water back then), constantly casting spells to heal themselves from the fatigue damage. It took an hour, and if the player’s direction was even slightly off, they would be forever lost in a seemingly endless ocean. Blizzard removed the water, so players tried manipulated the models in the game files to let them cross. This back and forth process went on for a while. Players found a new way, blizzard patched it out, players found a way around the patch, and so on. When all other attempts failed, the island was moved into an instance, effectively placing it in a separate world upon itself, and then eventually it was removed from the game completely. (LINKS TO REDDIT)

Other locations created for developers include Designer Island and Programmer Isle. Neither was ever accessible in live version of the game – only on private servers. Both are filled with stock assets, written messages, and a few test quests. The regions of Programmer Isle are named after some guys called Jeff and Patty Mack, and there are even a few test NPCs.

Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that so few players ever reached GM Island on a live server, and also due to its mysterious origins, it is still one of the most iconic places in the game. Even years after its removal.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

Continued...

Conspiracy Theories

• Apocalypse Culture, Adam Parfrey
• Apocalypse Culture II, Adam Parfrey
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Robert Shea
• Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, Arthur Goldwag
• Nothing in This Book Is True, But It's Exactly How Things Are, Bob Frissell
• The Invisible Crime, Michael F. Bell
• Human Race Get Off Your Knees, David Icke
• Who Built the Moon?, Christopher Knight, Alan Butler
• Underwater and Underground Bases, Richard Sauder

Men in Black

• The Real Men in Black, Nick Redfern
• Casebook on the Men in Black, Jim Keith
• Secret Rituals of the Men In Black, Allen Greenfield

Aliens

• The Seres Agenda, R. Scott Lemriel
• The Threat, David M. Jacobs
• For The Moon Is Hollow And Aliens Rule The Sky, Rob Shelsky
• Alien Magic, William F. Hamilton III
• Underwater and Underground Bases, Richard Sauder

Cryptids

• Chupacabra Road Trip, Nick Redfern
• The Secret History of the Jersey Devil, Brian Regal

Skinwalker Ranch

• Hunt for the Skinwalker, Colm A. Kelleher
• The Mothman Prophecies, John A. Keel
• Weird Science and Bizarre Beliefs, Gregory L. Reece

Supernatural

• Man, Myth and Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural, Richard Cavendish
• The Pregnant Ghost and Other Sexual Hauntings, Colin Waters
• Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Hauntings, Colin Wilson
• Cemetery Stories, Katherine Ramsland
• Soul Survivor, Andrea Leininger
• The Psychic Vampire Codex, Michelle Belanger
• Gef!: The Strange Tale of an Extra-Special Talking Mongoose, Christopher Josiffe

Hauntings

Amityville

• The Amityville Horror, Jay Anson
• The Night the Defeos Died, Ric Osuna

Enfield Poltergeist

• This House Is Haunted, Guy Lyon Playfair

Borley Rectory

• The Most Haunted House in England, Harry Price

Demons

• A Field Guide to Demons, Faeries, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits, Carol K. Mack
• The Dictionary of Demons, Michelle Belanger
• Hostage to the Devil, Malachi Martin

Vampires

• The Highgate Vampire, Sean Manchester
• Beyond the Highgate Vampire, David Farrant
• Unholy Hunger, Barbara E. Hort
• Vampires: The Occult Truth, Konstantinos

History

The Donner Party

• The Indifferent Stars Above, Daniel James Brown

Natural Disasters

• Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson

Rasputin

• Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs, Douglas Smith
• Rasputin: The Untold Story, Joseph T. Fuhrmann

World War II

• Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, Norman Ohler, Shaun Whiteside
• Nuremberg Diary, Gustave Mark Gilbert
• Heinrich Himmler, Peter Longerich

Crime & Punishment

• A History of Torture, George Ryley Scott
• Execution, Geoffrey Abbott

Miscellaneous

• The Last Book On The Left, Ben Kissel
• Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, Caitlin Doughty
• The Satyricon, Petronius
• A Restitution Of Decayed Intelligence, Richard Verstegan

Mythology

• The Lost Land of Lemuria, Sumathi Ramaswamy

Psychology

• Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, Magnus Hirschfeld
• The Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby

Satanic Panic(s)

• The Franklin Cover-Up, John W. DeCamp
• Michelle Remembers, Michelle Smith
• Twenty-Two Faces, Judy Byington
• Sybil, Flora Rheta Schreiber
• The Black Awakening, Russ Dizdar
• The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 as Mass Ritual, S.K. Bain

Witchcraft Panic(s)

• The Devils of Loudon
• The Malleus Maleficarum, Heinrich Kramer, Jacob Sprenger