I was about to reply to
in this thread
But I got carried away and decided to start a thread instead. As an ex WoW [del]addict[/del] player, I’m still excited that the expansion comes out this week. WoW and its culture are still fun to watch. In response to that quote … I have to tell my special little WoW story…
About two weeks before BC was released, my guild was bored after a raid ended (or failed to start perhaps), and started roaming Alliance towns raising hell. We went through Theramore, home of Jaina, and wiped out everybody, PC or NPC. We discovered that Jaina had the Alliance Boss loot table (50-99g) like the King of Stormwind, so she netted everyone (maybe 25 of us?) about 3g. She was in the unique position of being an Alliance Boss without the protection or surrounding population of the bigger bosses. She is neatly tucked away in her own tower, with no guards, in quiet unused Ally town. She was still a serious fight. Nothing that you’d solo or even 5man. But for a raiding guild it was trivial. After her we killed Onyxia right next door, and somebody said “Hey let’s go see if Jaina is back up. That was easy money.” About the same gold-wise as Onyxia drops. So we cruise back over, and sure enough, there she is. Cha-ching. We were curious then to find out exactly how long she takes to spawn. … Turns out … about 90 seconds!
Ah, the Good Ole Days. For the next maybe 48 hours straight, Jaina got nuked every time she spawned. People came and went, but in one form or another, the raid never ended. It was like a fountain pouring gold coins, and among our guild, if you had the time and inclination, you were free to go stand under it. The first day there was some Ally resistance, which made it all the more fun. (Her tower made a PVP assault nigh impossible though. They never had a chance.) At one point a 5man Horde group insisted they get a crack at her, promptly wiped hard and went away.
By the second day, word was out. There was some chump offended by our …uh … good fortune? and he sat in Orgrimmar and bitched about what we were doing, hoping somebody would rain on our parade. But it was a small server, and our guild was one of very few that could even do it. So nobody much cared. Our pace slowed from all-hours to just all-night. There wasn’t even anyone else doing it while we were off. We spent the last almost two weeks (I think) up to the release of BC happily harvesting Jaina’s millions. By then we had all done everything WoW had to do, and were just waiting for the expansion anyway. It was known that flying mounts were going to be The Money Sink at ~5000g. I personally pulled about 2000 out of her. And I was pretty casual among our group. Some people pulled 5-10k I believe. All told, she had to have poured out over 100,000g for us.
Now during of all this, there was of course the classic gamer debate going on: “Is this exploiting?” We were killing a PVP boss with no tricks. No funny business in the fight. Everybody had to be on their toes or they’d die. I think we may have even wiped once or twice due to lazy people getting killed and not getting back fast enough. Blizzard set the loot table, spawn time, lack of guards, everything. We had talked with more than one GM on our server who more or less told us that it was working as intended. Nonetheless, we knew it was too easy. Too much reward for the effort. Even though the amount of gold we were collecting could actually be had by other means if you knew how to farm. (Not counting the auctions, where the *real *money is made.) As we saw it, we could be out solo “Chinese Farming” for gold, or having fun here together with Jaina. The same money could be made, so the money shouldn’t be game breaking. And it would be petty earning compared to what would soon be made in the expansion.
Well … .when I said “word got out” … apparently word Really Got Out after all. Hehehe … This is where it comes back around to :
Wouldn’t it be so much smarter to piss them off the day *AFTER *they’ve given you all that money? Right?!
So BC gets released. Everyone bought it. Many people scheduled days off around it. And Blizzard drops the fucking hammer right in our stupid greedy faces! It turns out that we weren’t the only ones riding this gravy train we had found. Unbeknown to us, top guilds on dozens of servers had been farming Jaina for their own hundreds of thousands. So the day after cashing in on us with BC sales, they sent out hundreds of 72 hour bans. Maybe thousands. Its hard to say because they did a damn good job of scrubbing the complaints from their own forums for the next few weeks. Probably 20-30 people in my guild were hit, I saw confirmation that at least 10 other guilds were hit, and it reasonably could have been 30-40 guilds for all I know. Or a hundred shit, WoW is too big to wrap my head around.
We were pissed. Some people got pretty excited protesting it in light of the fact that we were told it was no big deal. Nobody got farther than a form email response. The big question of course was: “OMG my galdz!?” Or for those non-WoW readers, “Would they remove the gold from our accounts?” Did they even have the capability to? How would they know how much and where it had gone? Was that fair? Especially when they could have stopped us at any time? When their own agents had said ‘no harm no foul’?
The answer to all of these, and the moral of the story: “Don’t piss daddy off.” They used John McCain’s hatchet. Three days later, we were the ones who got looted. And in a totally random fashion as far as we ever deduced. Some people who took the most didn’t lose much, some people lost more than they gained. Some were untouched. Some people in the guild, who never even went to those raids, got banned and lost thousands that had nothing to do with it. (We had a bailout package for them I think.) Not sure what the net was. I came out a little bit ahead.
Now I don’t know if we were necessarily the origin of The Great Jaina Banning of 2006, but I know I was in a raid that independently discovered it shortly before it became a big deal. I have a feeling though, that we really were the spark, and I made my own little contribution to WoW history. /sniffle
Anyway, good luck with the new expansion. Any patch under 72 hours is short!
