Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 4 - Cataclysm

This post is pretty short compared to the others. There were a number of smaller dramas like the banning of swifty or item duping or WoW closing in Iran, but I struggled to cobble them together into anything worth reading. I was getting into a bit of a rut with this post, so I cut my losses and posted the topics I've finished, rather than leave it unfinished forever.

The Leaks

Cataclysm didn’t just contain controversy. For the first time, an expansion was the controversy. So we need to go right back to the beginning to figure out how it all unfolded.

MMO Champion has always been one of the largest platforms for WoW discourse outside of the official forums. And it was here, on the 15th of August 2009, that Cataclysm was leaked. World of Warcraft was no stranger to leaks – there had already been half a dozen, each promising a different vision of WoW’s next expansion - but they were rarely this detailed, which lent these particular leaks a certain credibility.

In short, the premise was this:

The ancient dragon aspect Deathwing (one of the only big baddies left from the original Warcraft games) had broken free from his prison in the centre of the world, and had used his enormous power to tear Azeroth to pieces. The continents from WoW’s first release (Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms] were going to be totally overhauled with new visuals and new stories, as well as the addition of player-flying.

Five new zones would be slotted in around the world too, where players could level from 80 to 85. Each new zone had an elemental theme, which would continue throughout the expansion. They included the lore-heavy Mount Hyjal, the expansive underwater world of Vashj’ir, the dark and atmospheric subterranean Deepholm, the Arabian Nights-Ancient Egypt fusion which was Uldum and the once peaceful, now apocalyptic Twilight Highlands.

Every expansion included new classes or races, and Cataclysm would be no exception. The Alliance would get Worgen – the human inhabitants of the walled off nation of Gilneas, who had the ability to turn into werewolves. The Horde would get goblins. I joined during Cataclysm, and to this day Gilneas is my favourite zone in the game.

It almost seemed too good to be true. Players had been begging for an alternative to the Vanilla zones, which were really starting to show their age. But no one had expected the scale or scope of these leaks.

The user Naya said, “Everything I read here is all I ever wanted.”

Some fans were wary that too much was being promised.

”I love all of this, and really looking forward to it, but I wouldn't bet running around naked in paris on all of this (stick to the races) just yet,” the user Skysin warned, “a lot of it seems very far fetched, compared to what has been speculated so far. none the less this would be an awesome next expansion if even 75% of it makes it into the next expansion.”

And some didn’t believe it at all.

”giant troll by blizzard imo”, said revasky

Luckily, they wouldn’t have to wait too long in suspense. Blizzcon was just around the corner.

The Announcement

The 21st August was a sunny day in Anaheim, California - as every day is there. The city’s convention centre was packed to bursting with over twenty thousand fans. Most of them had turned up with one primary desire: to be there in person when the third World of Warcraft expansion was announced.

The Opening Ceremony began at 11:30 sharp. When Mike Morhaime took to the stage in Main Hall D, it was to raucous applause. He warmed up the crowd like a pro; he played them a montage of historic Blizzard opening nights, showed off a glossy new WoW ad featuring Ozzy Osbourne, and when the moment was right, brought out the only man capable of eliciting more hype than himself - Chris Metzen. Chris was the mastermind behind Warcaft, and his arrival could mean only one thing. Something big was about to happen.

Sure enough, in the ceremony’s closing minutes, the announcement was made and the trailer began to play. It wasn’t very impressive – the content being revealed was clearly in an early state of development. But that didn’t matter. The cheer that rose up from the crowd would never be matched by any announcement Blizzard made after that.

The leaks had been true, to the last word. Cataclysm would be the biggest expansion Blizzard ever made, and its development even outpaced the original production of the game in many ways. Perhaps for that reason, well over a year passed before the next big reveal, a glossy cinematic trailer.

Players were drip-fed information over that time, and due to WoW’s use of large scale beta testers, everyone knew exactly what the expansion was like months before it released. The hype had never been so high.

On 7th December 2010, Cataclysm released. It represents the time when World of Warcraft hit its peak. For a brief period, it would boast twelve million players, a number no subscription-based MMORPG had ever achieved before, or would ever achieve again. After a few months, WoW would begin its inexorable decline, but no one could ever have seen it at the time. On the contrary. World of Warcraft looked unstoppable.

Players loved it… for a while.

But slowly, the cracks began to show. Familiarity breeds resentment, and players had a lot of time to mull over the many problems with Cataclysm. Those cracks grew into canyons. And by the time the expansion ended in September 2012, World of Warcraft was a shadow of it its former self.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from Northrend in the first place. And some said that even Northrend had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left Outland.

There wasn’t any single thing that doomed Cataclysm. Trying to pin down the thing that killed it is like trying to pinpoint what ended the Roman Empire. It endured a death by a thousand cuts, some of which are complicated and difficult to explain.

But I’ll do the best I can.

Problem 1: Remaking the old world was pointless

In a tragic twist of fate, it was Cataclysm’s biggest and most anticipated feature which dealt the greatest blow: the recreation of Azeroth. You see, almost every single zone was remade from scratch, changed up a little, and given a whole new plot told through entirely new quests (all of them set during the time of Cataclysm). And for what it’s worth, they were very good. Great stories, creative design, nice visuals, and some of the funniest quests ever added to WoW.

But their purpose within the game was unchanged – they were levelling zones to get players to level 60, at which point they would go on to the Burning Crusade zones (until level 70) then the Wrath of the Lich King zones (until level 80), before finally returning to Azeroth for the new Cataclysm zones, which would take them through to level 85.

As you can imagine, this made the timeline incredibly confusing for any new players. But more importantly, levelling wasn’t a big deal any more. Every time Blizzard added a new expansion, players had to go through more content to reach max level, and so levelling was made quicker. By the time Cataclysm released, the 1-60 process was incredibly fast. If you were already max level when Cata came out, and didn’t want to level up alts (secondary characters), then you wouldn’t see any of the new content. And even if you did create a new character, you could always level through PvP or dungeons instead. If you made the specific decision to level through questing, you might only see five of the thirty-eight re-made zones. A vast amount of development time and resources had been put into a feature which was, in hindsight, expendable.

"They reworked the 1-60 content to be faster and easier for new players, but in my personal opinion reached a point of being too easy (almost mind numbing, what was wrong with having a few elites around every now and then?)," one user said. "The fact that world content was easier along with heirlooms and dungeon finder (even though the latter two were from WotLK) really made the leveling experience rather impersonal, where there was rarely any reason to really even speak to other players."

Azeroth was big. Really big. You won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it was. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Azeroth. Blizzard could only create so much content for Cataclysm, and most of their time and resources had been spent on the revamp. This would reduce every other aspect of the expansion to its barest bones.

Problem 2: There was nothing to do

There were only five new levels. The other expansions had ten. There were only five ‘new’ zones (six if we include the PvP zone, Tol Barad). Burning Crusade had seven and Wrath had eight (nine if we include Wintergrasp). There was no new city. Both previous expansions had included a city.

To make matters worse, the new zones weren’t even that good. Uldum had promised players a detailed look into the ancient lore of the Titans (WoW’s mysterious gods), but it turned out to be a prolonged Indiana Jones goof. Mount Hyjal felt artificial due to its over-reliance on ‘phasing’ – technology Blizzard had developed to seamlessly change zones around you, based on your actions.

And most controversial of all was Vashj’ir. It was huge (so big that they split it into three sub-zones), mostly empty, and entirely underwater. Players were given special extra-fast mounts to get them from place to place, as well as the ability to run on the sea floor, but it wasn’t enough to stop the zone from feeling like a chore to get around. The zone’s three-dimensional setting was difficult to navigate, because Vashj’ir had a number of vertically-layered areas, and quest markers never told the player how high or low their objectives were.

On top of that, WoW’s gameplay was never designed to work underwater. In the featureless abyss, it was often difficult to tell how far away an enemy was, and since they could be anywhere above or below you, players often found themselves taken by surprise.

Vashj’ir had its fans – in fact, all the new zones did. But they were a vocal minority. It wasn’t long before the community labelled Vashj’ir the worst, most hated zone in the game.

You didn't have a brand new continent to level up on, instead you had zones that weren't as 'linked together' as the ones in Outland or Northrend. Vash'jir, to most people, was a terrible leveling zone simply because it had a Z-axis. Mount Hyjal was on the other side of Kalimdor from Uldum, Twilight Highlands was off by itself in the Eastern Kingdoms, Vash'jir was underwater and Deepholm was underground. The game kept sending you back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar every time you finished up a zone just to send you through portals to get the next area. It seemed disjointed.

There were plenty of other hints that Blizzard had run out of time on Cataclysm. While Blood Elves and Draenei had been core to the story of Burning Crusade, Worgen and Goblins were often forgotten. Blizzard elected to totally block access to the Goblin starting zones (which was a big deal because one of them, Kezan, was the Goblin homeland), but they got the consolation prize of Azshara (one of the vanilla zones) being revamped with a Goblin story, a mono-rail and a mini-city, Bilgewater Harbour.

The Worgen got no such luck. Once they finished their starting zone, all of the NPCs, animals, and quests vanished. Gilneas was lavishly decorated and incredibly atmospheric and even included a fully built and decorated city. But for whatever reason, Blizzard decided not to finish it. To this day, its houses, streets, and villages are conspicuously empty. This is kind of a problem, because Gilneas is crucial to the story of Lordaeron. The lack of clear resolution on Gilneas would anger fans (particularly the Lore nerds) for over a decade.

Okay, so this all looks bad. But there was other stuff to do, right?

Usually, expansions would have ‘dailies’ – a set of quests in each new zone that you could re-do every day in order to fill up a ‘reputation’ meter with a certain faction. As you filled it, you gained access to a Quartermaster who sold lots of cool stuff, like fancy new mounts. But dailies took time to design, so Blizzard let players gain reputation by playing dungeons instead. Blizzard had promised other end-game content instead. Path of the Titans was planned to be a max level progression system, but it was canned in development. There was also the addition of the archaeology skill. But it had originally been devised as a way to work through the Path of the Titans, and without it, all that remained was a crushingly dull minigame. So in the end, dungeons were basically all there was to do.

But as long as they were good, the fans would manage, right?

Problem 3: Dungeons and raids were a mess

Wrath of the Lich King’s dungeons had been easy. Comically easy. Fans complained, and Blizzard promised to bring back the hard-core difficulty they had once loved. So when Cataclysm released, it was with brutal dungeons, unforgiving bosses and oodles of ‘trash’ – groups of enemies players had to dispatch before they could get to the important fights. Tanks struggled with crowd control, and healers often had to chug mana potions after every trash fight. Every dungeon group needs a tank and a healer, but no one wanted to take up those roles, so the queue to join a dungeon often exceeded two hours. When it finally happened, it was a slog which often ended with everyone dying and subsequently quitting.

The entire game devolved into players idling in Stormwind and Orgrimmar until the Dungeon Finder told them they could go out, struggle with a dungeon, fail, and teleport back. ‘Never Leave Major City Syndrome’ slowly destroyed the community and the game-world.

Casual fans were angry at Blizzard for making the game so difficult to play. Hard-core fans were angry at casual fans for being angry at Blizzard, and for not being better at the game. Casual fans then responded that they shouldn’t be expected to treat World of Warcraft like a full time job just to be good at it – it was meant to be fun. Hard-core fans replied that the difficulty was part of the fun. And this argument on for months.

In World of Warcraft, hard-core raiders had always assumed that they were more intelligent than casuals because they had achieved so much — the fall of the Lich King, Karazhan, Black Temple and so on — whilst all the casuals had ever done was muck about in the questing zones having a good time. But conversely, the casuals had always believed that they were far more intelligent than the hard-core raiders — for precisely the same reasons.

Blizzard weighed in on the issue, with Ghostcrawler basically telling players to stop shouting at each other and have fun.

We do understand that some healers are frustrated and giving up. That is sad and unfortunate. But the degree to which it's happening, at least at this point in time, is vastly overstated on the forums. We also know that plenty of players like the changes and find healing more enjoyable now. Both sides need to spend a little less effort trying to drown out the other side claiming that everyone they know -- and by extension, “the majority of players” -- agree with their point. You shouldn’t need to invoke a silent majority if you can make an articulate and salient point.

It didn’t work.

In April 2011, the first major patch came out, and made the problem even worse. ‘Rise of the Zandalari’ brought two ‘new’ dungeons (they were remakes of Vanilla dungeons), Zul’Aman and Zul’Gurub. Not only did these dungeons make Cataclysm’s twelve other obsolete (because they had better gear), they were even harder. The player-base was livid. World of Warcraft was down 600,000 subscribers since the start of the expansion, and that was just the beginning.

Blizzard was desperate. They made every dungeon dramatically easier in order to stem the losses, which pissed off the only remaining people who had been happy about Cataclysm. Then they scrambled to release the next major patch as soon as possible, and even that wasn’t soon enough – another 300,000 subscribers would leave during patch 4.1. Rage of the Firelands was no instant-classic, but it was a much needed breath of fresh air in a very stale room. In addition to the Firelands raid, Blizzard introduced ‘the Molten Front’, a daily questing zone.

But the quick release of Firelands came at a cost. The patch was meant to resolve the two unfinished ‘elemental’ plots – fire and water. In one of Cataclysm’s first dungeons, the ruler of the plane of water (Neptulon) was abducted by Deathwing’s minions. A huge raid called The Abyssal Maw was designed where players would free him, but it was scrapped due to time constraints, and so Neptulon simply… stayed abducted forever?

When asked at Blizzon, Chris Metzen summed it up as ‘a damn mess’.

The fan speculation about the raid garnered more and more attention throughout Firelands. Greg ‘Ghostcrawler’ Street tried to minimise the loss of the Abyssal Maw, describing it as ‘three bosses inside Nespirah (a giant shell), with no unique art”. However players had seen the art and early designs, and so they knew this wasn’t true. Ghostcrawler insisted that it would have been shitty and cited the player pushback against the underwater gameplay of Vashj’ir as the major reason for its cancellation. Whether he was right, we will never know. But Firelands alone was not enough to tide the playerbase over for long.

I'm so salty about this getting scrapped. It would've been so much more unique than the rest of the raids.

[…]

It's kinda sad to look at the what-could-have-been... so much great content scrapped, remnants of it all left, a shadow of what it should have become. Makes me think, wouldn't it be so cool if it was in the game?

Problem 4: The terrible final patch

It was the end of November when the final patch released: Hour of Twilight. Sure, another 800,000 subscribers had left since Firelands, but Blizzard planned on winning them all back. The story of Cataclysm would be tied up, and players would finally get the chance to slay Deathwing. It would go down as one of the most despised patches in World of Warcraft history. This was all rooted in the fact that Deathwing was too big to engage in a conventional fight, and either Blizzard didn’t want to come up with anything creative, or they simply didn’t have the time or money to make it happen.

There were three new dungeons, and the idea was that they told a coherent story which players could follow through to the raid. Of these, one was well received - probably because it was originally going to be a raid, which had gotten shelved. The other two were slight edits of a Wrath of the Lich King zone called Dragonblight. ‘End time’ at least varied it up a bit but ‘Hour of Twilight’ (the dungeon, not the patch) barely changed anything.

But these disappointments were nothing to ‘Dragon Soul’, the final battle against Deathwing. Not only did it take place in another re-skin of Dragonblight, and not only was it an underwhelming end for WoW’s greatest villain, it also included some of the most mechanically awkward boss battles in the game – ‘Madness of Deathwing’ was especially hated for this reason.

80% of the raid is rehashed environments and models and the 20% that isn't was among the worst or most frustrating encounters in the history of the game. also the story was f***ing laughable

One of the new features introduced during this patch was the Raid Finder. It was a simple premise – the Dungeon Finder from Wrath of the Lich King had been a massive success, so Blizzard created a new one for Raids. LFR (Looking for Raid) was treated as a separate mode to the normal raids, which was astronomically easier. Personally, I loved it. I had never been good at WoW, so it was the first time I actually got to see current raid content, and feel like I was actually involved in the story (rather than watching it play out on youtube). I know a lot of people in the community loved it for the same reason.

Hardcore raiders made up a very small percentage of the community, and a huge amount of development time was dedicated to raids which most players would never see. It made sense for Blizzard to introduce LFR during a time when they were struggling to find content to keep players happy.

However to say that LFR was controversial is a massive understatement. A lot of fans absolutely despised it. Blizzard was accused of catering to the worst possible demographic – ultra casuals.

Instead of battling against people playing at the very peak of their class, you play with people content with being the very worst.

The reddit user /u/Hawk-of-Darkness explained it pretty fairly.

Typically speaking (LINKS TO REDDIT) people on LFR have no idea what they’re doing in the raid and it can become a train wreck very quickly, with only a couple people actually knowing what to do and then getting frustrated because everyone else keeps wiping.

However, it was often confusing exactly why hard-core players had such a burning resentment for LFR. After all, they didn’t need to play it, and it wasn’t aimed at them

There's this illusion that without LFR more people would be doing regular raiding, when in reality (and the devs already realized this) they would just quit because the reason raiding is avoided like a plague by the community isn't the difficulty, it's community and commitment reasons.

Writing for VentureBeat, William Harrison spoke for many players like me.

The new mechanic has received much praise and ire, causing an already polarized community to become even more hostile to one another. What are the claims? Why is everyone so angry? Most importantly, is the Looking For Raid system a help or hinderance to a game that has lost close to two million subscribers in the last year?

[..] until last week I had never seen the defeat of the main boss of a World of Warcraft expansion with my own eyes. That was until the LFR system took me straight into the maw of madness. I looked ahead and struck swiftly to victory.

As a fanatic of the lore and canon surrounding the Warcraft universe, I rejoiced at finally seeing the culmination of a story that I had been a part of for almost a year. To see Deathwing, bringer of the Catacylsm that destroyed the face of Azeroth itself, was a moment I never thought I would see. I mean, who has the time to raid when you have a full-time job and a life?

The LFR system is amazing for subscribers that want to experience the content while it's still relevant.

Over a year would pass before any new content was added. Another 1,200,000 subscribers left during that time. It was this patch that cemented Cataclysm’s reputation as the expansion that set WoW on its downward spiral.

Problem 5: The story took a nosedive

World of Warcraft has some of the most dense, complex lore of any video game franchise. While most fans probably don’t care about it, the most vocal ones usually do. And from the start, it was clear that something was wrong with Cataclysm.

The first hint was Deathwing, or more accurately, the complete lack of Deathwing. Every single part of Wrath of the Lich King tied into its main villain somehow, even tangentially. It was done to showed how he was a growing threat. You couldn’t get through a zone without him appearng in some way. But Deathwing was relatively absent in Cataclysm. There was a fun little feature where he would occasionally appear over a random zone, killing any players in it, but that’s all.

I still remember getting obliterated when Deathwing carpet-bombed my zone, it was ... GLORIOUS!

Most of Cataclysm’s story focused on other enemies – the Naga, the Twilight’s Hammer, and the Elemental Lords, whose only connection to Deathwing was their allegiance to him. In the lore, his motivations had always been flimsy compared to the previous two big bads, Illidan and the Lich King. And since Deathwing was never around, players never got to understand him. He was just a big angry dragon boy.

I'm very fond of this rant by /u/Diagnosan

I'd wanted a Deathwing patch from the first day of Vanilla. When it became clear that xpacks were going to be centered around individual villains with the announcement of BC, I wanted one for him. But when he looked nothing like he did in WC2 (Warcraft 2), I became a bit skeptical. This wasn't the Deathwing I'd grown up with.

Once we got to see him in game, all he did was flap his wings and yell at us like some senile old man wanting us to get off his lawn. Oh how I came to HATE that flapping sound, it was the Sindragosa log-in screen all over. We never got to see him cause havoc, really, just the aftermath. From time to time he'd gank you, sure. But it wasn't particularly linked to the story and it quickly turned into a boring annoyance. The one time it actually looked like he was going to kick some ass, the cinematic cut out. Even in dragon soul, what does he really... do? He just sits there and takes it while the same trashmob elementals we'd been fighting all xpack meekly walked up and gurgled at us threateningly.

He wasn't a raw, primal dragon that evoked fear and caused chaos during any of the actual gameplay. For a game about cataclysm, there was just so little of it. Then to add insult to all that injury, the old lizard was just a fucking pinyata with lava coming out of his face.

If the expansion’s antagonist was a bust, its protagonist wasn’t much better. Thrall was the founder of the Horde, and its leader. He was voiced by Chris Metzen and clearly his favourite character, as evidenced by the fact that he was a colossal Mary Sue. He was the biggest, strongest, magicalest, most level headed, most powerful, most loveliest, handsomest orc ever and if you didn’t want to lean through your screen and kiss him on the lips, well, you weren’t the kind of player Chris wanted in his game.

I won’t delve into his backstory much, but it involves being chosen by the elemental spirit of fire (et al), freeing his people from captivity, taking them across the sea, and founding a new nation. I don’t know if the Moses parallels were deliberate, but they sure were glaring. In Cataclysm, Thrall got an upgrade from saving his people to saving the entire world. And so Green Jesus was born.

Thrall’s goodie two shoes-ness was fine at first, because it kind of balanced out the crazies in the Horde. But he was becoming unbearable. He was constantly shoved in the player's face, and never questioned or criticised by other characters for his dumb decisions. The whole plot of the Hour of Twilight patch was to help Thrall power up the McGuffin weapon so that Thrall could work with the immortal dragon demi-gods and Thrall could take the final shot at Deathwing and Thrall could get all the credit. The ending cinematic of Cataclysm showed fireworks going up across the world while the camera panned to Thrall and his girlfriend, heavily implying she was about to give birth to a smorgasbord of mini-Thralls who no doubt promised to plague Azeroth with their manly Metzen voices for the rest of recorded time. He even got his own book, which went into further detail on just how spectacular he was, and how he was the only mortal worthy of taking Deathwing’s place as a demi-god of Earth.

Players came to despise him. On the Horde, they felt like he was constantly upstaging them. On the Alliance, they felt like Thrall (a Horde character) was turning into the MC of Warcraft. Other characters were being neglected or pushed aside to clear the way for Thrall.

To quote one user:

”I’ve had it with these motherfucking Thralls on this motherfucking elemental plane!”

As is often the case, someone wrote a whole university paper on Green Jesus.

While we’re on the topic of books, we need to remember that Blizzard released a novel accompaniment to every expansion. Sometimes they were decent, and sometimes they were written by Richard A Knaak. But these books had never been a big deal, because they just added detail to the events of the game – until Cataclysm. A number of major story events were only ever explained in the books, including important character deaths. Two faction leaders died in one of these books, with zero mention of it in the game. One day they were there, and the next they were gone. The decision divided fans, with some insisting all major story beats should be shown in game, and others pointing out that subtle character interactions and motivations were better portrayed through books because World of Warcraft’s writers were generally pretty bad.

And here we are. I think that’s everything people hated about Cataclysm. Not everyone hated it, of course. There were some who loved it – as I did. And some who held on in the vain hope that the next expansion would be better.

I think back to how much fun early Cataclysm was (LINKS TO REDDIT) with its brutal heroics, amazing outdoor questing areas and awesome first raid tier and then I think about what it turned into with Firelands and Dragon Soul and it makes me sad. Cataclysm could have and should have been a lot better and we the community with our incessant never ending whining played a huge part in its demise.

It was – at least in my opinion. But it was also even more controversial. We’ll save that for another time.

Brennan Jung summed it up best.

The idea of this expansion was great, the execution.. not so much.

Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

---

I recommend reading the first two parts first, but you should be able to understand this post just fine either way.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 2 - Burning Crusade

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

Here we are, here’s the good stuff. This is one of my top two favourite expansions – but unlike my other favourite, most people actually loved this one too. After the bizarre two-year LSD-fuelled interlude that was Burning Crusade, players were back in Azeroth, plunging into the icy continent of Northrend. Out of all the content missed from Vanilla, this was the place players most desperately wanted to go. And it was excellently done. This expansion concerns the story of Arthas Menethil, also known as the Lich King. I won’t go into the details because we’d be here for hours, but here’s a quick twenty minute refresher and here’s a three hour long monstrosity.

On their journey from level 70 to 80, players had the option of starting out on Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra. From there they would visit either the jungle-heavy Scholozar Basin or Grizzly Hills, a chilled out alpine zone with beautiful music. After the nature zones were done, we moved onto the desolate Dragonblight, absolutely brimming with dragon lore, or the home of the Frost Trolls, Zul’Drak – wow’s first totally urban zone. After that, players usually hit level 68, and were able to buy the ability to fly – which was vital for the final two zones due to their inhuman scale – Icecrown, the bastion of the Lich King’s army, or the mystical Storm Peaks, which was an abandoned science lab left behind by the ancient Titans.

If it wasn’t obvious, this was a huge leap in scale and aesthetic compared to Burning Crusade, and I can tell you that the questing experience was vastly improved. Players had so many options, they could level two characters through Northrend without ever touching the same content. That said, there was very clearly a fan-favourite route. Howling Fjord (never Boring Tundra, as it was known), Grizzly Hills, Dragonblight, and then Storm Peaks, although every zone was good.

Right in the middle of the continent sat Crystalsong Forest, and above it, Dalaran, a city of mages and beautiful purple spires, which hung in the sky in much the same way bricks don’t. It immediately became a fan-favourite.

Then there was the addition of the Death Knight, a ‘hero’ class, which started at level 58, and was so popular at first that the game was overwhelmed by them for months.

On top of that, the expansion gave us some truly iconic raids, like Ulduar (considered to be one of the best ever), Naxxramas, and Icecrown Citadel.

The period encompassing Wrath is considered by many long-time players to be the game’s golden age. Subscribers reached their peak of between 11 and 12 million, and stayed there for the entire expansion. If this all sounds a little too good, then let me placate your fears. There was all sorts of drama to be had in Wrath of the Lich King.

Let’s go through some now.

The Zombie Infestation

To many, the most memorable moment of Wrath of the Lich King happened before it even released. Blizzard wanted to try having another go at a world event, because the one at Ahn’Qiraj had gone so smoothly (take a look at part 1 for that). It was called the Zombie Infestation, and it was designed as a throw-back to the Corrupted Blood incident (also in part 1). Players knew some kind of scourge-related event was on the way, but that’s all.

Wow Insider posted these portentous words right before the event began:

Will it be a simple replay of the Scourge Invasion that brought Naxxramas to our shores for the first time? Or will it be something even more sinister, a world event that shakes the very foundations of the World of Warcraft as we know it?

Call us destructive, but we're kind of hoping for the second.

On October 23, the first phase began. Items called Conspicuous Crates and new NPCs called ‘Argent Healers’ appeared in Booty Bay, a small cross-faction city. Any player who touched the crates had ten minutes to reach a healer, or they would be turned into a ghoul. They would gain the ability to kill any players or NPCs, and their hotbar would be replaced with a new set of abilities, most notably the power to infect other players by vomiting up clouds of infectious air. Successfully infecting an NPC or player healed you, so it was in your interest to do it. Since the timer was so long, and the healers so plentiful, the plague remained under control.

The next day, more crates appeared throughout the capital cities of the game. Plagued Roaches began crawling the streets, infecting any player who stood on one. The timer for players to find an Argent Healer halved to five minutes. It was definitely a challenge to stay on top of, but still manageable.

On day three, NPCs started to transform into Plagued Residents and would wander the streets attacking any player or NPC they came across. The damaging abilities of Ghouls increased dramatically. They gained the ability to control nearby zombie NPCs.

Every morning, players woke up to find their cities more overwhelmed by the scourge. On the fourth, NPCs appeared in capital cities, handing out quests for players to investigate the plague, with the goal of stopping it. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. But meanwhile, it grew harder to avoid. The incubation period dropped from five minutes to two, and infected NPCs became far more powerful. They could explode, killing themselves but infecting everyone around them. The number of Argent Healers halved. Zombie bosses began to appear throughout the world. Necropolises began to fly across the questing zones, dropping off clusters of infected enemies as they went. Even in the forums, player avatars became zombies.

On day five, the incubation period shortened to just one minute and the Argent Healers were almost completely gone. The zombies dealt drastically more damage. But there was hope – players were finally able to combat the infestation. Horde players could accept quests to cure the plague, and Alliance players developed a weapon to destroy the Necropolises.

At midday on 27 October, the cure was found, and the invasion came to an end. Zombies could no longer spread the plague, and once killed, would not respawn. It was over.

Despite only lasting a week, the infection left a long-lasting mark on the game.

One of the most interesting things about becoming a zombie was that it allowed for cross-faction communication.

Zombie status is its own faction. Even on a PvE server you will be attackable by both Horde and Alliance players. Attacking guards and players will flag a PvE player even after reviving as your living counterpart. Both Horde and Alliance players can talk together as zombies. Non-zombie players will see /yell messages as a combination of "..." and "brains".

In addition, zombies could use portals in Shattrath to travel to any city, even one from the opposite faction. Horde zombies could easily reach the streets of the Alliance capitals, and vice versa.

Here are a few recollections of the event from players around Reddit. This comes from /u/lolplatypus

God I loved that event. A friend and I were just finishing up in Outland when it happened. We both hit 70, high-fived, and hearthed back to Stormwind. It happened almost like a movie. Trade chat was full of people going "Why the hell is there a Ziggurat outside SW?" and "Need help at the bridge, there's zombies!"

We got stoked, and ran to defend Stormwind with our newfound 70-ness. It was a bloodbath. It was the marines in Aliens getting overrun, the opening of Red Dawn, and all the best zombie movies rolled up into one. The line kept getting pushed back, everyone was getting infected. First we tried to hold them at the gates, then the bridge, then the tunnel, and then we finally got infected ourselves and joined the undead army streaming through Stormwind's streets.

And then the tears, oh god the tears. Everyone in SW was so mad. I really wish something like this would happen again.

Player DJDaring had this to say:

It was honestly one of my favorite events of all time. It started off mild, a new boss to farm in Kara with the guild and some boxes in neutral cities with occasionally ghouls. Then some invasions with some sweet loot and the rate at which the plague spread grew faster exponentially.

Finally, all the capitals were either battlefields or ghost towns as all NPCs and poor infected players (A fair number of instigators too.) fell to the plague. Quest givers, vendors, guards, trainers, it didn't matter. They all turned to ghouls.

I remember a battle lasting for a few brief days as horde and alliance gathered in the upper ring of Shattrath and cleansed fleeing players while acting as a bulwark against the undead. Blood knights and other Horde, stood along side me and the Alliance Paladins and Priests in solidarity. Then it cleared and we charged the boats and sailed to Northrend.

And another:

WoW's greatest world event ever. Would you defend your city against an endless onslaught of the walking dead, or join the dead and chew on your friends' brains (bonus points if you took out the aid station)?

And another account from /u/c_corbec

I loved it. Me and some guildies holed up at the Orgrimmar bank (I think it was the bank, anyway...) Shaun of the Dead style, with everyone who had a 'remove disease' spell cleansing as many people as they could.

An account from /u/_Drakkar (LINKS TO REDDIT)

When I saw the first couple of ghouls come at me, I immediately started spamming my anti undead abilities like turn undead & the likes. When I hit the one that lets me track undead on the map, I saw this mob & looked to then see the wave hit me. 0FPS & ten minutes of lag later, they had killed me & I was a ghoul now. Also they made it inside orgrimmar.

And /u/Tequilashot360

I recall getting infected in STV I think, got spanked by a couple of other players. Was part of a very large social guild at the time, called in the regular 'nothing better to do' crew, so we started off with about 5-6 infected. From there we made tracks all the way up to Ironforge, having an absolute blast chasing lowbies anywhere we seen them. By the time we got to IF there must of been about 50-60 people in our group...to say all hell broke loose when we came across the regulars duelling at the gates. After we made our way inside we decided to camp the battlemasters and AH (can't remember if the AH guys were killable though).

To say people were unimpressed is an understatement! Got to think of all the people who only get their 2-3 hours of wow every evening and they have to spend it being slaughtered in their own base of operations.

However not everyone enjoyed it. In fact, the event was rather controversial at the time. The WoW economy totally shut down, and so did all progression. Raids didn’t happen, trading didn’t happen, players couldn’t even approach cities without getting sucked in.

It's funny because as someone that was a hardcore raider at the time; I remember this event just being kind of annoying lol. It'd be great for them to bring it back, as in retrospect, it was fun, but at the time it was honestly kind of annoying.

You couldn't go about your routine without getting ganked by PC zombies hiding in the green slime in the Undercity, or right next to a flight master, or.....everywhere, really.....

Great event, but it really put a damper on anyone trying to just play normally, when it happened. I gold to grind out for consumables....and couldn’t.

Nowadays, most processes in the game can be done through the user interface, but back then, everyone relied on NPCs. If you wanted to queue for a battleground or buy materials or sell something, you had to speak to an NPC to do it – and the NPCs were all busy trying to gnaw on your head.

Nonetheless, the Zombie event is remembered fondly by most players. And it would be a fitting introduction to one of the most beloved expansions in the game’s history.

The Torture Quest

In an expansion full of death, undeath, disease and pestilence, it’s really no surprise that one quest involved torturing a character for information. ‘The Art of Persuasion’ is a short and sweet quest in which you torture a captured enemy with an item called the ‘Neutral Needler’, which has the description ‘Inflicts incredible pain to target, but does no permanent damage.’ Each time you use it, the character screams and begs for you to stop, and on the fourth, you successfully extract the info you’re looking for.

The Quest text is suitably foreboding.

The Kirin Tor code of conduct frowns upon our taking certain ‘extreme’ measures – even in desperate times such as these.

You however, as an outsider, are not bound by such restrictions and could take any steps necessary in the retrieval of information.

Do as you must.

The quest caught the attention of Richard Bartle, a revered MMO pioneer and general industry boffin. He posted a rant on his blog, which you can read here.

I'm not at all happy with this. I was expecting for there to be some way to tell the guy who gave you the quest that no, actually I don't want to torture a prisoner, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that. Worse, the quest is part of a chain you need to complete to gain access to the Nexus, which is the first instance you encounter (if you start on the west of the continent, as I did). So, either you play along and zap the guy, or you don't get to go to the Nexus.

I did zap him, pretty well in disbelief — I thought that surely the quest-giver would step in and stop it at some point? It didn't happen, though. Unless there's some kind of awful consequence further down the line, it would seem that Blizzard's designers are OK with breaking the Geneva convention.

Well they may be, but I'm not. Without some reward for saying no, this is a fiction-breaking quest of major proportions. I don't mind having torture in an MMO — it's the kind of thing a designer can use to give interesting choices that say things to the players. However, I do mind its being placed there casually as a run-of-the-mill quest with no regard for the fact that it would ring alarm bells: this means either that the designer can't see anything wrong with it, or that they're actually in favour of it and are forcing it on the player base to make a point. Neither case is satisfactory.

Bartle’s comments caused a stir in the community, who had largely ignored the implications of the quest up until then. It circulated around blogs, before making it to Kotaku – one of the largest gaming news sites. And it only gained traction from there.

For the most part, the playerbase reacted with ridicule.

The enemies in question, Malygos and his blue dragonflight, have declared war on all spellcasters, and kidnapped and murdered a ton of them, while threatening to destroy the planet with some pretty hardcore stupidity. They also threaten to kill the families of wizards if they don't join his cause. You are complaining about torture? Whether you play alliance or horde, you have been killing thousands upon thousands of creatures, a lot of them innocents. A 30-second torture session is worse than that? You would probably kill him if the quest was to execute him, so go jump into a well, Mr Bartle.

Another commenter mocked Bartle for trying to apply the Geneva convention to a fantasy game.

Ah, yes. The Geneva located right next to Booty Bay.

This seemed to be a common sentiment.

Guess this guy would be surprised to learn that what he has done countless times in games, aka killing people, is actually prohibited by the law.

One user simply responded with “Don’t be a little bitch.” Others directed him to Hello Kitty online instead. Within the game, the consequences of not torturing the character are global destruction. Some players argued would be more unethical to skip the quest. One fascinating response was from a player who disagreed with the torture, but only because their Roleplay character wouldn’t like it.

Playing on a Roleplaying server (Cenarion Circle) my ridiculously Lawful-Good priest would have had a huge problem with it. I would have much rather found another way to deal with it to work with my character's backstory, habits, etc. but there really isn't.

Other pundits were more even-handed.

Scott Jennings of Brokentoys.org pointed out that there were other quests in Wrath of the Lich King which involved torture, but justified it with the fact that this was a Death Knight quest, and Death Knights are evil by nature.

Jennings entertained the idea of giving the player the option of refusing to participate in ‘The Art of Persuasion’, but that this would mean making the quest far more political than it was ever designed to be. And of course, World of Warcraft is all about slaughtering animals to take their stuff, so torture isn’t really that extreme when you think about it.

Writing for Wired.com, Clive Thompson argued that not only is the torture fine, there should be more of it in games. He argued that video games are the perfect vehicles for helping people inhabit complex scenarios. Players love choices and consequences. Adding torture to a game, and writing it realistically, would be a great way of demonstrating how bad it is – how often it generates totally false information (because victims will say anything to make it stop), how it can have crushing psychological effects on the person inflicting it, how it can cause you to lose your moral high ground and can push people to the side of your opposition.

In Thompson’s opinion, the problem with ‘The Art of Persuasion’ was the lack of consequences like these. If the torture had caused other NPCs to refuse to speak to you, or neutral characters to become aggressive – and on the flip side, what if it made the game easier, because future opponents were scared of the player.

From my perspective, Americans aren't thinking very seriously about those consequences. The torture at Guantanamo Bay, in overseas CIA prisons and at Abu Ghraib has all gone by with relatively little public outcry.

Why? Partly because U.S. officials refuse to describe or admit clearly what they're doing. But equally important, I think, is that our mass culture is filled with wildly misleading ideas about how torture works.

Bartle responded to all of this controversy with another post. In reply to the comments about the Geneva Convention, he said, “Blizzard could put a quest to rape characters in there: real life anti-rape laws wouldn't apply. Nevertheless, a lot of people would be very disturbed by such a quest.”

When it comes to the discussion of killing in the game, he had this to say.

I am aware that playing WoW means you get to kill thousands of creatures. I am aware that murder is a worse crime than torture. Murder is a worse crime than anything (other than mass murder). However, previous quests have not exactly asked you to commit murder (at least for the Alliance — I don't know about Horde). It's always been for some morally justifiable purpose (self defence, most of the time).

There's a contradiction between "you have to torture this guy because if you don't then the Blue Dragonflight will destroy the world!" and "if you don't like it, don't do the quest". If I don't do it and the world isn't destroyed, that means it wasn't necessary in the first place, right? So why do the guys want me to torture him?

It’s worth noting you can skip the whole questing experience if you want, and just level through dungeons instead. But that doesn’t mean the quests are unnecessary.

He also argued that it broke the covenant between game and player by defying expectations. He went in expecting thievery and killing, but not torture. "It's as if you were reading the new book 8 of the Harry Potter series and Harry turns to drugs and uses his magic powers for sport to blind people. […]I knew it had rogues, so I expected thieving. I had to wait until the second expansion to find out it had gratuitous torture."

Overall, Bartle lays out a number of points which you can read for yourself here.

Once again, the topic took off and circulated back into the gaming media, even reaching The Atlantic.

Players were quick to mock the idea of the quest as ‘gratuitous’:

Gratuitous torture? For a second there I thought you just clicked a button and watched swirly lines shoot out at a cartoony douchebag. I must have missed the bit where you beat the living shit out of him, cut off his fingers one by one and make him eat them, and then slowly remove his organs until he talks.

There was also a lot more mockery, with an entire article (on a now defunct website) called ‘Richard Bartle is a pussy’.

Look at me! Look at me! I invented muds and I'm still relevant! READ MY BLOOOOOOOGGGGG!

There was really no ‘climactic moment’ in this situation. It sort of fizzled out. Among the wash of WoW controversies and discussion, it faded out of relevance. But it’s interesting to look back on, as yet another example of WoW provoking discussions about far greater topics than wizards and dragons.

The Wintercrash Update

Wrath of the Lich King was ambitious. In some ways, too ambitious for its own good. The sheer scope of the expansion meant that Blizzard had less time to polish it. Bugs were rampant. A number of patches came out shortly after the expansion’s release in an attempt to fix its problems, but often these only succeeded in making it worse.

Enter Patch 3.0.8. It released on 20 January 2009 and brought a slew of new bugs with it. This post attempted to list them all. Players were unable to create Death Knights, human women were clipping in and out of their weapons, mail had gone missing without a trace, arenas were broken, there was unbearable lag, and dozens of little problems appeared all across the game. More importantly, there was a major glitch with Wintergrasp that could break the whole server.

Wintergrasp was one of the big selling points of Wrath of the Lich King. It was a zone dedicated entirely to world PvP. Even on non-PvP servers, any player who strayed into Wintergrasp for too long would automatically have their PvP enabled. There were siege engines, ranks, enemy buildings to destroy, scheduled battles, and rewards for the victors.

Whoever won control of Wintergrasp would defend it next time around, and in the mean time, would be able to complete daily quests or access a short dungeon. You can read more about the process of fighting over Wintergrasp here.

It was well received. But after 3.0.8 came in, every time Wintergrasp changed hands, the entire continent would collapse. As soon as it started back up, the battle would reset, fighting would resume, someone would win, and the continent got knocked offline again. Over and over and over. The whole thing was a disaster.

There was speculation that Blizzard released the patch before it was ready because Wrath of the Lich King had pushed the subscriber numbers to never-before-seen heights, and they desperately wanted to keep their new players happy.

the massive number of quite big bugs for a patch that has been on the PTR for quite a while really stunned me.

One player wrote.

You all bitch and bitch and bitch for them to put the patch out, they rush it out, and you bitch some more.

Blizzard quickly acknowledged the issue. The thread is full of players begging them to disable Wintergrasp so that they could play the game without being constantly disconnected.

Jesus, yes. For the love of all things holy turn the GD thing off. Can't do ANYTHING in northrend.

Later that day, Wintergrasp was gone. Whichever faction had last controlled the zone would retain control until the problem was fixed, which caused problems of its own. Players who weren’t on the winning side complained that they were unable to do the Vault of the Ancients (that dungeon I mentioned).

In the meantime, players took to calling the zone Wintercrash.

There’s a lot more to this disaster of a patch than I’ve mentioned, but I won’t go into too much detail.

The Power of Martin Fury

This is my favourite incident from Wrath of the Lich King, just because it’s so bizarre (and relatively inconsequential). In April 2009, the website Wow Insider received a tip off about an enigmatic guild which was shattering the Ulduar raid achievements at a suspicious rate. They got them all done in a single day – an almost impossible feat for even the most skilled guild. Based on their gear and experience, they had no business even attempting Heroic Ulduar.

There was the possibility that players were hacking the game, but everyone assumed such a feat would’ve gained more attention, and so the early suspicions were dismissed. The forum post about it had so many deleted replies that it was impossible to follow.

But the tip-offs kept coming.

The guild was The Marvel Family, on the US server ‘Vek’nilash’. Inquisitive players quickly narrowed in on one specific member of the guild, called Karatechop. His gear was fine. Not great, not terrible. But WoW displayed fun stats on each player, which were publicly available, and this is where the breakthrough happened. At some point, Karatechop had dealt 353,892,967 million damage. in a single hit.

Players puzzled over how anyone could do that. There were a number of scripted story quests that let players deal huge damage, but nothing even close to that number. Then someone noticed that 353,892,967 was the maximum health of the Flame Leviathan.

Players were able to destroy towers throughout the raid in order to reduce the Flame Leviathan’s health before taking it on. Defeating it without destroying any towers was insanely difficult, and would net players with a rare achievement called ‘Orbit-uary’.

There was another achievement associated with the Flame Leviathan called Shutout. The boss had four turrets on top of it, and players could destroy them in order to slow the boss down and increase damage. Shutout was rewarded to raid groups who managed to defeat the Flame Leviathan without destroying any of his turrets.

Not only did Karatechop have both of these achievements, he got them at the exact same time. In case it wasn’t obvious, that was borderline impossible.

The natural conclusion was that Karatechop had found some way to one-shot the Flame Leviathan. And if that wasn’t crazy enough, the evidence indicated he had one-shotted every single boss he came across.

As this information came to light, the entire community turned its gaze on Karatechop. Every single crumb of information was carefully analysed and cross-analysed, until players noticed something strange. On his profile (which showed what gear a player was wearing), he had an item in his shirt-slot, but it wasn’t loading.

The witch-hunt ended here. Item #17, a shirt called Martin Fury.

Use: Kills all enemies in a 30 yard radius. Cheater.

Got him.

Somehow, Karatechop had gotten hold of a piece of gear which should never have found its way into his hands. It wasn’t unusual for game-breaking items to be used by developers and programmers to help them put the game together or test bugs. The fact that it was only the 17th item to ever be created (out of tens of thousands) proved it originated some time in WoW’s early development. Even items from the earliest parts of the game had at least four digit numbers.

As soon as this news came to light, it exploded through the entire WoW player-base with a force and speed that was impossible to ignore. Everyone on every server and every forum was talking about it, speculating on how it could have happened, and on what they would have done in Karatechop’s place.

Such is temptation. With infinite power at your fingertips, could you resist using it? Karatechop couldn't, apparently. As the saying goes, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That can certainly be applied to Karatechop here, but what of the person who awarded it to him? If this is an accident, it's on the list of most unlikely accidents ever.

Every single member of The Marvel Family was banned, even those who hadn’t participated in the raids. Karatechop made public the email he received from Blizzard, which said the following:

The character, "Karatechop," on the realm "Vek'nilash" was found to have obtained an item (inaccessible by standard game play) from another player and trivialized the World of Warcraft raid contents with the exploitive use of this item. Consequently, this character was able to assist with the accumulation of items and achievements through the use of this item that is not obtainable by "normal" means.. The character's actions gave the account an unfair advantage over all other players. As a result of the violation of the World of Warcraft Terms of Use, this account will be permanently closed.

One of the members made a blog post about it, which got hit with so much traffic that the site collapsed.

I had no idea that for a week, my guild was in possesion of a legendary chest piece given to one of us via in game mail from a GM. The person who got it in the mail had their account hacked a few weeks earlier, and petitioned blizz for about a month before everything was restored, not sure if this has any relevance. It was not bind on possession or equip or anything, so the person who got it in the mail traded it to our guild master.

It was called Mathin’s something, or Martin’s something, but it basically had 99 charges to kill anything within a 30 yard radius. They chose to try it out in Ulduar.

I wasn’t there, but they apparently downed Flame with this item and our guild master got a huuuge hit registered on the armory, everyone got achivements which we had only dreamed of getting before. The next day when he tried to log in his account was banned (suprise!) and trade chat was absolutely merciless towards anyone with the Marvel name over their heads.

I got whispers from countless level ones, obviously alts from different servers, asking me how we did it, why his armory was so whacked, etc. One was offering me "thousands of USD" to give him info. Ignored.

Everyone had open tickets, and then more bans. Guildies were going offline and vent was nuts with everyone all like "This WoW account has been closed and is no longer available for use…" and getting really mad. One by one the entire guild was slowly getting their accounts locked, eventually I got mine ( I have never been in Ulduar, let alone in the group that night.) Threads are being closed on the forums, our vent info was compromised at some point, and a 12 year old joined cursing and talking about chicken.

The post led to the theory that a GM had tried to restore a player’s lost items, and had accidentally only typed the first two digits, thereby sending Martin Fury by mistake. But there was a not-insignificant faction who suspected this had all been deliberate. They questioned whether Karatechop had some connections within Blizzard, or if there was corruption involved. Or perhaps someone at Blizzard got fired and decided to go out with a bang.

Blizzard has rarely restored any toon I've seen hacked to its former glory. They seem to give you some random stuff and just leave it in one of these multiple in-game mails. On his level 13 warlock, I believe, was Martin Fury. […]I honestly thought it was something Blizzard gave to one of Leroy's alts for four months of ignoring the problems with his account.

A poll found that only 48.6% of players would have messaged the GMs (Game Masters) if they had received Martin Fury. 33% would have done exactly what Karatechop did, 11.4% would have used it to mop up PvP, 10% would have saved it for future use, and 28.8% would have used it sparingly.

On 30th April 2009, WoW Insider would interview the man, the myth, the legend, Karatechop himself. He confirmed he was not a hacker, and didn’t work for Blizzard (as some rumours had claimed).

I don't believe banning is fair, especially since this would be my first infraction in the 4+ years I've played the game. But it's Blizzard's game and they are the ones calling the shots, so fair is relative. Up until the bans, I honestly didn't think I was destroying the World of Warcraft.

We were given a 'You Win' button and it was something we used.

The interview once again caused a stir, with many players angry at Karatechop.

You broke the EULA. You hurt your guild. Blizzard is just following their protocol for cheaters like you. And your little dog-and-pony show is pathetic too.

However he did have his defenders.

The guy got a freaking Dev item by mistake! He could of done a lot worse damage than what he did! He could of gone into Wintergrasp and killed every horde member in sight!

[…]

in terms of the EULA, please show me where it says that you cannot use an item given by BLIZZARD?! If you fail to give me evidence of this then your posts are nothing but trolling.

[…]

I hope the Blizzard employee who f'd up (if that's the case) got the sack as well, otherwise to ban only the player is unfair and excessive.