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Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

wow.joystiq.com

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Re: Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

#21

Post by TylerE »

brador wrote: post #17

It's interesting to comprehend the amount of lives a hack like this will positively affect. How many will pick up a book, or go for a walk, now that they no longer have their go-to fix of virtual reality. How many WOW addicts will have time to think "never again" and follow through. Equivalent to all the cigarettes in the world vanishing for a few hours? Possibly. And equally as effective I say.

> How many WOW addicts will have time to think "never again" and follow through

Somewhere between -infinity and zero.

Re: Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

#22

Post by eric_bullington »

aesopiate wrote: post #16
jpxxx wrote: post #5

I think that there's something kind of fascinating and romantic about the idea that an entire world and the ongoing social affairs of thousands of people can fit on a single server blade in the middle of nowhere.

You could easily be a Night Elf's World of Earthcraft avatar on some server blade in some cooler universe than ours.

As you probably are aware, this is not entirely unlikely:

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

An interesting read by world-renown philosopher Nick Bostrom.

Re: Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

#23

Post by waterlesscloud »

niggler wrote: post #19
Ogre wrote: post #14

There was a plague in WoW in 2005 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident Could be a similar sort of thing, or it could be a hack.

Debating whether to be impressed or disappointed that this has its own wikipedia article ...

It certainly raises some questions for the "notability" police.

Re: Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

#24

Post by patio11 »

Admin consoles: the soft underbelly of billion dollar software operations since...

Seriously, though: you almost certainly have one if you run a software business. Client side SSH certificates are your friend. If you're not able to do that, because it is really annoying, separate it from the main app and lock it down as much as possible. (Separate authentication from the main site/app's authentication scheme. Lock down access, ideally at the network level. Strongly consider two-factor auth.)

Re: Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

#25

Post by kahawe »

bsphil wrote: post #13
jpxxx wrote: post #5

I think that there's something kind of fascinating and romantic about the idea that an entire world and the ongoing social affairs of thousands of people can fit on a single server blade in the middle of nowhere.

That's what makes EVE so much more interesting to me. There's only one server. The monthly fee can be earned in-game. The economy is tied to actual dollars because it's so reliable. There have been plenty of universe-spanning conflicts that impact the entire game with genuine political drama, and the dev team steps back to let it unfold with minimal intervention.

Also a lot of EVE is actually played outside the game... think about traders and crafters and their excel spreadsheets or websites put together for trade networks.

And of course the spies! Their activities went so far as cutting an important fleet commanders electricity so his thousand-of-real-world-dollars titan could be shot down.

EVE is fascinating!

Re: Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

#27

Post by jiggy2011 »

jpxxx wrote: post #5

I think that there's something kind of fascinating and romantic about the idea that an entire world and the ongoing social affairs of thousands of people can fit on a single server blade in the middle of nowhere.

I'm going to assume it's much more than one physical box, probably big chunks of several data centres.

In MMO terminology "server" seems to refer to a single self contained game world.

Re: Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

#28

Post by ben0x539 »

tibbon wrote: post #15

If I remember right, there was a post on HN here a while ago about how there's a dot pattern embedded in all WoW screenshots, so they can identify who the user is even if they remove the character name from the screen. If they have the account information on this, I have to wonder if they could actually sue someone (instead of just banning them) for using this hack?

Those screenshots are probably the victims', anyway. While Blizzard probably does have enough logging to track this down on their end, it's fairly easy to get a trial account with bogus account information, so it would be back to grabbing their IP addresses and pleading with some ISP to reveal their real identity.
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