I’ve followed the blog Modern Warfail 2 since a similarly-named product came to market.  It’s best described as “There is no reason one blog dedicated to the failings of one game on one platform should be so wildly entertaining”.

In the eight years since its release, Warcraft III has never truly endured a gauntlet of game-breaking hilarity  But as long as we’re in the “final stretch” leading to Starcraft II, why not start now?

Shortly before dealing with the latest crash hack, Blizzard responded to “spambots that say ‘meow’” by “banning people who say ‘meow’”.  The week after?  The legendary “buildover farm hack” has company.

The first hack allows towers to fire while constructing.  In addition, cancelling a structure allows it to stand and fight for several seconds while your worker moves on to something better.  And should you be so bad that you lose with this hack, you have the ability to create untargetable buildings with no hit points.  Best summed as “Highperching for Pussies”, these glorified doodads cannot be killed, so enjoy your seven-hour race to see whose internet craps out first.

The second?  (Note: These pictures are NOT Kodos_Forsaken from the Battle.net forums, only continuing proof he is the most hated man on Battle.net.)

It lets players choose “Neutral (Passive)” as their playable race.  Yes, the game grants you twelve sheep on your quest to taking over the world. Really, what the hell is there to say? Maybe it’s time to start that Warfail III blog.

Credit to the Warcraft III General Discussion Forum for supplying the links.

Heard this one?  Blizzard pissed off its fans by listening to them.  Blizzard updated their anti-hacking program in order to eliminate custom game cheaters.  In doing so, they rendered a number of third-party programs illegal, many of which were used to administrate Defense of the Ancients.  I can’t comment on which programs are responsible (since nobody actually knows), but they may include a program that allow you to kick people from custom games, and a program that lets you ban people who left the game because their dad was in a car accident.

Pragmatically, you can take this either way.  On one hand, it indicates Blizzard is ignorant that a Warcraft III custom map is one of the most popular computer games in the world.  On the other side, Blizzard can do whatever they want with Battle.net, and you’re not paying for a lawyer to contest the Terms of Use.  Besides, on May the 20th, Blizzard used Battle.net to announce this was all going down:

“We would like to remind everybody that the use of any third-party software in conjunction with the game to modify Battle.net and/or change game play in any way may result in account closers and a people suspension of access to Battle.net.  Third-party software may include, but is not limited to any program that allows you to run multiple instances of the game at the same time, cheats, hacks, and/or bots.  To continue our aggressive stance on cheats/hacks, we will be monitoring Custom games as well as Ladder games on Battle.net.”

So naturally, DotA players are livid that they used hacks in order to enforce their custom game hierarchy.  How angry are they?  How about I just let some pretty pictures do the work?  A picture of somebody posting a thousand words is worth a thousand words. (Click to enlarge.)

Yup.  British imperialism, slavery, and the Holocaust.  What better than to associate a list of humanity’s crimes with Defense of the Ancients?  Props to Piesofthenorth for most of the information in this entry.  Be back over the weekend.  I have important, life-related things I need to deal with.

This has been on my mind for some time.

My Warcraft III win-loss record directly measures my success as a human being.  For this reason, I take the game more seriously than any amateur should.  Despite my role as an internet badass, a guy who openly criticizes political arguments by quoting a poster’s win percentage, I’m actually humble about my gaming ability.  If I lose the game on count of giving the “flag inspector” the right of way, I’ll owe up to that mistake.  I’ve nothing to lose from admitting that a legendary cyber-athlete like myself can make totally human errors.

Honestly, I have never been able to understand what compels one to cheat in an online game.  Your immediate response may be “to boost the value of his or her pathetic soul”, but I think it goes beyond that.  Chalk this up to a chess mentality: “If somebody does X, they are expecting Y as a result, and Y may eventually lead to Z.”  If someone hacks in a video game, they are expecting…what, exactly?

This isn’t necessarily the Russia Hackteam crowd I’m looking at, those who view shooting somebody through a wall as no different than picking up the Rocket Launcher.  I’m talking about those who want their performance “enhanced” by cheating.  Sports and politics provide financial incentive for people to step over each other.  If I could jam a needle in my ass and become a pro-level baseball player, I would be taking lessons from Barry Bonds right now.  The majority of players who cheat in online video games (probably a teenager, probably Eurasian, probably a virgin) will never have the opportunity to create money or fame through playing video games.

So you get a fancy number next to your account name.  That fancy number will get wiped out in a matter of months.  You will still play people who can throw you through the metaphorical plate-glass window.  You will alienate those who actually care about whether or not you hack.  And if you’re doing it for the lulz, that would go down as the lamest form of grief play in the history of online video games.  Honestly: What is Y?

I normally pass dwelling on the dumb things said on Warcraft III, but let’s break this gem down critically.  Forget that a program designed to detect illegal programs would probably also be illegal.  (In addition, it would have announced our cheating at the beginning of the game.)  But let’s assume it’s real.  According to him, six players playing or observing this match were hacking.  So here’s a question for you:

Seven people were in this game.  LiveFastDieFun, you or your friend: Which one was hacking?