Battle.net or: How I Learned To Stop Caring About My Game And Half-Ass the Fix
I believe that if the human races makes contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life, our species will be at nuclear war in a day. No, it won’t happen because the aliens pull an Independence Day on us. I think everything will be going great. Then the leader of the aliens will shop at Wal-Mart. As the greeter begs him to show his receipt, the leader will realize the human race has no redeeming value and deserves to be obliterated.
How did I come to such an impulsive conclusion? During the last several months, Warcraft III has witnessed a rash of cyber-warfare. As nerds spam the chat channels of people on the internet that they don’t like, one tough guy houses his idle weaponry in Clan PK on Azeroth.
Meow, meow, meow, meow…
Clearly, Blizzard is under shareholder obligation to curtail spambots in their seven-year-old, financially-irrelevant video game. Forget that the last two weeks of ladder play have been under siege by a new disconnect hack, the fantastic story of using a macro to queue illegal building commands and crash the game (Author’s Note: This issue is now patched as of January 20th); someone at Blizzard logged out of World of Warcraft to try and defeat this spammer. How did he attempt to do this? By forcing Battle.net to impose a two-week IP ban on any person who says “meow” in Clan PK. Seriously.
Well…know how when you were a kid, one of your classmates would persuade you to stab the teacher, and when you ask why, he says “just try it”, expecting you’re too stupid to foresee the inevitable court date? You know how this one ends.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:21 am
wow i read this like right when you posted this. But yea that has got to rank in top 3 of most retarded things i have seen blizzard do to counter hackers.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:23 am
Blizzard tried to fix a hack by banning people that say “meow?” Oh my god my day just got so much better.
January 19th, 2010 at 9:18 am
Negative, there’s a crash hack that’s been wrecking ladder play for two weeks, and somehow, banning bots who say the word “meow” was more important.
Still sad all around.
January 19th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
This reminds me of my days on the GameFAQs message boards. Every so often people would get banned for claiming to be underage (you have to be at least 13, due to laws about collecting information from children). Not that they blatantly came out and said “I AM 12 YEARS OLD BAN PLZ” But because someone contacted then on AIM and said “I am a GameFAQs mod. If you post a certain paragraph on a certain board I will increase your account status” or something like that. Usually it’s just some long-winded story or rant that they don’t bother to read, and nestled deep in there is a small “I am 12 years old.” Then they make another account and complain on Message Board Help, where they will be unanimously declared stupid.
Good times, good times.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
So this wasn’t just a weird loophole kinda thing that whoever owns the PK bot is doing? I seem to remember a similar sort of thing with Clan aC a while back, they would trick people into saying something and they would get a ban. IIRC anyway, So is this completely unrelated to that?
January 19th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
also, the serb quote at the end made me laugh.
January 21st, 2010 at 1:52 am
No idea, Pies. I’m sure it operated on the same principle, although I don’t have any recollection of that particular incident.
January 21st, 2010 at 8:54 am
IN YOUR FACE GHETTO
today (jan 21th) blizz released an update that fixes the hack, it also added couple of maps to the ladder map pool… HAHAHA just kidding, but the hack is gone now.
January 21st, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Yeah, I’ll go ahead and amend that. :P
January 22nd, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Blizzard does not care about games that no longer produce money. But that spam was really funny, the ones I saw only ever just typed random letters.
SC2 will be no different. Few years after release it’ll be just as abandoned as War3. Better enjoy it while it lasts!