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 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.