A little background for those of you who aren't coppers. A nuisance alt is a level 1 (usually human, almost always a human paladin) throwaway character that someone who's
Anyway. So after the eleventeenth "Sosexiiixoxox" and "Rpgayfagslol" cruises by like someone left the faucet running on the moron tank I actually start paying attention to General and see Justicarr and Gerodox leading this special olympics march into our Goldshire to camp and be as nasty as they can.
Or as crass, racist, and vulgar as you can get when so many people have driven that road ahead of you that the closest you can come to the shock-value racist name you want is "Neauger", because all the good phonetic spellings have been taken.
They're here because Total Gaming Network's video production arm has decided that Moon Guard needs to die. Specifically, that anyone who's being - let me go back to the source material for this - an "rp fag" needs to go. It's nothing really more than Blizzard's own change in target demographic taken to its logical conclusion. Uh...except...
To that end, they got a truly mind-boggling number of other
Technical trivia: Modern multi-player games work through the magic of multithreading, which is a trick whereby they pretend to do many things at the same time by doing one thing quickly in an awfully clever way. One of the "clever ways" Blizzard came up with when they designed the game engine for WoW is the concept of a load zone. Just like a monster's aggro radius, the "signals" your icon sends out have a local boundary range limit. This keeps the game engine from having to process all signals from all icons all the time. I f you and I come into proximity and I turn your way, my client is handed the data about your icon - what are you wearing, are you waling or running, your heading, and position, for example. Icon signal increases geometrically based on the number of icons in each others' ranges - this makes sense as you think about it, they're all processing all of the others' signals: If there are two of us in a "room", my client has to process data for both of us, and our interactions with each other. If there are three of us, it has to process for my effect on player 2, my effect on player 3, player 2's effects on me... This example is simple, easy to understand, and almost completely wrong in the details, but does serve to very graphically explain why, when you put too many players in one small area (*coughDalarancough*) the game slows down dramatically.
Now pack hundreds into an area about the size of a basketball court and the server will make a noise that's the digital equivalent of "oh dear CHRIST", and go somewhere quiet and stare at its hands.
Like a juggler with too many balls in the air, the server will screw up in that multithreading shell game I alluded to earlier and some pointers in the database will...slip. So for instance it will tell people your hair colour is "Stormwind Brie" instead of "red" as that pointer bumps into the wrong memory area. Like a phonograph needle skipping.
The longer this cascade failure goes on, the more deranged the server gets. Almost always the first sign is that NPCs stop respawning. Then it gets "weird."
The technical trivia is over. You can wake up now. ;)
That's what happened to Moon Guard. So the native Moon Guardians decided to pack up and come over to Wyrmrest Accord and kick over the bins until their own server came back on-line. Or it stopped being fun. You can guess which.
Because it wasn't fair that some bullies kicked over theirs, you see. A certain kind of person - a weak man - always needs to find a victim to vent himself on.
The irony is lost on them.
Lellex from Moon Guard wonders, in a thread that Blizzard deleted...
So that other warrior guy from YouTube got account banned for organizing an event that (intentionally or otherwise) crashed some servers, but you can have jerk offs like this organizing -intentional- griefing and disruption without any sort of punishment?
"Yes." You'll love why.
The parent of TGN.TV owns Stratics now. And Blizzard/Activision sort of "needs" Stratics in much the same way that Square-Enix "needed" Bradygames; continuing market exposure. They're a valuable business partner, which makes you the role-playing community the actual problem. I mean, you were considered the problem already (you and explorers may have been the target audience to begin with, but that design philosophy is so 2007!) it's just that no one has the heart to tell
Well, TGN is allowed to.
Hmmm. Now that I give that some thought, I'm not sure I like the implications of that.
