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Entire Cities In World of Warcraft Dead, Hack Suspected

Posted by timothy on from the just-some-reamde-plotlines-nothing-to-worry-about dept.

hypnosec writes "Entire cities in the World of Warcraft have been destroyed with no one spared, not even the NPCs. About 13:00 GMT, forums on WOW started getting the first comments from users regarding players and NPCs dying on the Ragnaros-EU realm in Orgrimmar. Users of the online game started reporting that Draenor had a similar sight to offer. Some of the other realms where this was reported include Tarren Mill, and Twisting Nether." Also at Joystiq, and (with more screenshots) at WCCF Tech, which reports that "it appears the damage is most severe in World of Warcraft European servers."

5 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. virtual genocide by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Informative

    worse than virtual pandemic

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  2. Hotfixed by _bug_ · · Score: 5, Informative

    Blizzard reports the exploit being used has been hotfixed.

    1. Re:Hotfixed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      The "exploit" in question being an unauthorized GM client.

  3. Re:What does it all mean? by LMahesa · · Score: 4, Informative

    In Role Playing Game (RPG) parlance, an NPC is a Non-Player Character. Anything beyond the scenery and objects that is not directly controlled by a player, in other words. A 'city' is just that - an in-game hub of sorts, which, I think, is usually represented by a dedicated server in online games. Or the other way round. *shrug*.

    Whether or not there's any actual role-playing going on in these online games is a different matter.

    --
    Look, no SIG!
  4. Re:Here's hoping... by jeffasselin · · Score: 5, Informative

    They're killing characters and npcs, not deleting them. Death is only a short-lived inconvenience in wow.

    Killing npcs is more annoying actually since some can take a while to respawn.

    The issue appears to be a combination of a teleport/wall-hack and the ability to kill any creature, npc or character with a single hit which obviously trivializes the whole game and enables griefing on this kind of epic scale. The hack was apparently found a couple weeks ago but only fixed today with a server restart.

    --
    If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.