Gaming The System: When Gamers Pull Off Epic Shenanigans

All too often we here at Game Informer write about the best bosses or the worst vacation spots in video games, but we rarely talk about the players who participate in these games. Compiled here for your reading pleasure and entertainment are stories about eight of the most interesting players to participate in online multiplayer games. 

Angwe The Ganker God Of World Of Warcraft

People who play PvP servers like to fight other players. Angwe liked to fight the entire Alliance by himself. And he won. Camping a bottleneck that was the only route from Menethil Harbor to several other areas of Alliance territory, his orc rogue killed countless Alliance players. This did not make him many friends. To the contrary, he became what could be argued as the most hated person on the Internet since Hitler, (Warning, the link contains extremely graphic language) receiving death threats and slanderous comments relating to different body parts, functions, and familial relations. 

Being the spirit of PvP incarnate, these messages did not deter Angwe in the slightest. In fact, he thrived on them and went so far as to create an Alliance account under the name “Angwespy” in order to see what Alliance players thought of him. He was so successful in his battle against every single Alliance player that tried to enter or exit Menethil Harbor that people made strategy guides to circumvent his actions. Angwe was the best PvP player to ever grace World of Warcraft and proved that human adversaries can be just as difficult as in-game bosses.

Knifing Objectification

Team Fortress 2 is a great game. You and a team of fellow gamers all work together to complete objectives as well as murder members of the opposing team. Numerous strategies have been developed to use in combat, but only one user had an epiphany that Einstein would envy: most of the people who play Team Fortress 2 are men and many men like to look at good-looking women. You see, one of the abilities players have on most servers is to “spray” images on flat areas around the map. dsSLAY3R simply took advantage of this by becoming invisible as a Spy and sneaking behind other players distracted by his carefully placed images of well-endowed women and instantly killing them with a well-placed backstab. I think of it as poetic justice for objectifying women.

Defenders Of The Shard

Game testers are so important because gamers regularly play games in unpredictable ways that can have game breaking results. In the case of Asheron’s Call, no one could have predicted the course of events that follows. What started out as a simple quest to destroy six magic shards of evil quickly took a turn for the strange when a faction of players on one of the servers decided they would defend the last remaining shard, the Shard of the Herald, from pesky adventurers. They nicknamed the shard Harry and made a habit of sacrificing themselves to the crystal, making it nearly invincible. This might seem like only a minor annoyance until you realize that the Defenders of the Shard were not only holding the other players on their own server from completing the quest, but also the players across all the other servers. What resulted is almost too incredible to describe. 

The game developers took a break from working on the game and took on the roles of in-game heroes and armed themselves with legendary weapons, and took two high-level players who had been instrumental in the quest along to battle the Defenders of the Shard. Little did they know that one of the players they invited into their party was already a defender himself. 

In a spectacular turn of events, the developers were defeated in their own game. Then they tried again. And again. On the third attempt the developers finally defeated the guardians and ended the shard quest of Asheron’s Call. Being the fantastically good sports that they were, the developers erected a server-specific monument to the fallen Defenders of the Shard as an acknowledgment to their achievements and feats of daring. 

The Biggest Digital Heist Of All Time

EVE Online is a massive MMO that places players into the roles of star pilots. Players can start their own companies to ship resources, patrol caravans, or facilitate trading –or act as assassins guilds. The Guiding Hands Social Club (GHSC) is one such group of assassins for hire and they were paid a sum equivalent to $500 to in-game assassinate Mirial, the CEO of the Ubiqua Seraph corporation. Did The Guiding Hands simply assault Mirial head-on, guns blazing? No. Anyone who tried that would be dead in less than three seconds. The CEO owned an Apocalypse class warship, which, for the EVE uninitiated, is essentially a more portable Death Star, without the exhaust port or exposed power core. So what did the Guiding Hands do? What any good assassin would do: they came at the CEO sideways, wearing a smile. 

Members of the group infiltrated the company and spent a great deal of time earning trust and rising through the ranks. One of the GHSC members even became second in command of Mirial’s company. Then, at the right, predetermined hour, they all struck, like cobras at an unwitting mongoose. The CEO was dead before he knew what hit him, and everything of value on his ship was looted. Then, for good measure, the Guiding Hands destroyed his escape pod (escape pods automatically fire on death), essentially killing him twice. The Guiding Hands Social Club walked away from the ordeal with about 426 billion ISK, the real-world equivalent of $16,500 in real-world money. 

The strangest part of this in-game robbery and assassination? This kind of thing is entirely in line with EVE’s rulebook. Well played, GHSC. Well played. 

Atonement

When YouTube user DarkSydeGeoff posted a video demonstrating how to exploit repairing in Battlefield 3 for infinite points, he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. But when he saw the effects of the exploit spread throughout Battlefield 3 and newly high-level players began griefing low-level players, he realized his error. So, in a classic case of vigilante-ism, he decided he would wipe out players using the exploit wherever he found them. Perhaps two wrongs don’t make a right, but Geoff tried his best to undo the evil and suffering he had caused across Battlefield 3’s servers. Of course, he could just be a Battlefield 3 troll who enjoys sowing chaos and destruction, but I prefer my interpretation.   

Fansy The Famous Bard

There once was an EverQuest player who went by the name of Fansy. The PvP server named Sullon Zek that Fansy chose to play on was aligned about 80% evil, 10% neutral, and 10% good, and had no rules. As you might imagine, the good team was trounced time and time again and had to retreat to isolated, in-game equivalents of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back. Fansy was a bard aligned with good, and… well, was named Fansy. Players were not especially nice or welcoming to Fansy as he travelled the land of EverQuest. He was jeered at and taunted, and called various names, the most innocuous of which was Fansy the Pansy.

You might recall that earlier I said there were no rules on the Sullon Zek server. Well, I lied. There was one rule that carried over from the other servers: Players below level six could not be attacked by other players. Also, Bards have the ability to train monsters to follow them and can run slightly faster than other players. Fansy managed to put two and two together after finding a particularly unpleasant group of people went and trained some sand giants, enormous creatures that can kill anything and everything. He returned to exact vengeance while chanting what became something of a battlecry for Fansy: “GO GO GOOD TEAM!” With his power of running faster than sand giants, he brought the entire Evil team to its knees. Soon, moderators were called in to deal with Fansy. The first kindly reminded him that there were no rules, while the second asked him to stop, saying that Fansy was breaking the rules. To clarify, Fansy was only stopped on a no rules server because rules were specially created to stop him. To this day, fansites still exist proclaiming the deeds of Fansy the famous bard in full detail. 

Cally The Crook

The universe of EVE is a big place and has its share of scum and villainy. Cally probably takes the cake for being the scummiest and filthiest. However, he also played one heck of a game of EVE. Cally started a bank called EVE Intergalactic Bank (EIB) that stored the in-game currency ISK, offered loans to start-up companies, and performed other bank-y actions. The catch? Cally had no intention of running a legitimate bank. One day, he decided he was done and took out all of the money players had invested into the bank, around 790 billion ISK. For reference, that translates to about $170,000 in the real-world. He used some of it to buy a huge, imperial super star destroyer ship, another chunk to put a bounty on his own head, and pocketed the rest. Oh, and then, deciding he wanted to be the biggest… villain would be the polite way of putting it, he posted a fifteen-minute long video (that is no longer available) bragging about how he pulled it off, mocking the bank’s employees and customers who trusted him with their money. 

The Day The World Slimed

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a magical land called Ultima Online. Dragons, necromancers, elementals, minotaurs, and many great evil things roamed the realm spreading disaster and discord. Out of necessity, this land was peopled with great heroes and heroines fighting to stem the tides of chaos. However, one not-quite-so-noble hero saw things differently than others. Chrae was his name, and great things have small beginnings. 

In a small brick cottage near the sea, accessible only by boat or recall, Chrae hatched his plan. He realized that one of the most humble of monsters in Ultima Online, the slime, split when struck. Usually this only served as a minor annoyance for players, but it eventually became their undoing. Chrae conducted tests in his cottage by the sea and realized that a purple potion, a weak alchemical grenade, could hit multiple slimes at once, and keep them alive. He brought in ten slimes, sealed the cottage and began to throw the weak substance. He was rewarded with an exponentially growing army of slime. Then Chrae (probably) said, “Let there be slime!” and there was. Everywhere. With the enemies stacked on top of each other – over one hundred slime deep – Chrae marched out his cottage. Hundreds of players valiantly attempted to withstand the endless slime horde, but none prevailed. Five hours after the door opened, cities were brought to their knees by Chrae’s army and the Atlantic server went dark, crashing from the sheer weight of the slimes. The next day, when the world had come back, Chrae sent a message to the city of Trinsic asking for 10,000 gold pieces or he would repeat the attack. They laughed in his face. Once more, the slimes marched. And again the servers crashed. The next day a patch was released stating that, “Slimes will no longer split when struck.” Though it was not his intention, Chrae single-handedly ended one of the most annoying and frustrating monster abilities in Ultima Online.