People are dicks – particularly on the Internet. While that shouldn’t come as any great surprise, occasionally we come across someone whose level of sheer dickery reaches legendary proportions. As we move into 2014, let’s take a look at a few such individuals from the previous year.
EVE Online And The Somer Blink Scandal
We’ll start with a fairly tame entry, and one in which both sides displayed a fair volume of dickheadedness. A few months CCP Interactive – the folks behind the immensely popular MMORPG EVE Online – announced a massive giveaway to celebrate its upcoming EVE Vegas event. It decided to run this event through gambling website SOMER Blink (a third-party site which runs hundreds of micro-lotteries per day involving ships, items, and gear). Now, here’s where things get a little troublesome: for some reason, EVE decided to include Two Gold Magnates and Three Guardian Vexors among the event’s prizes.
Apparently, those two ultra-rare ships were effectively supposed to be one-of-a-kind relics handed out only to collectors and loyal players. CCP had released both with the promise that no more would ever be created. Naturally, the community immediately went up in arms, shouting about favoritism. These concerns were only exacerbated by the fact that each staff member of SOMER Blink was gifted with a rare ship of their own, as well. Some players even went so far as to try to track down personal information of SOMER Blink staff so that they could threaten them – as though they believed this would stop the event from going forward.
Neverwinter’s Astral Diamond Exploit
I got bored of Neverwinter fairly quickly, but while I still played, there was talk of a huge in-game exploit which allowed players to make billions of Astral Diamonds – an in-game currency that can be used to buy paid currency known as “Zen,” which can in turn be exchanged for goods and services in Neverwinter’s in-game shop. They can also be used to buy items from the player-run auction house. Astral Diamonds are separate from in-game currency used to purchase items from vendors. It’s about as convoluted as it sounds.
Perfect World left the exploit alone for so long that they ultimately ended up having to take the server offline and roll it back several hours, as the economy was effectively devastated by a small group of players. Some of you are probably wondering why this has ended up on a list related to general assholishness. Well, aside from the players who were using the exploit – ruining the game for everyone else – this catastrophe wouldn’t have occurred if Perfect World hadn’t saddled Neverwinter with so many micro-transactions.
Sergey Titov, Hammerpoint Interactive, and The War Z Scam
I’m actually getting a little tired of writing about this one – and I’m pretty sure you’re sick of hearing about it – so I’ll keep it brief. There was this guy named Sergey Titov. He was the sort of guy even used car salesmen wouldn’t invite to parties (they found him too sleazy). A development firm he was previously involved with was responsible for Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing – one of the worst games ever made. Titov apparently didn’t want to mar his perfect track record of being a terrible human being, and so joined up with Hammerpoint Interactive to create The War Z, kicking off a train-wreck of events which ended with Hammerpoint being sent a Cease and Desist letter from Max Brooks and Valve having to refund thousands of customers. Read more about it here.
ZillianOP’s Fake Disability
Sergey Titov is an ass, but at least he’s pretty obvious about it. Somehow, the fact that he’s pretty terrible at hiding his less-admirable traits makes him seem better than this next fellow. For those of you who aren’t really in the loop, ZillianOP was a well-known streamer on Twitch, who primarily played Diablo 3. He was also paralyzed from the waist-down, and confined to a wheelchair.
Well…that’s what he told everyone, anyway.
As it turns out, the scumbag wasn’t actually disabled. Fans tuning into his stream one night watched a miracle unfold before their eyes, as he sprang to his feet while recording. While this happened, a girl who’d been chatting with him immediately began babbling about taking her dog to the fish shop. He made a ham-fisted attempt to save face, but the damage had already been done: everybody knew what a scumbag he really was.
Derp Trolling Takes Out League, Dota, EA, and Disney
Our final entry is the ‘hacker’ group known as Derp Trolling (and I use that term very generously). As many of you are no doubt aware, December 30 was kind of a bad day for League of Legends. And Dota 2. And Disney. And EA. The group decided, on a whim, to target a streamer known as PhantomL0rd, gleefully announcing that they would shut down the servers of any game he attempted to play.
They made good on those claims, executing DDOS attacks on Riot Games, Valve, and even Disney, bragging about it all the while on their Twitter feed. PhantomL0rd, for his part, capitalized on the presence of the script kiddies, informing everyone that they could subscribe to ask them questions. For a while, it was looking like he’d profit from everyone else’s misery…that is, until the group found his personal information and SWATted his house.
Now, as anyone with even a modicum of computer knowledge is aware, a DDOS attack is the equivalent of driving a bus into a storefront. Yeah, it’s going to cause a great deal of damage, and an enormous inconvenience aside…but it really doesn’t take anything more than basic operational skills to pull off. Of course, I get the feeling that DERP doesn’t really care about impressing anyone with their computer knowledge…they just want to wreak havoc and watch the world burn.
And they’re certainly succeeding in doing so.