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.