Through an exploit, a viral debuff can escape and infect any player or NPC in the world. Cue entire cities dying with no way to stop it. It was interesting enough that the CDC investigated.
Blizzard ended up repeating this event intentionally as a promo for the second expansion (a zombie apocalypse) and ironically, people hated it because it made the game unplayable!
Another funny accidental apocalypse in early WoW was kiting raid bosses to cities, letting them wreak havoc until a GM despawns them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl0VWJdE01M
On January 27, 2014 (YC 116 in-game), the one-year anniversary of the immense Battle of Asakai, player corporation "H A V O C", a member of Nulli Secunda, which in turn is a part of the N3/Pandemic Legion coalition, mistakenly failed to make a scheduled payment to in-game security force CONCORD. This resulted in the star system B-R5RB losing its sovereign status, which meant that other players could capture the system without needing to wait for the normal "reinforcement timers" (real time waiting periods of several days designed to allow defenders to rally).
I played EVE Online for a good 6 months but never really got over the learning curve hump, at least to the point where I would consider it "fun". I found myself split screening it and having an Excel spreadsheet open and suddenly I realized I was competing in an virtual economy that was all too real.
Oh man, the memories. My server was big on open world PvP, and I was in a large guild that enjoyed raiding Stormwind. We would often storm the city and hold the throne room with a few hundred players. If you got enough Alliance players to stay and fight you, eventually the entire zone would lag, and then the entire continent would crash for about 10 minutes. Any player on the Eastern Kingdoms would get booted back to the character select screen.
There is a legendary weapon (Thunderfury) that can only be gained through a long questline ending with an open-world boss fight that takes 20-40 players (depending on your skill level), just for a single person to get the weapon.
We raided Darnassus at the same time we knew our rival guild was attempting the quest and successfully prevented them from getting it by crashing all of Kalimdor* :)
> Another funny accidental apocalypse in early WoW was kiting raid bosses to cities, letting them wreak havoc until a GM despawns them
Blizzard repeated this event as a promo for the BC expansion too! "High Lord Kruul" would spawn in front of player cities with an army of burning legion mobs. He had nearly identical stats and skills as Kazzak.
* They tried again next week and got the weapon...
Through an exploit, a viral debuff can escape and infect any player or NPC in the world. Cue entire cities dying with no way to stop it. It was interesting enough that the CDC investigated.
Blizzard ended up repeating this event intentionally as a promo for the second expansion (a zombie apocalypse) and ironically, people hated it because it made the game unplayable!
Another funny accidental apocalypse in early WoW was kiting raid bosses to cities, letting them wreak havoc until a GM despawns them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl0VWJdE01M