Griefing, Money

Wensday night I went over to Brandon’s house, and we set about screwing with low level WoW players on the Alliance side (I’m horde, obviously).  We’re killing guards, and seeing if we can coax any players into going into PvP mode (since it’s a non-PvP server, you gotta get someone to try and go after ya before you can kill ’em.)  That’s when we found a bug in WoW.  High level hunters have Snake Trap – throw it down, and if an enemy steps on it, it releases snakes that poision the crap outta your opponent.  Pretty cool.

Well…. the discovery was accedental – I threw down a snake trap to kill guards (non PvP flagged players won’t set off the trap) and the snakes kill the guards in like 2 seconds.  Cool.  Then a low level Alliance player ran by the snakes… and the snakes killed him.

WTF?  Try it again… holy smokes.  We could kill ANYONE we wanted to without them expecting to suddenly be in combat!

Yeah… I’ll admit it, I can be an asshole.   We did that for like 3 hours… musta killed nearly a hundred Alliance that way (well, actually, killed a lot of the same players over and over).  It’s amazing how much fun it is to grief the crap outta people sometimes.  Normally, I don’t, unless it’s someone who’s similar level to me, and has a similar chance of kicking the crap outta me – then it’s fair game. 

The weird part is if you run across a bug like this on a non-PvP server, or harrass low enough level players, the Game Masters show up, and hit you with the Ban Hammer.  I completely expected to get a low-level ban out of it – 3 hours.  But nothing.  Never heard from them, nothing.

Which makes me wonder how closely monitored the servers are these days.  I’ve never drawn a GM warning before, but because of Gamer Zone, I know a lot of people who either got warnings or temporary bannings.  But back then, there were only like 5 million players – now it’s twice that, spread out over a huge number of servers.  In the real world, it takes roughly 1 police officer per 500 citizens here in the United States.  I wonder what the GM to Player ratio is like in a virtual world?  I can’t image anything approaching even 1 GM per 1,000 players – That would be 10,000 GM’s.  Even a 1 to 10,000 ratio seems extreme, you’d still be looking at 1,000 GM’s – pay ’em $7 / hour (keep it cheap for this example) and you’d be looking at laying out $1.1 million a month just in GM’s. 

I wish Blizzard wasn’t quite as secretive about the business side of thier product – it would be fascinating to see how the parallels between the Real World and the World of Warcraft world work out.

Still wating on my money from Kenosha.  I gave them the invoice BEFORE I went to Kenosha – this is becoming a problem.  Every time it seems like thier payments are getting slower, and slower.  This is always a frustrating situation for me – having money setting out there, and not being able to do anything about it.  Flat broke, and nice receivables. 🙁

I had planned ahead for it, but, when I stayed an extra week up there it burned through more than my planned cash alotment (thankfully I had already set up with dad on a backup plan in case I did end up there extra time), and even then I should have been payed during the second week based on thier normal payment speed.  But noooooo…. none of it could work out the way it should 😛

But I’m still getting some work in this week – worked for Dad doing AutoCAD drawings for two days, and next week I’ll be building panels.  Since dad floated me some during the trip, I’m not actually getting paid yet – I’m working off what I owe him first, and drawing $20 / day in actual cash until I’m up to date.

Damn this sucks.  I’m now fairly certain that Christmas this year is gonna be very tight!