I didn’t quit (or threaten to) but I did send an official complaint. A zombie invasion could indeed have been awesome, if there had been any thought given to lowbies, or to people who, say, picked a PvE server because they HATE PvP. With all NPCs dead or zombied and a very high chance of getting one-shotted on login if you’re not high level, the game was literally unplayable for a lot of people, me (and the player I recently recruited) included.

The person I ended up feeling worst for was a guy who posted on the forums: he was on his trial account. He’d just gotten to level 10. He ended up having to use all his gold to repair his gear (and gold is hard to get with the trial restrictions), and couldn’t play at all for multiple days. Of his 10 day trial. I don’t think trials got extended. And I know, if this had happened during mine, I wouldn’t be a player now. How many other people on trials didn’t go find the forums and post?

It was a cool idea. It could have been awesome in the figurative as well as literal sense. IMO, thoughtless implementation prevented that.

I don’t mind world-changing events in games. The zombie plague in Kingdom of Loathing a few years ago was a lot of fun. I do have a problem when a world-changing event is geared entirely toward a subsection of the player base, with no opportunity to opt out if you didn’t happen to be in the target demographic. I felt I was being punished for only having picked up the game recently. And I don’t think it’s smart for a game company to make the game unplayable for the new players just to give the high-level players something new to do.

* The people who willingly became zombies felt that gave them license to interfere with characters much lower in level.
* Anyone who dared cleanse the disease (playing the natural role of the good guy) was heaped with abuse. I was amused, but not in a good way, to see players who cleansed the disease accused of griefing for doing so, even when the consequence of not cleansing the disease was to become a zombie unwillingly. Evidently, only one side of this conflict was supposed to be able to deal with the event as they wanted to.
* Anyone who dared to state that it was not, in fact, enjoyable for them, for whatever reason, was treated abusively, including name-calling and profanity.
* Blizzard made no provision for *warning* anyone that this was going to come into the game and steal a week from the once-yearly Hallow’s End event, when many people were trying for the title, and not achieving the title because of those lost chances to trick-or-treat or save the towns meant waiting another full year.
* Blizzard made no provision for people who did not enjoy the zombie invasion besides blues advising them to either lie back and enjoy it or not log in, which was entirely contrary to every precedent they had set till that point.

You’re congratulating Zorba for being able to step outside his own perspective, while at the same time admitting that you, yourself, “can’t imagine” not enjoying the event. In fact, I believe that he enjoyed it as well, which is fine. I’m just saying that for the people who did not enjoy it, this was very far from a wonderful event — it was game-breaking. It was enough to make at least some of us fall entirely out of love with the game and the company. And it is only salt on the wound that any mention of that brings people out of the woodwork to comment on how much we *should* have enjoyed it, if only we were not lacking as players/people. Apparently, for the majority of WoW’s playerbase, and perhaps for Blizzard itself, the only valid kind of player is the kind who takes pleasure in utter mayhem and rampant bullying. Any other viewpoint is prima facie evidence of a glaring personality defect. But, hey, my kinetic/dark blast defender is almost level 5 now, so it’s all good. From the original closed beta to the month before the second expansion is a good run for anyone, in any game, and now maybe there will be new adventures in another game world for the next four years.

At the same time, the Zombie Invasion didn’t last too incredibly long, and was all about attempting to make the game more interesting. I must be from the Force of Awesome camp, because I deeply appreciated Blizzard’s effort with the zombie invasion event. To me, it is moments like these, that make a game truly unique and give players things worth remembering. It is up there with the Ahn’Qiraj gate opening event.

It’s all a matter of realizing that an MMO is not a static game where you should be able to expect the same thing from day to day, and being able to appreciate that. When I logged in and learned about the zombie invasion, I nearly died of excitement. Even at level 10 I had a blast becoming zombified and corpse-exploding in densely populated areas. The thrill of running from a pack of 6 npc zombies who never seem to give up was also awesome.

I guess this just illustrates Zorba’s point further, and I commend him on being able to step outside his personal opinion to see the broader perspective. I, for one, cannot imagine being mad at this event: IT ROCKED!

It was certainly vocabulary-expanding for some people, however; I didn’t know the average adolescent male *knew* that many terms for homosexual or ways to call people female as if that were a bad thing.

What I learned from the experience:

* If you put a way to make other people’s lives difficult anonymously into the hands of a group of adolescents, they *will* run amok with it.

* Any attempt to rein them in or express a dissenting opinion will be met with name-calling and profanity.

* They will insist to the bitter end that their fun outweighs any standard of decency you might appeal to (Starter areas? What fun is killing level 2 characters? How is that any challenge at all?)

* The only way to make sure it doesn’t happen again is to walk, and make it clear that you are walking, and why, and hope the admittedly-tiny shaft to the pocketbook is noticed.

NCSoft is a little less likely to do something like this because their numbers have *increased* a little in response to Blizzard doing it, and hopefully the tiny inflow of former Blizzard subscribers raises the collective maturity level of CoH subscribers. I definitely noticed that the people most likely to object to the utter disruption were the more mature subscribers, the ones for whom an MMO is part of a limited relaxation/social time after jobs, kids, and mates. Or the ones playing the game *with* their children: I ask again, what’s so fun about making a 6-year-old cry because he can’t play the game because his character’s dead again the minute he logs in or resses? You can keep it, thanks.