After 15 years of great success, one of the most recognisable “massively multiplayer online role playing games” (referred to by the clunky acronym MMORPG) World of Warcraft released a “vanilla” (non-updated) version of the game this summer. Famous YouTubers and streamers quickly rejoined their old friends, while thousands of people flood their channels and waited for hours to log in to the same servers as them.
As it turns out, however, you can have too much of a good thing — the servers became overcrowded from the second you pressed “Enter World”. For some English “realms” the waiting queue was over 10,000 people with an estimated wait time of nearly 10 hours. Even daytime weekday queues were going as far as 8,000 players.
“I was logging in at around 8am, while most people were still sleeping, and never logging out,” one player shared. ”Even when not actually playing, I was pressing a button once in a while in order not to get kicked out because I knew that once logged out, I stood no chance of logging in again on the same day.”
Other players shared stories of their dedication in the game’s chat feature, such as calling their boss to reschedule a meeting due to the long queues, or using excuses such as “my wife is waiting for me” and “I have to go get my kids in an hour” in order to be left to “gather” virtual resources before other players.
Classic Revival
Initially launched in 2004, World of Warcraft (WoW) is considered the first current-generation MMORPG. With an impressive immediate interest, it hit all charts and became the most popular MMORPG by the end of 2009 with nearly 10 million frequent players. By 2014 the number of registered players jumped over a hundred million, and by 2017 the game had become one of the highest-grossing video game franchises of all time.
Under seven different expansions, better graphics were developed, thousands of new features added, and new “lores” introduced. However, as more levels and quests were added, developer Blizzard Entertainment eased some of the in-game processes. Faster travelling and leveling up, easier ways of finding groups and making money and other changes were made, leaving some to yearn for the hands-off, laissez-faire programming of earlier versions. This demand eventually led to a Vanilla release of the game in August 2019, called WoW Classic.
The Study of Scarce Resources
With the game, and especially the reaching of the final 60th level, being quite the priority for so many, people realised they needed a bit of an order. Some quests require the gathering of a single item at a particular location that can be obtained by only one person at a time and everyone else should wait for it to respawn. At first, people were going for the “first come, first served” principle. However, soon they realised it was going to take too long, so players proposed to queue in line. Soon, an entire cave was full of characters strictly lined up and patiently waiting for their turn to obtain the object. Whenever a new person appeared and went to the front, everyone “yelled” at them to go to the back of the line.
In case a monster should have been killed, people were creating groups, and group leaders waited on queues. Once their turn, the group gathers, kills the monster and leaves. If the quest is harder, people start searching for others doing the same thing, so they can help each other. Some of the quests are also written in a more subtle way, and since in this version you do not have a “quest helper” indicating where to go and what to do, instead of searching the internet, most people ask on the in-game chat for instructions, creating a very social friendly environment.
The miracle of it all is that these interactions were not designed to take place — instead they occurred spontaneously through the organisation of the players. The result is perhaps a bit more faith in humanity’s inherent tendency toward order and cooperation.
This isn’t the first time WoW has provided a study of human behaviour, however. Some researchers use popular video games as a model of real (or at least non-virtual) world behaviour, by setting up certain situations and examining the players’ reactions.
The concept was introduced back in the early days of WoW after the so called “Corrupted Blood Incident”.
The idea was drawn from a “quest,” in which players were required to band together to kill a specific creature, with the ability to infest both characters and their companions with a deadly contagious curse — Corrupted Blood. One group of hunters decided to purposefully infect their pets, dispawn them, and respawn them in one of the busiest cities in the virtual world, which resulted in everyone quickly getting infected. Thus, a virtual Black Death was accidentally created.
The case soon drew the attention of epidemiologists, who compared it to SARS, bird flu or a bio-terrorism attack, thus opening up the idea of the use of virtual worlds to predict the effects of a disease outbreak. While computer models can map the spread of a disease, unlike virtual worlds or real life, they can’t predict the behaviour of the hosts. The Corrupted Blood Incident, meanwhile, ran the gamut of human reactions — some players selflessly rushed to help, others fled cities or tried to deliberately infect other players.
“Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread,” Tufts University Research Professor Nina Fefferman told the BBC after the incident. “And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.”
