Gnomes rain down on WoW players

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 6th July 2007
Comments (21) Stumble
Dead gnomes rained down outside Ironforge Bank recently in act of elaborate game advertising.

Dead gnomes rained down outside Ironforge Bank recently in act of elaborate game advertising.

In-game adverts are generally regarded as a bad thing, even when gamers are assured they will play a small and non-invasive role in the gameplay. Sometimes though, they can prove to be incredibly inventive and amusing. It's rare, but it happens.

Possibly in order to get around the latest patch to World of Warcraft, which had a spam-hammer component to fight back against the gold farmers which are currently plaguing the realms of Azeroth, one company has gone to extraordinary lengths to get some in-game publicity.

Using what Kerri Knight calls "the age-old client-side memory hack", advertisers for Wowmine.com rained down a message of biblical proportions outside Ironforge Bank; spelling out the web address with the bodies of dead gnomes who rained out of the sky in an unholy torrent of midgets.

Blizzard was quick to react and sent in teams to clean away the mess.

Blizzard reps have since asked the community to help tackle the problem via the WoW forums, just in case the gnomes (or worse) strike again;

"I ask that any player that witnesses these to report them straight [sic] away. If you feel so inclined, you can also post the realm name, and zone here and I can see what can be done about getting them handled that way. Please, once they are reported, leave the bodies alone, and do not linger around, or huddle near the bodies."

That's right folks, move along - there's nothing to see here except the piles of dead gnomes. Nothing at all.

Hate gold farmers? Think virtual worlds should be taxed, or is the whole thing way out of proportion? Put your answers on a postcard and send them to this thread... in handwriting form only please.
Quote DarkLord7854 6th July 2007, 14:15
I find that kind of advertising to be more interesting then any in-game ad I've seen so far
Quote will. 6th July 2007, 14:20
Yea, better than those annoying whispered messages you get.
Quote Slink 6th July 2007, 14:23
1g plx
Quote DXR_13KE 6th July 2007, 14:26
now that is a fun and imaginative way to advertise, at least if no one abuses of it and makes spamy Nasca size adds with Tauren bodies.
Quote Hugo 6th July 2007, 14:58
http://img393.imageshack.us/img393/1129/untitledsl4.jpg
Would you believe that we couldn't find anything in the entire bit-tech office to allow me to do that properly?

Now if we can only get some sort of anti-WoW message into WoW...
Quote pendragon 6th July 2007, 15:58
stupid gold farmers.. I couldn't stand that <expletive> when I was playing WoW... way to ruin the game.. at least Blizzard has always been on top of it with bannings and whatnot.
Quote ChiperSoft 6th July 2007, 16:49
Found a youtube vid of it happening. http://youtube.com/watch?v=LZ-3W27f1LM
Quote capnPedro 6th July 2007, 20:22
I'd be very interested to know how it was done. Spawning anything shouldn't be an action that can be performed by a client. I take it some sort of custom 'bot' was written.

Very clever stuff.
Quote identikit 6th July 2007, 20:35
Meh, I remember a group of guys that would join CS1.6 servers and their spraytags when sprayed next to each other formed a giant billboard. I think some of them got banned for no-recoil and aimbot hacks because they used it with paras to write domain names on the walls.
Quote FR34K 6th July 2007, 20:45
why gnomes?! My main's a gnome. Why couldn't it have been night elves, or some other race?

I'm kind of curious how they did it too.
Quote DXR_13KE 6th July 2007, 21:00
"its raining gnomes, alleluia, its raining gnomes......" :D
Quote Cthippo 6th July 2007, 21:19
If this had be a WoW sanction ad it would suck, but as a hack it kicks arse!
Quote proxess 6th July 2007, 22:14
Lets go back to the good old days! Ultima Online 2D <3
Quote completemadness 7th July 2007, 18:22
Quote:
Originally Posted by capnPedro
I'd be very interested to know how it was done. Spawning anything shouldn't be an action that can be performed by a client. I take it some sort of custom 'bot' was written.

Very clever stuff.
i think its due to the poor coding of wow

i remember a video where the guy could teleport anywhere in the world at the click of a button
Quote identikit 7th July 2007, 19:27
Quote:
Originally Posted by completemadness
i think its due to the poor coding of wow

i remember a video where the guy could teleport anywhere in the world at the click of a button

Surely that can't be right?! I mean you could just bind it and with autoit just keep doing stuff to earn gold.
Quote Edvuld 7th July 2007, 20:39
Quote:
Originally Posted by identikit
Surely that can't be right?! I mean you could just bind it and with autoit just keep doing stuff to earn gold.

Well, how do you think the gold-sellers make money?

I've seen videos of some lvl40 hunter downing bosses in Dire Maul for example solo by teleporting :(
Quote Bogomip 7th July 2007, 22:05
Quote:
Originally Posted by completemadness
i think its due to the poor coding of wow

i remember a video where the guy could teleport anywhere in the world at the click of a button
The command is there for game master use to teleport around the place helping people out and there was some way of hacking it, I assume the spawning things is just the same kind of thing.
Quote completemadness 8th July 2007, 02:50
Quote:
Originally Posted by Edvuld
Well, how do you think the gold-sellers make money?
actually they can just use bots to farm good creatures

have like 10 computers all doing that, your going to earn lots of money
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bogomip
The command is there for game master use to teleport around the place helping people out and there was some way of hacking it, I assume the spawning things is just the same kind of thing.
I guess its possible, but they should be using some direct link to the server or something, with a 3rd party tool, it should NOT be built into the main client, that is just asking for trouble (so bad coding :p)
Quote DarkLord7854 8th July 2007, 03:00
Quote:
Originally Posted by completemadness
I guess its possible, but they should be using some direct link to the server or something, with a 3rd party tool, it should NOT be built into the main client, that is just asking for trouble (so bad coding :p)

They're too lazy to make special clients for their GMs :p

Besides, imagine if they did, then if one got leaked then all hell would break out
Quote completemadness 8th July 2007, 16:14
Quote:
Originally Posted by DarkLord7854
They're too lazy to make special clients for their GMs :p

Besides, imagine if they did, then if one got leaked then all hell would break out
yeah but i would have thought its possible to make a very hard to break authentication procedure, and also possibly to encode the program in such a way that its hard to reverse engineer
at this point, to get it working they would need to actually login with the tool, and then they can be tracked easily

also it would be easy enough to log all connections with the tool, making tracing people much easier
Quote wastedoo 17th August 2007, 15:02
Abit late but, this happened in spirestone realm. donno if it was over more than one realm. But i was there and the gnomes were flying through the roof of if. got pretty boring afdter watching for a few mins. but it works hours and hours after this happened people were still sapming trade channel about it
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