In case you've lived underneath a rock for most your life, Leeroy Jenkins is the name of a WoW character who famously screamed out his name before charging into battle in a blazing display of unabashed recklessness, only to end up getting his entire team killed in epically ignorant fashion.
Blizzard stepped up and recognized Leeroy's fabled shamelessness several times by rewarding him an official trading card, mini figurine, and even named an achievement after him. See below.
Who might be the man behind this storied moment in WoW gaming history? Meet Ben Schulz, a Denver-based gamer who initially filmed the video with some buddies from college, never thinking it'd go anywhere. Oh, if only you'd known Schulz, if only. After the video had been online for a couple years, Schulz was formally invited to give the keynote speech at ROFLCon (been invited to speak at for three years now). Check out Schulz speaking at Blizzcon below:
Jenkins continues to find his way into various pop culture moments, even truck advertisements. Check out four such instances below. You've probably, definitely seen at least one of 'em before.
And of course, perhaps the pinnacle of Leeroy's widespread fame thus far--The Daily Show mention...Oh Leeroy, we love ya man.
blizzard
Over the course of a forum post on Battle.net, Blizzard outlined its policy on cheating in Overwatch, and placed a notable emphasis on the fact that players should play fair; play nice or suffer the consequences...
"If a player is found to be cheating — or using hacks, bots, or third-party software that provides any sort of unfair advantage — that player will be permanently banned from the game. Full stop," the company said. "Not only does cheating undermine the spirit of fair play that all of our products are based on, but it works to diminish the fun and enjoyment of others. While we are unlikely to publicly acknowledge when accounts are closed as a result of cheating or using unauthorized programs, we have and will continue to monitorOverwatch for exploitative behavior, as well as take action as needed to preserve the integrity of game."
Blizzard was quick to note that they will actively seek to verify accusations of cheating through the most reliable means possible:
"It's important to note that while video evidence from killcams, Plays of the Game, Highlights, and other community captured footage can be very helpful, we will never use it alone to verify whether or not cheating is taking place," Blizzard said. "As a result, we encourage players to play nice, play fair and avoid publicly accusing individuals of cheating whenever possible and instead use the reporting methods detailed above."
Let's call him courageous writer Shivam Bhatt stole some time at the 2016 Game Developer's Conference held in San Francisco to chat with Blizzard Co-Founder David Brevik during a Q&A about Diablo.
Bhatt carpe'd that diem and confessed to Brevik that he pirated the game almost two decades ago, offering up some cash on the spot for his transgression. Not only did Bhatt pretty much get rewarded with the most surreal reaction possible--Brevik taking a pic with him:
He even got a shoutout on Twitter from Brevik about the incident as well.
World of Warcraft's Executive Producer J. Allen Brack released the following statement via Eurogamer, as a response to the Nostalrius server closure:
"Failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard's rights. While Blizzard had looked into the possibility of working with unofficial servers, there was not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server.We wanted to let you know that we’ve been closely following the Nostalrius discussion and we appreciate your constructive thoughts and suggestions, added Brack. Our silence on this subject definitely doesn’t reflect our level of engagement and passion around this topic. We hear you. Many of us across Blizzard and the WoW Dev team have been passionate players ever since classic WoW. In fact, I personally work at Blizzard because of my love for classic WoW.
We explored options for developing classic servers and none could be executed without great difficulty. If we could push a button and all of this would be created, we would. However, there are tremendous operational challenges to integrating classic servers, not to mention the ongoing support of multiple live versions for every aspect of WOW.
Over the years we have talked about a “pristine realm”. In essence that would turn off all leveling acceleration including character transfers, heirloom gear, character boosts, Recruit-A-Friend bonuses, WoW Token, and access to cross realm zones, as well as group finder. We aren’t sure whether this version of a clean slate is something that would appeal to the community and it’s still an open topic of discussion.
In closing, Brack made reference to the 235,000 signatures for the petition to reinstate the server, saying: "They obviously care deeply about the game, and we look forward to more conversations with them in the coming weeks."
What do you make of all this?
In case you could go for a trip down memory lane, we've provided the original video that depicts the final few minutes leading up to the server shutdown:
You can also check out the compilation of screenshots depicting the original massive pilgrimage staged by players in response to the Nostalrius server shutdown, over here.
You've gotta give this mom credit for going for it! Gosh knows some of the other moms out there would've abandoned ship a character or two in.
The Nostalrius debate reached its head a while ago when a sh*toload of Vanilla server martyrs banded together in a wild mob to throw themselves off a cliff in a staged outcry of unrest over Blizzard's decision to shut down Nostalrius. See video:
Well, Blizzard, expectedly so, is busy making final preparations with Legion; but that didn't stop them from putting aside some time to play through a dungeon on Nostalrius. Here's what the WoW team of execs had to say about their experience:
“We got to play on the server for a little while,” he divulges. “It's really cool, they did an incredible job of building an experience that feels classic and authentic and that's incredibly hard to do. The painstaking effort it takes to research old videos to try and figure out what the data was because it doesn't exist anymore so you have to pull it out of the nether to put that experience together.
“The leadership team got together and we did a Stratholme run. John Hight [production director on WoW] was a Hunter and had a level eight pet and pulled half the instance, wiped us a few times. It was like, ‘why is the whole instance pulling? Oh it's your level eight pet!’ J [Allen Brack, VP and executive producer] was our priest, he’s like [casting buffs] and then sit and drink for 45 seconds, cast again, sit and drink,” he chuckles. “It's funny, we laugh at all that but it was a very moving experience because it's nostalgic and we all have very fond memories of playing that, that's when we were hardcore and all that stuff.”
Game director Tom Chilton also went on to offer up his take on Legacy servers:“I think it's something that interests Blizzard and we've always had the thought that it would cool to do a classic server or a Burning Crusade server or a Lich King server or whatever.
“It's difficult to pull off and the real cost in terms of our ability to do stuff for the existing game or our ability to do other new projects would be meaningfully affected if we decided to put our resources behind that. Unfortunately, it's not just the push of a button.”
They posted the following series of announcements to their Facebook page on what we can expect as potential developments for Nostalrius server over upcoming days:
Dear community,
The last few weeks have been full of exciting events that we did not anticipate. We saw the first official answer from J. Allen Brack on the topic of legacy servers, the petition reached 250.000 signatures, and we are currently scheduling a meeting at Blizzard campus!
We are very excited to be able to help Blizzard understand the part of their community asking for legacy servers and many other related topics, in the hope that they will eventually make it possible to legally play previous game expansions.
Since these events are major changes regarding the legacy server scene, completely changing our former strategy, we have several announcements today:
A. Ambassadors of Legacy servers
After the answer from Blizzard and the amazing support we received, we feel we are now not only the admins of a private server: We are also the ambassadors of a larger movement for the entire World of Warcraft community that wants to see game history restored. It is a major responsibility. Our top-priority and only focus now is to fulfill the needs of this community, by carrying your voice to Blizzard directly.
B. Nostalrius source code and database won’t be releasedWe acknowledge the help that the emulation community provided to us by creating MaNGOS and our initial objective was to release part of these sources to help improve the current emulators - without our special anti-cheat and some other critical features.
Our custom anticheat had unique functionalities that allowed us to detect and track any kind of hack / bot in a generic way. We believe the anticheat that we made was able to detect and was able to block all of the known threats, and releasing our code would allow the development of more powerful cheating tools that would be more difficult, if not impossible, to detect. We have spent countless hours to fight people making money from exploits, cheats and traffics: the last thing we want to see now is people getting more money from wow hacks because of us.
Some voices in the emulation scene wanted to legally force us to release the complete source code if we chose to only publish a part of it. As explained above, the anticheat is not something we would reveal in any case.
A second important point is that keeping the sources private could be useful at some point during the discussion with Blizzard. They proposed to discuss together and we want to have all the chances on our side, for the community we represent now.
Furthermore, if official legacy servers were to be released at some point in the future, the emulation would become, in essence, obsolete for our community.
C. A special gift for you
On a side note, the development team has prepared a gift for you. One of the hidden Nostalrius features was the ability to "replay" sequences of the game. This is something that was mainly used to create our videos, but never released to players. We accumulated a few replays of different events that occurred on our PvP and PvE servers, and we are willing to let you replay these magic moments. We are glad to inform you that Nostalrius team is releasing the first "replay" feature for World of Warcraft, and will be available to anyone: a powerful tool for future e-sport event maybe ?
The source code is available here (based on BunnyEmu, credit to their developers) :
The day has finally come! Get yoselves ready for heal-snipes people. Ana, Pharah's mother and also a sniper support character can heal allies from far away, AND put enemies to sleep. Check out the Ana origins trailer as well:
