World of Warcraft hackers kill thousands

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Hotfixed "kill hack" decimates players in massively multiplayer massacre

World of Warcraft hackers became Death, the destroyer of worlds, last weekend when they discovered an exploit allowing level 1 characters to instantly kill any player or NPC in the game. Apocalyptic scenes of corpses littered the streets of Orgrimmar and Stormwind on the afflicted servers, according to Eurogamer.

The hackers not only managed to decimate the player population, but also cleared WoW's End Time dungeon in about three minutes. Blizzard didn't see much to laugh about, though, and soon patched it up.

"This exploit has already been hotfixed, so it should not be repeatable. It's safe to continue playing and adventuring in major cities and elsewhere in Azeroth," said a Blizzard community manager. "As with any exploit, we are taking this disruptive action very seriously and [are] conducting a thorough investigation."

Some players grabbed footage of the mass killings, preserving eerie (but, we'll admit, darkly humorous) scenes of lone newbies roaming about the capital cities, fully geared heroes groaning and collapsing before their deceptively lethal gaze.

Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.