Back in the early days of MMORPGs—and those days it was 2004—the MMOs started to realize that people wanted more to do than just new content involving episodes and new villains and higher level caps. Instead, MMO companies discovered that people wanted to experience in-game what happened to them outside in the global culture. So City of Heroes added the Winter Event.
With that winter event came some unexpected bugs…currently best described in the most recent MMO Anthropology article,
By far the most amusing phenomena that rose out of the original 2004 Winter Event in City of Heroes happened to be the city-region bosses the Winter Lords. These were gigantic snowmen appearing about ten stories tall, textured as if made entirely out of snow, with icicle noses. They were leveled appropriately to the given zone they happened to be in meaning that beginning zones saw weak versions and expert zones saw extremely strong versions.
Each Winter Lord boss-spawn would take numerous heroes minutes of fighting in order to bring one down. However, it was quickly discovered that even high level heroes could take down a weak Winter Lord and receive a notable amount of experience points (experience is a metric for increasing the capabilities and advancement of characters standard to MMOs) this high amount of experience also translated to other heroes in their team. This activity is better known in the MMO community as “power leveling.”
While we’ve seen multiple other MMOs run with New Years and Christmas-themed events such as World of Warcraft and Winter’s Veil, these introductions into seasonal events are never-ending and will be staying with us for years to come.
The Winter “Level” Lord, however, has come and gone.
We fully expect new bugs and more community-based exploits to take advantage of interesting elements added by seasonal events in games; although, if they arrive in Star Wars: The Old Republic we might be seeing even more bans coming down on the heads of customers.
Link, via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.
The Level Lord was truly the gift that kept on giving. Good times.