Murderous thieves swept through the Kingdom of Khandaras over the weekend, causing what one observer said was nothing less than an "apocalypse."
Khandaras, for those readers out of the loop, isn't a suburb of Siberia; rather, it's the fictitious land at the center of the role-playing video game Diablo II, which on Saturday became a virtual killing field of Diablo devotees, with top players getting plugged without even knowing what hit them.
And by the time the smoke cleared sometime on New Year's Day, most people still didn't know what had technically caused the abrupt death of their characters. Was it a hack? A crack? A bug? A mere cheat? Or something worse -- was it, in the words of some, a genocide?
Or maybe even a cheap publicity stunt?
Blizzard, the game's manufacturer, isn't being specific about what caused the problem. Multiplayer Diablo is played through Battle.net, Blizzard's online gaming service, and on Tuesday a Battle.net systems operator said in a statement that the problem had been fixed.
Additionally, Battle.net will revive players who found themselves suddenly dead, and will provide a mechanism for players who lost "items" -- these being axes and amulets and such, the things that make a character powerful in Diablo -- to get back these possessions. (Interesting tangent: So valuable are these items to Diablo players that people actually pay money for them at auction sites).
But what caused the problem in the first place? Blizzard said it preferred not to say: "We haven't specified the nature of the circumstances," said Deborah Osborne, a company spokeswoman, explaining that to do so might (further) weaken the security of its network.
Osborne added that Battle.net is monitored closely, and that technicians began fixing the problem as soon as they heard about it -- which was on Sunday, Dec. 31.
Even though Blizzard isn't detailing what happened to the multiplayer characters, several players expressed their frustration about the problem on Diablo discussion groups all over the Internet, some wondering whether Blizzard itself -- and not elusive hackers -- was to blame for the player deaths.
That theory goes like this: The top-score rankings -- the "ladder," it's called -- were getting kind of static, and killing the best players would stir things up a bit, making Diablo even more exciting.
Some -- call them "extremists" if you like -- asked whether affected players had any legal options to pursue Blizzard and/or the real killers.
But in the end, it seemed, cooler heads prevailed, with players expressing real gratitude and surprise that Blizzard implemented a fix so swiftly.
Though the company may have had no option -- in the end, it may come out that a loophole in a recent Blizzard patch to Battle.net was the real cause of the problem.
"This sort of forced their hand," said Nicholas Ryan, an avid Diablo II player who explained that the company almost never revives players that die due to "technical problems," and that in this case, "it was their very own thing that was exploited."
Ryan said that since Dec. 19, when the patch was implemented, there have been rumors that some players' most valuable items were mysteriously lost.
"The problem was," Ryan said, "some people had found out that if you try to log in about 50 or 60 times with the name of a character that already exists, about 1 percent of the time the server would suddenly give you access to that character."
At first, only very few people knew about this, Ryan said, but then -- as happens on the Internet -- the cat got out of the bag. The cheat apparently proved too irresistible for some, and that's what led to last week's apocalypse.
Blizzard spokeswoman Osborne said that the company would not comment on whether the cheaters would be pursued by the company. "That's for our legal department," she said. But she did say that what occurred was "a crime" in California, where Blizzard is based.
Gaile Gray, who writes about Diablo II for Diabloii.net, a site dedicated to the game, said that she hopes the cheaters are caught.
"It is my fervent hope that in the 21st century there would be repercussions for this kind of destructive act," she said. "It's not about real-life issues like life or death, but there was no point here other than malice -- and I don't understand the mentality of the persons who would do this."
"We might not be our (role-playing) characters," she added, "but we do care about our characters."
