It's no surprise that World of Warcraft suffered a bit of connection troubles following the launch of its latest expansion, Warlords of Draenor. The same thing happens with every expansion: millions of players try to log in at the same time, thereby flooding the servers and shutting the game down. It's one of the pitfalls of the MMO design, but most players simply accept the trouble and wait for their turn to play.
However, one player known as 'nitesmoke' wasn't going to take connection issues lying down. He was going to protest, regardless of whether or not it affected hundreds of thousands of other players. See, nitesmoke ran the official World of Warcraft subreddit, a.k.a. one of the game's biggest forums in the entirety of the internet. When nitesmoke took the subreddit down, nearly 200,000 people lost access - basically, the moderator was holding the forum hostage because the game wouldn't let him play.
Obviously, the community makes up a massive part of World of Warcraft's success, and while a studio would rarely involve itself in such matters, one of Blizzard's community managers actually stepped in to try and help resolve the issue. Unfortunately, manager Jonathon Brown wasn't able to do much on the technical side, though he did express his concern that one person held thousands of fans' access to one of their favorite sites in his hands:
@nitesmoke This frustration is fair, but maybe ownership of a subreddit should rest with someone who wouldn't shut it down over frustration.
— Zarhym Deadeye (@CM_Zarhym) November 16, 2014
Of course, as with all World of Warcraft technical difficulties, nitesmoke's access was soon restored. That being said, the moderator's actions didn't go unnoticed: additional subreddits were created to call for a change in power following the 14-hour protest, and nitesmoke was eventually removed and replaced with a team of new moderators. The World of Warcraft subreddit would never be held hostage again.
While it may sound silly - thousands of fans fighting over a simple forum - Reddit is absolutely massive nowadays, and something like this could one day be far more important than it sounds. At this rate, Reddit could end up being a major influence on the gaming industry, similar to what Metacritic became; a grab for power such as this could have major consequences in the future.
For now, though, take it at surface value: it's just a story about a whiny World of Warcraft player who got impatient and eventually booted out of his own forum.
