Three days ago, on September 16th, An employee at Wizard101 went rogue.
If you don’t know already, Wizard101 is an online game that’s been online since 2008. The game is owned by KingsIsle Entertainment, a gaming company based in the United States.
Players on wizard Friday evening 101 kept getting strange messages from the game’s announcement system. These messages read things such as “Email support@wizard101.com so that I can get a raise” and, “The wizard police are after me”.
Yes, whoever was doing this actually said that.
It seems clear already the culprit and the motive: some employee at KingsIsle is fed up with his job, and wants to get back at his boss, right? Since KingsIsle hasn’t made an official statement yet, let’s look at the information we have to draw our own conclusions.
The Hack
Around 8 PM, the messages began popup.
The first message doesn’t give much context, but it wasn’t long until it all started to make sense to player’s online.
Obviously, someone had moderator access to the servers and was trying to troll the players logged on at the time. Vulgar language, memes, and angry messages regarding the developer of the game began to flash around the players’ screen
I have to admit, when I first saw these images and some clips gathered by witnesses of the hack, I laughed. To me, an older teen, the situation is humorous and I would have loved to watch all the chaos ensue live.
But the reality is that this game is marketed toward children. While Wizard101 does have an older audience in the game, the majority of users are naïve little kids who just want to learn to cast spells and have magic battles. Unsuspecting children watched the words, “Dick and balls” flash across their screen, and it’s immature to commit these types of hacks on games like these. Hacking isn’t ethical ever, of course, I don’t encourage it, but if you are going to expose people to stupid vulgar messages, they probably shouldn’t be kids.
But who would go through the time and effort to stir up trouble like this?
Who Did It?
The messages shared during the online attack lead us to believe that an employee who worked on the game decided to send the messages, though KingsIsle hasn’t released its official statement yet. There isn’t even a guarantee that they will, though players can assume this won’t have any major effects on the future of the game.
Some players believe it may have been an outside source unaffiliated with KingsIsle or Wizard101, and that is an important possibility to consider. As onlookers, we really have no idea what happened that night until they tell us, so the best thing we can do is sit around and wait.
The Result
After announcing that the hacker no longer had access to their system, the Wizard101 Staff gave every player who witnessed the drama 60,000 crowns. Crowns are a monetary system within the game. While the company did not state the motive for their compensation, while I was researching this whole fiasco, I noticed there was a bit of pressure for compensation on Twitter.
Regardless of compensation, what the games community needs are answers. This situation was serious and dramatic. Though, with their history of responses so situations where their under fire for issues in their games, I’m not so sure we’re gonna hear updates anytime soon.
