Habbo Hotel is an MMO in the same way that a piece of cake is a doorstop. Sure, it can sort of do the job, in a half-assed kind of way, but it's not the same as the real thing. In Habbo Hotel, you have the excitement of wandering around a hotel and talking to people. Yeah, that's just about it.
A ton of members of various sites: 4-chan, YTMND, Encyclopedia Dramatica and a few others got together and raided Habbo Hotel: all dressed identically as black men with dark suits, black loafers and large black afros. Together they filled rooms of several of the hotels, blocking exits and access to various amenities: most famously the pools. Once there and with a captive audience, they began flooding the rooms with jokes and memes and in addition some formed themselves into the shape of a swastika.
Classy.
The raiders continued to attack Habbo Hotel at preset times at least four more times over the next year. Habbo staff have tried to preemptively shut down the attacks, with varied success. Truly an epic sight to behold.
And ironically, this is the only interesting thing to have ever occurred on Habbo Hotel to this day.
You youngins probably don't know about Ultima Online. Back during the 90s, there was this video game series called Ultima, that allowed players a unprecedented amount of freedom in exploring a detailed world, while questing and trying to save the world. And it was good.
Then, Ultima Online came out, and it too was good (despite the fact that you could no longer pick up just about anything and put it in your backpack). But the game hadn't even been released yet when the unthinkable happened: somebody killed Lord British - the alter ego of game creator Richard Garriott.
During an appearance during the Ultima Online beta test in 1997, a player named Rainz cast a fire field spell on Lord British that ended up killing him. Strange thing was: Lord British was supposed to be invulnerable.
It turned out that Garriott had forgotten to check the invulnerability flag on Lord British before he sent his character out into the harsh unforgiving world. The punishment for that is apparently murder by incineration.
As thanks for his successful bid at regicide, Rainz was banned from the beta test, although if you ask, officials will say that Rainz was banned for exploiting glitches to grief other players. Yeah right.
EVE Online is a space-themed game that provides you all of the excitement of performing menial labor and running a large business without all the needless hassles that usually come with doing those kinds of jobs, like a paycheque.
The game of EVE is rather unique because there are absolutely no mechanics that prevent players from holding others for ransom, putting out assassination contracts on people or just outright defrauding other people for vast sums of online money. Oh, and did I mention that the money that you acquire in the game can be exchanged for more game time?
In some cases moles have been sent into large in-game corporations to defraud the members for vast amounts of money, in some cases equivalent to over $15,000 USD in the real-world.
Understandably this can cause people to become really damned upset. Compounding the problem is the fact that EVE's moderators won't do a thing to stop any of this bad behavior. But if the sharks want to rip themselves apart, why try to stop them?
The Great Scam is probably the best example of an EVE scam, directly from the scammer himself.
Picture this: it's September, 2005. Zul'Gurub has just been opened to the public and it's fucking epic. 20-player raid culminating on a massive attack against a blood god named Hakkar the Soulflayer. How the hell could it go wrong?
Well, the battle was epic, but the players noticed something strange. Hakkar passed on a disease called 'corrupted blood' which dealt a fair amount of damage to the afflicted over about three minutes. What they also noticed is that their pets could also be infected by corrupted blood, and if they were then sent away, the timer could be paused.
Not soon after this discovery, players began to teleport the disease out of Zul'Gurub and into the world at large. The disease rapidly spread throughout the cities of the World of Warcraft infecting everybody: players and non-player characters alike, and killing people by the hundreds.
Voluntary quarantines didn't work, and eventually Blizzard was forced to restart the game servers to stop the spread of the disease, and eventually a patch stopped people from exporting corrupted blood throughout the world.
Ironically, the spread of corrupted blood was not unlike the spread of infectious diseases in the real world (except very few forms of swine flu deal shadow damage). Researchers have studied and drawn comparisons to the infection, relating the players who spread the disease to others to people like Typhoid Mary.
And there you go. Eight minor conveniences for those of us who live in the real world, but to people who play these kinds of games, they were eight of the most significant disasters to affect their lives. We must never forget.
