With the announcement of Diablo II: Resurrected (awesome!!!), here's a Blizzard story of love, and loss. A thread.
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If you played Diablo II and you had a problem with a character, or were being bad, or got reported, you were at the mercy of Marty. Marty was OG Blizzard, and aside from the Blizzard North engineers, was the only person at Blizzard that knew how the online databases worked.
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So if you had a character with an inappropriate name, or were duping, etc. Marty was going to shut you down. Or if you got corrupted he'd be the one to restore it when possible. We'd get an email or request in bnet chat and Marty would take care of it.
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However, due to the way the database worked there was no changing names. So if you had a bad name, zap, that character was removed. All its items. Gone. So this obviously resulted in tickets as people would spend hundreds of hours on racist character names just to lose it all.
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So one day we get note of a disturbance in the lobby at work. Before WoW it was rare that someone would show up at the building, but it happened. This was pre-campus, pre-bullet proof glass, pre-security. But this was a bigger ordeal, and this person wasn't leaving.
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So we all sort of 1 by 1 head out that way pretending to go somewhere so we could try to figure out what was happening. Turns out this guy shows up with his wife, and newborn baby in his arms, to protest his character getting deleted.
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He's pleading, he's begging. No, sorry sir, we don't restore them here's our policy and also you can't be here. He's there for hours pacing outside. He had driven from Arizona or something to come talk to someone with his family.
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No, sir, sorry you'll have to leave. The cops are called. Eventually someone overhears him say "The character's name is Butter Ape! That's not bad!" and then "I just didn't put the E!" and Marty giggles a little. We all giggle a little. The cops arrive. Back to work.
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