Vigilante Justice

Last night, while playing Diablo 2 on Battlenet, I was in a public game, and this jerk with the username *bloodknife went hostile on me. [In D2, players are normally allied unless they choose to fight against each other. ] This guy was level 67, and I was level 38. He killed me almost instantaneously, then stood right outside town, not letting me get my corpse. [In D2, your corpse contains your hard-won items. If you leave it, you leave them.] Each time I ran out, he’d fry me, even after promising to let me pass. He profited from this: each time he killed someone, they’d drop some money, so he was extorting them to give him all their gold before he’d let them reclaim their bodies.

With Joseph’s help, I was finally able to reclaim my body, when *bloodknife got distracted. I left the game, went to the Battlenet chat channel, and started telling people there what had happened.

“If anyone’s interested, there’s a jerk in game “whatever”, clvl 67 sorceress, who’s holding 5 players’ corpses for ransom, extorting gold and items from them before he lets them go.”

All these big bad lvl 90 and above Matriarchs said “No way! What an asshole! What was that game name again? We’ll take care of him!” then proceeded to join the game and destroy the jerk. I got into the game to watch the show, and took great pleasure watching four 90th level sorceresses and amazons give Mr. *bloodknife a dose of his own medicine: guarding his corpse, killing him each time he left town, until he’d lost all his money. Then he quit. All the while, I was messaging him taunts: “Aww, how’s it feel to get raped by a lvl 92 amazon? Poor thing!”

What I find interesting about all of this is how essentially unpatrolled communities like Battlenet become self-policing. Vigilante Justice at its finest.