What happened in a MMORPG that perhaps were not designed to?

akabear

I recall in L2, early on some players discovered that certain raid bosses were not leashed to their spawn area.
In one instance some players trained the raid boss miles across the map to bring it into Giran, a town full of AFK player stalls. The boss went rampant and killed many of the players that were afk, with some players that died dropping items.

In another similar instance, a solo player trained a boss across the map into the pvp arena. In the pvp arena, there were no death penalties and the player could respawn instantly in close proximity. The difficulty in killing that boss was just doing the damage only, so able to attack without death penalty meant the player did the impossible solo.

And early after beta, I remember players en-mass crowding two doors to a warehouse effectively locking a known scammer inside.

These and many other unintended design flaws were sorely missed later when patched.
I would like to think design short falls rather than bugs.

What were some things that happened in a MMORPG that perhaps were not designed to?

Jamation

So this is somewhat similar, but also not really the player's faults.
So in a game I played they also had player stalls and most people would leave them in the cities, but there were warp points so the cities were a safe place from any form of attack.
WELL YOU THOUGHT

It was a Christmas event and I guess they hadn't really thought/considered it but one of the events was supposed to spawn some Christmas style enemies in the towns for people to kill. Well this thing has some AOE stomps and such and...the bodies...they were everywhere...
After that, the event was never held again xD

maouw

Maplestory used to have ~5 continents with a transportation hub city called Orbis where you'd basically get off one air ship and hop onto another one when travelling between continents.

After a certain revamp, they decided to add a few portal options (fast travel) so players could more easily access content that was difficult to travel to. However, one piece of content that was given fast travel was Japan's Momijigaoka - and you could talk to 2 npc's from that place to go straight to Orbis. This immediately halved all travel times between continents - and eventually led to the devs just creating a giant portal that let you move to any town of your choice.

Tyranthraxus

Yours truly greatly enjoys hosting special player-events, in the games I've played. As such, there's often been times where we've manipulated or otherwise used odd or un-intended game mechanics, to produce unique events. My best stories and the majority of my countless events would be from SWG and SWTOR; I enjoy Star Wars greatly.

SWG:

Race events were odd, in that I would fake being a game "warden" - which was something that trusted players were rarely given, to temporarily silence spammers and obscene players, in-game. By "accidentally" putting out an odd bunch of gibberish resembling command-line code, I used Storyteller props to cover an immediately change of my outfits to all-white, something I also explained as an effect of activating game warden abilities. The Race droids were too simple in SWG to genuinely measure who won a race. So I explained that I was using a warden ability to view a "hidden" list of times recorded in the droid that you normally couldn't access. However, it was ALL showmanship - I personally determined the winners of each round. The tracks were waypoints you'd put in, and I'd use 4 racing droids, unlocking each before each round began - to make sure players didn't memorize a specific course around both the Player Cities and NPC Cities we'd run our courses through.

The Storyteller system had all sort of props - and you could move them, but only so far from their initial placements. Since macros were also a thing in SWG, I recall a couple of events where I'd put together NPC "bases" for our guild to go in and destroy and kill the NPCs in. On time, I placed a series of platforms over swamps and wrote a macro to move the platforms forward at a modest speed, so we went platform to platform over all of this odd terrain to get to where we were going. It was an un-intended mechanic, but it served our purpose and provided some great fun.

In space, yours truly hosted a good number of space-PvP events as parts of series, in 08' and 09'. Colored chat-text was something that had been removed from the game a few years earlier - but I accidentally learned how to make my chat *box* text show up colored. As such, I used this to make announcements during events and special functions - which helped in chat-box-only environs, such as space. I flat-out refused to spread knowledge of how this was done, as to avoid other players over-using it, and possibly drawing the devs into taking that out, too.


SWTOR:

The one big un-intended mechanic that I made use of came from use of the Daily areas as PvP-areas, before the game had dedicated PvP-instances of each world. Our community was large enough that I had us gather up our players from both factions, spam the player-created in-game chat channels with reports of big PvP fights in the one we'd chosen for that day's event, and then players would naturally arrive in these areas to either immediately see the fighting, or to see people talking about it in the local chats. Indeed, the biggest PvP fights I ever saw in SWTOR weren't even the early days of Ilum; It came from fights that we would (sometimes) be able to spark in the Daily areas, which at this time were all highly-used, as there were fewer of them.

Indeed, breaking game conventions and mechanics can definately create some very fond memories and make for some very memorable events! I greatly enjoy that AoC seems to have a lot of "natural" events and spawns planned that will inherently draw players to them.