[SP] an MMO's NPC AI's have risen up in rebellion

It started in the speedrunning community, as an exploit to skip most of the game's content. That morning, the world record time for any% was 2h38m, and that evening it was 26m. The second exploit was more subtle, and it was from an unknown source.

First I have to give you a little background. Bits of the old engine remained from when the game was more of a simulation, nearly a decade ago. NPC citizens were given rudimentary AI and functioned in a very stripped down version of direct democracy. It was no surprise that the NPC AI would vote to abolish the monarchy, given the first exploit involved a member of the royal court. It never passed though, as it required the consent of the King, and the Council of Elders, the latter of which were hard to convince of anything unanimously.

So, that evening dozens of people gave this a shot. A couple of runners took turns lowering the time to 23m15s by the time the servers performed maintenance, at 3am Eastern Daylight Time, or 7AM GMT.

It wasn't unheard of that the servers had trouble rebooting. The game itself was a hot mess, and was ten thousand patches on top of a cardboard foundation. But when fifteen minutes stretched to thirty, the devs were forced to tweet out they were having some difficulties. The servers came up five minutes later, and hell broke loose almost immediately.

All servers were trying to crosstalk, instead of running as parallel instances. Initially, players weren't allowed to swap instances (we didn't know at the time about the crosstalk), and after a few minutes, all players were forced into one instance. Again, at the time we didn't know the other servers were providing computing cycles for an unknown process, that the devs hadn't even found yet.

One of many charming quirks of the game was that too many entities in one area led to massive lag. Crowding every player into one server was a nightmare. Players couldn't move, chat rolled up every five minutes or so, but the code keeping players in place seemed to run with no problem. We later found out that was on purpose, and the malicious code used the time to remove the monarchy entirely.

Many users, especially our American players, were logging off for the night in frustration, unable to do their dailies. Game was broken beyond anything the playerbase had seen before. And then, at 4:02 EDT, they went down unexpectedly. Looking back, this was the singularity. When the servers came back up, just four minutes later, they weren't speaking to us. Or each other.

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