Gaming for a cause…

Those of you who play “WoW” might have heard something about tonight’s “Running to the Bulls for Ezra”.

Rather than type a lot, I’ll just link some things here:

This little boy (http://www.ezrachatterton.org/) was an avid WoW player and the 11+ million of us who play the game got to know him through his “Make A Wish” of being a Blizzard developer for a day… He got to make a quest, voice the NPC, and design a weapon while he was there.

Anyways, Ezra was an amazing inspiration and a *lot* of people who play the game kept up with him and his condition – but he eventually passed away October 20th.

Another rather famous fellow in the game/blogosphere who goes by Big Red Kitty (http://www.bigredkitty.net/) decided to hold an in-game memorial for Ezra tonight by getting a few folks to make level 1 Tauren Hunters (the race/class Ezra played) and go march on Stormwind (the enemy’s main city) for charity… Well, a few thousand folks thought this was a grand idea, showed up, and crashed WoW… All of it.

Even the main site went down…

In total there were 897 new Tauren made on the server “Argent Dawn” before character creation was disabled on the server. Myself and Kalira here at Ravenwood were two of them.

About 15 minutes into the stampede the GMs on the server asked us to please stop because things were going south in the server room rapidly.

Running of the Bulls for Ezra

So about 80% of the “Steak and Ale” army logged out, but it was too late and the world (of warcraft) exploded…

It is always nice to see a group of folks come together to celebrate the life of someone – but to have a thousand people from every time zone around the globe come together for a boy they’ve never actually met, to celebrate his memory, laugh and dance, and donate to a good cause that provided such a dream for a him, it brings such joy.

Thank you to everyone who came, and thank you to Blizzard for putting up with us shutting down the biggest game in the world for an hour.