WoW Classic hardcore raid wipe: Is this the greatest (or worst) act of griefing of all-time?

World of Warcraft Classic hardcore witnessed a breathtaking piece of griefing as almost an entire raid party was wiped out by a nefarious player who had gone to considerable - and we mean really extensive - lengths to infiltrate the group.

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First, a bit of background with this one. For the uninitiated, hardcore mode means that death is permanent; there's no rezzing, so as you can imagine, the stakes are particularly high when it comes to a raid encounter.

So, the group of 40 set out to tackle the Four Horsemen encounter, all of them max level (60), with one tank being a certain 'Tinyviolin69' who's the griefer in question.

As PC Gamer reports, Tinyviolin69 played with the guild for an entire year to gain their trust and get the call to be one of the main tanks on the raid. He starts the encounter by leading one of the four horsemen, Sir Zeliek, to the correct pull spot, before turning and running the boss into his teammates.

Efforts to draw Sir Zeliek away by other tanks fail, and Tinyviolin69 manages to wipe out almost the entire group (36 of them died - and of course, they are dead full-stop, not coming back).

That's nasty indeed, but the baffling bit is that Tinyviolin69's reputation as a griefer was hardly unknown (the name's a bit of a clue, too). The group was aware of his past and still let him into the raid - presumably because he made great efforts to be a model guild member for the past year, as mentioned. A seriously long con indeed.

Still, would you really trust that someone with a reputation as a top-level griefer - with many banned accounts - had really reformed and changed their ways? And put them in a position where they could trash a huge encounter like this one? Probably not, and a lot of the WoW community are unsympathetic as a result - or find it totally hilarious.

Others feel pretty bad for those whose characters saw their demise in this way, and with max-level hardcore players, it is undeniably a pretty tough break.

It does raise the question: might the wiped out guild appeal to get the affected characters brought back to life? Given that there's video evidence of what happened, and it's a clear instance of griefing.

Maybe that'll happen, but given that the guild knew all about Tinyviolin69's past, it could be argued that to some extent, they must have realized they were rather playing with fire.

Official WoW Classic hardcore servers are coming, as you may recall, and should be here imminently, due to debut at some point this summer. Death here will still be permanent, though you'll be able to transfer your expired character to a standard WoW Classic server to play with, should you wish.