World of Warcraft Fans pretended to be excited about a fictional game feature called “Glorbo,” and the stunt went viral when AI-powered websites credulously reported on the made-up feature. It’s a joke that is ridiculous on the surface, but reveals a deeper fear among them World of Warcraft fans.
“I am so excited that they finally introduced Glorbo!!!is the title of user kaefer_kriegerin’s viral Reddit post. Here’s the opening of the message itself:
Honestly, this new feature makes me so happy! I just really want some major bot-driven news websites to publish an article on this.
I have to say, ever since they started hinting at it in Hearthstone in 1994, it was clear that sooner or later they would introduce Glorbo to World of Warcraft.
It doesn’t take a keen expert to realize that Glorbo isn’t real, as a new feature or otherwise. It’s a silly-sounding word, padded with enough made-up lyric like, “I feel like Dragonflight has been victory after victory so far, like when they brought back Chen Stormstout as the new Karazhan’s final boss? Absolutely amazing!” to hopefully fool an AI. Sure enough, the trick worked: an outlet called The portal, which is published by the esports platform Z League, went for it. The Portal has since removed its Glorbo article, but an archived version exists, and community site Wowhead also wrote on the subject. Polygon has reached out to Z League about the Glorbo piece and the article writing process, and will update when the company responds.
In itself, this is just a silly blunder. I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard adds a Glorbo NPC to the game in a later patch. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a community-in-joke or funny meme was included in the MMO. But there’s a reason why this trap was relatively easy to set: Blizzard updates regularly World of Warcraft, releasing new expansions and then following up on its premise with successive patches. Those patches become the subject of much discussion, with players reading spoilers from data mining and providing critical feedback on new customization options,
Incidents like the Glorbo debacle threaten that process, as they can create an overwhelming amount of noise. The Portal posts dozens of articles a day, seemingly using AI tools to scrape social media for even the most vaguely interesting storyline. World of Warcraft may be a meaty fantasy game, but it still gets regular content updates that require feedback and discussion – and it would be a shame to see those conversations drowned out in a sea of Glorbo-esque articles scraped from forums without further thought.