Last night two people on the streets of Riften begged me to bite them. No, more than that, they offered to pay me to bite them. They'd seen me frolicking through the forests in my werewolf form in Elder Scrolls Online, bushy tail wagging, and they'd offered to throw outrageous sums of gold at me so I could sink my teeth into them and let them join in the fun. And when I told them that I'd already chomped on someone else for the week? They refused to believe me, and immediately started calling in zone chat for someone else willing to cater to their demands.

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“ Had I not used my single bite to transform someone else I would have gladly taken the 35,000 gold one fellow offered.

Werewolf and vampire bites are big business in Elder Scrolls Online as of late. Had I not used my single bite to transform someone else into a werewolf for the week (and on the wrong person, at that), I admit I would have gladly taken the 35,000 gold pieces one fellow was offering. Part of the appeal springs from the novelty of it all. Few players even knew the opportunity to morph into these creatures of the night were in the game until a steady stream of players started reaching the last ten levels before the level cap. High-level cities like the Ebonheart Pact's Riften exploded into boomtowns once undeniable proof revealed itself in the forms of players cavorting about in their werewolf and vampire forms.

Vampirism and Lycanthropy have long been a part of Elder Scrolls lore, but their appearance in ZeniMax Online's MMORPG has had the perhaps unintended effect of shaking players out of the predictable routine of shuttling from one quest to the next and from one zone to the next. It makes the world feel more alive. You might experience this feeling while hunting down the NPC werewolves and vampires during the game's full moons and new moons respectively if you can't convince someone to bite you. Or you might find it in the towns once you witness the way the tease of changing into such beasties draws players from far below the intended levels.

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Fresh out of the starter zones, players who haven't even reached level 10 huddle like beggars among the crafter's stalls and banks and flood the zone chat with pleas to take pity on them and bite them for free so they can use it their entire playthrough. The massive sums of cash come from comparative veterans with 25 or more levels under their belts, who try to toss away everything they've earned so far just for the pleasure of becoming the latest shaggy dog or bloodsucker. In a game where there are no server-wide auction houses, it yields the fastest transfers of money that I've seen during my whole playthrough.

Sure, it gets annoying sometimes. Players spurned by the vampires and werewolves in high level zones like the Rift itself have taken to begging in other zones, where their pleas take on tragic notes of desperation. At other times, it brings out the worst in what's otherwise one of the best MMORPG communities I've known in years. Indeed, some players are all too willing to dupe the wide-eyed players offering the massive sums, claiming that they'll bite the player as soon as they hand over the cash and then running away once it's in hand. In most cases, it seems, the offending parties bore the taint of neither creature.

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The whole scenario also delivers numerous opportunities for roleplay, most notably in the form of players calling themselves the "Dawnguard" (after the vampire-themed Skyrim expansion of the same name). During the short windows every few days when the infectious NPCs come out for an evening stroll, said players hop up on their mounts and patrol the countryside looking for both vampires and werewolves to slay, to stop other players from getting the curses. Cruel, yes, but it adds some danger to the process of hoping one of the NPCs takes a swipe at you.

“ If the NPCs that give players vampirism or lycanthropy are always dead, players that want the diseases will have no choice but to pay other humans.

ESO developer ZeniMax Online Studios almost certainly didn't intend. The theory goes that if all the NPCs that can give players vampirism or lycanthropy are always dead, players that want the diseases (and the exclusive skills that come with them) will have no choice but to pay other humans to bite them. It's an underground economy.

I was in one of those groups on the run from such griefers when I received my own infection of "Sanies Lupinus." We managed to find two werewolves hiding in a creek bed, and we each let them swipe at us once to trigger the infection. There was something perversely tense about the process as we waited for players to come kill our prize at any moment; almost as if we were doing something wrong. Thus actually contracting the disease triggered feelings of real excitement, almost as though we'd downed a raid boss or completed a rare achievement.

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More contemporary MMOs need moments like this. So many lose their personality in trying to deliver an excess of scripted content, and in the process they forget that the strength of the genre is the adventures players create for themselves. In time, I know, the interest will die, and the offers for werewolf bites will shrink down to nothing or disappear altogether.

But for now, the weird little situation in places like Riften brings the best out of Elder Scrolls and the MMO genre for Elder Scrolls Online--and I suspect I'll remember it more than my battles against the forces of Molag Bal a year from now. And when that happens in an MMO, the developers have done their jobs well.

Leif Johnson is a freelance games writer. You can follow him on Twitter at @leifjohnson