STARS "World First" Heroic ShannoxFollow

There was a debate about this in my guild the other night. I personally feel like it's an exploit. Yes, it is completly Blizzard's fault that this happened and they didn't technically do anything wrong, but obviously this was not what Blizz had intended. They should be given a reversal on the faction change and a refund, whilst having their kill removed. I doubt the refund will happen though.

One of my guildies went so far as to say he thought they should be banned. I think that's way too extreme. I think he probably said that more out of bitterness than anything else though. =x They didn't break the ToS, they just exploited a loophole.

Eh, it could have been a bug but it also could have been an oversight on Blizz's part. It's really hard for us as players to know for sure. If they did decide to give a short term ban to the people in STARS I wouldn't have any issue with it, but I still think it's a bit excessive.

I definitely like the idea of resetting their Rag achieve and making them do another week or normal modes though!

According to mmo-champion.com STARS was politely told by a GM to get out of the instance and then locked the portal. Blizzard then shut down heroic mode until Tuesday.

That logic would let pretty much any bug, glitch, or exploit be "okay" as long as someone from Blizzard didn't specifically say something isn't working as intended. The difference between this and most bugs is that this is obviously not intended. Raid lock-outs are there for a reason.

I guess it's probably not the time to mention that I didn't have a problem with exploiting the saronite bomb bug on LK either.

To be fair I'm all for rules in a competition and such. But for something like this that falls into a bit of a grey area, the classy thing to do would be to admit that the players got the better of you, reset their instance, let them start with everyone else when the raid unlocks again, and state that this isn't allowed in the future.

I don't really see why any sort of punishment is needed at this phase. A competitive player is always going to walk that fine line between 'clever use of game mechanics' and 'outright exploit' anyway.



You know this still feels a little vague to me. Probably the reason I see a big grey area. In my mind I could justify any of these being against ToS:

1) Hugging the walls to skip trash packs
2) Stacking 10 Boomkins in your raid because they do more DPS
3) Putting a DK on your arena team because they are overpowered at the moment
4) Bringing over faction-specific (or faction-difficult at least) items when you faction swap to sell at a large profit on the AH
5) Faction Swapping to get around a raid lockout.
6) Zerging OS-3D with 10 mages
7) Wall walking to get on top of a building/cliff in a BG
8) Using saronite bombs to glitch the platform breaking up

I have trouble seeing a nice clean place to draw a line. *shrugs*

Edited, Jul 2nd 2011 12:05pm by someproteinguy

The gray area is there so Blizzard can, for pretty much any reason, take their ball and go home. In this case, the relevant portion should be:



They used an error in design (faction changes resetting Raid lock-out) to get into heroic Firelands (which shouldn't be available right now). I don't care what Blizzard actually does to them, but I do think it's cheating.

As for your 1-8...

1) Hugging a wall is okay, glitching through it isn't.
2) Class (imbalance) is part of the game. It's contrary to their "Bring the player, not the class" philosophy, but it's pretty standard fare for MMOs.
3) See (2).
4) Could you move the items through the neutral AH? If yes, go for it. Taking advantage of Worgen not having a racial mount to get a Goblin Tryke on an Alliance toon, not so much.
5) Definitely cheating.
6) If there's nothing else going on, sure, go for it.
7) If it's just to get a terrain advantage, fine. If it's to get out of the starting area early, no.
8) Yeas, because it's a glitch. The only gray area here would be in how obvious the glitch is and whether using it was deliberate or not. It's still cheating, but if it was unintentional then the punishment should be much more lenient (ie, no suspension, only "undo" the fight and any rewards for completing it).

I would say no, and that's pretty impressive. I'm assuming you used a fair number of Misdirects and Tricks of the Trade to keep aggro on your pet? If this became a problem, I could see Blizz nerfing Tenacity pets (and the blueberry) to not have the 90% AoE damage reduction, and removing taunts from Cunning and Ferocity pets.