[ryguy]

They couldn't handle the difficultly... so they find an exploit. A well deserved ban, grats!

[Kody]

slayme said:

Evade buggings mobs to win a fight is a bit more than using spellsteal as it is intended even if you bring the mobs all over the place to use it (kiting is since when bannable?). Obviously they didn't want the buff to be used like that, so they changed it but it doesn't mean its exploiting.

Anything not intended that you take advantage of is abusing game mechanics. Plain and simple.

Raid encounters are designed and balanced with variables in mind. One of those variables usually isn't to have a trash mob pulled from across the zone and tanked at the encounter location for the purpose of spellstealing its buff. That's called unintended.

However, again, this particular case the news is about is much more severe as no one really cared about Hodir at that point; he'd already been killed and was just a stepping-stone to something greater. Yogg-Saron with no keepers is as great as it gets -- even eclipsing Algalon the Observer in difficulty. It's an entirely different ballgame, so to speak.

[Xentropy]

The problem, though, is that as "less significant" as Hodir was at the time, by exploiting and then making sure their friends at Blizzard fixed the exploit immediately after, but didn't increase the timer on the hard mode until the NEXT week, Ensidia ensured they had one extra week to work on Algalon compared to their competition.

In my opinion, the Hodir exploit was MORE severe, because it lead to Algalon down one week sooner than otherwise. Yogg+0 isn't even part of progression, getting Yogg+0 first doesn't lead to a string of other firsts.

[Endless]

Xentropy said:

The problem, though, is that as "less significant" as Hodir was at the time, by exploiting and then making sure their friends at Blizzard fixed the exploit immediately after, but didn't increase the timer on the hard mode until the NEXT week, Ensidia ensured they had one extra week to work on Algalon compared to their competition.

In my opinion, the Hodir exploit was MORE severe, because it lead to Algalon down one week sooner than otherwise. Yogg+0 isn't even part of progression, getting Yogg+0 first doesn't lead to a string of other firsts.

That would have made sense if the two guilds (Inner Sanctum and Method) who downed Hodir before the cockblock got stripped of the hard mode item too. After all, Method, who got Hodir before the cockblock, was only one day behind Ensidia on Algalon. If Ensidia had been locked for a week because of the cockblock while Method could ignore it and start working on the rest, they'd have had just as bad an advantage, and would probably have been first.

[Xentropy]

But Method didn't cheat to get him down earlier, they just got lucky (and downed him before Blizzard lowered the timer). How many guilds may have downed him during the 2 minute timer if Ensidia hadn't had their friends fix the exploit *after* using it? It really throws whether Ensidia should have even had the world first Algalon entirely into question, for me. Sure, Blizzard shouldn't have been messing with the hard modes so much, but how is cheating to get around it okay in one case but not in another? The fact it was "more important" for Ensidia to cheat (to not fall behind in progression, not just for some meaningless bragging rights) just makes it WORSE, not better, to my mind.

[Endless]

So, according to you, the world first on Algalon should have been decided on the sheer luck of killing a boss before Blizz breaks it and makes it impossible to progress for others? What kind of competition is it where two teams can do part of the race on a paved straightline while the others have to take the dirtroad covered with rocks? "Grats Method, you won a race that only you were allowed to participate in, all the other competitors had to wait two weeks before they could go". What an achievement that would have been.
If I see a race where two cars can go forward (with one being faster in the first place) while all the others are stuck at the red light, then what's the point? At least if there's a car that can cause a challenge for the win there's minimal interest and value into being first. (Not that there's a lot in the first place, mind you. But at least you could pretend there was a competition).

They way I see it is that it sucks balls for other guilds that Blizzard "fixed" the spellstolen buff without fixing Hodir appropriately at the same time, because they should have had a chance at the same progression as Method, IS and Ensidia. In hindsight, it probably would have been best to remove the item from all three guilds and reset Hodir after the pollinate hotfix to "reset" the race and have everyone have the same chance. But Blizzard's thoughts at that moment probably were to fix pollinate to avoid having it used against all the hard modes and trust their lousy math telling them Hodir was fine. It's pretty clear when you see that after the pollinate fix no one has downed Hodir that there was a reason for it and that maybe players were right about it being tuned stupid instead of hard.

[fizyx]

Kody said:

Anything not intended that you take advantage of is abusing game mechanics. Plain and simple.

Raid encounters are designed and balanced with variables in mind. One of those variables usually isn't to have a trash mob pulled from across the zone and tanked at the encounter location for the purpose of spellstealing its buff. That's called unintended.

However, again, this particular case the news is about is much more severe as no one really cared about Hodir at that point; he'd already been killed and was just a stepping-stone to something greater. Yogg-Saron with no keepers is as great as it gets -- even eclipsing Algalon the Observer in difficulty. It's an entirely different ballgame, so to speak.

I disagree with your first statement. I agree that using hard to get buffs from strange sources is NOT intended... but to call it an exploit is just not right. Many of the ways people play the game are unintended. Sometimes this is good, and sometimes its bad. When it goes against what Blizzard wants the game to be played like, they fix it.

However, Blizzard knows (and has ALWAYS accepted, as far as I know), that people can go to great lengths to get out of the way buffs that will help them. The problem with this in Vanilla was that these buffs were not optional in many cases; the bosses were designed around raids having the buffs. Blizzard didn't like the need for extreme buff stacking, and so they tried to balance it.

That does NOT mean that using every available buff is exploiting, it just means that Blizzard in no way intendeds that it be necessary. That's what the Ensidia post is about: To find that you MUST have a hard to get buff from a location not in proximity to the boss goes against that entire philosophy. That does make it unintended... but in no way an exploit.


Just thought of an EXTREMELY related example: Mages spell stealing the buff from the NPCs in Storm Peaks, then getting summoned in to Naxx for Patchwerk. This was a creative, and unintended, use of game mechanics, but NO ONE called this an exploit. Blizzard, seeing that the availability of the buff threw many calculations off, fixed it so the buff was no longer attainable.

This is the EXACT SAME situation that all the Ensidia Hodir drama is about, and I don't believe this situation will ever be an exploit while the fights involved still require a whole raids worth of participation. The kills may not be as legit, and it may be hotfixed within minutes... but it's still not a bannable exploit by any means.


Last extreme example after my wall of text: The following video is of a pally, relatively early in Vanilla (I believe pre-BWL) soloing Kazzak using Reckoning in an unintended way. As far as I have been able to find out, he was never warned for the action, let alone banned. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMGTL6BC_cg"]YouTube - Paladin Solos Lord Kazzak[/ame]

[zakayron]

this entire thread needs less QQ moar PEW PEW