Exodus punished for exploiting Yogg-Saron encounter
by Zach Yonzon 
Jun 29th 2009 at 10:47PM
Contrary to some reports, however, Exodus released a statement on their website that members of their guild were not banned, clarifying that Blizzard meted out a 72-hour suspension for their abuse of game mechanics. They argue that the encounter wasn't beatable to begin with, similar to the C'thun fight in Ahn'Qiraj before it was fixed, prompting the exploit. In the same statement, Exodus also points at Ensidia's arguably hypocritical stance of complaining about the abuse considering Ensidia used similar questionable methods to achieve other World Firsts. Serennia mentions this behavior in his column at wowriot, as well, bringing into question Blizzard's apparent double standard when meting out punishment.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Cheats, Guilds, Blizzard
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 8)
gundamxzero Jun 29th 2009 10:54PM
Blizz loves ensidia, they are their "benchmark"
pat Jun 29th 2009 11:14PM
^
Agreed. When Ensidia boasted about the Hodir 25 hard mode encounter being "mathematically impossible" (pre-nerf), and used their mages to spell steal off Freya's trash... No banning occured, and no one said that it was wrong. Total B/S
Bouillestfu Jun 29th 2009 11:50PM
Ensidia is full of crap.
They've done it before: they've stolen world firsts before with exploits. However I,ve never heard of ensidia being punished for its ways before. They've only been praised for their world firsts. When a worthy succesor comes across BAM they take the bat.
I find it quite cool to see people discover exploits on bosses. Means they've found their way of killiing a boss and thought outside of the box!
Charneldeath Jun 30th 2009 12:34AM
Ensida didn't evade out adds. They just M/Ced something for a buff.
Big difference
Zachary Pruckowski Jun 30th 2009 1:13AM
"Ensida didn't evade out adds. They just M/Ced something for a buff."
This is key. Ensidia didn't trivialize any of the mechanics of Hard-mode Hodir when they did the Flower Power thing. They still had to contend with Biting Cold and all the runes and buffs and the helper-NPCs, and they still had to work their butts off to pull the kill off.
By contrast, Exodus evade-bugging Guardians removed (1) having to pick out, taunt, and pull 20 yards the marked Guardians from a crowd of 20 guardians within 10 seconds, (2) having to heal 2 off-tanks holding 5 100% guardians (each hits for 20k-25k) every 45 secounds with a limited number of healers (I read that 4 is the current strat), and (3) pulling off enough DPS to get those guardians back to 1% quick enough to have time to get back to the boss. Exodus's exploit turned Yogg-Saron into a spank fight (don't even need a tank).
That's the difference to Blizzard. Additionally, Blizzard probably realized that buffing Hodir in the middle of the race was a bad idea, especially since it was done after raiders got it down for the lockout. But I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard's more concerned about exploits that remove mechanics than exploits that make the numbers easier. That's why they hotfixed Freya-zerg, and that's why spell-stealing a buff that lets you ignore Naxx mechanics was bannable, but spell-stealing a +DPS buff was not.
Retropally Jun 30th 2009 5:33AM
I totally agree zach.
Ensidia are good at what they do because they think outside of the box. Every boss has different tactics and the best thing about the game is that there isnt just one set way of beating any boss.
Blizz where right in giving a suspension, and not a ban. It gives them a warning and tells them not to do this sort of thing again. The difference is that they even admitted this was an exploit by saying the fight was impossible, so they used this exploit to get round it and lie to the community by not saying a word. I've lost all respect for them.
Hansbo Jun 30th 2009 6:59AM
Even if we can agree that Ensidia's Hodir kill and Exodus' Y0 kill was done in an equally exploitive manner (which I don't really agree with), the following is an exerpt from blizzard's exploitation page (http://www.wow-europe.com/en/policy/exploitation.html#be):
"Factors included in determining the appropriate penalty:
Whether or not the exploit is performed intentionally, maliciously, and/or repeatedly
Whether or not the exploit damages another character, their gameplay, the service itself and/or its economy
Whether or not an attempt has been made to conceal the exploit's use"
Note the last line. This is really enough for the difference in treatment, and all of you saying Ensidia would have gotten off with a slap on the wrist under equal circumstances are just speculating. The fact is that even if the exploits were equally wrong in blizzard's eyes, their own policy explains the difference in punishments.
Hansbo Jun 30th 2009 7:08AM
I can also add that, according to that page, what Ensidia did counts more as "abuse of game mechanics" than an "exploit". According to blizzard, there has to be a bug for it to be counted as an exploit, and it seems that exploits tend to have harsher punishments (for obvious reasons; bugs are much more obviously not meant to be used than game mechanics).
Arelagord Jun 30th 2009 11:12AM
Ensidia flower buff was in no way an exploit to get a world first. I do not care about who or what get world first, but the reporting in Wow.com has become garbage. The hodir kill was not a world first, but a world thrist after a considerable buff which made the boss physicaly impossible. This was not an exploit as after blizzard removed the spellsteal nature of the buff -and nerfed the encounter- realising it was impossible.
Jon Do Jun 30th 2009 11:26AM
No matter what Ensidia tries to do to tarnish the achievement of Exodus, Exodus has the World First, and everyone knows it.
And as a programmer, I’ll have to lay this one at Blizzard’s feet. If after 5 years of scripting raids they don’t trap an Evade as a matter of a routine error check, then they ‘win’ one Epic Fail award.
Unfortunately, Blizzard is coming across as unfairly treating the two situations - as I recall Blizz openly said that Ensidia’s earlier exploit was not the intended design any more than Exodus’s exploit was the intended design. So where was the suspension for Ensidia? Is beating a fight with an exploit and then reporting it, better than beating a fight with an exploit and not reporting it? And let’s face it - Ensidia’s exploit gave them an unfair advantage in the race to later world-firsts - putting any later claims to first in question (and a 72-hour suspension would have put them out of the race).
In 3.1, Blizzard endgame raiding races appear to be about as reputable as doping-tarnished cycling or drug-enhanced baseball records of the last decade.
Phatty Jun 30th 2009 3:57PM
I don't understand how Mind Control or Spell Steal qualify as exploits, ever. They are spells included with the class. NOT using them makes you less skilled of a player. If you don't want those spells to be used, make the mobs immune. How is this the player's fault? Let's just say for example that a certain encounter is "impossible." But using MC\SS makes it possible. Who's to say that wasn't blizz intention? There's at least one encounter I can think of that people don't try without priests - Think naxx25. Maybe they should include in the tooltip for the spell: "Not to be used in Raid instances," or "using in Raids is a bannable offense." Ridiculous.
Adaroit Jun 30th 2009 5:42PM
For all of you who are claiming that MC'd a mob to assist during a boss encounter is not an exploit seem to fail to recall the Void Reaver fiasco back in the BC days. It was found that you could MC a Tempest-Smith and use it to down the VR in ten seconds. Blizzard jumped on that and warned that anyone who used that "exploit" would be subject to banning.
Hoggersbud Jul 1st 2009 12:47AM
In the Void Reaver case, that was because of sloppy coding on Blizzard's part, with the mob's ability not having a global cooldown. So you could write a macro to spam cast it.
Totally different case here as far as I know.
QQInsider Aug 9th 2009 7:48PM
Had a lot of a sympathy for them until I read their official statement.
"You guys are like a lot of other little european babies, who lack sportsmanship."
What an asshole. Insulting a whole continent based on the perceived bias towards one guild in a video game. Grow up.
james Jun 29th 2009 10:55PM
Lame, Lame, Lame.
Poor Exodus :( Banned by the very people who allowed such an exploit to exist.
jorik.janssens Jul 1st 2009 2:28PM
You can't really forsee everything, but to me it's the same as with the gnome warrior that got the god item. When something is so obviously out of place and you decide to exploit it, then you're doing the wrong thing.
EZ Jun 29th 2009 11:43PM
Lame is right!
can you believe they actually took that screen shot? All their drakes huddles around the new mount, while knowing all the time that the only reason they have all this attention is because of an exploit! gah it makes me nerd rage that they used this exploit to bathe in the attention and stroke their e-peens.
exploiters!
Orrine Jun 30th 2009 1:36AM
Why is it lame? If bug exists it doesn't means you HAVE TO use it - children are defenseless, but you don't beat them to get their money because you want some. Let's blame the parents for their children can't defend themselves from robbers.
Malkavos Jun 30th 2009 9:03AM
No... you blame the robbers.
micgillam Jun 30th 2009 10:13AM
Come on! Everyone who has ever jumped onto the wheel in DM is guilty of the exact same abuse, for that matter, standing your healer on the ledge for the VC fight and evading out all the adds is the same. If this came up in pre-release playtesting, something should have been done to fix it before it released. If it didn't come up in testing, Blizz needs to re-evaluate how they're doing their testing. Either way, when they do their part perfectly, we'll do our part perfectly. As long as things are screwy, we can get hurt by them plenty and Blizz is slow as molasses about fixing them, but as soon as we benefit from them it's grounds for group suspension? I understand you want players to do it the right way, but seriously - own your own s***!