Quote (MaliceMizer @ Sep 16 2019 09:25pm)

I was watching a wow classic spec video and the narrator said that the private server #s are off due to the private hosts not knowing how armor, spell penetration, dots, and debuffs from multiple classes actually work.
Is this true?
What do you think that margin of error is? Are you paying for wow classic on the blizz servers even though you invested so much on the private?

Quote (SCXiao @ 17 Sep 2019 09:44)

iirc layering "worked as intended" out in the world but Blizz underestimated how people would be abusing it. Doing it for raids and instances though was a clear bug and people have gotten punished for it

Quote (Disturbedxx @ 17 Sep 2019 10:29)

Any known players got banned? Their items removed? Their too s removed? I wanna know how they got punished! :evil:

Quote

Soooooo since I’m seeing a lot of confusion (here and elsewhere), here’s some insight into how we draw the line between what makes something a punishable exploit versus a “happy little accident.”

The key factor here is intent. Did the player do something with the specific intention of causing a glitch to occur, and did they do it order to exploit said glitch for their own benefit?

This recent glitch makes a pretty clean example. The players who were abusing it had to do some Very Weird Stuff to cause it to occur, and then did so repeatedly. No reasonable person would expect that this behavior was intended, and the players involved had to go out of their way to cause it. It’s obviously unintended, it’s obviously a glitch, and the people who abused it were obviously exploiting said glitch for their own benefit. That’s pretty open and shut.

Someone mentioned Esfand’s random MC reset in this thread, which is a pretty clean example of the other end of the spectrum. In that case, they just turned up to raid and the instance had been reset. They didn’t do anything intentional to cause it or go looking for reproduction steps so they could abuse it - in fact, they reported it to us and didn’t continue until they got confirmation that it was out of their control (and that we wouldn’t consider it an exploit if they cleared).

Side note for the curious: that was a completely separate bug that has existed since 2004, and actually happened several times back then, it just wasn’t being broadcast to thousands of viewers at the time.

Obviously, neither situation is ideal - we try our best to provide a fair playing field for everyone - but there’s a pretty massive difference between “the instance is reset and we don’t know why” and “if we do this One Weird Trick we can infinitely farm this dungeon boss.” That’s the key factor that turns something from an accident into an exploit.

This ended up being longer than I expected so I’ll wrap it up with one last caveat: there is a lot of context and nuance that goes into these situations, and they’re not usually as cut and dry as these two examples. We end up making a lot of judgement calls based on the specifics of each exploit as well as their overall impact on the game (the phrase “clever use of game mechanics” originally came from one such convoluted situation). These two cases just happen to be pretty obvious.

Quote (BasedGoff @ Sep 16 2019 02:32pm)

there is no reason for layering to exist passed level 30 really, I understand how it can delay people in super populated zones like the barrens, but it isn't needed for people above lvl 30 imo

Quote (Jihn420 @ Sep 17 2019 09:36pm)

Try playing on a high pop server at peak time. Tanaris was completely over picked the last two days for me could barely do a single quest

Quote (BasedGoff @ Sep 18 2019 08:49am)

I play on herod, pretty sure that's one of the top 3 busiest servers