f13.net

I think it works something like:

1) Enter instance with group
2) Leave group
3) Tag as many mobs as possible, group AoEs them down and heals you
4) Rejoin group before the 1-min kick timer hits zero
5) Goto 1

Is that seriously a bannable exploit?  I thought people had been doing that for years.

Apparently this was fixed years ago but then unfixed in beta without having been refixed. And a whole bunch of people realized that.

What they DIDN'T realize was that Blizzard didn't also unfix their datamonitoring tools  :awesome_for_real:

So, it seems a whole bunch of people on my server where using some sort of exploit to level really fast. I think it had to do with one of the instances but I am not sure. I didnt ask for details. Anyway, it seems that Blizzard is aware of the problem and taking steps.

Quite a lot of people got a 3 day ban on Thursday and Friday. One guild that did it very heavily had 80% of their members banned, and even had their levels rolled back to 70. It remains to been seen if ever one who got banned will be rolled back or not.

Good job Blizz.

/clap

Yeah from all signs they were exploiting instances and their timers. Personally I detest people that are so poor of players that they are willing to cheat hack and exploit to be the best, because to me that is not the Best... the best can do it with in the rules. :mob:

I give props to the guild and players that bust their balls to get to the top and be server first when they do it the old fashion way... I just laughed my ass off when the qq's about this hit the forum. All the QQ'ers, but it is not fair to ban for this... we didn't do anything that the game didn't allow us to do. *giggles*

On the other hand, they DID giggle, so I have to give them +1 gay point for that  :drillf:

Who the fuck are you?

I don't understand this.  Do instance mobs somehow behave differently than outdoor mobs in their exp distribution when tagged by one person but mostly killed by others?  Cause typically if this happens, the person who tagged gets to loot, and a little exp, but it's a tiny percentage of what they normally get.

On one hand, do we really have to ritually murder every newbie who wanders in here?

I am Tissa or would you prefer a full bio?  Either way thanks for the welcome. =)

I didn't think our stringent capitalization standards applied to forum names. I imagine this comes as a surprise to apocrypha as well.

No you aren't.  You're tissa.  You couldn't be arsed to use the shift key when coming up with a forum name.

The capitalization in tissa's posts has been fine. The only place where it hasn't been done is in his/her forum name.

The instant hostility towards newcomers from some of the veteran posters here is a little much.

The instant hostility towards newcomers from some of the veteran posters here is a little much.

Actually, I'm with Reg.  You're all a little hostile.

No you aren't.  You're tissa.  You couldn't be arsed to use the shift key when coming up with a forum name.

u r 2 cute.   :why_so_serious:


I am the champion of noobs, but come on.  Giving props to catassery? QQ?

A lot of new sign-ups appeared unable to use the shift key on the first letter of their nic. That had a strong correlation with low quality first posts and ergo long-term survival.

Does anybody happen to have a copy of schild's first Waterthread post?

Who the fuck are you? We've seen a lot worse in the very recent past. If you have a problem with what they said, respond to that rather than go with the "RAWRRR NEW MEAT" schtick.

Almost like being instantly kick/banned from IRC upon joining the channel. Just cause.

:hello_thar:

It wasn't a particularly retarded first post.  Lowercase nick has precedent.  *giggles* is permissible depending on gender/orientation.

Judgment for the defendant!!

WHO THE FUCK ARE ANY OF YOU?!?!?!?

WHO THE FUCK ARE ANY OF YOU?!?!?!?

Cheddar, you can't talk after that horrible newb you brought in here from LOTRO or whatever, the one who was saying "hail" instead of "hello" and shit.  :oh_i_see:

R-U-N-N-O-F-T

Also, +1 to the giggler, cause he/she's post was much better than any of the new person posts we have got recently.

Blizzard made an error by putting in the "Realm First" achievements. It's a blank check for stupidity amongst your players. Of course they are going to cheat to get it when you put in a reward for speed.

Your right.  tissa, I apologize.   :geezer:

I like to think that Blizzard put in the server first achievements in so they know which accounts to watch for "suspicious" activity or to find out who's life is centered around the game.

I think rewarding different playstyles is something Blizzard have really been working towards for a long time now with WoW, imo they've resolved a lot of the tension that used to exist in the hardcore vs casual debate. You can get enjoyment out of WoW however hardcore or however casual you are, and this specific achievement is a small dinggratsepeen reward for the hardcore.

Of course having a handy marker of which accounts to check for exploiting is an added bonus but I'm sure they were able to track server firsts and abnormal leveling speeds etc before they put the achievement system in place :)

Yeah I will admit that I do like the achievements especially now that I am not raiding. 

I'm actually very disappointed in the achievements. LOTRO and COX both give you titles for all of these, mostly amusing, and are one of my favorite parts of both games. When I first heard about the achievements, that's what I thought and was delighted, but achievements without titles or whatever are pretty pointless.

I want the fishing achievement, but I don't want to be called "Salty"  :uhrr:

The plan was to get ahead of the curve to avoid ganks and get server first shaman.

I prepped a full set of 20 dailies in the days leading up to launch, so I logged in and was 1/4 of the way to 71 within 10 mins. I'd been in the beta and gotten my mage and rogue up to 72 through Howling Fjord, so I knew the quests there. I started at 2AM PST when everybody in ABS was in bed (seriously, there were like 2 people on), so I wound up connecting with the Ars RS guys for the entire northern part of the zone. I was finishing up the zone around the time that people started getting back on, so I moved to Dragonblight instead of Borean in order to stay in an empty zone. Dinged 73 there and took my planned 4 hour nap.

From Dragonblight, went to Grizzly Hills (the zone starts really slow but the last half of the zone is well paced and interesting) till most of the way through 74. It was late night hours by that time, so I hopped over and did about half of Borean Tundra (the starter zones are the fastest for pure leveling speed) while everybody was asleep, which put me most of the way through 75. I got my only gank around 10 AM server in Borean, so I popped back over and finished up Grizzly Hills and moved to Zul'Drak.

I had planned on sleeping again when I hit 77, but I got excited about the flying mount and wasn't that tired, so I decided to push on. Kami loaned me 4k gold for the mount and getting a flying mount upped my leveling speed by 40% or so. Burned through 77 and 78 in Zul'Drak and Shalozar and popped over to Storm Peaks because I'd done the quests there on a premade 80 and it's my favorite zone. Decided that I couldn't hit 80 in peaks without getting severely slowed down with the heavy lore quests at the end (which are awesome but not conducive to fast leveling) so I popped over to icecrown and did the initial 3 hubs then back to Storm Peaks to finish.

The finish part was fun because I told you all I had 5k to go. At the time I was in an area where the mobs don't give XP (it's for the aforementioned lore quests) but I didn't realize it, so I said like 5k to go and ground through 8 or 9 mobs before I realize they weren't giving XP. When I dinged I had about 600 people whisper me grats, which was awesome. My chat box basically continuously scrolled for about a minute and a half.

Chatting as a whole was pretty entertaining. I had transfers talking to me about every 20 minutes from 76 onward and had several dozen people whisper me during 79 asking me "How close are you to 80?" to which I'd reply a percent and they'd respond "cool" and drop the conversation. I also had a bunch of "how u lvl so fast?" for the last two levels. All in all, I was whispering fairly continuously from the time people got up this morning.

So that's the story. Took around 40 hours and I wound up being about 45 minutes slower than I expected I'd be when I made my guess at 77. Leveled specced 30/0/3X which is nice because it makes me really tough while keeping most of ele's dps. I died about 15 times and corpse ran once.

I have a couple things going for me.

First, going so fast lets me treat it like a pve server. I went running around at 1/3 health, no mana, or whatever and didn't have to worry about getting ganked because I was literally the only person in the zone. I similarly didn't have to wait on respawns or escort mobs to appear and didn't have to worry about getting mobs tagged out from under me. More or less all the quests worked for me since I was the first one doing them while others had problems with mobs/objects respawning. In short, going first lets you go faster.

Second, ele shamans have really nice burst. My slowest level was 74 (about 4.75 hours) because I got lava burst at 75, which is a guaranteed 4k crit. So the kill pattern was Bolt->Bolt->FlShock->Burst->Bolt, which is 9 seconds per mob with basically no downtime. I maybe went through 2 stacks of water. This is slower than a ret pally can go (I know, buddyshrews really was faster than me, mostly due to aoe) but noticeably faster than a priest. I spent a lot of time chatting with the leading horde priest after I accidentally fell into his battle for undercity and he mentioned it was taking him about 5 hours per level and that his leveling had slowed when he could no longer tab dot targets to death. I really do think prests are faster with spirit tap/surge of light/rest disc than with a shadow build for leveling.

Third, I didn't really do anything besides level. No professions, only a few instance runs, few group quests, etc.

Dinged 73 there and took my planned 4 hour nap.

Ooh, "The Argent Champion" is a good title for my pally, and I'm already revered with Argent Dawn because I have an OCD fixation on scourgestones. I should finish that off and then go for exalted with Argent Crusade.

So far I had two people whisper that they were going to report me for dual boxing on refer a friend when they asked how I was leveling so quick before WoTLK. Funny part is a real friend has referred me as I started over a new account  :uhrr:

But honestly that instance leveling is pretty common knowledge and was warned(banned) last time as it was a major way for power leveling services.

The funny part is dual boxing isnt against the TOS.

A guy in my guild was our server's first 80 (elemental troll shaman). Here's what he posted about it:

Or you just fall behind the pack  :grin:

AD rep is easy, just rip through Stratholme a few times. My Prot Paladin would pull the live-side undead mobs in chunks of a 100 or so  :grin:

piccolo flute thing that makes everyone dance around you

Does anybody happen to have a copy of schild's first Waterthread post?

Oh, and I'm with Nebu on this - permaban the exploiters or it's a bunch of flowers.

Oh, and I'm with Nebu on this - permaban the exploiters or it's a bunch of flowers.