Cracks starting to show?

[Sjofn]

I've linked him before, but my mage still cracks me up.

[Setanta]

My hunter is wearing the Tier/drop gear from Firelands - belf admittedly, but it looks good. Prot pally is running Ymirjar Lord's gear from ICC although I would like tosee her in T2. The rest I don't care about.

[Wolf]

One of my raiders got hacked over the weekend, he emptied out the more fancy stuff out of the guild bank. GM returned all the stuff to him and I got an automatic email with all the same stuff in my in-game mail. So we basically doubled up on everything relevent. That's standard fare at this point, it's probably the second or third time it's happened.

[Ironwood]

I have a theory that these chaps are using some duping bug and that's why we get our stuff back twice.

I was fairly happy with the outcome anyway.

[SurfD]

I have a theory that these chaps are using some duping bug and that's why we get our stuff back twice.

I was fairly happy with the outcome anyway.

Depending on who grabs your stuff, its more of a fact that they are dupeing, rather then a theory.  There are a few servers that have reported seeing Hundreds of Queens' Garnets (the Deathwing raid only Epic Red Gems) on the Auction house, all listed by the same guy, for dirt cheap prices, which is almost mathematically impossible given your chances of getting a single Epic gem at all, let alone multiple hundreds a mere month+ into the lifespan of that raid.

My server has been flooded with people Spamming stacks of Sands of Time in the Auction house / Trade chat at 12000 for a stack of 20 (for reference, they cost 2700g EACH to purchase from the vendor that sells them if you have the max rep discount through the Bartering Guild perk).  There is no way in hell anyone could legitimately want to be throwing money away to sell these things for 1/4 or less then what it costs to buy them.

[Ironwood]

Indeed.

[Samprimary]

I don't think they've done hunters or shaman yet. I'm pretty sure hunter (like paladin) would be very predictable. I'd be curious to see Shaman though, since it feels like their sets haven't really ever had universal appeal among the community.

The shaman sets are a byproduct of shaman development in sum: shaman starts as a bastard thematic hybrid that they don't really know what to do with and/or make of through the vast majority of the product's lifespan, and lead designers really don't have a feel for the class concept and never did, and the designs surrounding shaman sets represents that. Usually. Some of them just look like 'uh i dunno druidish'

[SurfD]

I don't think they've done hunters or shaman yet. I'm pretty sure hunter (like paladin) would be very predictable. I'd be curious to see Shaman though, since it feels like their sets haven't really ever had universal appeal among the community.

The shaman sets are a byproduct of shaman development in sum: shaman starts as a bastard thematic hybrid that they don't really know what to do with and/or make of through the vast majority of the product's lifespan, and lead designers really don't have a feel for the class concept and never did, and the designs surrounding shaman sets represents that. Usually. Some of them just look like 'uh i dunno druidish'

Yeah, that just about summs it up.  Shaman sets tend to swing wildly from "We commune with the elements" through "We got Animal Totems and Bones" right into "Today I feel like a Voodoo Witch Doctor" with what seems like no real pattern or thought behind it.

[Wolf]

I have a theory that these chaps are using some duping bug and that's why we get our stuff back twice.

I was fairly happy with the outcome anyway.

snip

It could also be just stuff from hacked people's accounts. I think that's how they get away with it - sell everything dirt cheap, turn it around through several accounts and there - free gold. I think they have mules they feed all the stolen stuff in the last X hours, then sever transfer them, sell there, transfer the money to another account, etc. I just don't think there's a dupe exploit that wouldn't be common knowledge at this point or hot fixed out of the game yesterday.

[SurfD]

I dont know, somehow it does not seem like it would be though.  I mean, sure, it is possible that the odd person here and there might have a few Sands of Time on their character when they get hacked, or enough gold to purchase a bunch of them, but I cant realistically see the gold farmers going through all the trouble of buying more Sands with the gold, or collecting the Sands on one bot just to offload them by the stack in Trade or on the AH at a rediculous loss in overall gold.

Like I said above, at one point on my server just a few weeks ago, there was one bot offering something like 15 stacks of Sands at 12000g a stack in Trade, and another with like an entire AH page of stacks of Sands for 14000 a stack.  Considering that an individual Sand costs an absolute minimum of 2700g, selling 20 of them for 12000 is crazy.  The things are only used in two things in the entire game (The Alchemy Dragon mount, and the first step of the Firelands Legendary Staff quest), so it's not like the average person is going to be wandering around with a bunch of completely useless 2700g items without intending to use it REALLY soon.

The same general logic could also be applied to the servers who were seeing multiple hundreds of Queens Garnets show up on the AH.  My server rarely ever has more then a single AH page of cut AND uncut Garnets.  There is only one way to get them, which is tokens from the bosses in the dragon soul raids.  7 tokens with a low % chance to give you any RANDOM epic gem, and 1 token guaranteed to give you at least one, provided you can clear the place completely in non raidfinder.  I doubt you would see enough Queens Garnets produced in a month to flood the AH with STACKS of uncut gems in under a month even if every raid capable level 85 character was clearing 7/8 on a weekly basis, so the idea that gold farmers could collect even a few stacks of a specific color of gem through sheer luck while hacking accounts is probably stretching probability pretty far.

[Wolf]

hmm yeah, I do remember that some Garnets popped up on our server too. Maybe you're right, I just can't believe Blizzard won't patch that right the fuck away.

[apocrypha]

Like they patched the z-axis cheats that let low levels farm mining nodes by teleporting between them underground? That when I stopped playing (about 6 months ago) had been going on for 4 years?

I think that the arms race between the hackers/gold farmers and Blizzard is one that they know they can't win by out-hacking the hackers. They'll always lose that one so they retaliate by a) making gold effectively worthless and b) having their own, legit, RMT options instead.

[Merusk]

I think that the arms race between the hackers/gold farmers and Blizzard is one that they know they can't win by out-hacking the hackers. They'll always lose that one so they retaliate by a) making gold effectively worthless and b) having their own, legit, RMT options instead.

Their approach to this has always been "give them enough rope."  They let bugs and dupes run for a long while, then ban everyone recorded doing it and patch that hole.  The z-axis thing has seen 3-4 different iterations (always the same exploit, sure, always done differently so far as I know) in those 4 years, not including the one that had been used in Dire Maul back in the BC days.

[SurfD]

You know, now that i think about it, I dont think i have seen an underground mining / herb bot in a fairly long while.  Same goes for the guys with the 15 bots doing air choreography infront of the Auction house to spell out their gold farming website.

Still plenty of people using automated paths and stuff, but not very many teleport hackers / z-axis exploiters.