Forum Drama: KT capable Horde Guild eats the ban stick.

[SurfD]

One of the guys in my guild just posted some info on a bit of forum drama.

Seems that the only current US based Horde Guild capable of a full Naxx clear, <Overrated> just got something like 90% of their memebers perma banned for, of all things, being retarded enough to to use a blatant Data file hack to allow wall walking in AQ 40 to skip their entire raid past everything after Skeram to go directly to C'thun.  I mean, I realise the trash clear to cthun sucks, but hell, it only takes 5 hours of effort for my guild (not a catass guild by any means) to clear through to him.  Was it REALLY worth the banstick slapdown to get the easy C'thun loot every week?

Couple of relevant posts on the forums:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=43425267&sid=1

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=35975655&sid=1

A video of the actual hack in action (origionally the thing was used to skip directly to the Quest people for the Regalia / Armaments turn in quests.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8633973161089723869&q=Aq+quest+Exploit&hl=en

I mean, all that work, and any reputation of being a "legetimate" top end guild, flushed, cause you were caught exploiting on old content......

[bhodi]

Their excuse? They were bored.

[Jayce]

Their excuse? They were bored.

As always.

[Xanthippe]

More hilarity from their server board:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=43884822&sid=1

The hypocrisy is laughable. I don't know one person in Overrated but the resentment and envy most of you are showing on these forums is pathetic. They accomplish something you can't so you attack like children.

MOST if not ALL of you are guilty of the same thing Overrated did on a smaller scale. How many of you need something from BRD if you are starting to farm FR gear or want HoJ? Do you jump off ledges and swim through the lava? You think that's different? In beta I think it was Ropetown that had a bunch of people get suspended for lava jumping (aka skipping content). It's the same damn thing.

Yes.  It's just like lava jumping.  Just like it.  Only it's not.  At all.

[Sogrinaugh]

Don't really feel like digging up the post but one of the overrated guys sounded rather relieved.  Had something like 220 days played on 1 character.

[Triforcer]

More hilarity from their server board:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=43884822&sid=1

The hypocrisy is laughable. I don't know one person in Overrated but the resentment and envy most of you are showing on these forums is pathetic. They accomplish something you can't so you attack like children.

MOST if not ALL of you are guilty of the same thing Overrated did on a smaller scale. How many of you need something from BRD if you are starting to farm FR gear or want HoJ? Do you jump off ledges and swim through the lava? You think that's different? In beta I think it was Ropetown that had a bunch of people get suspended for lava jumping (aka skipping content). It's the same damn thing.

Yes.  It's just like lava jumping.  Just like it.  Only it's not.  At all.

Is naturally dropping to a lower level in BRD really forbidden (or was it)?  That seems stupid.  YOu might as well ban people for jumping off the zep before it reaches the official designated landing point.

[lamaros]

More hilarity from their server board:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=43884822&sid=1

The hypocrisy is laughable. I don't know one person in Overrated but the resentment and envy most of you are showing on these forums is pathetic. They accomplish something you can't so you attack like children.

MOST if not ALL of you are guilty of the same thing Overrated did on a smaller scale. How many of you need something from BRD if you are starting to farm FR gear or want HoJ? Do you jump off ledges and swim through the lava? You think that's different? In beta I think it was Ropetown that had a bunch of people get suspended for lava jumping (aka skipping content). It's the same damn thing.

Yes.  It's just like lava jumping.  Just like it.  Only it's not.  At all.

Is naturally dropping to a lower level in BRD really forbidden (or was it)?  That seems stupid.  YOu might as well ban people for jumping off the zep before it reaches the official designated landing point.

At one stage it was, yeah. Blizzard learnt, though.

[Fabricated]

Lava hopping was bannable until they added a bunch of fire elementals on the path to make it more of a challenge instead of a complete "Skip half the instance" thing.

[SurfD]

Using the same lava jumping logic, it should be a bannable offense to take a level 60 into any level 40 or lower instance and bypass all the mobs to go strait to the bosses, just because you can due to aggro range mechanics.

[Margalis]

I mean, I realise the trash clear to cthun sucks, but hell, it only takes 5 hours of effort for my guild (not a catass guild by any means) to clear through to him.  Was it REALLY worth the banstick slapdown to get the easy C'thun loot every week?

Ooh, only 5 hours!

How the hell do you hack a client-side data file to allow you to walk through walls anyway?

[Shavnir]

First off you have to realize AQ40 is a downard spiral shaped instance.  That is to say a bit past the first boss is almost directly above the last boss.

Since all the bosses are spawned at once all they did was use model replacement to hop down through the platform the first boss stands on with a slow fall and land in an area near the last boss.

Since all the collision detection is done client side, and since the client uses data in patch-#.mpq files in it its possible to replace models in this way, many people have done it for things like herbalism nodes (turning them so they're easier to see), and occasionally campfires (various exploits for getting into a BG early have been because of this).

Really blizzard's options for fixing this problem should be to just have the warden sniff out anyone with more patch-# files than they should have.  I honestly donno why they just went this route instead, but it reinforces the point that blizz dosen't fuck around when it comes to banning huge numbers of people.

[Merusk]

Really blizzard's options for fixing this problem should be to just have the warden sniff out anyone with more patch-# files than they should have.  I honestly donno why they just went this route instead, but it reinforces the point that blizz dosen't fuck around when it comes to banning huge numbers of people.

They're not looking to fix it, per se, but as of 1.11 or 1.12 the Warden does notice if you've got altered files.  They patched it to stop folks farming DM from the sky, and prevent stuff like these wall hacks. As a side-effect Hunters who used to patch-out the Lhok'delar staff model for something better looking and replace the dragonstalker purple with a black or red set can't do it anymore.

 If you find a 'work around' and still get the client to run, I imagine it notifies Blizzard. Their strategy has always been "let folks cheat for a bit and pass it around, then ban.  You catch more cheaters that way and sell more new boxes."  I recall folks saying the same thing about Diablo/ WC/ SC on Battle.Net.

[Ironwood]

Have I replied in this thread yet ?

LOL.

Yeah, that'll do it.

Cheating scumbuckets who have a misplaced sense of entitlement.  Wipe them out.  All of them.

[Shavnir]

 If you find a 'work around' and still get the client to run, I imagine it notifies Blizzard. Their strategy has always been "let folks cheat for a bit and pass it around, then ban.  You catch more cheaters that way and sell more new boxes."  I recall folks saying the same thing about Diablo/ WC/ SC on Battle.Net.

Plus that way every couple of months blizz can say "Oh yea we banned over 40,000 accounts, so don't cheat okay"

[schild]

Five Hours for content you've already done versus 2 minutes to get to the inevitable end result is the definition of fun. I'm not saying cheat, I'm saying This Is The Reason I Don't Play MMOGs (much, at all, anymore). Bullshit timesinks.

Edit: Though, this cheat does make my point louder than I ever could. It's positively disgusting to cheat in a game built around wasting time, but that point remains. Even then, I'm such a jaded dick that the logging in and out makes it too much work. In that time I can load up a demo of something I've never played and experience something new or judge a good 5-10 flash games built by indie folks.

[Ironwood]

Not really appropriate tho.  They were skipping 'the fun' so that they would have an easier time skipping 'the fun' on the next level.  It's just fucking stupid whichever way you slice it.  Cheating for the sake of it.


Don't get me wrong :  I think five hours to do ANYTHING 40 man is the very textbook definition of unfun.  Indeed, I think that would probably even go in the American definition of torture.  I personally can't imagine doing such mindless levels of trash for a shiny purple.  But they were after the shiny purple to make the next shiny purple easier to get to.   That's broken thinking.

What they're basically saying is 'Playing with my 40 mates for Five hours is too much.  I hate those guys.'

:)


After all, Schild, are you really saying that you want an online game to only provide you with 2 minutes fun ?  That's a little silly.  Your OCD problem does not translate to my fun.

[schild]

I shouldn't have to put in a days worth of work to get the best loot in the game. The Diablo style of nearly random is far more fun than....that shit. I don't even know what to call it. Raiding just doesn't do it justice. Maybe "raping" does though.

[Ironwood]

No, I agree with that.  Everyone knows my feelings on 40 man hardcore raiding.  I'm just not sure that taking that to its logical conclusion is what happened here at all.  Timesinks are important for the genre for too many reasons to go back into (and you know them all anyway.)

The whole idea of 'The Best Loot In The Game' is what breaks the thinking anyway.  These guys were chasing Naxx Epics.  They saw AQ40 as nothing more than a stepping stone and it's that that's the problem.

Personally, these encounters SHOULD be their own reward and All the bosses SHOULD drop comparable loot.  They should be being done because they're there, not as a Goal.

Random Loot Would Not Work, tho, and I think you know why.

[schild]

Well, therein lies the big problem. In these games - all of them (that I know of, please someone prove me wrong) - there's always something better. And you always know what that something is...

By the time you get there (not counting the ultimate hardcore catass guilders), they've released the next bit of shiny, and due to the internet, you know what that is also.

It's a disgusting vicious cycle. It's prat of the reason MMOGs suck in general. Someone, somewhere needs to come up with a system for creating loot. My opinion, Bandai/Cyber Connect's .Hack random dungeon generator perfected a system for generating content (the content sucks a lot, but that's not the point), now someone needs to generate a loot system that is nearly infinitely random. I want a fun, fast, hack and slash where the amount of loot is so huge and the dungeon possibilities so vast that making a strategy guide would be near impossible (it'd be thousands of pages if they showed stats...). I know I'm just being ridiculous here, but I would except a game with that sort of randomization with any one of the following play styles Diablo/Phantasy Star, FFXII, Infinity Engine Stuff, Hellgate: London style, or EVEN SRPG/TBS style.

Why am I even posting this shit?

Nevermind, /derail, go back to talking about WoW. For a moment I almost got glossy eyed at the possibility of fun if someone who wanted to make a difference got some money. My bad, I should know better.

[Ironwood]

Heh.


All that loot.  Now try and balance it all.  Now react when the Internet community realises the CodPiece of Thrusting Might is overpowered and everyone is trying to get one and can't because, hey, it's random.

And who's getting them ?  The Gold Farmers.  And you too can have one for real dollars please.

Sigh.  Same as it ever was.

Oh and where the hell has Hellgate gone anyway ?

[schild]

Fuck balance.

There, I said it. You don't like what someone has, avoid him. Life isn't fair. Get a helmet. Leave balance to this diku nonsense.

Edit: On a more serious note, you balance the attributes that make up the tiers of weapons that contribute to the whole. I'd still be ok with fucking balance though. Oh, and there would be no 40 man raids. There would however, be a 40 man free for all arena called The Bucket of Blood. Your goal? Not to die. Fuck the # of people you kill. The goal is to get out with your equipment. And just for good measure, offer a hardcore mode so people can lose their characters. At the end of the day, it seems like Blizzard north needs to make Diablo Online and Flagship needs to offer out of box persistant servers for small groups of people (2 to 30 concurrent or something) so communities could have their own loot lovefest.

[Malathor]

The whole idea of 'The Best Loot In The Game' is what breaks the thinking anyway.  These guys were chasing Naxx Epics.  They saw AQ40 as nothing more than a stepping stone and it's that that's the problem.

Personally, these encounters SHOULD be their own reward and All the bosses SHOULD drop comparable loot.  They should be being done because they're there, not as a Goal.

Raiding should be it's own reward, but in the case of AQ it isn't because the zone itself is poorly designed piece of garbage, vastly inferior to Naxx (or BWL for that matter) in every way. The first half of the zone was a joke even when it was released, most guilds at Overrated's level cleared that the first night it opened. The second half carries a truely insane trash to boss ratio, far worse than anything in MC. Except for the Emps and C'Thun encounters the whole zone is just shit. Add to that the fact that these guys probably cleared the zone 20+ times already and its hardly surprising they dreaded running this crap yet again just to get the shineys off the last boss.

None of that excuses what they did in the least, however. They didn't really bitch about it, they knew full well they throughly deserved a banning.

[Ironwood]

Can't argue with that either.

The Bucket Of Blood.

I am interested in your views and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.  Oh wait, ingame, you mean ?  Nah.

[schild]

Actually, no, I meant here in Phoenix. Everyone knows we have enough people. Hell, we have enough real estate types to start a gladiator tournament. Last man standing gets another strip of highway IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING DESERT.

[damijin]

Wow, I had no idea this was getting so much attention. I was in a guild with a lot of these guys 3 or 4 years ago when we all played Planetside and then Lineage 2 together, but we kind of fell out of touch when they moved on to WoW. Anyway, I got some IMs from some of them back on the night that it happened, and just to prove that they're almost kind of sorry about what they did:

    Jessica: Damijin sir, I have a lesson for you, and that is to never cheat. Thank you for your time!

    Damijin: I do not... understand..

    Jessica: I SAID DON'T CHEAT JESUS

    Damijin: ALRIGHT I'LL NOT CHEAT ON THE LORD AND SAVIOR

    Jessica: NO

    Jessica: THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEAN

    Damijin: Sounds like it's what you meant.

    Jessica: THOU SHALT NOT CHEAT.

    Jessica: I cheated. Fudgy cheated. Kablez cheated. We are all now permanently banned from the world of warcraft!

    Damijin: hahaha

    Damijin: ahahahaha

    Damijin: hahaha

    Damijin: all my friends are cheaters :-(

    Jessica: It's ok though. We might not ever cheat again

But then again, when we played Planetside we got bored one day and killed an entire army of our own team by waiting for a base to be taken, then taking down our own generator so no one could buy a vehicle (inevitably leading to everyone standing around the vehicle station waiting for it to come up instead of fixing it themselves), followed by orbital striking the mass of people crowding the vehicle station.

About 6 times.

And we made a movie of it.

And we posted it on the official forums.

But yeah, maybe this'll set them straight. it wont

[Triforcer]

Wow, I had no idea this was getting so much attention. I was in a guild with a lot of these guys 3 or 4 years ago when we all played Planetside and then Lineage 2 together, but we kind of fell out of touch when they moved on to WoW. Anyway, I got some IMs from some of them back on the night that it happened, and just to prove that they're almost kind of sorry about what they did:

    Jessica: Damijin sir, I have a lesson for you, and that is to never cheat. Thank you for your time!

    Damijin: I do not... understand..

    Jessica: I SAID DON'T CHEAT JESUS

    Damijin: ALRIGHT I'LL NOT CHEAT ON THE LORD AND SAVIOR

    Jessica: NO

    Jessica: THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEAN

    Damijin: Sounds like it's what you meant.

    Jessica: THOU SHALT NOT CHEAT.

    Jessica: I cheated. Fudgy cheated. Kablez cheated. We are all now permanently banned from the world of warcraft!

    Damijin: hahaha

    Damijin: ahahahaha

    Damijin: hahaha

    Damijin: all my friends are cheaters :-(

    Jessica: It's ok though. We might not ever cheat again

But then again, when we played Planetside we got bored one day and killed an entire army of our own team by waiting for a base to be taken, then taking down our own generator so no one could buy a vehicle (inevitably leading to everyone standing around the vehicle station waiting for it to come up instead of fixing it themselves), followed by orbital striking the mass of people crowding the vehicle station.

About 6 times.

And we made a movie of it.

And we posted it on the official forums.

But yeah, maybe this'll set them straight. it wont

That conversation is bullshit.  There are no women on the internet or in MMOs.

[Ironwood]

Who says it's a woman ?  Jessica is a nice manly name.

To the Name My Son Thread with thee.

[Zane0]

Hmph, you don't need to spend 5 hours to progress.  The instance timers save intermittent progress for the week!  Remember?  You'd have to find a lot of like-minded people of course, but that's about half the game from any perspective.

This is a rather silly thing to have done.  My guild skips to C'thun by taking another guild's instance- one that can only clear to Huhuran or the Emps. (3/4's through)  That's quite a bit easier, and you don't get banned!  I guess some servers don't have very many guilds that are capable of this, so that's the only reason I can think of for not being very intelligent, other than hacking for "the thrill".

[damijin]

She's a girl.

And an elitist.

And was a rampant PKer in Lineage 2, and a pretty damn good pilot in Planetside. Her hobbies include making grown men cry and spamming forums.

edit: talked to a few of my other friends too. they're kind of dissapointed that no one has bothered to really publish WHY they did it. It wasn't because they had to it was because they're all powergamers and they believed that as a guild they had already "beat" the game. They then decided that AQ40 was stupidly designed and proceded to exploit it in a very blatantly obvious way. Even recording the boss deaths on their public DKP charts to make it more obvious to anyone paying attention.

I dont know how long they did it for, but they're all fairly proud of themsleves for getting this much attention. Most of them plan on rerolling to another server and prepping for Burning Crusade content. They also made the snide remark that Blizzard had left enough members of the clan active that they could actually exploit it again in a week or two if they really wanted to~

[Ironwood]

I refer you to the 'Misplaced Sense of Entitlement' I mentioned some moments ago.

[Furiously]

I refer you to the 'Misplaced Sense of Entitlement' I mentioned some moments ago.

I see a lot of that going around...

[lamaros]

You know if I had completeled most of the content and was sick of wasting time on boring instance design each week, and was going to reroll again for TBC I wouldn't really see much of a problem with it either.

Afterall, I can get a copy of WoW over here for cheaper than the monthly cost.

[Velorath]

edit: talked to a few of my other friends too. they're kind of dissapointed that no one has bothered to really publish WHY they did it. It wasn't because they had to it was because they're all powergamers and they believed that as a guild they had already "beat" the game. They then decided that AQ40 was stupidly designed and proceded to exploit it in a very blatantly obvious way. Even recording the boss deaths on their public DKP charts to make it more obvious to anyone paying attention.

I dont know how long they did it for, but they're all fairly proud of themsleves for getting this much attention. Most of them plan on rerolling to another server and prepping for Burning Crusade content. They also made the snide remark that Blizzard had left enough members of the clan active that they could actually exploit it again in a week or two if they really wanted to~

That's as bad an excuse as the guy I saw on the WoW boards who claimed that his reason for constantly going afk in BG's was to show Blizzard how much of a problem it is that people can do it.  Your friends were lazy and stupid and they got caught cheating.  It's a little late now to try and make a cause out of it or to pretend to be proud that they got banned from a computer game.

[Xanthippe]

Swell.  Rumor has it they're now on my server.

At least they're on the other side.  I feel like going camping.

[damijin]

edit: talked to a few of my other friends too. they're kind of disappointed that no one has bothered to really publish WHY they did it. It wasn't because they had to it was because they're all powergamers and they believed that as a guild they had already "beat" the game. They then decided that AQ40 was stupidly designed and proceded to exploit it in a very blatantly obvious way. Even recording the boss deaths on their public DKP charts to make it more obvious to anyone paying attention.

I don't know how long they did it for, but they're all fairly proud of themselves for getting this much attention. Most of them plan on rerolling to another server and prepping for Burning Crusade content. They also made the snide remark that Blizzard had left enough members of the clan active that they could actually exploit it again in a week or two if they really wanted to~

That's as bad an excuse as the guy I saw on the WoW boards who claimed that his reason for constantly going afk in BG's was to show Blizzard how much of a problem it is that people can do it.  Your friends were lazy and stupid and they got caught cheating.  It's a little late now to try and make a cause out of it or to pretend to be proud that they got banned from a computer game.

I'm not going to defend cheating, but I will defend my friend's as people. They didn't do it for some greater cause to prove something to Blizzard, and I didn't say they did.

They did it because they felt they had "beat the game", and they thought that doing so much work for that instance was dumb, they wanted to "go out with a bang" as one of them put it, and judging by the amount of people talking about it, they did. They entirely expected to be banned. That same person said he wanted to be banned in some ways, because the amount of time he was spending to help the guild maintain it's top position was draining him. He told me he pretty much had to play at leat 6 to 8 hours per day, 6 or 7 days per week, strictly raiding, and raiding all content that he's already done several times. So he found it to be a relief in many ways. I know these guys, and while their values may not make sense to the average casual gamer, they're not in the same category as a hacker who gets caught on a CS server and goes "oh crap, you got me, I actually suck and i was cheating to be better."

They're more like myg0t in some ways, where you're supposed to catch them, but the only reason they did it was to make people talk in the first place. Also, they're pretty damn awesome players at anything I've seen them play, so I have no doubt that they'll legitly decimate the Burning Crusade content, and perhaps pull stunts similar to this one when they're ready to actually leave the game.

That's how they are. Destructive elitists as far as the overall community is concerned, but certainly not lazy or stupid.

(P.S. I know computer games may not mean much to you, they're simply a part of your life. One piece to it. But for some of these guys,  games are the majority of their life. It's a very, very, real and major part. So honestly, yes, they do get "proud" over things that happen in the game.)