Challenge Mode Leaderboard 5.2

[RayuEU]

tl;dr version: bugs were used to beat Challenge Mode records and I'm hoping action can be taken to restore the leaderboards to their full glory.

Dear fellow gamers,

Let me introduce myself first so you know my perspective before I try to make my point; I recently came back to WoW to try the new Challenge Mode feature. Over the past couple of months I've made a lot of new friends while doing them and for a while now we've been quite competitive in Challenge Modes, having held multiple world records throughout their existence.

Now there have been many discussions amongst those who care about Challenge Modes about which tricks should be allowed and which shouldn't. Notable examples are Death Knights using Control Undead on very strong spirits in Scarlet Monastery, multi-clicking of purifies in Shado-Pan Monastery and keeping Resin stacks in Siege of Niuzao Temple after resetting the instance.

I've personally mostly thought of these things as clever use of game mechanics, but whatever side you chose in the above argument, you can't deny that these tricks/glitches/bugs/exploits have one thing in common: they are reproducable. Everyone can still use them and beat the current times on the leaderboards.

Now to come to my point, with the recent launch of patch 5.2 there have been some bugs that had a huge impact on the leaderboards, most notably one that allowed monk tanks to pull off millions of damage and to a smaller extent a bug that caused people to gain the Luck of the Draw buff from LFD in Challenge Modes. Both of these bugs were hotfixed within hours of their discovery, but they scarred the leaderboards. Not only did some groups shave seconds off their original times using the Luck of the Draw bug, but there were also groups that obliterated some of the world records and set them to times that are now (nearly) impossible to beat. This renders the leaderboards useless as people can't tell which records were bugged and which were simply impressive.

While I know most people don't really care about the leaderboards, me and a lot of people I know do care and would like to see some form of action to disqualify runs abusing these bugs. I have two suggestions for accomplishing this:

Delete all times obtained within the time period the bugs were active (only a few hours), which would make sure every bugged time is removed, but would also cause some groups that played fair to lose their times.

A safer option would be to just pick the obvious runs out and remove those times. This could be limited to as few as 3-4 runs with times that are simply not realistic when looking at group composition and deviation from other top times.

I've really enjoyed Challenge Modes so far and while I understand that it was said with their release that not much attention would be paid to the methods used to obtain times, I really hope that Blizzard will not let this awesome feature be ruined by a few people that only cared for a quick laugh.

If you've read this far, thanks for letting me share this with you. If you agree with my message, please post your support on this thread: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7101510443

[Therm]

lol Blizzard cares Nothing about fixing rankings.


http://us.battle.net/wow/en/pvp/battlegrounds/

[Ayla]

If you want blizzard to change something, you should post on the forums, not here.

[DanixAsc]

Bumping this as it was posted quite late and people interested in it might have missed it!

[RayuEU]

It saddens me that my thread only received 3 replies. I know not many people care about Challenge Modes, but I hoped there were at least a few people that cared about fair competition in general. We will continue running top-level Challenge Modes nonetheless.

[Deleted]

It saddens me that my thread only received 3 replies. I know not many people care about Challenge Modes, but I hoped there were at least a few people that cared about fair competition in general. We will continue running top-level Challenge Modes nonetheless.

You do realise that Challenge Modes are not balanced at all yeah? At those ilvls there are certain classes which excel compared to others so things will never be "fair".

[Dranged]

Why don't you just enjoy your own accomplishments and ignore what other ppl do? I did my own golds around the xmas holidays because I wanted the achievements and the transmog gear; neither of which is diminished by anything some other group does.

[Baracuda]

Here, have my post. Will never play challenge mode but should be fair, relatively.

[Deleted]

There is little point to a reset. Having a faster time is relying on group composition, sockets, profession bonuses and which current classes are fotm.
So why bother caring about abusing "bugs" when its not fair chance for different classes/groups in the first place?

You could of course turn this arround and argue since it doesnt matter it doesnt matter if you reset it. Perhaps they could make resets with raid tiers so times would be always for current state of the game.

[Deleted]

Quite incredible that all the replies simply tell the OP to forget about it. Personally considering that Blizzard have implemented realm and region wide leader boards i would hope they could at least police it moderately.

It certainly wouldn't be hard to fix, but their reluctance to tackle either arena or rbg exploiters leads me to believe the bugged times may pollute the CM leaderboards for some time.

[RayuEU]

I'm glad this thread was finally picked up! Thanks for your feedback everyone.

[Ruffles]

tl;dr version: bugs were used to beat Challenge Mode records and I'm hoping action can be taken to restore the leaderboards to their full glory.

Now there have been many discussions amongst those who care about Challenge Modes about which tricks should be allowed and which shouldn't. Notable examples are Death Knights using Control Undead on very strong spirits in Scarlet Monastery, multi-clicking of purifies in Shado-Pan Monastery and keeping Resin stacks in Siege of Niuzao Temple after resetting the instance.

I've personally mostly thought of these things as clever use of game mechanics, but whatever side you chose in the above argument, you can't deny that these tricks/glitches/bugs/exploits have one thing in common: they are reproducable. Everyone can still use them and beat the current times on the leaderboards.

Those are obviously bugs which shouldn't be part of the challenge modes. You skip a lot of time by using them.
As for people trying to get a world record time or improve their best time, they'll go again and again, it won't really matter if they reset the tables. Those who got their achievements and are not planning on going there again, won't care too much.

[Valsh]

Those are obviously bugs which shouldn't be part of the challenge modes. You skip a lot of time by using them.
As for people trying to get a world record time or improve their best time, they'll go again and again, it won't really matter if they reset the tables. Those who got their achievements and are not planning on going there again, won't care too much.

Did you even read his post?

[Deleted]

He's saying reseting the tables is not detrimental to anyone, since those going for world record times will continuously run the instance.

Another option is to archive the leader boards each tier, similar to seasons in arena.

[Dranged]

What about hotfixes and class changes? If they nerf for example fire mages tomorrow, should all runs with a fire mage in the grp prior to the nerf be wiped? Since it would be unfair to those comps who run CMs with fire mages after the nerf.