Stamped Tricks

[Namor of Muradin]

It's not asinine. It's completly logical. The fact that you can't seem to comprehend the logic behind, THAT *IS* asinine.
It's not "very likely" unintended - IT IS UNINTENDED.

I understand very clearly the logic of your argument. I just don't agree with it. I don't disagree with any of your examples as to whether or not those aspects of the rules of the gameworld were unintended. Yes, they were unintended. However, they were the rules of the gameworld before the rules of the gameworld were changed by the developers.

I don't think it is the job of the players to discern the intent of the developers, EVEN when something it is pretty obviously unintended. Our job, I am arguing, is to play in the world we are given, which makes these instances 'clever use of game mechanics'. You argue it is the job of the player to use their judgement and not do anything they think might be unintended, and anyone who does something that "general consensus" agrees is unintended must be a cheater and exploiter.

We are unlikely to reach agreement on this point, but I will give one example to illustrate what to me is the fundamental flaw in your assertion. In very early progession, there is no "general consensus" yet, and frankly, in any virtual world as complex as WoW, there will always be some sort of unintended consequence, especially with less tested fights. So what is a player to do? Guess? Stop playing until the developers make their intentions clear? I find the fact that Blizzard bans people for holes in their own coding to be the ultimate hypocrisy on their part. They set the world up. The onus is on them, not the player.

I realize the desire to have a "level playing field" for comparing parses on completely equal terms, but it is tilting at windmills. The layer of personal competition in terms of parse ranking is already skewed by many different things (different strats, rng, cheesing, etc) to prevent it from ever being a completely valid method for comparing player performance. I find singling out people who 'don't play by the rules as I see the rules' to be completely arbitrary, whereas if you start with the precept that the rules of the gameworld are 'the rules', then there is no more arbitrariness. Why should your standards (or anyone else's for that matter) be "the standard"?

[Azortharion]

Nah it would still show up, same reason why it lists "Player has lost X aura" when they die. To be sure, take animal bond talent and dismiss your pet during a log fight. Exploit abuser can get around this by having their pet already summoned before the boss is pulled (which is most likely the case), although doesn't explain why log browser doesn't report events for stampede pet summons.

It used to..? The hell? :P

[Kissthebaby]

who cares about parsing. Every fight has some sort of cheesing involved (except juggernaut), what does it show? That my raid let me kill adds this week on immerseus, I got to go down first on norushen, etc. Who cares if megabloks "exploited" (which we dont even know is true). The fact is his guild let him cheese certain bosses and he got high parses. Parsing is what players do when they are bored on farm content or are just in shitty guilds. No reason to start a riot.

[mercychan]

I understand very clearly the logic of your argument. I just don't agree with it. I don't disagree with any of your examples as to whether or not those aspects of the rules of the gameworld were unintended. Yes, they were unintended. However, they were the rules of the gameworld before the rules of the gameworld were changed by the developers.

I don't think it is the job of the players to discern the intent of the developers, EVEN when something it is pretty obviously unintended. Our job, I am arguing, is to play in the world we are given, which makes these instances 'clever use of game mechanics'. You argue it is the job of the player to use their judgement and not do anything they think might be unintended, and anyone who does something that "general consensus" agrees is unintended must be a cheater and exploiter.

We are unlikely to reach agreement on this point, but I will give one example to illustrate what to me is the fundamental flaw in your assertion. In very early progession, there is no "general consensus" yet, and frankly, in any virtual world as complex as WoW, there will always be some sort of unintended consequence, especially with less tested fights. So what is a player to do? Guess? Stop playing until the developers make their intentions clear? I find the fact that Blizzard bans people for holes in their own coding to be the ultimate hypocrisy on their part. They set the world up. The onus is on them, not the player.

I realize the desire to have a "level playing field" for comparing parses on completely equal terms, but it is tilting at windmills. The layer of personal competition in terms of parse ranking is already skewed by many different things (different strats, rng, cheesing, etc) to prevent it from ever being a completely valid method for comparing player performance. I find singling out people who 'don't play by the rules as I see the rules' to be completely arbitrary, whereas if you start with the precept that the rules of the gameworld are 'the rules', then there is no more arbitrariness. Why should your standards (or anyone else's for that matter) be "the standard"?

Although your opinion is perfectly fine and valid, your logic is surely flawed. Let me make an analogy to speedrunning a game. If someone were to find a prerelease patch of a game, not available to the general speedrunner, in which this prerelease patch made the character move 20% faster, could this person claim a world record run with that? No, because its the community that decides, not some outdated mechanic that the developer didn't consider would become and issue months later, as draco is trying to argue. Why is that so hard for you to understand?

[Anastacy]

If one particular buff/debuff that is not intended to work for, say, Stampeding pets and is fixed to not work when discovered, you can pretty much use Common Sense (tm) to apply that logic to other buffs/debuffs of a similar nature.

Just because buff/debuff A has been fixed and buff/debuff B has not does not mean B is appropriate.

Abusing how buffs/debuffs work goes all the way back to C'thun, and probably earlier.

[mercychan]

It used to..? The hell? :P

what do you mean

[Azortharion]

what do you mean

Stampede pet summons have always been reported in WoL, in my logs too so either you're not looking the right places or something even weirder is up Idunno.

[mercychan]

Stampede pet summons have always been reported in WoL, in my logs too so either you're not looking the right places or something even weirder is up Idunno.

Oh sorry, yes you are right, I meant to say that WoL didn't report any stampede event for Mega

[Dracodraco]

We are unlikely to reach agreement on this point, but I will give one example to illustrate what to me is the fundamental flaw in your assertion. In very early progession, there is no "general consensus" yet, and frankly, in any virtual world as complex as WoW, there will always be some sort of unintended consequence, especially with less tested fights. So what is a player to do? Guess? Stop playing until the developers make their intentions clear? I find the fact that Blizzard bans people for holes in their own coding to be the ultimate hypocrisy on their part. They set the world up. The onus is on them, not the player.

Just quoting the important part - here's the thing. Approaching an encounter differently (ala BOP or no BOP paragons) is still falling under the clever game-mechanics category. I agree that in such situations, there should be no consequences. You're trying to compare apples (different approaches to encounters) to oranges (gaining an unfair advantage through visitting other areas of the game world to aquire buffs that should be dissappearing). As long as you keep thinking those two are even remotely the same, we are not going to see eye to eye on this. Here's where I think you should be able to, quite logically, see the line -
If there is a predecent for something being unintended and removed when found out, it's going to be done again. This includes every single pet glitch you can think up. It does not include doing bosses in a different way, so long as that way is only altered through the mechanics of a player in the raid, or specific handling of the mechanics.

A great example of an encounter that was done in a different way than intended, but viewed as "legal" by blizzard, was the tri-force ragnaros geyser mechanic. It was intended that you'd swap groups in and out of it to keep resetting the superheated debuff, and would then have required you to use more than just three healers to keep up with the P4 damage. Finding a clever way around it that allowed you to 3 heal made a previously impossible dps check "possible".


As a closing remark, you keep going on and on and ON about "WELL, IF THE DEVELOPERS PUT IT IN THE WORLD WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO USE IT; IT's THEIR FAULT FOR MAKING IT!"
No. No, you shouldn't. I have already explained once - try and code something as hugely advanced and intertwined as WoW, and you will end up with bugs and glitches. It is your duty as a player to report these bugs and glitches when found out. Not to keep them secret and take advantage of them for your own personal gain.

Consider this "real world" scenario:
You're sitting in the waiting room at the doctors office. The guy in front of you gets called in to the doctor. He gets up and walks in to the doctors office. However, he accidentelly left his car keys on the table.
Do you:
A: Tell him he forgot his keys (reporting the mistake).
B: Grab the keys and think "SWEET! NEW CAR!".

And last but not least, let me remind you of something everyone who plays WoW has agreed to:

As with all things, your use of the Game is governed by certain rules. These rules (the “World of Warcraft Code of Conduct”), maintained and enforced exclusively by Blizzard, must be adhered to by all players. It is your responsibility to know, understand and abide by this World of Warcraft Code of Conduct. The following rules are not meant to be exhaustive, and Blizzard reserves the right to determine which conduct it considers to be outside the spirit of the Game and to take such disciplinary measures as it sees fit up to and including termination and deletion of the Account. Blizzard reserves the right to modify this Code of Conduct at any time.

C. Rules Related to Game Play.
(i) Using or exploiting errors in design, features which have not been documented, and/or "program bugs" to gain access that is otherwise not available, or to obtain a competitive advantage over other players;

(Note the parts that says "It is your responsibility to know, understand and abide by this WoW CoC", and "Obtain a competitive advantage over other players")

Different approaches to a boss has one thing in common - everyone can do it, and no one has to jump through weird hoops to aquire buffs in order to complete an encounter.

[eschatological]

Namor,

On Lei Shi progression, a few of us found out that flare would immediately end the Get Away! (Not the hiding) phase. I reported it immediately and as far as I know, no Western guilds really got further progression because of it - we first discovered it on the Korean fansites.

Obviously, this was an unintended design flaw. Apparently there was a hidden npc doing the pushback who could only be exposed by the visible Lei Shi when she took enough damage.

Are you saying we should have used that to essentially skip a whole phase of the fight, where juggling the debuff was hardest? Just because we could? Cause I wholeheartedly disagree with that, and would consider any such kill as exploited.

[Namor of Muradin]

Although your opinion is perfectly fine and valid, your logic is surely flawed. Let me make an analogy to speedrunning a game. If someone were to find a prerelease patch of a game, not available to the general speedrunner, in which this prerelease patch made the character move 20% faster, could this person claim a world record run with that? No, because its the community that decides, not some outdated mechanic that the developer didn't consider would become and issue months later, as draco is trying to argue. Why is that so hard for you to understand?

If someone where to play a version of the game that wasn't available to everyone, why would you even want to compare their speedrun to people who played under a different set of rules? That is a specious example.

I find it amusing that you think I "don't understand" the point that you are making. I understand it clearly. I just think that it is a flawed and arbitrary standard that reflect variations in individual bias, and is thus a flawed mechanism for making generalized statements about people's ethics.

Let me provide a non-game based example. When a lawyer is able to use the current laws to argue why his client should not pay taxes, that is a clever lawyer. When a wealthy corporation uses its influence to cause changes in the tax laws to serve its interests, that is exploitation, I would argue.

Thus in my view, someone who plays the game without bots or without hacking the game, even if they use an unintended mechanic that the rule makers (developers) allowed to remain in the game, they are not responsible for that mechanic being in the game and thus should not be seen in the same way as the person who tries to circumvent the world rules (a hack that allows you to fly in a no-fly zone, for example, or to be able to harvest nodes from the underside of the map).

- - - Updated - - -

As a closing remark, you keep going on and on and ON about "WELL, IF THE DEVELOPERS PUT IT IN THE WORLD WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO USE IT; IT's THEIR FAULT FOR MAKING IT!"
No. No, you shouldn't. I have already explained once - try and code something as hugely advanced and intertwined as WoW, and you will end up with bugs and glitches. It is your duty as a player to report these bugs and glitches when found out. Not to keep them secret and take advantage of them for your own personal gain.

I agree that this is the point at the heart of the matter - whether the onus is on the player or on the game developer. I agree with you (and with the point Eschatalogical made) that it makes for a better community if players actively participate with making the game "better" by pointing out things that don't seem to make sense. However, as you pointed out with the Ragnaros example, things are not always clear cut in terms of what action Blizzard will take. My point is that there is always going to be an arbitrary line, and so in the final analysis, I see the ultimate responsibility lying with the developer, not the player.

As for the part of "personal gain", that to me is nonsense. What gain does any of us get by having a high rank, or being in a guild that gets a world first kill? Other than epeen and an inflated sense of self, not much in my opinion. No one is losing a paycheck or unable to feed their children as a result of this stuff.

The reason I decided to jump into the discussion is that I find it amusing in the first place that people get so emotional on this topic. I think it has to do with the internal compass we all have about what is fair or unfair. But even when there is general agreement on what is fair, there is always the element of personal definition and preference behind it, which to me is what underlies the fundamentally arbitrary nature of that type of generalization. So I realize I have taken an unpopular position to an extreme in this thread; the reality of my own approach to wow gameplay is a generally blissful unawareness of these "exploits" until they are already fixed. However, I don't agree that it fair to deride the creative efforts of others in this regard - genius is often finding a way within the rules to do what no one else realized was even possible.

[Dracodraco]

If someone where to play a version of the game that wasn't available to everyone, why would you even want to compare their speedrun to people who played under a different set of rules? That is a specious example.

I find it amusing that you think I "don't understand" the point that you are making. I understand it clearly. I just think that it is a flawed and arbitrary standard that reflect variations in individual bias, and is thus a flawed mechanism for making generalized statements about people's ethics.

Let me provide a non-game based example. When a lawyer is able to use the current laws to argue why his client should not pay taxes, that is a clever lawyer. When a wealthy corporation uses its influence to cause changes in the tax laws to serve its interests, that is exploitation, I would argue.

Thus in my view, someone who plays the game without bots or without hacking the game, even if they use an unintended mechanic that the rule makers (developers) allowed to remain in the game, they are not responsible for that mechanic being in the game and thus should not be seen in the same way as the person who tries to circumvent the world rules (a hack that allows you to fly in a no-fly zone, for example, or to be able to harvest nodes from the underside of the map).

That's your issue. You keep stating "allowed to remain in the game" or some other version thereof. This is not an intentional thing that they left there, it is something that was overlooked. You used an example with lawyers and corporations, let me give you an example -

A law is passed that opens a loophole which makes a lawyer able to let his client get away with not paying taxes. The loophole is then closed as soon as this is found out, and in harsh enough cases, punishment is given out - this is what all the PREVIOUS hunter-pet-bugs have resulted in.

If a new law then passes that once again allows someone to not pay taxes, there is a huge line of previous events that gives predecent to this loophole being fixed as soon as it is found out again. This is not something that remains in the game once found out.
Your entire argument falls apart because it's implying that the developers WANTED to let this fall through the net, and enter the live version of the game. This is not the case, and by agreeing to the CoC (which everyone has), legally, you have to report any such findings to blizzard, and not take advantage of them.

As for the part of "personal gain", that to me is nonsense. What gain does any of us get by having a high rank, or being in a guild that gets a world first kill? Other than epeen and an inflated sense of self, not much in my opinion. No one is losing a paycheck or unable to feed their children as a result of this stuff.

You do 10% more dps than any other hunter because of abusing a bug that you are keeping secret so you can take advantage of it for as long as possible. This is a personal gain. If you don't like the wording or think it's misleading, then replace personal gain with "Obtain a competitive advantage over other players"

As they do in the CoC. It means the same, but I guess you might understand it better if you can put it in reference to something Blizzard has stated.

Basicly - by not disclosing this bug, and through using it, anyone who has done so have gotten the unfair competitive advantage over every other player that their character does 10% more damage for absolutely no reason, what-so-ever.

That said, I'm not sure what your point is. It's okay to abuse bugs and exploits when we're on farm, but not during progress...? That's just stupid as fuck.

[Deleted]

After spending 5 minutes surfing the forums of a popular exploit site( im sure you know the name) I've already found a couple exploits on how to sustain 1.5 million+ dps on spoils and thok as any class/spec really and also a couple other bosses. I did this for educational purposes with no intent to use them. And no it's not the outdated Hex of jammal'an trick. If someone really wanted to find out, they easily could within like 10 minutes and a few bucks.

[Deleted]

After spending 5 minutes surfing the forums of a popular exploit site( im sure you know the name) I've already found a couple exploits on how to sustain 1.5 million+ dps on spoils and thok as any class/spec really and also a couple other bosses. I did this for educational purposes with no intent to use them. And no it's not the outdated Hex of jammal'an trick. If someone really wanted to find out, they easily could within like 10 minutes and a few bucks.

Great! This sure adds value to the current discussion!

[Dracodraco]

After spending 5 minutes surfing the forums of a popular exploit site( im sure you know the name) I've already found a couple exploits on how to sustain 1.5 million+ dps on spoils and thok as any class/spec really and also a couple other bosses. I did this for educational purposes with no intent to use them. And no it's not the outdated Hex of jammal'an trick. If someone really wanted to find out, they easily could within like 10 minutes and a few bucks.

Not sure what that has to do with anything but yes, I am aware of this trick (FD too OP), and I have reported it as soon as I found out .

[Deleted]

Not sure what that has to do with anything but yes, I am aware of this trick (FD too OP), and I have reported it as soon as I found out .

Can be done by rogue with vanish and preparation too. Reported also.

There is one legit way you can actually boost your stampedes damage maybe even more than these exploits and im not speaking about tricks. So far none has used it thought, maybe ppl are too busy finding these exploits. Pay your unholy DK to give you hes unholy frenzy. Im surprized that megabloks haven't done this yet. tested this quickly at dummys and seemed to work for stampede pets, sad thing I don't have UH DK in my raidgroup.

[mercychan]

what is unholy

[Namor of Muradin]

That said, I'm not sure what your point is. It's okay to abuse bugs and exploits when we're on farm, but not during progress...? That's just stupid as fuck.[/FONT][/COLOR]

My point is that getting this bent over video game competition is at its root stupid as fuck, and that thinking you or anyone else in the "community" is an arbiter of morality within this fantasy world is the worst type of hypocrisy.

[Dracodraco]

My point is that getting this bent over video game competition is at its root stupid as fuck, and that thinking you or anyone else in the "community" is an arbiter of morality within this fantasy world is the worst type of hypocrisy.

So that equals to "well, no one is hurt, let's abuse away and congratulate people for doing it"? Heh.
I know that you don't even compete near the top end, but when you've got everything on farm for months, the only thing that keeps this game fresh is competition. Who can perform better? Who is able to push out that little bit of extra DPS over anyone else? There's a reason people like sports, and in most cases, it's not because they want to see X sweaty men run around on a field, kicking/tossing/dribbling a ball around. When someone that was previously respected and looked up to is found to probably use steroids to gain their performance, that's something that is just a downer overall.
But please, tell me in which way I am a hypocrite.

[Deleted]

My point is that getting this bent over video game competition is at its root stupid as fuck, and that thinking you or anyone else in the "community" is an arbiter of morality within this fantasy world is the worst type of hypocrisy.

And at last your ludicrous insubstantial argument has been whittled down to 'lol your all virgins its a game heuhueue megabloks #1'