Realm First Herbalism after just 12 minutes into WOTLK Live?

[rogoth]

Flight form isn't working as intended if it's allowing you to fly where you shouldn't be.

And the players using it fully well know that they shouldn't be able to fly in Northrend so quickly.

i'm gonna use you as the punching bag to respond to everyone who has tried to berate me for calling this a loophole and not an exploit, and i'm going to try and explain why that is to the best of my ability and hope people are smart enough to see the point being made.

as i said previously:

warlock summoning worked as it was intended to work
druid flight form worked as it was intended to work

these things are factually correct, what you and every other person who responded to me trying to mock me has failed to identify, is that the druid player never used the shapeshift ability while in northrend, why is this key?, because the 'checks and balances' test for flight in northrend is the 'cold weather flying' ability that you purchase at the flight trainer in dalaran and unlock at lvl 77, this is a loophole that bypasses that particular block, meaning that if the druid player had been summoned to northrend and had used the shapeshift skill for flight form and was still able to fly around without cold weather flying, then that would constitute an exploit, as it was working not as intended, however since the check was never performed, nothing was exploited, by all means try to argue semantics but it's a very clear distinction to make that this is using a loophole to gain an advantage and it's on blizzard to close that loophole and while you can argue over the morality of using such a thing to gain an advantage, ultimately nothing was used incorrectly, nothing was actually exploited in a way the game isn't intended to function.

[Coldfrostzero]

i'm gonna use you as the punching bag to respond to everyone who has tried to berate me for calling this a loophole and not an exploit, and i'm going to try and explain why that is to the best of my ability and hope people are smart enough to see the point being made.

as i said previously:

warlock summoning worked as it was intended to work
druid flight form worked as it was intended to work

these things are factually correct, what you and every other person who responded to me trying to mock me has failed to identify, is that the druid player never used the shapeshift ability while in northrend, why is this key?, because the 'checks and balances' test for flight in northrend is the 'cold weather flying' ability that you purchase at the flight trainer in dalaran and unlock at lvl 77, this is a loophole that bypasses that particular block, meaning that if the druid player had been summoned to northrend and had used the shapeshift skill for flight form and was still able to fly around without cold weather flying, then that would constitute an exploit, as it was working not as intended, however since the check was never performed, nothing was exploited, by all means try to argue semantics but it's a very clear distinction to make that this is using a loophole to gain an advantage and it's on blizzard to close that loophole and while you can argue over the morality of using such a thing to gain an advantage, ultimately nothing was used incorrectly, nothing was actually exploited in a way the game isn't intended to function.

I think what you fail to address is that summoning and then taking advantage of the fact that the check doesn't happen is the exploit. Yes, they are not exploits to get summoned or to be summoned while in flight form. It is an exploit when you decide to do something you wouldn't normally be able to do because of limitations that are supposed to exist. It isn't a loophole or clever use of game mechanics when you are deliberately doing something you know you shouldn't be able to do. That's always been Blizzard's stance.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

outside of being able to fly in northrend without cold weather flying, nothing there is 'exploiting', it's purely a 'clever use of game mechanics' as everything is functioning but as we know they don't have a testing/QA team anymore so stuff like this will always slip through.

There are really people who still believe this? They had a whole thing during the higher of
The lawsuit stuff about making there QA contractors full employees, no matter how much QA you have no game is ever gonna catch every exploit.

[tomten]

It's different from things like rextroy one shotting a raidboss where he's not breaking any rules because blizz didn't have buff cleansing on a raid instance and just assumed all temp buffs would be gone by the time you get to the boss. That was lack of blizz foresight and clever use of mechanics, the druid is just breaking the rules by using an exploit to get benefits he shouldn't have in an area he shouldn't have them

Is it really different? The summon doesn't clear form or have any checks on cold flying. Its poor and lazy coding and its blizzards fault.
It 100% falls under clever use of game mechanics. Not an exploit.

[Gotanks305]

Regardless of what you wanna call it exploit loophole or Clever use of game mechanics gives people an unfair advantage over the rest of the populace. giving a handful of druids who are greedy enough to do this a huge Jump on manipulating the herb market and Milling / inscription, wouldnt go as far as banning them but should have the herbs removed and or gold earned removed

[Aleksej89]

guys dont feed the troll, lol.
is this your first time on gaming forums?

[tomten]

What do you think exploit means?

To be honest, barley blizzard knows what they consider an exploit considering how inconsistent they always are on these matters.

[Nebron]

i'm gonna use you as the punching bag to respond to everyone who has tried to berate me for calling this a loophole and not an exploit, and i'm going to try and explain why that is to the best of my ability and hope people are smart enough to see the point being made.

as i said previously:

warlock summoning worked as it was intended to work
druid flight form worked as it was intended to work

these things are factually correct, what you and every other person who responded to me trying to mock me has failed to identify, is that the druid player never used the shapeshift ability while in northrend, why is this key?, because the 'checks and balances' test for flight in northrend is the 'cold weather flying' ability that you purchase at the flight trainer in dalaran and unlock at lvl 77, this is a loophole that bypasses that particular block, meaning that if the druid player had been summoned to northrend and had used the shapeshift skill for flight form and was still able to fly around without cold weather flying, then that would constitute an exploit, as it was working not as intended, however since the check was never performed, nothing was exploited, by all means try to argue semantics but it's a very clear distinction to make that this is using a loophole to gain an advantage and it's on blizzard to close that loophole and while you can argue over the morality of using such a thing to gain an advantage, ultimately nothing was used incorrectly, nothing was actually exploited in a way the game isn't intended to function.

It's amusing how hard you're trying to prove it's not an exploit.
Okay then, let's get back to definitions.

[...] use of elements of a game system in a manner not intended by the game's designers, in a way that gives a substantial unfair advantage to players using it.

What about gamedeveloper.com?

Exploits will be defined as the following:
Exploit: The player uses mechanics put in by the developer to circumvent the gameplay.

The whole point of what exploit is, breaks down to the idea of "intention" and whether it's substiantially impactful. I doubt it was an intentional design by WoW devs. Thus clearly, taking adventage of the fact that summoning shapeshifted druid to Northrend bypasses the code block that verifies the "Cold Weather Flying" condition, is exploiting the design of the game.

nothing was actually exploited in a way the game isn't intended to function

- literally, it was not how the game was supposed to work. It's an error that has been used by a player. Existence of the error caused by developer doesn't mean, it's how the game is supposed to work. Is it really that hard to get? Or you are one of those, who won't ever acknowledge the fact of being incorrect?

[rogoth]

There are really people who still believe this? They had a whole thing during the higher of
The lawsuit stuff about making there QA contractors full employees, no matter how much QA you have no game is ever gonna catch every exploit.

they even stated they don't have a dedicated testing team, the 'classic' developers are literally just a handful of people, what you're talking about is the team that works on the 'retail' environment version of WoW, which is an entirely different thing altogether.

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It's amusing how hard you're trying to prove it's not an exploit.
Okay then, let's get back to definitions.


What about gamedeveloper.com?


The whole point of what exploit is, breaks down to the idea of "intention" and whether it's substiantially impactful. I doubt it was an intentional design by WoW devs. Thus clearly, taking adventage of the fact that summoning shapeshifted druid to Northrend bypasses the code block that verifies the "Cold Weather Flying" condition, is exploiting the design of the game.

- literally, it was not how the game was supposed to work. It's an error that has been used by a player. Existence of the error caused by developer doesn't mean, it's how the game is supposed to work. Is it really that hard to get? Or you are one of those, who won't ever acknowledge the fact of being incorrect?

lets get something sorted first of all, in the 14 years i have been posting on these forums, i have dozens of times acknowledged when i was wrong and apologised after the fact, that doesn't mean that i will just roll over, secondly, in this instance, the definitions you have tried to use as the basis of your arguement are flawed, why is that you might ask, because blizzard over the many many years that people have used exploits to gain any kind of advantage have enforced them in such a sporadic and disproportionate way that makes it quite literally impossible to determine what is an exploit and what is 'clever use of game mechanics' because when enforced it's seemingly done so on a whim of whichever developer it is that is tasked with fixing the issue etc.

and i'll state this again, nothing that the players did in the scenario posted was using the skills and spells in an unintended way, the outcome was unintended for sure, not gonna say anything to the contrary here, but you and everyone else is conflating the outcome of what happened with the action of DOING what happened, the action itself was all working as intended, and in relation to your other point, you're inferring that the players did this maliciously, here's a DA arguement, player 1+2 were online before their friend due to server queues, when their friend managed to get online they summoned them to northrend to skip the issues with getting there that people had reported, and when arriving found that they were able to fly around so made use of that, it wasn't something they could have all tested ahead of time as it was all locked off content, so how do you determine malice in this situation?

your entire arguement is predicated on this entire scenario being something everyone involved had prior knowledge of, and was used explicitly to negate the blocks in place in order to get a realm first achievement faster than anyone else doing it 'legit', when you can't know that, and while on a scale of averages, it's more likely to be true than not, because there's enough room for doubt the devs shouldn't action these people (outside of maybe stripping the achievement and resetting that so someone else is still able to acquire it), as this is entirely the fault of blizzard and not the player.

[Hofazius]

edit: Blizzard has banned and rolled back achievements for significantly less broken shit in this expansion most notably. Seems like a dangerous game to play for an achievement that gives you absolutely nothing.

The problem is that if you intended to do this achievement, you'd have to choose the way of exploiting the moment you hear of this method. Too often in the past Blizzard did not revoke the achievements and you'd be naive going the legal way not expecting someone else to do it this way. Either way, even if Blizzard takes away the server first achievement now, they'll never assign it to someone else. It'd be just vanished. But if you want to have a chance of getting it - go cheat.

Another good example would be the Cata release. It was possible to catch Cata fishes somewhere in Tanaris weeks/days before release. A friend of mine bought those fishes and prepared server first cooking. They removed all of his materials prior to launch. So far so good, nothing special. But another player could keep his materials (guild bank, post system, or he was just overlooked...) and boom - server first after a couple of minutes.

The server first achievements generally suck. It's just playing the lottery with sometimes preparation and unfair advantages.


> so how do you determine malice in this situation?
You can't 100 % prove it, but I think the evidence is blatant. So he just realized he could miraculously fly in Northrend the moment he gets summoned (probably without any sign of wanting to go there by airship), now instead of being amazed about it instantly decides to fly to Sholazar Basin to practice some herbalism and "Woo, what was that? Nice, an achievement! Didn't know about it." 12 minutes later? He also never dismounted in these 12 minutes to not let the magic go.

[Nachtigal]

they even stated they don't have a dedicated testing team, the 'classic' developers are literally just a handful of people, what you're talking about is the team that works on the 'retail' environment version of WoW, which is an entirely different thing altogether.

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lets get something sorted first of all, in the 14 years i have been posting on these forums, i have dozens of times acknowledged when i was wrong and apologised after the fact, that doesn't mean that i will just roll over, secondly, in this instance, the definitions you have tried to use as the basis of your arguement are flawed, why is that you might ask, because blizzard over the many many years that people have used exploits to gain any kind of advantage have enforced them in such a sporadic and disproportionate way that makes it quite literally impossible to determine what is an exploit and what is 'clever use of game mechanics' because when enforced it's seemingly done so on a whim of whichever developer it is that is tasked with fixing the issue etc.

and i'll state this again, nothing that the players did in the scenario posted was using the skills and spells in an unintended way, the outcome was unintended for sure, not gonna say anything to the contrary here, but you and everyone else is conflating the outcome of what happened with the action of DOING what happened, the action itself was all working as intended, and in relation to your other point, you're inferring that the players did this maliciously, here's a DA arguement, player 1+2 were online before their friend due to server queues, when their friend managed to get online they summoned them to northrend to skip the issues with getting there that people had reported, and when arriving found that they were able to fly around so made use of that, it wasn't something they could have all tested ahead of time as it was all locked off content, so how do you determine malice in this situation?

your entire arguement is predicated on this entire scenario being something everyone involved had prior knowledge of, and was used explicitly to negate the blocks in place in order to get a realm first achievement faster than anyone else doing it 'legit', when you can't know that, and while on a scale of averages, it's more likely to be true than not, because there's enough room for doubt the devs shouldn't action these people (outside of maybe stripping the achievement and resetting that so someone else is still able to acquire it), as this is entirely the fault of blizzard and not the player.

14 years of admitting you’re wrong and this is the hill you choose to die on, huh?

[Lorgar Aurelian]

they even stated they don't have a dedicated testing team, the 'classic' developers are literally just a handful of people, what you're talking about is the team that works on the 'retail' environment version of WoW, which is an entirely different thing altogether.

So when you said “ we know they don't have a testing/QA team anymore” you really meant classic which never had a team no longer has a team? Come off it no one’s gonna buy that.

Oh and your wrong either way classic does have there own testers and are even hiring for more testers. https://gamejobs.co/Senior-Test-Anal...-Entertainment

[Davaca]

they even stated they don't have a dedicated testing team, the 'classic' developers are literally just a handful of people, what you're talking about is the team that works on the 'retail' environment version of WoW, which is an entirely different thing altogether.

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lets get something sorted first of all, in the 14 years i have been posting on these forums, i have dozens of times acknowledged when i was wrong and apologised after the fact, that doesn't mean that i will just roll over, secondly, in this instance, the definitions you have tried to use as the basis of your arguement are flawed, why is that you might ask, because blizzard over the many many years that people have used exploits to gain any kind of advantage have enforced them in such a sporadic and disproportionate way that makes it quite literally impossible to determine what is an exploit and what is 'clever use of game mechanics' because when enforced it's seemingly done so on a whim of whichever developer it is that is tasked with fixing the issue etc.

and i'll state this again, nothing that the players did in the scenario posted was using the skills and spells in an unintended way, the outcome was unintended for sure, not gonna say anything to the contrary here, but you and everyone else is conflating the outcome of what happened with the action of DOING what happened, the action itself was all working as intended, and in relation to your other point, you're inferring that the players did this maliciously, here's a DA arguement, player 1+2 were online before their friend due to server queues, when their friend managed to get online they summoned them to northrend to skip the issues with getting there that people had reported, and when arriving found that they were able to fly around so made use of that, it wasn't something they could have all tested ahead of time as it was all locked off content, so how do you determine malice in this situation?

your entire arguement is predicated on this entire scenario being something everyone involved had prior knowledge of, and was used explicitly to negate the blocks in place in order to get a realm first achievement faster than anyone else doing it 'legit', when you can't know that, and while on a scale of averages, it's more likely to be true than not, because there's enough room for doubt the devs shouldn't action these people (outside of maybe stripping the achievement and resetting that so someone else is still able to acquire it), as this is entirely the fault of blizzard and not the player.

I seriously don't think it's that complicated. When they introduced "Cold Weather Flying" CLEARLY the intended purpose was: "no flying in Northrend (by any means) until you get Cold Weather Flying". Developers simply didn't want people to fly in Northrend until that condition was met. Period.

At the end of the day, no matter how many other "intended" mechanics you use, if you are going to directly or indirectly bypass another rule and do something that wasn't intended.

[schwank05]

I have zero problems with people using exploits to get things done in the game that is a re release of a 10+ year old game. If Blizzard cannot be arsed to fix something by now why is it the players responsibility to do their jobs for them.

[Darkimpact]

The guy exploited a bug specifically to cheat the system to get something. The bug isn't an exploit but what he did is. This whole argument is idiotic.

[Bhanzai]

The guy exploited a bug specifically to cheat the system to get something. The bug isn't an exploit but what he did is. This whole argument is idiotic.

This person has it right.

[rogoth]

So when you said “ we know they don't have a testing/QA team anymore” you really meant classic which never had a team no longer has a team? Come off it no one’s gonna buy that.

Oh and your wrong either way classic does have there own testers and are even hiring for more testers. https://gamejobs.co/Senior-Test-Anal...-Entertainment

i'll be honest i was working on what seems to be outdated information, as i haven't checked or bothered to really update how big of a team the classic devs are since the original 'classic realms' release which was the last time i played anything WoW related, and even just a cursory glance at news stuff around the TBCC launch didn't show anything meaningfully had changed, but if they do have a test team then it must be very small and not at all equipped to do the job necessary.

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The guy exploited a bug specifically to cheat the system to get something. The bug isn't an exploit but what he did is. This whole argument is idiotic.

thank you for simplifying what i said down to a TLR version, that's essentially what i was getting at.

[Lochton]

A druid summoned in flight form from Outland stays in flight form, and herbing doesn't dismount.

Well, that would be an exploit.

[Nebron]

they even stated they don't have a dedicated testing team, the 'classic' developers are literally just a handful of people, what you're talking about is the team that works on the 'retail' environment version of WoW, which is an entirely different thing altogether.

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lets get something sorted first of all, in the 14 years i have been posting on these forums, i have dozens of times acknowledged when i was wrong and apologised after the fact, that doesn't mean that i will just roll over, secondly, in this instance, the definitions you have tried to use as the basis of your arguement are flawed, why is that you might ask, because blizzard over the many many years that people have used exploits to gain any kind of advantage have enforced them in such a sporadic and disproportionate way that makes it quite literally impossible to determine what is an exploit and what is 'clever use of game mechanics' because when enforced it's seemingly done so on a whim of whichever developer it is that is tasked with fixing the issue etc.

and i'll state this again, nothing that the players did in the scenario posted was using the skills and spells in an unintended way, the outcome was unintended for sure, not gonna say anything to the contrary here, but you and everyone else is conflating the outcome of what happened with the action of DOING what happened, the action itself was all working as intended, and in relation to your other point, you're inferring that the players did this maliciously, here's a DA arguement, player 1+2 were online before their friend due to server queues, when their friend managed to get online they summoned them to northrend to skip the issues with getting there that people had reported, and when arriving found that they were able to fly around so made use of that, it wasn't something they could have all tested ahead of time as it was all locked off content, so how do you determine malice in this situation?

your entire arguement is predicated on this entire scenario being something everyone involved had prior knowledge of, and was used explicitly to negate the blocks in place in order to get a realm first achievement faster than anyone else doing it 'legit', when you can't know that, and while on a scale of averages, it's more likely to be true than not, because there's enough room for doubt the devs shouldn't action these people (outside of maybe stripping the achievement and resetting that so someone else is still able to acquire it), as this is entirely the fault of blizzard and not the player.

1. I have never said it's easy to pinpoint the definition of exploit, but the common agreement is that it's a use of intended behaviour. There's no dictionary term for an in-game exploit. Definitions from my sources describe what people in general perceive as an exploit.
2. The player very well could be unaware of the outcome, that's correct. But then I love how you simply go with:

and when arriving found that they were able to fly around so made use of that

There are two scenarios here:
A) he was aware of the outcome and deliberately took advenatge of that.
B) he wasn't aware of the outcome, since he was summoned by friends to bypass overcrowded server issues, but then he randomly decides not to get out of the shapeshift (which would disallow him to re-enter the flying form) and continue with questing...

... then realizes it's not how it should work so it's preferable not to get out of the flying form and take adventage of that situation going for the Realm First Herbalist.
In either of these two scenarios, there's intention. Player MUST HAVE BEEN aware it's not how the game works.

3. That's why it's a slippery topic. You can't always be aware that you are playing the game in a way that has not been intented. But there's a clear distinction between someone who accidentally, I don't know, skips a long NPC roleplay scene that listening to is the quest objective, and someone how achieves Realm First by using a broken game mechanics he must be fully aware of (and knowledge of that fact is indicated by the deviation from a default player's behavior). He must have known that dismounting would disallow him to proceed further.

Also, it doesn't matter if the things he did worked as intented and it's only the outcome that makes the difference. He must have commited himself to take adventage of the situation willfully. That's unfair. It's substantially impactful. He doesn't need to be banned imo, but the achievement should be rolled.

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The guy exploited a bug specifically to cheat the system to get something. The bug isn't an exploit but what he did is. This whole argument is idiotic.

thank you for simplifying what i said down to a TLR version, that's essentially what i was getting at.

Wait what? It's precisely the opposite of what you advocate for, lol.
The player commited an exploit. He took adventage of the situation. The bug exists regardless of whether anyone exploits it. The whole point of this thread is about a guy who ACTUALLY EXPLOITED A BUG and you stubbornly try to make a weird logic-gymnastics argument to prove it cannot be considered an exploit.
Are you a troll or just illogical?

[Rathwirt]

Congrats to them on a creative solution and making sure they didn't accidentally go somewhere that forced them out of form.