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