You missed the time that a guy got mistakenly given a GM tabard and used it to one shot all the hardmode bosses in Ulduar. There were permabans handed out for that. They got a few world first achievements in their run.
I understand getting banned for stuff like the GM giving someone an item that let them insta clear raids, and pvp exploits, but the fact that blizzard bans people for their inability to test their own game is just shocking.
As a member of Overrated who got banned, it took several weeks into TBC and dozens of e-mails to finally get unbanned. Most of the guild never did until wrath, when all of the banned accounts were released.
@@ChumpkinINC Editing game files was nothing new at this point, some people did it in BGs to remove things like fences in WSG. This was just on a way bigger scale.
Hilarious how we've gone from PERMA banning an entire guild for wanting to skip to the last boss in a raid that wasn't even current, to not even suspending people for buying hundreds of thousands of gold and destroying entire server economies. Thanks Blizz :)
People always say this as they are the same issue and they arent lol Bug abuse has always been against the rules for all MMOs Gold buying does not have the same effect as you altering game files to gain a great advantage
Some more info and context to ensidia lich king ban. As you said this was normal mode and there was therefor no "world first" race and it was in no way a difficult fight for them. I was in a guild that was about rank 50 at the time and we killed it pretty easy first week without any exploit. Needless to say ensidia had no incentive to exploit. Ensidia said they did not know what was causing the bug (hard to notice that saronite bombs rebuilds the platform), they even wiped intentionally when it happened (not because of the bug, but they wanted to learn the fight better for heroic). After the ban was over and it was found out it was caused by saronite bombs they easily went in and killed it in a 2. raid with different characters and was able to compete in the actual world first race starting the next week allthough with gear removed from the lich king kill. Some people in Ensidia quit after blizzards handling of this and they as a guild never recovered. Now you might think to yourself, the fight was obviously bugged and Ensidia should have just not killed it. However every end boss released up until this point was bugged. For example the previous tier (TOGC) hard mode was first killed by Paragon, they chain stunned the adds the entire fight which obviously made it a joke (blizzard somehow forgot to add DR to the mobs). They were not banned for doing this, so why would Ensidia think they would get banned for rebuilt platform (which they couldnt possible know the cause of).
There are some more storys about Paragon and the "clever use of game mechanics". But the guild obviously just wasnt on blizzards radar at that point so they got away with it.
oldschool wotlk just is something else, the new experience, the raids started to get really serious and had so much new stuff in them.. what a time to be alive man
They didn't get banned for it, but the room glitch that Premonition (and later, other guilds) used on Atramedes in Blackwing Descent was pretty flagrant. Due to the tuning of the fight, the disc damage became unmanagable, and the solution discovered was to literally take Atramedes out of the room. Not enough to despawn him, but JUST enough so that the discs wouldn't hit raid members.
All of these are good and there are more. 👌 But the funniest exploit I witnessed and took part in, was the heirloom multistrike sword abuse with rogues back in SoO... attacking so fast and often that the game lagged for the entire raidgroup during any encounters and the dps it did was crazy. We used it in one of our farm weeks, worked amazing and got fixed shortly after that. Some guilds were banned for it, because they did many runs or sellruns with it. But of course this isn't a World First exploit. Sadly I don't know of any videos about it, I didn't record it myself, but I wish I had. It was very funny though.
So I've heard a ton of versions of the Ensidia ban including that Rogue player was purposely walking towards the platform to throw the bomb nowhere near Arthas.
They really will give the sponers to anybody and anything it seems, imagine wanting a degenerate wow content creator to advertise your product lmao. Can the bar be any lower?
@@alchemyty XIV's pop is kind of in the toilet. The game is incredibly boring, stale, long overdue for freshness and most of the people who joined during Covid long left.
I worked on the team that handled that investigation at Blizzard. I can very much assure you they 100% knew what was causing it when they killed the boss.
I remember being around during the controversy. From what I remember the rogue dps that was using the bombs put out a statement saying that yes, they noticed that the platforms were regenerating, they knew that this was not intended for the fight, and they used it anyways for the kill. However, they specifically did not know what was causing the issue, and knew that Blizzard had people actively watching their every attempt. The controversy came around the fact that blizzard did not communicate with them at all during all of their attempts. Blizzard never put a pause on attempts to hotfix the broken mechanic. Blizzard, actively watching, allows them to continue to leverage the broken mechanic repeatedly over dozens, of not hundreds of attempts, and only banned them once they succeeded. Had there been some communication like "hey, this is what's causing the issue. Stop using sarronite bombs, or we will be forced to take action for exploitation" the outcome could have absolutely been avoided. Its slightly gray since Ensidia knew that the mechanic was unintended and used it anyways, while blizzard knew Ensidia was using it and what caused it but refused to communicate with them or the community at large.
Rebuilding the platforms allows you to ignore the dps check of killing the 3 valkyrs who snatch people and toss you off the platform. It massively trivializes that part of the fight. Its ABSOLUTELY an exploit. Its also blizzards fault that it worked how it did, not the players. Prior to yogg and lich king exploits being punished the notion of beating a boss as intended didnt exist. There were no raid guides detailing the boss mechanics. Blizzard presented the player with dragons that did stuff and it was your job to make it run out of health before the stuff it did killed you and your friends No guide, no rulebook. No "proper" kill strat
Nah mate, its been bug abusing and exploiting since long before WoW was even released ^^ Only actual exploiters ever called it something as cheesy as "Clever use of game mechanics" :D
The Hodir fight wasent any of these as Blizzard came out and said they hade intended the buff to be used by Mages but they dident think about limiting it to Freja alone as players started to use it on Hodir instead. Thats not an exploit its just the same as was happening constantly in Vanilla with players bringing world buffs into a raid fight.
I wasn't in a big guild but Raiding Rainbow got banned for at least server first Orbituary. We figured out a way to kill FL with the towers up but none of the mechanics would activate during the fight which obviously makes the encounter much easier. IIRC this was part of the reason why Blizzard started using the dialog with NPCs to start the encounter rather than just jumping in a vehicle and taking down towers or not. Our whole raid got banned for a week and we lost our titles and loot (obviously).
Apart from the one where they edited game files (thought a skip to legit C'thun would be nice) I think all of these are on blizzard to fix and don't warrant a ban. If anything Blizzard should thank them for pointing out these flaws.
it did make a difference cause Ensidia lost the entire first week of heroic progression. You couldn't enter heroic without normal mode achiv. The 72 hour ban happened just before reset and included the reset time, so while the others where able to start heroic Ensidia had only normal mode available.
The word "banned" these days seems to have been stretched to also mean "suspended". I hear it a lot now and it rarely actually means someone was banned, in that they can _never_ return. Its like how the word "literally" is often used to mean "figuratively".
I remember a guild on my old server were ranked one of the top in the world and they got banned for something to do with Malygose exploit. The guild was Notorious and they (trying to remember so apologize for misremembering and not all the facts) did some exploit where they took all high end ranged DPS and one tank (i think 1) and used multiple blood lust to defeat the boss while he was in the air and before he could go to the next phase where the platform dissolves/breaks apart. Blizz had to change the fight after that to make the boss 0 health without going to the next phase. They only got a small ban but I remember it was the talk of the time especially on Gurubashi where they were. I wish I could remember the exact details but it was so long ago.
In AQ40, Blizzard banned people. In Black Temple, before release, Blizzard helped Nihilum practice most of BT on the PTR with an actual Dev in tow. And after Nihilum had their Illidan World First, they hotfixed that Warlocks could Soulstone a person outside of their group (Nihilum had the whole Raid soulstoned for the whole encounter).
Funniest thing about the AQ40 hack: Back until one of the patches in MoP you could glitch through the wall of the platform if you had a big enough mount. Used to run C'thun only runs for the transmog this way
It made 0 difference to the WF race. Paragon got LK HC on the 26th of march and it took until april 11th for the second kill by FTH. (plus a buff increase)
This have nothing to do with world first, but Ulduar back in the day had many bosses that could be bugg abused. To be honest, i used em all. Flame leviathan could be solo'd without getting raidlocked. I farmed that boss for DAYS before it was fixed. Kologarnn could be bugged so his ability to pick up players to squeez em to death didnt trigger. Thorims gauntlet could be skipped. No first phase to go and poke him to jump down and no adds to deal with in the arena. He jumps down after the first dialog. Ulduar were one of the best raids ever, but first weeks of release it was packed with things that could be abused, just like ensidia did at hodir and much more!
I was clearing AQ40 just last week with a friend. I accidentally skipped toe cthun. Some mobs had knocked me through the ground and I had to use the unstuck feature, and it placed me right on top of the boss.
Even before the Exodus Yogg exploit, my guild received the same treatment for "exploiting" HM FL out of his room where the mechanics don't happen. That's why he leashes and resets now.
Some context on ensidia hodir kill... method and inner sanctum had done hardmodes the first week of uld when ensidia did nm and it was a breeze. Blizzard severely buffed it so ensidia felt they had no option but flower power to stay competitive. Buzzkill's old blog on nihilum/ensidia is a good read on it all.
Getting banned for deleting files to skip to c’thun is wild considering you can skip to him by mounting up and alt-f4 at 98% of the cast through the wall that has a ledge above it to the right of prophet skerams platform
On Archimonde server, during vanilla, my guild (Discordia) would pull Khazzak into "unkown" zone. basicly pulling him up the hill behind his spawn to the flat area deadzone between zones. We never got a ban for it. Basicly it was to prevent alliance from cheesing the death/heal mechanic to prevent us from a kill by sending their naked characters to die. after doing it once or twice I said I wont be doing it again, as I was the lock summoning everyone up there. I also was against people using the mind control orb in BWL from below it, but less so. Also dont think anyone ever got banned for that either.
I remember my entire guild running up there in the between zone land going to Kazzak, we mostly started from the bridge between STV and Duskwood. Was fun :)
Anyone remember the guild Deus Vox? They "cascaded" BWL in order to run it multiple times a reset. Only Razergore locked you to that ID, so they would get Razergore really low and HS out as many people as possible leaving behind only the people necessary to kill it. They would then zone everyone back in and clear the rest of the instance then do it again and again.
During the tbc pre-patch the warrior ability rampage stacked infinitely so people were having warriors stack the ability and 1 shot bosses, I know people themselves got banned but not sure if entire guilds got ban waved.
That Hodir hardmode was not an exploit in anyway as Blizzard themselfs hade come out and said that the buffs was intended to be spell stealable by Mages but they were expecting players to use them on Freja and not Hodir. That is not an exploit but instead a very legit way of outsmarting the devs without changing anything about the Hodir fight itself. They dident break any of Hodirs mechanics they just brought a buff into the fight that the devs hade made available they just dident think about players using the buff on another boss other then Freja. This was constantly happening in Vanilla with world buffs getting used in raids. This was just a side effect they werent excpecting players to use the buff for. The LichKing situation is also badly reported here as while the bombs did break the mechanics of the fight. The players hade reported the bug happening in there attempts and there was no way any of the players could possable have known these bombs was the cause of it. Even players from Paragon hade reported it happening in there attempts. Its like he said, alot of top players used these bombs in there standard rotation so it wasent something 1 guy found out just to make the fight easier. The ban itself is arguable but getting the world first removed is ofc understandable as the fight was definatly cleared due to a bug happening. It was only after the world first clear that the issue of the bombs was discovered so the players couldent have known about it before that.
@@anttihakkarainen1520 Martin's Fury yup, a GM test tabard. Instantly kills everything within 50 yds. 200 charges. Accidentally mailed to them from a GM.
Ah yes, lets repeat that bullshit as well! Its not like every shitty youtuber and their mother and their mothers mother has talked about the martins fury story atleast twice by now lmaoooo
I will never get the cases why Blizzard ropes the consequences due to their lack of bug testing on the players. Its one thing to edit the in-game files and force the game to play in a way that it was never designed to. Its another to use in-game resources to make a fight easier, which they signed off on as builds do not get published without being approved by the developers. If its jank, they approved of said jank, whether intentionally or not.
Not even an honorable mention to the first guild that got banned for "exploiting"? Conquest, all got banned for exploits, however blizzard refused to tell them *what* exploit they were using.
didnt Stars get banned in WoD cuz they found an exploit with Hanz and Franz where a rogue would follow the boss to the upper platform and then mass ress the raid and they could do the fight from up there, avoiding every mechanic? or am i just having a fever dream
No. No it doesn't. People always push the bar. When I played they said it gets better after ARR, it didn't. Then they said post ARR part is boring, it gets better in Heavensward. It didn't. They said the second part of Heavensward is where it picks up. Guess what?! Still a snooze fest. Then they said Stormblood, then Shadowbringers.
I prefer ARR to HW. Couldn't give a rat's ass about Ishgard or the dragons. It all felt like a huge sidequest getting in the way of saving the scions and clearing our names.
@@pixwiz1935 Or perhaps it's worth considering that the game is just not meant for you, because that statement is generally pretty true. That doesn't mean it will be true for everyone, though. Vastly better, as OP here says is a bit of an overstatement, because the story goes up and down in quality quite a bit. In a very broad sense, he's right, though. FF14 does get better (for the most part) the further you get in, provided that the story that starts in ARR grabbed your attention to begin with. If it didn't, then it's very likely the rest of the game won't appeal to you either. Personally, I'd say that ARR is a slog that's very slow to get started, post ARR is way too long but once you get to HW it does improve, as the storybeats seem to find their sweet spot. Stormblood feels a bit sidequest-y for a large chunk of it, but ShB brings things right back on track and is the best part of the game, storywise, while Endwalker starts off strong, but then experiences a steep drop that almost gives you whiplash at how sudden it is and never recovers from that again.
As a member of Overrated, I hate Nerfie and that dumb woman he fell in love with. No one needed to know about replacing the sand texture with the tentacle.
We found out later it had nothing to do with her. A FoH member told us it was Furor himself that had the GMs watch us. I guess he was upset that we made them the #2 Horde guild on the server and then poached a few players.
Apart from the first one, most of those were just people using tools available to players to skip mechanics. And guess what? Using immunities to skip mechanics is a legit way of playing the game. Do all the mages, palas, hunters get banned for solo-soaking a mechanic that requiers you to split the damage? Cloak on a rogue could play havoc on a debuff, AMS could stop a tank from gaining stacks and solotank the boss, Feign Death, Vanish and Invis could also skip mechanics - where does one draw the line? Do you go FF14 route and ban people for changing the settings for your zoom level? If a button is available to you in the game, pressing it to gain advantage is fair play, I'd say. Be it by jumping into a wall to disorient the mobs, or using engineering items off-GCD. It's not like the rest of the player population can't do the same.
Fun facts: We (Paragon) only went looking for that LFR exploit after we saw it happening in Method's armory pages. I still think it was the right move, since we considered Method our only competition, so it made sense to want to be on even footing. Even if we were not banned, I doubt we would have been able to get world firsts. The Spine of Deathwing was poorly balanced and required you to have access to specific classes, which I assume the Koreans had (we bought some, eventually). In Cata there was one boss where we lost the world first by one minute. Amusingly mmo-champion even got the first report wrong and announced that we won it by one minute. Luckily it was one of the mid-instance bosses in BRM so it didn't matter much.
I was in that guild and used to raid MC with them that did the C'thune cheat although I had quit WoW a couple months before this happened, it was on the pvp server Shadowmoon.
Both of those Yogg glitches were legitimate world firsts and should have been treated as such. The first because they used it once and reported it immediately - legitimate. The second because they used a known mechanic that Blizz hadn't fixed in multiple expansions - legitimate. Ensidia's kill of LK was also legitimate.
Liquid should 100% have complained about the suspension. It's fair to take the achievements and rewards off them, but it was Blizzards fault that the tactic seemed to be acceptable (like, how hard is it to make one blue post saying "we know of the bug, anyone who exploits it will be punished"?) so they should have just removed the ill-gained progression from those who reported it and tried fairly.
I THINK the only reason blizzard decided to do something about the Helya exploit is BECAUSE Limit was fair, REPORTED the bug (naturally Blizzard didn’t fix it), they didn’t use it and THEN other guilds did without any consequences.
I think using the walls to your advantage isn't an exploit. If it's ok to kite enemies by such means in classic, it's ok to have enemies stop to give you a extra second to live
I remember our wotlk raiding guild getting server first on heroic twin val'kyr 25 by accidentally using an exploit that interrupts the cast of the boss heal a split of a second before their shield is activated. I don't think blizz found out. :' )
I think they key word there is "accidentally". They tend to ban guilds who intentionally use bugs or exploits that are clearly not meant to be part of the game in order to gain an advantage. From the back end, it's relatively obvious when a group is doing something without realizing it's an exploit and when they do it intentionally.
I still think the saronite bomb ban was unfair. Two reasons. 1) they were making progress on the fight and felt confidant they'd down it soon. they werent beating their head against the wall like EJ with C'Thun or something. 2) there was no way for them to even know what was causing the platform to reform since the rogues always were using bombs on bosses. there wasnt a variable that changed for them to even pick up on. And actually a 3rd reason - they had a good history. no history of exploiting or anything like that. they deserved the benefit of the doubt being an OG guild.
Kiting a pull with the classic "fence jump" pathing bug is the essence of classic, but they tried to get rid of it as time went on, to the point they banned everyone 72H because one person did this for 6 seconds during the most important fight possible.
The ensidia ban wasn’t ensidia’s fault. Saronite bombs are part of the DPS rotation for rogues in wrath. And where are rogues located? Up the bosses arse! So I believe that was Blizzard wanting to pass it as bug abuse rather than admitting they messed up an end expansion raid again (looking at you Kiljaden)
I love the story of a guild using a bug to get a world-first final raid boss kill, then reporting the bug. And they got banned for it! C'mon Blizz, those are good players.
Blizz fucked up, they were told they had fucked up. Punished the players for letting them know. Absolutely idiotic reaction. I get removing titles, even the gear from the boss fight. But banning them isn’t right. This is just another, among many, reasons as to why the game will never recover. When given a choice Blizz has a history of always taking the choice that is the most anti-player
@@agilagilsen8714 the players knew it was a bug, knew they should have reported it, and yet they still abused it to get the world first. The fact that they reported it later just proves that they knew what they did was wrong. If they had just reported it from the start and not used it to win the race, then I'd have more sympathy. Hell, even well-known modern-day exploiters like Rextroy only exploit once they've reported it to Blizzard and gotten confirmation that it will be fixed.
Overrated member here. We deserved the ban, etc. etc. What isn't well known is that Furor is apparently the one who had GMs checking in on us. We migrated to FoH's server (BDF) and quickly made them #2 behind us, and then poached a few players including tanks during 4H attempts. That's at least according to a FoH member later on.
just before the chase scene in halls of reflection instance the chase glitched and didnt happen, for us... so we dropped the lich king in HOR before anyone dropping him in ICC
My opinion finding a bug and using it is a legit way of playing. As long as you are not changing the game, it's the devs fault and these bans were just Blizzard angry because people showed that their game was bugged.
On one hand, I get Blizzard's point of view that they want to discourage people hunting for unintended ways of progging a boss as that's not fun community progression. On the other hand, they can't reasonably expect the vast majority of players to see an opportunity for solving a particular mechanic more easily and expect them not to do it. The majority of these bans resulted from using mechanics that Blizzard themselves put in the game but were just applied in a way different than they expected, and they reacted by banning the guilds. That's not the way to go imo
I never played world of warcraft but i am part of the sweaty tryhard community. We have a saying, if you arent cheating you arent trying. Every top guild of every game is cheating one way or another. In new world most of us just bought gold then exploited death reroll looting mechanics with alts to ensure we had the best recipe early one.
Exploiting a bug, report to the game devs to fix it. instead of fixing the bugs, they choose to banned the player for reported it, 200IQ move there game dev
Still dont understand ensidias ban on the lich king. They used the bombs on every single boss, as it was a normal part of the damage rotation and also it was on their first kill of the lich king. They didnt even know it was a bug caused by the bombs and just thought it was a normal encounter. Also its a bug created by blizzard and why should they not use bombs just because blizzard fucked up?
The guild that used a bug then reported it and got shit taken away is partially a reason people don't report shit. if you fuck up and people use it an report it after it is on you. I remember I was buying something and the price was off. when I mentioned it to the manager they fixed the price and charged me the full price. last time I will ever tell a place if their pricing system is messed up in a customers favor.
It is possible to skip to c'thun without modify any of the gamefiles with just a simple mount + alt f4 trick below Skeram and jumping to the tunnel before c'thun.
People in Vanilla did not have the benefit of having 19 years of knowledge of the content, there's a lot they didn't know that we know today, hence why classic raids fall over
@@gabrielreed8039 Yes, I was just saying that because it is especially dumb that they modified gamefiles when that skip is possible without it. It's not hard to find either I did that skip in vanilla running in solo just to look around. Didn't abuse it to do it in a raid. There were other skips you could do in vanilla but not on classic because the slow strafing through walls and gates got fixed.
@@MoonTurky Pretty sure that's the copium talking there buddy. Wow was a great mmo but it is clear that they have really ignored the players. FF14 can't destroy wow. But Blizzard is killing wow. I enjoy ff14 cause it's fun and my time and effort is rewarded and the community is amazing. Wow's community can really so toxic.
