“goddamit, I didn’t get the guards, let me die, get rezzed and try again?”

At any rate, I think it’s safe to say, The honeymoon is over.

I think it was poor design that Blizz let the boss run through the instance without aggroing the creatures in Molten Core. Non Boss creatures help pull each other all the time if you try to skip content, like in Gnomeregon [thanks to my Imp for showing that] or Dead Mines [again, thank you Mr. Imp] or Zul’Farrack [not my Imp, some hunter’s pet].

So, a switch needs to be flipped that if a Boss runs through he grabs everyone. Simple.

How about this tactic we use…

Four or more rogues, one warlock. One rogue unstealths and pulls all the mobs in the way (using evade to avoid getting hit much). Warlock runs after him with a clear path. Rogue vanishes just before he dies, mobs all go back into place. Repeat process using the next rogue. Once we get to our target the warlock then summons in the rest of the group.

According to your logic, this isnt an exploit.

“The first time, it was clever. I’m sure it was irritating to find a great new tactic and have a GM show up and tell them it was an exploit.

Trying the same kind of thing the next time, after a warning – that’s not clever. ”

Heres the deal, the two things that they did were completely unrelated. There were no similarities between them. The first night they were warned was for fighting the boss in his own area. They used a hunter trap pulling technique (remember, nobody had been told that it was an exploit) to split the main boss from his two linked mobs. For this, they got warned not to do it again by the GM.

The next night, they cleared about half way into the instance and had a rogue smack up the boss then the warlock summoned him back to the group. The boss came through the zone to the group, his linked associates cam with him. The raid party fought the boss and the other mobs exactly as they would have done had they been in the boss’s room.

For this they were suspended.

The guild in question is, unsurprisingly, an Everquest ‘uber’ PvE guild. They were well known and developed strategies for boss fights that are still widely used today. They have a very creative raid leader who knows how to think outside of what the designers intended. Unfortunately, unlike some of the other superguilds, they dont have anyone who works at Blizzard.

Its like Foton says, there is a grey are, and Blizzard have done nothing to define it.

“When possible, we will educate players on what is and is not intended by game design.”

Hows about right now!! Read the whole first comment from blizzard, they explain that people have been suspended for repeatedly exploiting molten core. Yet they give zero indication of how they were exploiting it. If it wasnt for the guild in question posting the tactics they used, then nobody would have a clue and there would be more suspensions soon for using exactly the same techniques. All Blizzard needed to say, in public, was that using any pulling technique that deliberately separates and un-aggro’s linked mobs is not allowed. Any deliberate use of a technique that drags a boss through other, unlinked, mobs without aggroing them, is not allowed.

“Back in Star Wars Galaxies, my guildleader wanted to compile a list of definitive game exploits (a list, not a how-to, ffs) so he could point to the list and say ‘don’t do these.’

Your guildleader should not have to. Blizzard must have a GM policy, a guidebook if you will, that tells the GM staff what it is that players are not allowed to do. They probably updated it yesterday with the above examples. This needs to be made publicly available.

Or watch what’s going on, say “oh, hell, we never thought of that” and ask the players not to do it while you redesign the encounter and/or class ability.

The first time, it was clever. I’m sure it was irritating to find a great new tactic and have a GM show up and tell them it was an exploit.

Trying the same kind of thing the next time, after a warning – that’s not clever.

Well, yes. I’d expect them to close the instance on ALL the servers and reopen it only when it’s fixed.

You may want to look into deriving your sense of worth from internal metrics rather than external ones. I presume you *enjoyed* fighting all the mobs to get to the big mob at the back? That is why you were doing it, right? How could that enjoyment be nullified by the knowledge that there was another path? If it wasn’t enjoyment, but suffering, then perhaps one should find a more rewarding pasttime?

Back in the Ultima Online days, people used boxes to block Balrons so they could fight them relatively safely. We would pick up the boxes and fight them the way the Dev Team Intended. For some odd reason, the game wasn’t “ruined” by those box weilding fools. If we did not want to fight Balrons, we could always not go to where they were.

Maybe we were just crazy. We’d earn our way through Covetous, clawing and scratching the way to the Lich level, whilst most players would just teleport to the bottom.

If you ever played a table top game you know that the little trick that this guild tried to pull would never work with a table top game.

Most table top GMs I’ve been involved with are quite willing to reward clever strategems with reduced fighting. It’s a poor GM that says: “You can’t do that cause I got all these monsters I want you to fight!”

– Brask Mumei

“You could argue that all exploits, then, are not something that developers should ban for. True, but the exception to the rule is the following: anything that is detrimental to the enjoyment of the game for others is punishable. That includes duping (economy problems), causing other player characters to get stuck/die/etc, gaining a completely unfair advantage over others, etc.”

Well allow me to retort.

If I had to EARN my through the same area fighting, clawing and scratching my way to the mob and you walk in and do a little summon trick you would be damn right to say that your “exploit” has ruined a piece of the game for me.

Was the Foton example the same thing? Not in the slightest. He went TO the mob and proceeded to kill it. He didn’t bring the mob to him through some clever scheme.

However, Blizzard should have seen this coming. No one at Blizz is a gaming Noob. CoH pulling was common place in EQ. They had to know that it would be tried here. There are 2 simple solutions in my opinion.

1. Make it so that when Pissed_Off_MOB_01 passes by any non-pissed off mob it aggros them. Go ahead and do your lil rogue summon just be prepared to fight the whole zone at once. Don’t like it? Then stop being lazy and move through the content.

2. Make it so that the CoH like spell clears all aggro created by the person being CoH’d.

Either solution works.

To me exploitation in MMOG terms mean knowingly and purposefully using a glitch or lack of foresight in the game to gain an advantage over the game.

With that said…If you pull a mob with the intention of fighting it and it gets caught on geometry and you kill it. The first time you did this you didn’t KNOW and therefor you didn’t do it on purpose. The second time you do it you knew and did it on purpose. The first time isn’t exploitation the second time is. If you tell your buddy what happened and he runs over and does it he is exploiting even if he is “just seeing if it was true”.

It’s a pretty simple concept really. MMRPGs evolved from table top RPGs like AD&D. Good, bad, right or wrong the developers are trying to reporduce that environment for the masses. If you ever played a table top game you know that the little trick that this guild tried to pull would never work with a table top game. But since there is no 24/7 intelligent GM capable of watching all the players in all the areas at all times people will find cheap tactics to circumvent some, most or all of the content. In cases like that the offenders need to be told “don’t do that”. If they ignore the request and continue it is pretty much like being told “Fuck you I will do what I want”. Now if someone told me that in my house they too would be suspended..From the tip of boot.

Another way to look at it is like this…Let say the content is a tree house you built for your . Now you come home one day after a few months and discover that the very person you built this tree house for has decided to sell crack out if it. Now that is not why you built the treehouse. Wouldn’t you put them on punishment? I would.

I doubt this will be very popular so I will don my asbestos suit.