Some new hotfixes were pushed to the live game which indicates that Blizzard may be looking into players who Frog Farmed in MoP Remix. But for what reason?
Around 5:26 PM PST last night, three new hotfixes were added to live servers in the following databases:
CriteriaTree: Frog Farmer Designer Value
CriteriaTree: 10.2.7 Timewalking Season - Is Frog Farmer
Criteria
For the two in CriteriaTree, we know the names and they seem to indicate that Blizzard may be looking to tell the game who was a Frog Farmer. We cannot determine what these hotfixes do, if anything right now.
If they were going to ban people, putting this requirement as a CriteriaTree would be a very abnormal way to identify and do it. Blizzard would likely just internally find out who Frog Farmed and Ban the targeted players. CriteriaTree is normally used for achievement objectives or other hidden trackers which is why this seems like such an odd hotfix. I can see a couple things that this may be used for:
They may add bonus loot, Bronze or drops to those who did NOT Frog Farm and this is how they’re telling the game to choose who to give it to.
They may rollback or remove stats from those who did Frog Farm a lot.
They may be for a new achievement requiring players to kill a certain amount of Frogs in an upcoming new achievement.
They may be using it to track frog kills for internal stats
Doubt it will be a ban, then they would need to ban pretty much everyone in the top 10 guilds and their Race to world first events would be dead. Not to mention WoW would drop on the Twitch page from #11 to #100 something. (== loss of promotion == loss of money)
Hurray, thats sounds Amazing, sounds like alot of fun, no matter what Blizzard Actually does.
While I dont think they will Ban the players, I would have quite alot of Schadenfreude.
My bet is on Cloak Nerfs, according to their Frogfarm Value.
And my Hope would be on overall Buffs depending on the FrogFarm Value.
So the less Frogs you Farmed, the more Buff you get.
And the Ultimate would be a Mix of Nerf and Buff, alot of Schadenfreude and Buffs for Gameplay, what could I want more?
(I Demand some form of Schadenfreud, because I actually got Accused of Frog Farming, just because I No Lifed the Weekend)
Betcha this happens 24hrs before the TWW pre patch goes live
I really hope they do not go this route as most who do have the increased stats are more than happy to lend a helping hand. In two groups I joined today with frogger it started with taunts and jeers and ended up in cheers and thanking the frogger for the help…
Hopefully its to target those that did not and give them an increase in threads. Though from my personal observation more Stamina Threads drop than any of the other stats.
Edit: this extract from another wowhead post about the gate farm exploit which suggests froggers will not get a Ban!
## Different Than Other Farms
Why is this different than other farms like the Frog Farm or the Goat Farm? There's a level of plausible deniability. Frogs dropped and were used to farm Lesser Charm of Good Fortune back in Mists of Pandaria, and also were still on live servers for those who want Bonus Rolls for old raids. There was no way for players to know that the current dropping of Lesser Charms were supposed to be unintended in MoP Remix. For all players knew, it was a great homage to the Great Frog-culling of 2014.
Don’t ban them, just set all their cloak stats to negative so they can’t do any damage, account wide, and give all their retail characters a forced title “the frog abuser” for all the duration of the event
Just boost everyone’s stats that didn’t farm frogs extensively so everything I do in the game, whether it be dungeons, LFR or other raids is done easily and 100x faster.
Then I can sit back and relax, watch some TV shows and stuff instead of spending hours on everything combined.
When you have all the popular streamers streaming pug raids with members of the raid running around with 3m hp and 5-6m dps what do people expect?
This is on Blizzard for doing what they do best ignoring PTR forums and not making adjustments before they release stuff to live servers.
I highly doubt people will be banned but i hope they get everything taken away from them, they have the best gear, the best gems and all the cosmetics/achievements because they exploited the frogs.
People need to remember, the EULA and TOS clearly state that exploiting bugs or gaining any kind of unfair advantage is classed as cheating be them known bugs or not and has always resulted in actions taken against your account.
This is not new.
I do doubt they will be using this to identify none boosters to buff them, this is a long time event not designed to be completed it a few weeks. The exploiters who seriously took advantage of this are the ones who this will be targeting and rightly so.
If it was not for the fact that big name streamers and influencers were doing this those people would have received bans, i doubt Blizzard will ban streamers so i think its safe to say that wont happen.
That’s a good way of showing tens of thousands of viewers, many of which that don’t play WoW (yet) how vindictive Blizzard may be and that spending dozens of hours mindless farming gets you banned or stuff taken away… and indirectly promote other games as these streamers will just play something else instead
You do realize Blizzard must have known about this farm as it’s 12 years old, right? It’s an oversight that they didn’t remove the lesser charms.
You also realize they could have easily prevented people mass farming for dozens of hours by having a cap on the cloak that increases every week?
People were farming frogs during the PTR, they could easily have gotten it out of the PTR logs, but they either ignored it or are simply blind?
… and Wowhead the most popular World of Warcraft information site posted about the farm as well as a GOOD WAY TO GET BRONZE
With a guide how to do it. So are we banning thousands of people now?
you have at least few posts in every thread defending the froggers, since the beginning of this. That a lot of attention for someone that doesn’t care… and someone that have not killed a single frog
I seriously doubt it as wowhead themselves had a post on how to go about frog farming, meaning they were promoting it before they published the nerf article. They also published a possible reason why ban wont happen suggesting plausible deniability. Anyway I don’t agree with the ban but I do agree with the dev’s coming up with a solution to even the playing field, and do it in a better way than throwing tidbits at the whiners. Just do it properly first time round.
No matter which road you go down you have issues.
And the issues are
Where do you draw the line?
Eg, Player 1 - Farmed 12 hours a day for 3 days (or however long it was live for)
Player 2 - Farmed maybe 3 hours on 2 days each
Player 3 - Farmed 1 hour on 1 perhaps 2 days
Player 4 - Farmed say 50 minutes total.
Player 5 - Did Epoch Quest in the area because of the charms too, but it took them say 30 minutes
Player 6 - Killed maybe a handful
Where do you draw the line ? Ban all of them, ban only the top, anyone over an hour (if so why an hour ??).
Likewise if you buff everyone who in your words didn’t, how about the guy that did epoch quest ? Or the one done 50 minutes total ? Now they fall in the gap while everyone else essentially gets given a welfare handout.
Same if you nerf, off course those that farmed for insane hours will feel it the most. But the middle may feel it harshly also because its arguable they lost more from not doing quests to see the hype and penalised hard.
No one knows what (if anything) will happen. But its not an easy one.
