This isn’t a court or a democracy. Blizz decides what’s allowed based on their vision of what the gameplay should look like.
They wouldn’t have put in 5 raids and a dozen dungeons if their intention was for everyone to farm frogs. Nor would they have designed all these gems if they had planned for everyone to use ward.
They messed up. Negligence, incompetence, -call it what you want- is not an excuse for people to break the spirit of the game. They knew exactly what they were doing.
This mode is no longer about playing the game but finding the next exploit.
Exactly which is why I have repeatedly said in other threads that they close down the farms because it’s clearly not what they want.
Agreed.
Farming frogs is not an exploiting though. It was just killing open world mobs. They changed it because of the above said ‘this is not what they had intended’. The fact that they have ignored (prior to launch) every single known farming spot for coins or lucky potion is not the fault of the playerbase.
Bypassing instance lock is far closer to exploiting territory.
However the issue remains that there is a huge difference between those who have farmed and those who haven’t.
Whilst I appreciate that people feel there is a huge disparity in power between us and them I’m not chomping at the bit demanding they be banned from World of Warcraft or that they should be banned in the run up to TWW. That just seems mean.
Whether or not Blizzard choose to do anything about the difference remains to be seen but as I previously stated I would rather see us matched up rather than people banned from the game.
And not only did they let frogs and multiple other farms like goats slip through, they also didn’t do anything to stop it when it was happening. Not a peep.
Lol are you new to WoW? Welcome to MMORPGs.
It’s metagaming central. This will always happen. Always. If not frogs or goats then something else.
Farming trash in raids comes to mind. Slower than frogs but just as effective. Also had to get nerfed.
The smart thing to do would be just blanket delete any character that spent more than a couple of hours farming frogs/birds/goats/that one scenario. No need for major actions against the account.
Those characters are only a week old. Farmers can just go again and not exploit this time.
And if a 7 day setback makes them quit forever, ngl, they weren’t a useful sort of person to keep around anyway
I’m guessing you mean not instantly, because afaik it was nerfed eventually. Interesting point though. Obviously the delay came from an internal discussion where the same arguments were made as by frog farmers on the forum. And then they nerfed it, so we know who won.
You’re wrong. The decisive factor of whether something’s an exploit is not whether it’s a bug, or UI glitch, or just lack of insight and testing from the devs. It’s the intent of the player. If I kill a mob and it drops 100k gold, and I keep killing it, I know that I’m breaking the game. Depending on the company I may or may not get a ban (in WoW I’m certain I won’t, because as you said, I’m just grinding mobs), but it makes me an exploiter nonetheless.
If this were a court, I’d say intent is almost impossible to prove, which is why those abusing the reputation-macro bug in retail got whacked and these farmers didn’t. But this isn’t a court. If blizzard were to make a hard stand against people who knowingly abuse the game, players would think twice before doing it and instead ask on a forum/ticket whether it’s allowed. (as they do in other games).
This also absolves them of repercussions as there’s a paper trail of their question.
I missed out on the frog farming opportunity but I would never wish for those that did engage in it to be banned or w/e. However, I do think Blizzard NEEDS to limit their gains going forward because I assume they will just be getting more and more powerful as time goes on, thus perpetuating the gap between those that farmed the frogs and those that didn’t. It’s just not fun knowing that you’ll never be able to catch up because of some slip up by simple-minded folk hired by Blizzard.
could you explain why I can’t catch up? I figured that If I spend farming all raids on a daily basis I can get all gear upgraded in around 20 days. I mean yeah they have an advantage in power but does it realy bother ?
I meant in regards to the cloak. Of course, you can farm the bronze by no lifing it for the next 3 months to get to where the frog farmers are RIGHT NOW. I mean, go for it, knock yourself out! But the cloak gains is practically infinite. They will be ahead by that as long as they continue to put in the same effort that you will, at minimum. Probably even less because they can clear Mythic SoO in about 12 minutes like the Echo guys did with their 10-12 man group of froggy boosters.
Why so? There’s no imaginable way that anyone farming frogs didn’t know it’s not intended that they be able to get that kind of power gains in such a way. Not a single person can possibly be ignorant enough to believe they weren’t getting on the exploit wagon before it was taken away.
It’s just bald faced lies and horsepoop, claiming innocence and that they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong and hoping to get away with it. Time people got called out on intentionally exploiting.
But the characters are only 7 days old, so delete them and do nothing else. The players are welcome to start again and be on a level playing field this time. They would, ironically, be significantly less far behind people who have raided daily than those who have raided daily are currently behind frog farmers.
What about random dungeons/scenarios??
Basically this. Examples can and should be made of people found abusing exploits. But as above; I don’t think they need to lose their accounts. Not for characters with only a week of time played. Delete them, move on. It’s kinder than a ban. If the same player makes another character and exploits another farm; delete that one too. Eventually they’ll either learn to play the game like normal people, or quit.
I would say that there’s thresholds though. A few people I know went out to see what the frog stuff was about, spent 5-10 mins, and stopped. There needs to be an agreed level of exploiting, say a certain number of hours, or a large specific number of frogs killed. Someone casually investigating something they’ve seen on youtube, or just happening to kill some frogs in passing, should not be held accountable. Someone who spent the entire weekend exploiting should have a consequence applied.
Some valid points but I still think the scaling on upgrading gear is way higher then those threads you can farm. I will continue farming the raids and see how it goes I guess.
Yes, however, reminder that there is a limit by item level for upgrading the gear. The limiting factor will ultimately be the cloak (towards the near end of the event). But you are correct for the time being.
After they had been aware of it for at least four to five DAYS.
if it really were this big of a deal they’d have instantly shut down the servers and hotfixed it but since it took them that long you can safely assume they didn’t see this as that big of a deal.
Also what do you mean with…
“Won”…? Who lost?? If you don’t want to play with froggers then make your own groups and raid without them?
It’s a PvE mode game and you fully control who you play with?
You aren’t. The game being broken does not equal YOU breaking the game, especially not when it’s an oversight as incredibly basic as frogs.
So ‘you’ create a faulty product and then blame the customer for using the product as you presented it to them because metagaming exists??
This entire situation is Blizzard’s fault to begin with.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s tons of people who frogged just because they felt that they HAD to just so they can make sure that they can still get in to higher groups, thus leaving them no other choice but to farm frogs.
Do you want to perma-ban those people too? Because to no fault of their own, they were put in a position where they felt they may have had no other choice.
It’s not so simple as just “oh they frogged to get an advantage”, because not everybody did it for that reason.
See the reason above, also both WoWHead and Blizzard both validated frog farming to a large degree, the former by making literal guides and the latter by staying entirely silent on the topic for almost an entire week.
It doesn’t matter how old they are. People don’t want to start all over again. Many people finished all of the achievements already. Many farmed out their gear. Many progged the raids already.
Nobody wants to go and start all over again over something that they were initially possible even forced in to doing because they felt like they had no other choice if they wanted to still be able to get in to groups.
This entire situation is on Blizzard. Punishing players for exhibiting common player behavior is beyond ludicrous.
Oh to add on to this point – many people who play retail are casual gamers who play only a few hours a day. Exactly how much time do you think that people have to just throw an entire week of gameplay out of the window and start from scratch just because they frogged for a few hours over the weekend?
tbf even if they remove the cloak stats. They will loose around 6k main stat for example. An 556 ilvl weapon upgraded grants 17k mainstat.
people underestimate the ilvl upgrades. cloak is not that important. Would never farm for threads. Bronze is the resource everyone should look at to upgrad gear
To emphasize that even further – If it’s all about the bronze that people got from frogging even if you exclude the cloak: With enough game knowledge you’ll know places in the overworld that have enough mob density that you can bounce between them just constantly farming them for hours without hyperspawn, and gain around 70% of the amount of Bronze that Frogging gave with Hyperspawn.
Are you (royal ‘you’) going to want to then ban players who farm Bronze through regular farms, too?
