I’m in a very small guild on Mirage Raceway and yet members will ask in guild chat for an invite to exploit layers
It’s not my bag - I have no interest in short cuts - and I struggle to see how it affects me
I don’t use AH - I use what I loot or get from quests or instances
I’m in no rush to speed level - I’m enjoying the game
I think a lot of folk are forgetting that it isn’t a competition and that it may be a business for a tiny handful of streamers - but they have no impact upon the day to day activity of almost any other player
It has an impact on the people using the AH and trade chat, since it affects the perceived value and currency inflation.
But yeah, of course it has no impact on you if you’re never intending on participating in the economy.
Oh yeah, and it also affects the perceived social norms. Like, how good your gear is expected to be for something, and things like that. Eventually people will discriminate against the freshly dinged because they aren’t overgeared for something like strat or scholo, with people starting to think stuff like “it’ll take too long”.
It’s only a matter of time until that becomes the norm. The longer it takes until that happens, the better.
I played in vanilla. LFG was a thing back then too. Only the guilds that were raiding could reliably stay away from the pugs on a daily basis.
Which is still true on retail actually. It’s just that the social design of the game is made worse on retail so the amount of guilds raiding is fewer compared to the ones pugging the content. (Not counting the difference of difficulty, I’m counting 'em all together.)
The social design was done way better back in vanilla, as well as in classic.
However, there’s an inevitable bleed effect from retail to classic, which even the social design of the game can’t completely amend.
Despite the many moans I think Blizz has done a pretty good job
Players have far more experience coming into this - and some are savvy enough to use exploits
But it’ll balance out
I am predicting a pretty significant banwave - and it will include some high profile streamers - I think it the only way Blizz can protect its wider player base
Only a fraction of the developers who worked on Classic now were part of the original vanilla team. And the designers from back then, as in the ones calling the shots, are pretty much gone altogether from Blizzard. So what THIS Blizz has done, is just the changes and the work of porting it into the new Engine based on past logs and the patch they saved from vanilla.
It’s not this Blizz that did a great job. It’s the original designers that did a fantastic job. This Blizz just tried their best not to ruin what the original Blizz accomplished, however there were cost-cutting orders they had to adhere to, which unfortunately included layers (as in they went with layers instead of “unnescessarily” trying to guess how many servers would be needed with the risk of guessing too high), which they also likely wanted to associate to Classic as well since they were expecting it to do well (the feedback weren’t exactly hiding their enthusiasm), which is likely to become a part of 9.0 since sharding is overwhelmingly seen as a negative feature over on retail.
Kind of like creating the hero for a villain of their own creation, and doing their best to associate good press with it in order to raise the positive image it’ll have once it’s announced for retail (most likely).
If they DON’T have such plans, it means they kept saying how layering is “new technology” in the Q&A’s for Classic (even though it’s just sharding 2.0 and further shows their attempts to disassociate layering from sharding), which they had “gone through the effort to develop for Classic”, only to then remove it for phase 2 because that’s what they’ve also “promised”.
In other words, under orders to cut costs (look back to gaming news from December '18/January '19), it doesn’t make sense to spend development effort and work so hard to disassociate it from sharding when giving public statements, to then only have it “disappear” into nothingness shortly after.
It makes more sense for them to make it seem like the “hero” people want, to give it tons of positive PR by having it “save” the Classic launch by saying how it would otherwise be impossible to keep the servers up during the launch (which it would, but it’d be fine eventually regardless, it’d just take a lot more time like weeks or months until the servers would become stable enough, depending on the pressure the servers would have from people trying to log in and level etc. from day in and day out), which would make people associate the positive image of Classic and its “great launch” to the image they’re trying to create for the layering technology.
Which would then be a win-win since it did cut costs by not making 'em open soo many servers when expecting many players to drop off over time (which, for all you know, they could’ve been expecting more to drop off than it actually did, and keep in mind the queues became less prevalent and smaller in size cuz they kept increasing the population tolerance too so it wasn’t only that people quit playing although some have definitely quit playing already, it’s just not the only relevant factor), and it’ll likely garner a lot of positive attention so it’ll become the great “hero” that slayed the bad “villain” of sharding over on retail for the next expansion.
It did however get this big setback of bad publicity with the layering abuses and its effect on realm economies and character progression and whatnot (including the prevalence of rare patterns and BoE drops from instances etc.), so it will not get the full effect of a great welcome they were likely trying to achieve by doing all of this though. It’ll nonetheless still be seen as a great exchange for dropping sharding, if that is what they’ll do for the next expansion.
Also, fun little story, they also attributed the first expansion launch without the need to keep the servers offline, which was the Legion launch, to the sharding technology. Which is the same kind of language used for layering and the Classic launch (not identical, but similar), in Q&A’s prior to its launch. It’s just that the obvious downsides to layers was foreseen by a few, like the layer hopping, which the fanatics kept saying “wasn’t gonna be a thing”, and then what nobody saw coming which was the effect it was having on instances.
Now, Lore did say in a blue post that the bug causing instance resets while inside “was a thing in vanilla” too.
Couldn’t be bothered writing it all again, so there you have it. Try to look behind the curtains instead of trusting what you’re told at face value all the time.
So the dungeon reset while inside just so happened to not only resemble layer hopping, it was also triggered by hopping layers. The coincidences sure are plenty.
The idea of ‘The End Justifies The Means’ only applies if the Means are a morally neutral action, like ‘walking’.
Getting your case a) handled much faster because ‘you know a guy’ and b) arbited by people you know is not a morally neutral action, it by itself is cronyism.
And we basically only have the parties suspected of said cronysim saying that the decision ‘was the same as always’ , which not only by itself affects the veracity of their statement but also ilustrates perfectly why you should always try to let as neutral as possible arbiters make a judgement call in a matter.
I truely hope you will never get embroiled into a court matter and then have the opposing party and judge be best buds since college, saying ‘it doesn’t matter as we would nevah evah let our human emotions and personal relations have an impact on our work’ (which already completely ignores the subconscious workings of people’s brain - you may very well not even be aware that you are treating someone you know and like better than an unknown person).
What happened has been streamed live and the decision is made public by Blizzard. You are suggesting that the decision was biased and I’m asking you to back up your claim.
If the decision were to be actually biased you’d have zero issue in providing ample evidence of that comparing it with past cases, but you, so far, not only failed to do so, but didn’t even try and kept dancing around the bush instead.
The reason is simple: Blizzard has actually decided consistently with their long-standing policy and past interpretations, which completely destroys the hypothesis that they have been unfair in this specific case.
Maybe you should ask yourself why in a court of law the judge being friend of one of the parties is actually not enough to recuse him or nullify his decision… especially if you are unable to bring up any evidence that the decision was actually biased…
Actually it is in Northern Europe and the US but I suddenly realized, looking on your Realm name, we may very well see cultural differences at work here.
My apologies for not realizing this sooner, it still doesn’t change my outlook and observations, however.
For what it’s worth, still plenty of /layer requests, 60’s with Epic Mounts and even Whelp Pets galore and blatant OOC talk in /s in what supposedly is a RP Realm.
Speaking on a personal level, it is all rather demotivating.
Certainly, not all friendships require judges’ disqualification, as the Seventh Circuit explained over thirty years ago.
Judicial ethics authorities agree that judges need not disqualify themselves in many cases in which a party or lawyer is a friend.
In some cases it can happen, but as you see the bar is somewhat higher than just “being friends”.
There may be situations, however, in which the judge’s friendship with a lawyer or party is so tight that the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned. Whether a friendship between a judge and a lawyer or party reaches that point and consequently requires the judge’s disqualification in the proceeding is essentially a question of degree. The answer depends on the facts of the case.
Thing is, the moment questions regarding your integrity as judge (or mediator or any other similar judicial function) arise, those friendships etc. will lead to extra scrutiny and a professional ‘stink’ that makes most of those functionaries shy away the moment a case enters the court, as while it may not always lead to you being literally required to do so (and hence a plaintiff being able of forcing you to do so), you needlessly complicate matters for all parties and institutions involved.
To return to the current case, the fact that e.g. the normal Ticket response time was severely shortened by avoiding the official channels (yet the response is somehow seen as official) is already special treatment based upon personal relations, and already shows that the parties involved are actually incapable of setting their friendship aside - which IS grounds to recuse yourself etc.
In other words, the proper response would have been ‘File a Ticket’ - the same response all other players get.
In meanwhile Esfand is doing Ony for the 5th time this week, using 4 times the excuse he leads 4 40 men raid teams in his guild, and now a 5th time using the excuse “he wants to try out tanking Ony as prot”. Streamers not getting banned is all I see.
I’m all the way against exploits.
But as Blizzard sweeped instance reset exploit under the rug, this raises
some serious questions if players are or aren’t allowed to fully benefit from “creative use of game mechanics” or “pure exploits”.
Oldschool Blizzard did very good job protecting game integrity and people were afraid to use exploits. Exploiters were handled swiftly by GM’s. I suppose Activision has way different policy for staff it seems. Automatic mutes/reports and GM’s handling only minor issues.
POLL:
Will you or will you not use next possible exploit in your advantage, as manyt others will for sure (without penalties)?
I keep seeing exploiters with their gears and Epic mounts…good job blizzard. I used to experience an era where cheaters were banned quickly. This era is over