Potiongate - how it should have been handled

Community General Discussion
1

Potiongate hit many players and Blizzard made a controversial decision of just banning with no notice or communication. As you don’t get banned for finding and farming a ludicrous hyperspawn and using troll on Jaina, one-shotting Kazzak with Reckoning stacks and whatnot during WoW lifespan.

How it should have been handled?

  • Quick reaction from Blizzard (Twitter, in game even). especially when many people were asking and reporting it.
  • Characters overdosing potion could get a debuff-punishment and work their sins off
  • The debuff would create an arrow similar to Hunters mark or… failing lore quest long time ago. So everyone would clearly see naughty toons :stuck_out_tongue: And it could block using professions.
  • The debuff creates a rez-sickness effect in every instance aside of LFR
  • To remove the debuff run X-amount (can titanforge) of LFR and Tortollan meme quests. After 3 Uldir LFR runs per toon people would be mentally punished enough :wink: Maybe add BT Timewalking to the list if a GM is an incarnation of evil…
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if you exploit you get punished.

they should have perma ban the exploiters or atleast delete their characters.

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3

They chose to exploit.

They should be punished and I’d say, a month’s ban with their character levels reverted.

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I’m not going to have sympathy that cheaters got a temp ban.

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There is no “gate” in this. People exploited an obvious bug and got punished. Working as intended.

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Well, defined exploit in this case. The game allows you to do this. You didn’t really had to do anything unusual to trigger it.

Is this an exploit also?:

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but you did have to do something unusual to do it, you cant have done it by accident.

abusing a exploit is on purpose abusing a bug to gain a advantage and no those you linked are not bugs.

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8

From the description of what was happening - if someone refreshed the potion before existing effect run out it would also stack. Not sure about the duration but if someone wanted a longer one by drinking more of them that would also be normal potion use that would trigger the bug. Plus people were reporting/asking Blizzard about this and it was left with zero communication for ~2 days. Preach made a video about it and he also mentions Cauldron bug which has a way higher impact on the game than fast leveling during a free weekend to offset Final Fantasy…

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Easy: you exploit: long ban. Simples.

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Or instead of doing 10 times more work that is not needed at all they could just suspend them because they broke the ToS.

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Or not so.

Simple reasons appear to be things of madness these days. How dare we think logically!! Shame on us.

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no it was not as simple as drink another one to refresh it, since its hotfixed it should be ok so share youtube link about it, as you can see its onley possible to do it on purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoUmgmDsP80

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That’s not something you do, “by accident.”

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what was handled poorly was that Blizzard didn’t react in time. Lock the character from being used for a set amount of hours or give everyone a 1-2 day ban. What in the actual crap did players do with the exploit if some are rumored to be unbanned 2nd week of Crucible?

When you have a lot of people reporting a bug, the very obvious thing would be for the developers to look into it. From the people I’ve listened to, Blizzard did the exact opposite. They simply ignored it and then people went “oh well if Blizzard aren’t doing anything about it, it’s okey”. It’s not some exploit which lets you one-shot high end bosses or something. it was a big xp boost. Players have done far worse exploits without being punished for it.

Blizzard are just useless when it comes to communicating with the community. A bug which makes a class underperform? Nah who gives a crap. A bug/cheese mechanic that makes a class perform a little better? NERF THAT CRAP! But let’s wait another month before we fix the underperformance bug issue. Or what’s better, communicate changes that are made to the game. Players have a right to know all the changes applied to the game. We are not supposed to realize a change in the middle of a raid or dungeon because Blizzard can’t communicate like normal adults.

Edit: It’s very easy to ban players after there have been several reports about the bug, but it’s super hard to change the xp potion so you can actually see when it runs out. That’s just too difficult…

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There was a blue response on the Customer Support forum confirming it would be considered exploiting.

That was in the form of a suspension, which any exploit should be.

Or the fandom they would get for being the bad guy sticking it to the man…

We really did not need (yet) another thread… there are countless others you could have posted this in. It’s done. We get it, levelling is a chore which is why people did it… its a reason, but not an excuse.

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16

Man some people here are way too harsh. Deleting someones character over someone leveling a few characters faster? Seriously?
Rules are good guidelines but you should never place your rules over your players. Honestly surprised they went this far on this one. Banning players that abused it on pvp I do understand though.

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Took them more than 2 days to even respond to massive amounts of questions on twitter + no devs communicated in any way. Also lore makes a smug tweet 3 days after bug was REPORTED AND DISCOVERED. Why are you trying to only blame the players and praise blizzard?

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18

Blizzard went total overkill. 48h hours would have been enough.

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Instead of banning people they should really open a discussion about leveling, nerfing our chars and XP boost (looms now limited to 50%, no RAF, no more boosting, removed the potions) doesn’t help thus why people hate it. But I bet they do already hence why we got the “Buy a boost!”. Making it longer while prunning chars doesn’t make it more fun. Give us a way to really speed it up along with even some challenge scenario to skip parts. Right now the only thing they want you to do is buy a boost, buying a boost means them keeping leveling the slow boring drag it’s now.

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Those that had not abused the game rules before only got 2-3 days. Those that got more… well thats based on their history, not this specific rule breach. Every time a penalty is added, it gets more severe the more rule breaks there are.

Even if I did not have green text, you don’t need an IQ of over 9000 to work out that this particular thing was NOT an intended mechanic. Taking advantage of it knowing full well that Blizzard did not intend it to work this way is what it is, taking advantage. To most it was clear, you can see that in the posts on this forum where people were discussing it and many replying “Its an exploit”… but they continued to do so… and I do understand, many do not use these forums, but they are quick to find these forums when they get banned for it. It was on Reddit, twitter, facebook etc but mostly it was on those sites I wont mention that are specifically for the purpose of leaking exploits.

I do have sympathy with those that did this completely unknowing of the consequences, I am sure there are many, but those coming here to the forums are not so wet behind the ears, they are on these forums, they have seen these type of things before and as such should have realized where this route would lead.

I’m not a blizzard fanboy by any means, but I am completely for fair gameplay. Why should someone get their heritage armor weeks before me because they chose to use something that was clearly an exploit when I would not?

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