Profession system rework was the most exciting thing about Dragonflight for me. Cool system, specs, equipment, crafting gear matters…
But the amount of exploits that came along is just too much. People were abusing Dirt, profession swap for consortium rep, azurecloth/chronocloth and now I finally understood why enchants were selling so low - the exploit according to reddit posts was up for months.
Knowledge points are bad as they are: there are no catchups, they are uncapped. That means you started later - you will only catch up when you maxed. You missed a week - you are not getting points from weekly quests. I don’t know why they thought it is a good desicion, we have conquest/valor cap increasing each week, why not KP. I actually thought they will be capped with ability to respec on a long cooldown, but anyway.
Exploits are bad, but they are inevitable. Especially with complex mmorpg systems on top of each other. But how you handle them is what matters. More bans, deleting gold and items from accounts that abused bugs, some measures that will make everyone think twice before exploiting.
Heard the phrase “exploit early, exploit often”? Is this the way to play a game with subscription? When you fix an exploit but don’t clean after it you just encourage to exploit as soon as possible.
I know crafting is a very niche part of game, so people will go on and praise Drgonflight for all the other good things it has and communication level from blizzard which indeed improved a lot. But crafting system’s management is very dissapointing.
How were most of it exploits? Dirt had higher spawn rate and higher drop rate. Thats not exploit. Quests give rep because they were designed that way. Just because Blizzard nerfed it later doesn’t mean they suddenly became exploits and should be punished. Should blizzard also punish someone who played spec before it was nerfed while it was op? Or people who put 3 different elemental gems in Lariat before nerfs? Its silly to ask for punishment for something before nerfs.
It created a huge disparity between players who exploited and not. You either remove unfair advantage or let it be as it is. Obviously dragon shards were not suppose to drop as much as they did. Though I agree it’s not ban wothry exploit - but the knowledge should have been removed.
Same with quests. Swapping all professions every week is in no way intended gameplay, you get 2 weekly quests for your professions, if you swapped you was not supposed to get another one - it’s just bad coding design. The whole purpose was to timegate some recipies, but with the rep exploit some people got them much earlier - it should have been removed with all crafts.
They should have banned aff locks who were doing 1kk damage with a single spell. They haven’t, have they? It actually supports my point about how there’s little to no consequences for exploits.
We can agrue what is an exploit and isn’t, in real world is you signed an unfair contract it still can be revoked in court.
You don’t seem to understand what exploit is. Why should players be punished because Blizzard decided to nerf something ? That doesn’t make sense. This isn’t “clever use of game mechanics” thats normally used to justify exploits. Players didn’t find some loophole to gain advantage. Treasures were there for everyone to loot. Everyone had dragonflying to reach them. There was no unfair advantage.
Exploit - make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource).
It is not necessary a bug abuse or cheating or anything. The fact is players were not suppose to get extra ~50 dragon shards on week one. Either revert or don’t change. Imagine normal raid were dropping mythic gear on week one. Should players be punished? No, but should the gear be left as is? Hell no. Just because professions are niche content that does not mean no one cares about advantages there.
Historically blizzard has shown that an exploit is when you abuse a unintended game mechanic that should not have been there from the start. Overpowered specs dont have any unintended game mechanics they are just overtuned which is fixed by turning down the dmg % knob on some of their spells. KP was not intended to be farmed infinitely but it was on launch. Blizzard did not turn down the droprate knob for KP instead they made it capped per week but not before a bunch of goblins had taken advantage of it and got super mega rich from it.
In my opinion they should be punished for this and there is a precedent here. I remember in legion people found out that there was a world quest they could spam for infinite artifact power and they all got suspended right before the new tier was about to come out.
Pretty sure its capped based on my own and other peoples experience that they have shared online. I almost always get 3 KP drops from the first 3 chests or disturbed dirts i loot in the world and then poof the next 30 dirts i loot only reward me with dragonscale trophies.
We are talking about Dragon Shards of knowledge. Not about those weekly treasure drops like Molten Globule or Elemental Splinter. Dragon shards of knowledge give 1 KP and 50 mettle and on start they had much higher drop rate then Blizzard nerfed drop rate. Shards were (since start) and still are only non capped way to get KP for non gathering professions. Only thing that changed was drop rate. And OP wants Blizzard to ban people who looted shards before they were nerfed.
If that is true, that the droprate was just all wrong then i dont think blizzard can do anything about it which sucks because this will negatively impact the market until we are all max KP which will prob happen a couple of tiers in the future. The goblins that knew about this bug are now sitting at 300+ KP and are going to be able to craft alot more of the absolute best items at the lowest price for the next 2 patches.
The only solution for this i can come up with is to force reset peoples KP if they are above a certain limit.
Goblins= people that play the game for 30 hours a day only to make gold
Bug/exploit/overpowered whatever, the droprate was not correct and it was fixed call it whatever you want.
What does availability have to do with bugs? Are you saying that its their own fault that they did not capitalize during those first 2 weeks of the expansion? Maybe they did not have time to play the game nonstop and farm treasures all day.
If blizzard had not nerfed the droprate then i would not be complaining about this stuff but the fact that they did has now lead to some people having waayy more power than others and there is no way for everyone else to get to the same power level as them. It is just unfair, plain and simple.
Nah, I don’t want these people banned, just reduce KP they have according to droprate changes. I want people who abused enchanting tier 3 banned but we will not see this either.
How do you think KP should be reduced after being already spent? And how can they accurately determine how many KPs were obtained fairly and how many were obtained by exploit?
As for the enchanting exploit, I don’t know how it worked. All I know that I saw a post on MMO champion saying that Blizzard temporarily disabled creating enchanting scrolls. It could be an banworthy exploit.
It wouldnt be that hard to found out the reasonable ammount of KP that you can farm since day 1 without exploiting. Proff quests gives 6 or smnthg every week, treasures and Treatises and so on. If blizzard Wanted to they could even the playing Field.
You get 14 guaranteed per week (or 11 for engineers, enchanters and alchemists, 10 for gatherers) if you do ALL the weekly tasks. Then there are many one time sources like first craft bonus, renown rewards, etc. There are monthly sources like darkmoon faire. These are all “legit” ways to get knowledge.
But dragonshards still exist. I get them every week still even after the nerf. I get them in M+ chests, in aiding the accord chests, in dirt piles, etc. How can they know if it was just luck or exploit obtained in first week? If they nerf the chance is 1%, there can still be some lucky players who get several in one day, or players who grinded dirt 24/7 and got 1000 out of 100000 dirt piles.
And you didn’t answer the more important question. What if the knowledge points are already spent? Let’s say a player spent 400 points. 300 were legit and 100 from exploiting (assuming they can figure that out). Let’s say the points are spent in 3 trees, which ones to remove? Do you want Blizzard to reward them with a free respec at the cost of 100 points?
That’s exaclty what they changed - droprate from piles and spawnrate of piles
people maxed out expedition rep on week one and with it they got 50+ dragon shards. Now there are not so much dirt piles to grind DS. It’s not a rocket science to determine how much more then expected did they get.
The problem is no one give a shield.
I’m fine with resetting. Crafters who exploit early expansion have their builds prepared on beta anyway. Another solution is to set them at negative points.
It would be hard. My friend loots 15-20 shards per week. I loot around 10. There is reddit post on woweconomy about guy who farmed 250 shards few weeks ago and maxed Engineering knowldge and it took him 8 hours a day. For a month. Ots all dependant on how much effort you put. Even after initial nerfs you can and could still get plenty of shards.
So if Blizzard decide to nerf the weekly quest to grant 2 points instead of 3, should all players who did the weekly every week be punished because they “exploited” the old quest?
The facts are
Blizzard devs buff and nerf stuff all the time in all their games and have been doing so since the company existed.
Players ALWAYS try to find the most efficient methods to do something. Whether it’s farming gold, or XP, or honour points, or artifact power or whatever. Sometimes Blizzard nerfs those methods stuff and some times they let it be for years.
It’s not the players’ job to figure out Blizzard’s intention or predict what’s going to be nerfed or buffed. They just do what works best for them.
Blizzard never punish players for stuff they nerf. For example when they nerf the DPS of the class, they don’t takeaway the loot/achievement they got from killing bosses with their OP ability or the arena rank they got in PVP.
Let’s say one player found a shard in a dirt pile and decided to spend the next 4 hours doing nothing but farming dirt. Another player decided to spend 4 hours doing Mythic 0 to get some gear. A third player decided to spend 4 hours levelling an alt.
Why would you take the knowledge points from the first player, but not the gear from the second player, or reduce the level of the third player’s alt? All 3 players the invested time in the game and got different rewards.
No one cares because now 50 knowledge points from 50 shards doesn’t make as big a difference as it did in the first couple of weeks.
Any player who farmed normally since the launch should be at 300 or more points and should have already maxed artisan’s consortium rep.
The early 50 points advantage allowed some players to be among very few who can craft certain items at max ilvl and charging high commissions. At some point a Blacksmith who could craft a 418 weapon could charge 100K. This advantage is now gone because now there are many now who can craft the same item and commissions have dropped significantly and you can craft the same weapon for 5K.
Unless they take the gold they made from charging high commissions early, it doesn’t matter. They ALREADY made millions.
What you said in your original post about lack of catchup mechanic is something I can get behind. Though levelling up professions now is very cheap compared to first few weeks.