Punishment for exploits?

Gameplay Professions
21

Ok, once again, please read carefully and try to think.

That’s a very bad example, why would they nerf 3 points to 2? Also weekly quests are timegated by nature - you missed a week you have 3 points less and no catch up. Looting shards from piles is not a first week event.
If you want to talk about weekly quests let’s talk about consortium rep. People who switched their professions to get all quests and boost their rep. The mechanism of changing profession and completing quest is not an exploit per se. But let’s agree this is no a gameplay designed reputation farm. Blizzard agreed and disabled it. However harm is done.

all irrelevant. Stop comparing class balancing with game mechanic changes. If you want to then please take a look at a bug when affliction warlock could oneshot people in arenas. I haven’t heard about any bans after it and it was 100% exploit with required a very specific setup out of arena. Please explain why no one was banned for this too?

Because Mythic 0 provided correct loot in correct amount. Imagine Mythic 0 dropped Mythic raid gear on week one. Do you think blizzard would have let people keep the gear? No way, gearing is an essencial gameplay, professions are secondary.

That’s such a stupid argument, you seem to understand the issue in your next paragraph so why even say something like this. Should we like not care about anything because sooner or later it won’t matter? Imagine some people get max level pvp gear first week, but hey, now conquest is uncapped you can get it too so it’s ok bro.

And extremelly meaningless. Even if you can make some gold it’s just a bad feeling that you can’y catch up to some people even if you started at the same time.

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22

To make it like engineering quests may be? Engineers get 2 points from their quests.

Why would they nerf dragonshard chance from dirt pile from 20% to 1% (or whatever the numbers)? .

In both cases it’s just arbitrary numbers.

bugs that require a special setup outside the arena should be banned.
An ability that is overpowered by normal game play due to number tuning shouldn’t be banned.

Dirt piles farming didn’t require special setup. It was just number tuning of a drop chance.

I don’t know the warlock bug you mention, and can’t explain why it was not banned. I think if it should have been banned if it was as you described.

Blizzard has a nasty record of not being consistent with their bans. They banned Ensidia for using Saronite bombs on Lich king even though it was clearly unintentional. They didn’t ban them for using Flower power on Hodir even though it was intentional. More recently they didn’t ban guilds for using Venthyr mage ability on jailer which disabled a phase 4 mechanic, but they banned guilds that allowed tanks to die on Helja which also disabled a mechanic, but didn’t ban guilds that allowed tanks to die on Archimonde.

The rule is exploiting mechanics that require special setup and unusual game play should be banned.

Exploiting mechanics that were just number tuning from Blizzard like farming monsters that give more XP or have high spawn rate, or farming dirt piles with high drop chance, or using an overpowered talent should not be punished at all.

Define correct?
Why is 50% dragonshards drop chance “incorrect” and 1% “correct”. May be the “correct” action is to revert the nerf and increase dragonshard drop chance again to allow new players to catchup.

It’s a tuning of a random proc just like the tuning of a proc chance of a trinket or of a class talent, or of the drop chance in a Mythic 0.

100%, 50%, 0.001% are just arbitrary numbers base on some developer’s whim.

Why imagine? This already happened with world quests on week one. It wasn’t mythic raid gear, but item levels in first week or two were about 20 items levels higher than they are now. Yet players, myself included, got to keep the items obtained from world quests in the first couple of weeks.

In this case you are saying the “gear” should be removed not the conquest points.

But before were asking for the knowledge points to be be removed not the millions of gold that they earned from those points, you even suggested KP can go negative.

Professions are means to make GOLD. Knowledge points are just means to an end. They are not goals. So no one cares if they remove them.

I am spending Knowledge points in useless trees now (resourcefulness for example). I already caught up.

How? By having two chars with same profession. I have a LW for mail gear and another for leather gear. I have a potion alchemist and a phial alchemist. That’s double the knowledge points per week. This is how I catch up.

23

Sure not everyone knew that it was an exploit and there is an easy way to figure out if they were. The exploiters knew that the shard droprate was prob going to get nerfed so they thought to make hay while the sun shined meaning they farmed dirts nonstop the first week. And the ones that didnt know the droprate was too big they thought nothing of it, they looted chests that they stumbled upon and did not fly around the dragon isles actively looking for them. So in the end the exploiters are the ones with 300+ KP and the non exploiters have about the same KP as everyone else.

The best solution would be to implement a maximum allowed ammount of KP maybe next week to be around maybe 200-250(Not entirely sure how much KP you should have atm). So the people that have above this max limit will login with 200 KP to spend on a reset spec tree.

24

Which I still have no idea why they did it ><

Because profession system is one of the biggest content updates in Dragonflight, so allowing maxing out early is not intended by developers. They nerfed the spawn of piles which was the only way to grind expedition rep.

does not mean should be left as is

Oh common dude it was not like this. I have mutiple characters, I saw dragon shard in dirt/pack once or twice ever. People were getting hundreds week one. Besides knowledge it is a huge boost in mettle. Imho they should not have nerfed if they did not revert it. Don’t act like it’s not a big disadvantage.

That’s… why I made the post. To express my dissapointment in lack of blizzard’s actions.

You are using demagogue techincs - mixing completely different examples together to prove your point. “farming monsters that give more XP” and “using an overpowered talent” has nothing to do with the discussion. And for the last time, as much as my inner disc priest wants to “punish” everyone - that’s not the goal, there are ways to preserve game balance without banning people. It’s just not if I will find an exploit like enchanting exploit which was up for a long time, you bet I am using it, because I have no fear for breaking tos.

Same ilvl 1-2 item per boss for 5-player party, one dungeon per week. Because without caps on shards it is possible to max out a system sooner then expected. Too little too late to revert the nerf.

I played on the first week and I don’t remember it. I only remember people farming same rares for loot on the same day.

Ok if you can track correctly amount of gold people earned by having more KP you can remove it, if not then my suggestion more or less fair.

Who cares? It’s the end of a patch. Did you catch up on week 2 after people farmed 50+ more KP? Don’t think so.

25

Your entire post is just one big attempt to muddy waters of this discussion.

26

You are probably right. But this is pure guess work. May be Blizzard decided last minute before launch they wanted professions maxed in 1 day like it did in the last 8 expansions.

As I said some people focused on professions. Others on levelling alts, other on gearing on Mythic 0.

I personally was focused on doing campaign quests and side quests, and optional story lines. Then did M0 to get some gear. Then levelled a Warrior. Did M0 on the warrior too. So I didn’t get 100 dragonshards too.

And this was possible to max professions day 1 for the last 8 expansions. Why are we supposed to expect otherwise?

Blizzard has been OK with people taking extremes measures to progress faster than expected.

Mythic raids progression are supposed to last several weeks (or even an entire season) for a typical mythic guild. Yet Blizzard always allowed World First raiders to level up 9 alts and do 20 normal and heroic splits, and raid 16 hours per day for 2 weeks to get world first.

Why is doing levelling 10 chars and 20 raid splits an ok behaviour and not grinding dirt/packs?

Both are unusual behaviour that typical wow players don’t do. Both requires extreme measures. Both give a HUGE early advantage to a group of players. Both require spending lots of hours playing the game (more than what an average or even hardcore player would normally do).

Not only did Blizzard allow this behaviour, they historically rewarded this extreme behaviour when they had “Realm first level 80” , “Realm first level 80 Tauren”, “Realm first Hebarlist”.

Players were using degenerate technics to farm the Maw in shadowlands and overcome the “Eye of the Jailer” mechanic to get a few of weeks advantage to unlock a socket on their gear and Blizzard was perfectly fine with that.

Did the players who got 50+ more KP by farming dirt/packs get world first Raszageth? Did they catch up 2 weeks later and got world 20th? I don’t think so.

Who cares if they killed Mythic Raszageth now? It’s the end of a patch.

You didn’t give me a single reason why players should be punished over an extreme behaviour that granted a significant advantage, when Blizzard have historically allowed, encouraged and even rewarded similar behaviours over the past 18 years.

27

To maintain balance in the economy. I just feels bad that no matter how you spend your KP you will be for a long time behind some people who got this advantage by abusing a “woopsie” that Blizzard released the expansion with. As an example there is a certain amazon mmorpg where ,assive gold dupes occured and ruined economy to the point that people left the game, because they could not buy anything if they did not dupe.

I love crafting in games, I was exited about profession changes. I did not understand how I can’t craft anything with profit and when I learn how much dragon shards people farmed I was like “oh, that’s why”. I’m just sad that it could be handled differently, the way it was handled has a huge “no one cares lol” mark on it.

Time’s changed. I don’t think it’s a good argument to continue making bad desicions if you made some in the past.

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28

Spoiler alert: you cannot balance the economy in WoW no matter what.
At some point the “time” factor will say “yes bye bye” like Alonso to Sainz and will screw up any attemp of fixing it.
Either is time in 10+ years of gold farming leading to people with so much gold that can control AH without issue or time ppl can spend farming anything over you.

29

Yes, I am aware of that game (New World).

However there are few points:

  • New World gold dupe exploit was actually creating massive amounts of gold out of nowhere. It wasn’t a monster tuned to drop a lot of gold, and wasn’t a game design bug, it was actually a technical bug caused by deliberately lagging. This is definitely a type of bug if it happened in WOW, Blizzard would not only take the gold, but would probably permanently ban the players involved.

  • New World had a lot of other major issues, like bots permanently banning innocent players, players moving game window to become immune to damage, etc. The game relied on the game client as the source of truth rather than the game server which is a catastrophic design mistake (from software engineering standpoint not game design standpoint) that opened a lot of exploits. There is a long video about it if you are interested.

  • The Dragonflight situation is way less severe. In the case Dragonflight no new gold was created. A lot of gold changed hands which was bound to happen anyway. Since regardless of exploit or not, someone would have been the first one able to craft a 418 2H weapon. The exploit only changed “Who” and “When” not “if” that happened or not.
    Actually I doubt it would have changed the “Who”.

  • Elemental Lariat played a much bigger factor in the gold changing hands. Most players waited with the first spark to create Elemental Lariat. Having the recipe mattered much more than having knowledge points

  • Many players saved the second and 3rd spark for weapons. By the time the 3rd spark was available many players who didn’t exploit were at least able to create 405 items and compete a bit. People were crafting weapons mostly at that time. This is the time my leatherworker was crafting 5-10 bows per day.

No it didn’t. This behaviour is still encouraged AND rewarded.

Vault of the Incarnates - Hall of Fame congratulates and celebrates players who create 9-10 chars and did 20 split raids. Those players were multiboxing to run There are no plans to remove it.

On launch day, I had login issues. I spent about 90 minutes trying to login. Before I even I could even login, there were famous streamers farming same spot over and over and shard hopping who were level 67 already. Intentional and repeated “shard hopping” is punishable behaviour IMO. After those players reached 70, they went on to level and gear other chars. They made it to compete in the world first.

So the question is if they punish the dirt/pack farmers they would, rightfully, ask “why me, why not them?”.

If Blizzard decide to ban this, they should make a clear policy change and make it apply to future exploits not past ones, and give players a good notice. The same way they changed their stance on multi-bots. They gave players notice.

30

These takes are some of the most random and half baked takes i have ever read.

Yeah it seems more likely that blizzard 2 weeks into the expansion decided to do a 180 in their design philosophy on proffessions instead of them finding out about a bug lol?

And if they wanted players to have maxed out KP week one, then why implement time-gated sources of KP like the weekly quests.

All extreme measures are not equal. Getting world first, better gear or more sockets has almost zero impact for the majority of the playerbase.

The only people i know this affect is the hardcore of the hardcore raiders that are forced to do whatever is necessary to get the best gear. So if there is a way for them to get better gear by playing an obscene amount, they are forced to do it. This has happened a million times in history for example with The artifact weapon and concordance levels, Island expedition farming, HoA traits farming on alts.

When it comes to auction houses though and the economy, nobody is a single entity that is capable of just functioning alone. The market is a big interwoven structure that involves everyone. So if some players cheat, it affects absolutely everyone automatically.

In our eyes they have been inconsistent yes, but no justice system can dispense justice at 100% effectiveness. But that does not mean we should give up on the concept of justice just because a few murderers sometimes never get punished.

31

Again it is not a good argument, we all gonna die someday so nothing matters.

Is the most important factor here.

That does not affect anyone, does it? The only thing I can think of is getting fast gear to boost other people, but let’s be honest, people who boost others aren’t able to do it because of gear.

The answer is simple - you can still lvl up in a day, but after nerfs you can’t farm shards enough to catch up. What is so hard to understand here? In some professions 50 point difference is a difference between losing gold and breaking even. Even if it does not have a big impact it still feels bad knowing that you missed out on such an advantage. No one will complain about missing a week of weekly quests, it is how it is, but that is different.

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32

Yeah, I agree. But it’s not players job to figure that out and get punished if the don’t.

Do you really think the “majority of the playerbase” are crafters or bother do to weekly profession quests to care about other players being far ahead?

Do you know how many times I get asked questions like “how to I get artisan mettle for recraft?”

The Race to world first affects economy far more than the knowledge point exploit.

When one or two guild buy all consumables, reagents, all BOE items in the auction house, the price go up for everyone. In BFA Method players had all players AND all their alts level up 3 professions to max (i.e. level up 2 professions, then drop 1 and level up another). They claimed that bought all the reagents in the auction houses of three Realms.

According this article to kill the Jailer:

I understand that. And that’s why I said when I asked you to define “correct”. That may be correct is to undo the nerf and let everyone catch up.

33

When i was talking about profs, majority of the playerbase meant most of the people that did profs, and when it was about gear i meant most people that value gear. Sorry if i did not clarify that in my post…

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34

Just because you have an opinion doesnt mean you should share it All i read is an entitled that prolly made zero gold while we made goldcaps. Dirt digging was up for everyone that wanted to invest time doing it. I did 2 hours a day dirt digging week 1, my guildies went 4 hours a day chasing rare after rare. They had a contest who will get the highest ilvl, btw their gear didnt last more than a week. I made 35 mil so far, but they were 2 ilvl higher than me W O W. If you missed the chance, pitty, better luck next expansion start. Everyone that wants makes goldcaps first weeks.

99% of people dont care about profs. My guild has 44 active players and 3 max crafters (im one of them). Just because few of us made millions so what? Once everyone catched up first week of january (even the very casual crafter could guaranteed you rank 5 first week of january, that was 6,5 weeks into DF) everything crashed. Only reason some of us made gold was due to lack of supply.
Would you imagine people doing 16s+ for infusion and not finding crafters for 418?

Only reason people were able to get gear was due to us doing dirt digging week 1, and artisan’s shuffle.

35

We are on a forum where you are supposed to express your opinions and get other peoples inputs on them.

You give the same take as a previous person in this thread. That its your own fault that you did not make use of this situation which is just wrong. Like i said to the previous guy, if blizzard had not changed the droprate i would not be complaining since there would be no permanent discrepancy in KP levels. But now there is a discrepancy that will stay until the end of the expac or until we have gotten max KP from just doing weekly sht.

To put this into perspective assuming you are a raider and you competing against another guild and your competetitor exploited a bug that gave them gear with 20 ilvls higher than anything your guild can get. As that guild is steaming through content while you are struggling it would not feel fair would it? And then your competetitor says to you “Your own fault for not exploiting the bug”

Im not salty because you made alot of money and i did not, im salty at the unfairness that the KP system has created with a few of the hardcore players that capitalized on this exploit now sitting at the top and nobody else can join them there since blizzard patched the droprates.

So what? Even if it is as you say only 1% which is a figure i am sceptical to believing, that is still hundreds of thousands of people that want to have a fair and equal system.

Yes you are right after a few weeks the casuals could prob make rank 5 of a few armorpieces. But at that same time the exploiters had fully maxed out KP on both of their crafting profs and could make everything rank 5. That is not fair.

36

ok.

Those players don’t care if the crafter has an extra 50 or 500 knowledge points. Some of them might not be even aware of the exploit or don’t know what’s a knowledge point.

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37

Again, just because its a forum doesnt mean you should share your opinion.

If you want an input to what you said about “punishing players that invested time to do said farms for KP” which is an insult to players like me and the 15-30 hours we spent farming first 2 weeks, well: the one that QQ about our farming is a degenerate entitled idiot that lost the bandwagon and is beyond salty. See you got your input, i can insult you as you can insult players like me.

Have you seen us early crafters make a thread about: “casual crafters that join the crafting market tanked our fees which is beyond toxic as they undervalue both their time and ours to level up a prof, please punish them for disrupting the economy”. No we didnt.
Its supply and demand. As you casual crafters started offering r5s (which was really early, like 1st week of January, around 6 weeks into expansion) everything tanking to sub 10k fee. I literally saw my 100k fees drop to 5-10k in couple days.
However i didnt do a thread QQ about casual crafters disrupting economy.

Almost all my ingame crafter friends quit trade chat crafting that week because fees were a joke to even bother, so you didnt really have a lot of competition from maxed ones.

You have a git gud issues mate. If you think you didnt make money because you didnt get enough knowledge points due to nerf, then for that many years you play the game based on your achievements you dont understand crafting profs thus you are a bellow average player profwise or you dont understand economics. If there was never a KP nerf the only difference would be that profs would tank 4th week into exp instead of 6th week. You would never make any serious gold this xp. You only make gold only when supply is low and demand is high.
wow

38

Maybe follow your advice? Of course the one who profited from nerf will protect all exploites they did, I bet if you missed some you will complain about them too.

Woah the most calm wow player :smiley: take a chill pill for real

??? that’s just normal economy, what would you complain about? Extra KP week one was an incident and adter the nerf the crafters were divided forever. You came here saying how much you profited from early exploits and fail to see the issue?

yeah go back in time and farm DS you lazy peon /s

Let’s forget about gear crafting for a sec cause it is server specific. I was always able to profit with consumables however for the first time even after maxing flasks the best I could do is break even. Made no sense why people sell so low, and then I saw how others had 100+ more points invested in trees like resoursfullness and yeah sure now I see.

Not everyone’s goal to make millions, some people just like to engage in crafting for themselves, it feels bad that because of the nerf some people dominated the market with no way to catch up. Is it fair, is it bug/exploit or intended - it is all irrelevant, because it feels bad for players.

39

you need to edit your post because as i said later in my post i did follow my advice:

“Have you seen us early crafters make a thread about: “casual crafters that join the crafting market tanked our fees which is beyond toxic as they undervalue both their time and ours to level up a prof, please punish them for disrupting the economy”. No we didnt.”

There is a very big difference between saying: I believe that X was bad for Z, than saying “i would punish X playerbase because QQQQQQQQ”.

Being a finance guy RL i like making gold as a hobby, i dont make gold because i need gold, i make it because i like it. It’s not a big deal, i can always /care and buy a token. All shadowlands long i made sub 500.000g, and i spent more. Now i made maybe 35mil due to an opportunity i didnt waste.

Again we didnt exploit a bug.
There is difference between saying: “blizzard why you nerfed droprate” and “punish X playerbase because i didnt do x farm”. Why exactly punish a playerbase because someone was slacking?

40

The post is not only about dragon shard and consortium rep.

There was a chronocloth/azurecloth exploit and people were banned but quickly reverted. Recent enchanting bug that was live for a long time had no bans at all.

Good question, so why did they punish the playerbase with nerfs? If they left it as is no issue.