After a few weeks into ST and checking the logs every week…my guild and me waited to see the usage of the item “Snowball” on the Dreamscythe and Weaver encounter to result in invalid logs.
I went to the Warcraft Logs Discord a few minutes ago for the first time ever and asked about it and i got a pretty quick response from a mod there saying that for WCL the usage of the item “Snowball” on this encounter is fine and it’s up to Blizzard to fix it if they don’t want people to use it.
My question now is: Is it a bannable exploit to use the “Snowball” item on the “Dreamscythe and Weaver” encounter to bypass the whole knockback mechanic of the fight?
This is the statement from the WCL Discord: https://ibb.co/3yBbS93
I don’t want to be mean Dottie but do you have any official source like a statement on twitter from Blizzard for that?
I just make it clear: We won’t use it in our raid until Blizzard gives us the permission for it.
But being left alone with this situation is extremely unlucky for players that care about parsing and it would not take long for Blizzard to give us a simple statement on this topic.
Do you see any top parser being banned for snowball usage? Obviously not.
We were using snowball back in 2019 vanilla and we are using it now. Blizzard never cared about such tiny exploits otherwise they would fix it years ago.
And let me remind you about lvl 55 new year event grinches that were used in phase one raiding. No one got banned for this, but wcl deleted those parses, because grinches were op af and it was unfair.
The question is not if it is an exploit.
The question is if it is a bannable exploit (or can lead to other forms of actions against the account of the user) OR if Blizzard is ok with using this exploit.
An Item that let’s you skip 50% of all mechanics of a boss encounter is not OP?
Grinches were a limited use (x3) during a limited time event (Feast of Winter Veil), hence had no place on logs as later attempts wouldn’t be able to compete with the ones during that period.
A snowball on the other hand can be used by anybody at any time, as I recall they can be picked up/crafted. Thats the difference.
In terms of bannable or not, I doubt Blizzard cares about skipping a mechanic thats pretty much irrelevant and occurs 2-3 times/fight during a tank/spank boss in a 30 min raid.
Worse case scenario they fix it, much like LoSing during Electro. As far as I know nobody got banned for that.
All nice but worthless until Blizzard says: We will not take action against any player that uses a snowball to use it to bypass a whole boss mechanic of our current raid.
Don’t get me wrong: My intent is not to get all the people banned that used it. My intent is that i WANT to use it by myself (since WCL allows it for parsing) but i don’t want to risk my account for it.
And on this topic player opinions on how big the chance might be or not be to get sanctioned for it simply don’t matter. It is all up to Blizzard and if they say nothing about it its NOT the same as allowing it.
Then there still is the risk of getting banned for it. And it is exactly that “risk” that prevents players from using it.
One can ask at least i guess? I dont expect them to answer. Of course I don’t expect them to answer here because i think their community managing is extremely bad but…at least i shall give it a try…maybe a rarespawn CM comes up. Who knows.
You can try to ask through in-game support appeal, but its i high chance that you’ll get a nonsense answer which is not related to your question and instant closing of your appeal. And even for that you’ll have to wait few weeks
It’s hard to say. We have a lot of unintended behavour in game that players use pretty often, for example logout skips but nobody was banned for using it. Also we had some “exploits” that was bannable such as warlock imp exploit or karazhan (back to TBC) exploit with chess event to get infinite loot. It’s hard to say what it is on blizzard opinion, legit game mechanic or “exploit”. But personally i dont think that it would be bannable because most of bannable exploites were about getting infinite loot, but here only benefit that you get is just a bit better logs (boss is easy anyway) so i dont think that it’s bannable, but blizzard opinion maybe other, idk.
Warlock imp bug - economy breaking bug.
Karazhan infinite loot - economy breaking bug.
Both bugs were fixed in a matter of hours if i remember correctly. And i doubt someone got banned, but i wouldnt be surprised.
You shouldnt compare those bugs to snowball exploit. Everyone can use snowball and advantage it gives is just meh. Average player doesnt care about it and thats why its not important.
