Top-end players straddle the line very carefully between “bannable” and “not bannable” - they don’t care if it’s an exploit or not, or if it’s fun or not.
These people only have one thing on their minds: Competing at the highest level and hopefully winning.
And they will do anything to maintain their spots or even win. ANYTHING. It doesn’t matter how degenerate or ridiculous it is, it doesn’t matter if it’s the right thing to do, it doesn’t even matter if it’s an exploit or bug - they will quite rightly assume that the rules are being evenly applied, so if one group does it, everybody does it, and whoever does it first bases their decision on precedent.
They will do anything. They will spend a quarter million dollars on gear. They will hire programmers to write addons to trivialize encounters. They will level the same class 4 times to hedge against bad RNG combined with weekly caps. They will run the same raid 20 times in order to funnel gear, creating characters of all the different armor types each to maximize the chance of any particular piece of loot dropping.
They will even, and we saw this last time, play for so long and so hardcore that they develop serious health complications and end up having to have doctors on site who eventually order them to go home and sleep.
There is absolutely nothing Blizzard can reasonably do to stop this madness. The only thing anybody can actually do is stop giving people attention for playing video games in this way. That’s the only way it stops. And that’s not going to happen I imagine, so yeah.
The reason we look up to sports (and e-sports) is because of their impressive ability to overcome physical and mental challenges and compete with one another, and to celebrate the health and versatility of the human body in the process. The first part RTWF reasonably captures, but the second part it most certainly does not.
I’m very impressed with how games like SC2, CS, and even WoW’s M+ and arena play out as competitive events because people have time to practice and play and compete and many exploits are actually fixed. RTWF, by contrast, is completely sick. Sorry, but that’s my honest opinion.