Yeah, no, I don’t need a tutorial about things I know better than most here.
But thank you.
No, it doesn’t change the fact that players abused a bug in high legend during the professional tournament qualification season and didn’t get punished for it.
Nothing anyone here says ever will change that fact.
So happy they decided to ignore wild balance for another broken garbage game mode nobody cares to play.
No one said it does
But you’re the one comparing a genuine in-game bug to a malicious third party hack, and this is what you got replies for
You’re talking double standard for completely different cases that can’t be judged on the same standard
It’s not completely different to me. In fact, bug abusing in high-stakes game to me is much worse than cheating in some fun, pointless mode.
Bug abusing is a low-morality act, it’s undeniable. Especially if it is doing harm to over players.
But it is simply using the game as it behaves.
The azerite snake/alexstrasza interaction was a bug. But it was allowed. Some streamers asked blizzard if it was ok to play the deck in stream and make videos about it before it gets fixed and the answer was yes, it’s ok.
The faulty one is the game here, not the player. If they didn’t want that interaction to exist, they shouldn’t have allowed it to exist in the vanilla game to be replicated by anyone. Same for the weapon. You cannot punish players for doing something as simple as playing the game. If you do, you will punish players that did not intend to bug abuse and that simply found out this issue by accident, which is unfair to punish them because of your mistake.
There can always be a scale for if you really want to punish bug abusers, but it generaly only happens when the bug is causing serious damage.
Cheating however, the faulty one is definitely the player. They intend to cause harm to other players, regardless of the mean, but one that is not part of the base game. They use third party whatever to accomplish something that is not of the responsability of the game.
As GnomeSayin said :
From there you just have to draw the line to when it becomes cheating.
For me, players using modified decklist allowing them to play a 0 mana soulfire should be banned for cheating, since this is not something you can do in the base game.
But I guess they either don’t care when it’s only happening for a tavern brawl once in a while, or they consider that banning it could bann players that just google “X tavern brawl decklist” and got that one without knowing it was not a legal one (how could they know the decklist does not come from the game, if it works in the game ?)
tl;dr : bug abusing and cheating should be clearly separated, would it be for case clarification. The consequence for each could be the same if it was the policy, but the real debate is to which category each case belongs, and where you put them on the spectrum of each
Nope, you made the debate about that, not me. In fact, I couldn’t care less about the difference between the categories. Both harm other users.
The big, main difference (I feel like a parrott, lol) is that cheaters are cheating in a fun mode which has no stakes in it, and the bug abusers abused the bug to get into a 50 thousand dollar tournament.
Nice touch, quoting blizzard. Unfortunately, I’m way too experienced with their idiocies to take it seriously. They banned an innocent player who no-lifes this game 12 hours per day 2 times for botting, which is nonsensical and the poor guy is still playing for some reason.
Nah, I don’t care what blizzard says or does. They are hypocritical, and this is just another example of it.
I get what you’re saying.
The difference here is intentionality in ALL cases. A hacker is purposefully hacking. Using a bug can be either intentional or unintentional. For example, I had the staff equipped and froze my opponent and stopped for several seconds trying to figure it out. I had the weapon equipped already and just used it normally gaining a freeze in addition. It’s not like I would unequip the weapon to “make it fair”. I needed the weapon for the plagues anyway against my opponent.
But people who do it intentionally, I agree they are very similar to hackers. They are abusing the system to their benefit. But that act is slightly different in actually hacking to instant win.
If there is a bug in the system and others are using it and you choose not to, you are at a disadvantage especially if using the bug is not going to suffer a penalty. So you may have to use the bug to even the odds.
A hacker is just doing it to intentionally grief other players and have no intention of the match being equal.
But I get what you are saying. Intentionally using a bug to specifically gain an advantage is definitely morally questionable. Just not to the same degree as a hacker literally cheating and doing things the opponent cannot do.
They should’ve disabled DK until it got fixed.
That’s the problem, how do I know if I’m gonna get punished or not?
The difference between bug abusing and cheating might be logical to you here on the forum, but I’ve seen this company do too many nonsensical, user-punishing mistakes to rely on that logic.
Just too much PTSD.
I’ve got banned 3 times because of gangs abusing flag system.
I’ve seen innocent players permanently banned TWICE for botting.
And then I’ve seen top 20 players on stream abusing the weapon bug and go unpunished.
I wouldn’t be so certain about them being categorically and logically consistent. The only thing consistent about their actions is inconsistency and hypocrisy.
You know it if you are using what Blizzard gives you.
They can’t blame you for exploiting a bug, because they can’t prove you did it intentionally. 
What do you mean?
Plenty of ways to prove.
Look for difference in amount of DK games played between when there was a bug and when there wasn’t.
Cross-check it with the difference in winrate between now and then.
Or just open the freakin’ stream and see for yourself a player admitting to abusing it, LOL
Hmm, I said it wrong.
See it like this then: As long as you aren’t using a third-party software, you are good. Using bugged cards will not get you banned. It’s fine as long as it’s in the game.
I would say you know it’s not a problem IF Blizzard specifically says they know about a bug exists and say it’s not punishable or something.
If I saw a bug, I’d play another game with it to make sure it’s a bug or search the internet to see if anyone else knows. As soon as Blizzard knows about it, I’d stop using it. I’d only be using it to spread the word so Blizzard can acknowledge it.
But that’s just me. I agree with you, other people won’t care and will continue to abuse it, especially if it’s a super advantageous bug. I agree those people should have actions taken against them for specifically abusing a bug.
But you and I both know that Blizzard will give privilege to streamers. They will ask them not to use the bug or show others as a warning and they won’t do that for other players. They also are hesitant on banning those streamers because that would cause them to lose viewership into their game. I agree it’s not a two way street here and they get that special privilege.
Like I said, I agree with what you are saying. It’s definitely not consistent. But I 100% think hackers should be punished with outright bans forever. I wish it could be a lifetime ban using two-step authentication. That’s what the game needs. But abusing a bug should be a lesser punishment. Maybe a 30 day ban.
Yeah well, I also have my own moral standards and I’m not abusing any bugs to get ahead. And their job is to protect my moral standards and the integriy of the game and disallow anyone taking advantage over me, especially when the stakes are high.
I just don’t care about what anyone does in a pointless new fun mode, sue me.
See, they have agency over disabling the class/card that abuses it immediately.
They aren’t doing it on purpose, that purpose being laziness.
The blaming party is Blizzard regarding this. Always.
I think it’s based on how bad the bug is. If it’s game breaking, they do ban the card. An extra freeze on an opponent they don’t tend to care because they think it’s not causing a major issue in game disruption and they don’t want people who aren’t exploiting the bug to not be able to play their decks.
I would say the freezing bug was very serious.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I remember it being the Shopper DH meta. That interaction skyrocketed DK’s % of winning against it, probably.
I agree, but Blizzard didn’t.
I think it was a BS bug that should have been hotfixed.
And yet, they immediately removed Pyrotechnician, which wasn’t even a bug, but had just created an oppressive deck.
There’s a clear delineation between installing third party software to alter game files and finding an ingame bug.
No, they don’t ban people for bugs. I seem to recall one of the devs even abused a bug several years ago.
They’ve been consistent on this all along.
It think this echos what Schyla said and I agree.
I won’t either, but we’re the minority.