Because Blizzard is the definitive entity of truth. Go ahead please and look up “Insert Big Company Name silently patches” on your favorite search engine. Maybe you will understand why a lot of these companies deny certain exploits (rightfully so).
If you’ve ever worked in Software, you know this is false. That’s why there are QA Engineers, Testers and so on.
Edit: also, look up “reverse engineering”.
Yep, I believe you over Blizzard because I have about an hour’s worth of experience dealing with you and nearly 20 years experience with Blizzard. Blizzard is obviously in the business of lying to and hiding things from their players, that’s why they are so successful. You found them out! Also your point about QA testers is amusing and reverse engineering proves exactly my point, you need the code to try and prove your theory. Typing “/who” in game no matter what string of characters you put after it isn’t reverse engineering. Blizzard flat out stated that doesn’t work. Hold your breath and stomp your feet for eternity and it still won’t work.
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Here is your proof, kind sir.
I think it’s kinda crappy that there is one set of rules for streamers and another set of rules for the rest of us. Why should some cheaters get a pass on bans just because they have legions of followers and give Blizz free advertising?
Isn’t that sort of pay to win in a way? Pay (read: make Blizz money) to not suffer disciplinary actions?
Meh, whatever not gonna let it bother me but still. Meh.
Blizz must not consider layer abuse against the TOS or they would have banned Jokerd and APES.
I mean ppl are just using a game feature. It’s not a bug, it’s working as intended.
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If anybody had actually been banned for layer abuse, then maybe this post would make sense…
But since nobody has, then there is no preferential treatment here.
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The screenshots don’t show anything other than different results from a /who. There is zero evidence that the results are a result of layers. And layers are continent-wide, nothing to do with which zone you’re in.
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You do NOT speak for the community, just yourself. Mkay?
With that out of the way, I will agree that layering is a problem. It was intended to aid server capacity and playability of the game due to Blizzard being to told to go cheap with Classic since the top brass didn’t want to take this seriously.
Your 1st point would be nice. I cannot call it an exploit however. This is because the system was working, more or less, as intended.
Your other two points, I disagree with entirely. What I would rather see, if they were to take action to try and restore balance to the whole thing, would be as follows:
- Remove layering completely and increase the number of servers to accommodate accordingly for a more spread out player base.
- Wipe the servers clean, and start fresh and do it properly this time.
- Credit everyone with at least 2 weeks game time, a month would be better, as compensation for the problems resulting from their own short sightedness and efforts to take shortcuts.
Who. Cares. Just play the game and stop looking for things to be “outraged” over.
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It depends on how you interpret the part about ‘exploiting an unintended feature for personal gain.’ The fact they patched it seems a pretty clear indication it was an unintended feature. Also, the people exploiting the feature did gain a significant advantage over others in terms of TIME invested, the most valuable virtual commodity there ultimately is. So the criteria would appear to be met.
Obviously these things are handled on a case by case basis. What I would do personally is have GM’s monitoring for such dubious activities and just discretely issue warnings via whisper to individuals participating in any grey area exploit. Even if it were automated it would serve as a clear warning to stop before more serious steps were needed.
Or they could sticky an announcement feed on the forums that clarified stuff like that.
There doesn’t seem to be a strong emphasis on community interaction however, at least through the WoW forums. There isn’t a group of highly recognizable community managers staffed at Blizzard like at other game companies that regularly interact with the forum community on these type of issues.
I don’t know if that is because Blizzard as a company doesn’t recognize the value of such interactions, which seems doubtful, or perhaps they perceive them as too great a potential PR risk, it is hard to say. But it would go a long way to avoiding backlash over issues like this when they crop up.
Please explain how my “methodology was flawed” in the below test:
i.imgur.c0m/hJL8B9L.png - 6:45:32
i.imgur.c0m/5utum0v.png - 6:45:42
i.imgur.c0m/aIzi0Ir.png - 6:46:00
i.imgur.c0m/vNao2D8.png - 6:46:12
I performed four /who queries as quickly as the /who cooldown would allow, first with z-“Stormwind City” 29, then “Stormwind City” 29, then z-“Stormwind City” 29, then “Stormwind City” 29.
Chat with timestamps is included in each screenshot. About 10 seconds between each. (10s being the cooldown for /who – which BTW is one reason I think this “didn’t work” for some people. I suspect they weren’t waiting long enough to actually be able to perform another query, thus not getting updated results.)
In queries 1 and 3, the search result contains the same two people. In queries 2 and 4 (those without “-z”), the results contain the same 12 people, which included the 2 people from queries 1 and 3. An additional 2 people show up in query 4, likely because they just entered the zone.
The results in queries 2 and 4 presumably give us all the level 29 players in Stormwind. The results in queries 1 and 3 are clearly a subset of that group. Why? If not layering, then why were the same 10 people absent from queries 1 and 3, but present in 2 and 4?
- Everyone in queries 2 and 4 are in Stormwind, so this isn’t a matter of the “broader search” matching some other criteria. There is no guild called “Stormwind City Brawlers” or any nonsense like that. All of the players returned in queries 2 and 4 should have matched and been returned in all 4 queries.
- The search was narrow enough to never hit 50 people, so this isn’t a matter of truncation.
- The same people are in the 2nd and 4th query, so this isn’t a matter of people entering and leaving the zone. It’s absurd to claim the same 10 people absent in queries 1 and 3 but present in queries 2 and 4 all walked in, out, then back into the city together over the course of 30 seconds.
And for the record I don’t even really care if Blizzard was dishonest or wrong about this. It’s just driving me nuts that the /who results are so obviously telling, but people aren’t even looking at it, and instead just going, “LOL Blizz said it didn’t work ur dum.”
Blizzard flat out stated this doesn’t work. There you go.
You realize this is exactly what I said right? This just creates a proportional mega server. Where the AH is the aggregation of 1-2 servers. This currently exists on retail for groups of servers that are too small to sustain themselves.
If you have a player cap of 5k in OG vanilla and 20k in current classic, one layer would actually severely skew the economy. There would be the same amount of resources dispersed by a larger amount of players.
Layering with massive caps actually aligns resources generated per player close to OG vanilla than having one layer with 20k people.
The only problem here is layering abuse where one person can gain an advantage by jumping layers to cycle spawns.
Yep, worked for me too til it was patched on Sunday. I don’t really care whether the trolls believe it or not, they were the same trolls trolling the other thread and couldn’t bother to try it out themselves. Either that or they know and are just being ignorant on purpose.
Have you ever worked in technology? It’s entirely possible the dev thought it didn’t work but it did. Devs don’t always know how their stuff actually works. This is called a “bug” and it happens from time-to-time.
I think I presented some pretty conclusive evidence. /who clearly wasn’t working as they intended/described, but it is working that way now. If you can’t be bothered to even look at it or address the questions raised without just going, “nu uhhhhhh” then I don’t know what to tell you.
And you’re still wrong. Good night.
What a sad human being.
Don’t be sad that I don’t believe you over a gaming company that has been in business for decades and is extremely successful. Just because you’re wrong doesn’t mean I hate you.
My entire guild confirmed this as well. Blizzard absolutely silently hotfixed this after claiming it didn’t exist.