Cross-faction collusion is pretty frowned upon. If reported enough Blizzard would probably take action.
That being said as soon as that rogue goes away and the horde just decide to hang out there indefinitely then it’s back to being free game.
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I’m probably going to hate myself for even bothering responding to this but the answer is probably. Or at least up to the entity who sets the law, in this case Blizzard and cross-faction collusion is frowned upon and necessary to create a boat ticket selling scenario. Intent has always mattered for discerning punishment or action in pretty much any aspect of life. That’s why some people get away with shady stuff because they have plausible deniability and other situations where, for instance, a campaign violates campaign finance laws, but they are not punished as after review they determine it was not intentional.
Hell in the real world in a lot of cases all that really matters is how well the attorneys argue their side to the judge who is interpreting the law based on how he views it and there are plenty of instances where the courts, especially the lower ones, rule against the precedence. As one of co-workers says “You can have the most iron-clad case, but if you don’t argue it properly you’ll lose”
And FTR if I was in the game of selling boat tickets I’d be using a priest to mind control off anyone who didn’t want to pay.
Foremost. Cross-Faction collusion USED to be frowned upon. As far as I can tell, in modern WoW, it is all but encouraged with features built-in like Real-ID. The assumption that “cross-faction collusion is bad” is an assumption that needs to be questioned.
If you honestly believe that there is a difference between a guy trying to “peddle tickets” or not…then does it instantly become okay to kill everyone if that guy logs off? He’s no longer selling tickets, so it becomes okay to engage in PvP again?
To me that sounds absolutely absurd that one is bannable and the other is completely fine…and being able to toggle between the two.
Especially since you can just kill the guy in regular PvP and get on the boat…and problem solved, the way it should have been solved.
In the case of classic they are adhering to old-school rules. They eventually removed PvE to PvP restrictions, but they’re enforced in classic.
If we work on the assumption that cross-faction collusion is an actionable then the offense isn’t necessarily that the Alliance player is peddling tickets or that the Horde is killing people who won’t pay. The offense is that to pull this setup off you need an Alliance player to tell people that to get through they have to pay and to accept the gold and you need the Horde to kill and not kill (or mind control or whatever) based on payment. This requires cross-faction collusion and the offense is committed.
This is why I said that as soon as the Alliance player is removed from the equation the entire situation changes because now they truly are just WPvP griefing.
This is a red herring argument. Being able to find a way around a predicament doesn’t make it any less illegal. Pretend you have a mafia in your town that extorts people to pay a toll to cross a bridge and you have the option of going to another bridge that they aren’t monitoring. You have a solution in front of you that may not even be inconvenient to you, but that doesn’t suddenly make the mafia’s position any less illegal.
Its old game mechanics, but new rules. We’re not suddenly governed by the 15 year-old Terms of Service just because we’re playing the simulacrum of a 15 year old game. We’re playing under the modern Terms of Service which has no prohibition with cross faction communication…otherwise everyone using Read-ID should be banned.
I cannot work under this assumption until you can show that it is…in fact, a bad thing.
Except its not illegal. Its PvP. This is EXACTLY what PvP servers were set up for. And these npcs were designed to be PvP hotspots. Saying its a red herring that you can solve this problem with PvP is denying the whole point of PvP servers.
In your mafia analogy. It would be like that…but in a universe where murder was not only legal, but also the encouraged method to solve disputes. Sure, they mob might be trying to extort you under pain of murder…but murder was fine anyways. And you could always just murder them in return since that is how we solve problems in that universe.
I mean ToS is different than CoC. The ToS is largely about making you agree to certain criteria while the CoC focuses specifically on gameplay and the CoC is very broad by design. In fact the CoC just says cheating of any kind is not tolerated and the article finishes by saying if you think your actions might violate the CoC then reconsider it.
The point I was making though is that Blizzard has been very clear that Classic and Retail are different games and are handling them differently due to the way the games work. They don’t need to justify this to anyone.
Sure you can because this whole discussion started on the premise of something you said:
There’s two faucets to this conversation.
-Does intent of the activity change the response it gets?
-Is cross-faction collusion approved of by Blizzard?
The first one isn’t really debatable. Intent always matters, that’s why people who act recklessly get charged with manslaughter, people who kill in a fit of rage get charged with a crime of passion and people who premeditate a murder get charged with first degree murder. All three result in the death of someone, but all three intents were different.
Now secondly I got off my lazy butt to put this one to bed as well.
The post acknowledges that they are not receptive to cross-faction collusion and that they would generally frown upon this behavior, but given the nature of why this is being done they are not taking action on it…for now. They are entirely leaving the door open to changing it down the road if something changes.
The fact of the matter is that blatant cross-faction collusion abuse just doesn’t seem to be happening all that often to really test Blizzard on this issue. I’m not even entirely convinced the OP really had this happen to him and it might have been a bait thread, but who knows. Regardless we can still talk about the hypothetical.
I haven’t said anything was illegal about the PvP aspect, in fact I’ve been ignoring it entirely because it’s not part of the illegal activity.
It’s a red herring because it sidesteps the actual discussion which is not about PvP. The discussion is about the legality of cross-faction collusion.
There is no buts, my mafia analogy is rock solid in explaining that just because a solution exists for you does not change the legality of an act that caused you to consider that solution.
If cross faction collusion is against the rules. Ban me and everyone else who uses Real-ID to talk to the other faction.
Because i use it it without remorse.
Going 66mph in a 65 zone is illegal, but a cop isn’t going to bother pulling you over because he has bigger fish to fry.
That’s the equivalency you’re trying to argue here when you try to broadly compare some RiD chatter and people colluding with the opposite faction to extort other players.
im pointing out the absurdity in claiming that something that is built into the very wow client could be considered against the rules.
Adding someone to RiD isn’t against the rules. I don’t think you can do this against the opposing faction either, but I’m not 100% sure on that.
You can argue it’s hypocrisy if you want that they give us the tools to be able to collude far more easily in 2020 than we had back in 2004, but they are separate talking points. The fact of the matter is it’s pretty much impossible to police everyone to begin with and they’re only going to target people who heavily abused it.
You most certainly can real-id cross faction and i use it regularly.
And i don’t think im arguing hypocrisy, just using the feature as an example that modern day WoW has no prohibition on cross faction communications or coordination…and in-fact has built in features to make it easier.
Ok well I’ll take your word for it, I google’d it and it sounded like you could on retail, but it was hidden in classic and only possible if you knew the API string. Realistically I’d think Blizzard should disable that on Classic because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to allow it.
The point I’m making is there’s a huge difference between you RiDing an Alliance player and saying “Hey I’ll stay on this side of the area and you stay on that side so we don’t compete for mobs” and players using it to be able to efficiently extort other players. You can argue that both are wrong (and I’d say you’re right), but the reality is that policing all those kinds of activities is simply not feasible even if they wanted to.
I am under the impression that the whole premise is that cross faction communication/coordination is the sticking point here.
Iv’e shown an explicit example where its fine.
Do we now just cherrypick which kinds of collusion we like and dislike?
No, Blizzard does.
And FYI you haven’t. I did with the RC decision Blizzard made.
You doing something and not getting actioned or caught doesn’t make it fine.
Sounds like a poor way to enforce rules…which is why is the exact reason “cross faction collusion” is not a thing anymore. It was impossible to enforce with things like vent back in the day and discord now.
Rofl okay. Then ban me for using Real ID /shrug.
I literally pointed out a direct quote where they said they do not approve of cross-faction collusion. You can be ignorant if you want.
I’m not Blizzard.
They dont like it, but that behavior still exists. They have done nothing to address it months later. For all intents-and-purposes they’re fine with it.
They have gone out of their way to let us know they’re aware of it…and have made the active choice to do nothing.
For that specific scenario. That doesn’t suddenly make all scenarios fine.
I’m not aware of any situation in the modern epoch of WoW where they’ve done or could do anything about it. That is why I am so comfortable in stating cross faction communication is fine.
And if it really is against the rules…but they can never and never will enforce it. Then is it really against the rules?
Once again you’re equating broad/general communication with the specific example of people colluding to extort other players. As I said earlier this type of extreme collusion is not overly rampant and does not seem to happen to test the boundaries.
The fact is Blizzard’s statement made it crystal clear that the concept of cross faction collusion goes against the spirit of the game and they’re not fans of it, they just chose not to act on the current RCOTDS situation and gave their reasons why while still leaving the door open to change their mind later.
Nothing left to prove here, if you’d like to disprove me in that all levels of collusion are allowed I’d encourage you to orchestrate a boat ticket mafia that involves cross faction collusion and let me know how it goes.