"it's not cheating or an exploit, it's a clever use of game mechanics which Blizz tolerates and actually encourages"

[Ziryus-doomhammer (Ziryus)]

But what about the people who literally advertise that they are exploiting? Like people who are in general chat all day saying “can someone layer me for mobs please.” That literally translates to “can someone help me exploit.” Why aren’t they being banned?

Well that’s not really an exploit, that’s layering working as designed. Which blizzard has already announced they’ll be addressing by adding restrictions to layer hopping.

[Autrwarrior-atiesh]

No they weren’t. Blizzard devs told them before they even entered the raid that it was a bug in vanilla and now classic. They were given the go a head to do the raid again.

This bug occurred multiple times in vanilla.

[Lightonator-tichondrius]

Now use this logic for players who jump layers to AOE farm… stop being mediocre and hypocrite, its literal the same problem and abuse but somehow layers changing isnt “wrong” by blizzard

[Midorikuni-mankrik]

What part of the sentence the group waited for confirmation from the devs that it was an unintended bug and that they could do the bosses again.

So they willingly gave a raid double the loot from bosses? Because they didn’t take the items apparently.

The items weren’t deleted, according to Esfand a moment ago.

Seems a little unfair for the other players doing raids, no?

[Zackin-moon-guard]

The key factor here is intent. Did the player do something with the specific intention of causing a glitch to occur, and did they do it order to exploit said glitch for their own benefit?

I think it’s important to change the wording, since judging by the rest of your post, you punish based on methodology and intent.

Doing things that are legitimate gameplay but may not quite be yielding intended results is not something that you have historically held players accountable for. It’s why the dungeon XP bug a week or so ago didn’t get people into trouble - although it’s unconventional to run trivial dungeons with 10 players instead of the usual 5, it’s completely legitimate gameplay that happened to be yielding greater rewards than intended. It’s also why the XP Potion bug involved account penalties; because breaking an item that you should only be using once an hour into multiple stacks and using them all at once clearly requires both intent and methodology.

Your “One Weird Trick”/“Very Weird Stuff” phrases support this, and is also why I’m guessing you haven’t been punishing players for “layer abuse”. Switching layers is legitimate gameplay, but people know they can take advantage of it for a benefit.

The question is when knowledge of the glitch itself becomes facilitation. For example, say someone innocently stumbles onto a glitch and then 1,000 players follow suit. Can you really hold the first few players harmless and punish the rest who actively sought to exploit it? Close call.

Lately they seem to be taking the route of penalties based on severity. To use my potion example from before, it’s discovery could have easily been encountered by accident. All it would have taken is someone to have sorted their inventory with the first one still ticking and then used the extra one with the last few minutes left to maintain full uptime. I doubt people who had it happen to them once or twice and were running 2 potions instead of just 1 for a few minutes had anything happen to them. The ones who discovered it, published it, and then decided to sneeze on a quest and level 10 times were punished.

Same logic can probably be extrapolated here.

[Lionhearth-aerie-peak]

what we need are bans and public ones

[Autrwarrior-atiesh]

Have you seriously not been keeping up.

Blizzard already posted a statement that they are bringing restrictions into layer hoping.

[Nagual-smolderweb]

What part of: they didn’t deserved that loot you don’t get. It wasn’t supposed to be there.

Why do them have the privilege to loot the bosses twice?

[Hydra-grobbulus-664006]

I agree this was mistake to allow Esfand to loot. Gear should be removed. Streamers already have an entitlement assumption. Equal justice Equal law.

Bad precedent allowing their guild to loot twice.

[Nightpain-earthen-ring]

Don’t delete their items, delete their accounts.

[Amtrack-mugthol (Amtrack)]

The temple of salt is at it’s max capacity today that is for sure.

[Kylekatarn-grobbulus]

WE MUST HAVE PUBLIC EXECUTIONS FOR ALL INVOLVED IN HACKING!

See how stupid that sounds when you rephrase it?

Not. Gonna. Happen

[Autrwarrior-atiesh]

The bug was in vanilla to. You just didn’t have streamers with thousands of viewers.

Back than blizzard didn’t punish those people either as it was nothing the players did. So yes they got to run it again. I remember a few times it happened personally. Blizzard isnt in the market to punish those who just got lucky cause of a bug. Nothing more.

[Daimonas-fizzcrank (Daimonas)]

Did the player do something with the specific intention of causing a glitch to occur

The players used the game’s documented mechanic, called “layering”, to gain advantage over others who also also used it, for example, to loot the Gurubashi Arena chest multiple times during a single spawn event.

The 2004’s definition of “explit” is “using an undocumented game feature”. This was completely documented.

did they do it order to exploit said glitch for their own benefit

No, they did it to let their in-game characters gain benefit, without actually gaining financial benefit for it, selling their earned gold or accounts, or anything like that.

[Bovini-azuresong]

I’m still hoping Blizzard will make clever use of administration mechanics and start banning accounts that actively and repeatedly used the exploits. Ban them without distinction. Streamers and regular players alike.

[Leecher-myzrael]

It makes me smile when Blizzard get’s right to the point and shuts it down. Good times!

[Hydra-grobbulus-664006]

For sure. Probably because of the all the layer-hopping exploiters claiming it was “in-game mechanics” for the past 3 weeks with complete arrogance.

[Nekrage-auchindoun]

Someone mentioned Esfand’s random MC reset in this thread, which is a pretty clean example of the other end of the spectrum. In that case, they just turned up to raid and the instance had been reset. They didn’t do anything intentional to cause it or go looking for reproduction steps so they could abuse it - in fact, they reported it to us and didn’t continue until they got confirmation that it was out of their control (and that we wouldn’t consider it an exploit if they cleared).

Ok so they didn’t exploit it intentionally yet they still benefited from it causing an imbalance in the amount of RAID LOOT acquired on that server.

Are you saying that you plan to allow them to keep the extra gear they earned because of this?

[Deerhoof-ysera]

Yep, I pretty much read that as, “This is our excuse to give streamers a pass despite streaming themselves exploiting and encouraging others to do the same.”

[Gravity-faerlina-630516]

his ended up being longer than I expected so I’ll wrap it up with one last caveat: there is a lot of context and nuance that goes into these situations, and they’re not usually as cut and dry as these t

yah okay, we’ll see - judgement calls eh? sounds biased and probably just a cover up for what the rest of us refer to as “streamer benefits”