The first response we need from Blizzard is to acknowledge that this is an exploit. As in, a very concise and clear statement that exploiting layer hopping for personal gain is against the rules of the game.
Everything else should move on from there, including fixing the exploit, rolling back gains (including level XP aka World’s First 60, including MC clearing including World’s First MC clear). Lastly, suspensions should be made, and this absolutely includes streamers, specifically the extremely large ones that provide Blizzard with a constant flow of free marketing.
Blizzard is in a tough spot. For them to truly acknowledge this exploit means they need to take action against the massive free marketing they are receiving via Twitch streamers. Make no mistake, these streamers provide Blizzard with massive marketing efforts for free. If Blizzard bans these streamers then they are going to take a lot of heat.
It is a tough spot: A) Hurt the community but get free marketing (allow exploit + streamers) or B) Repair trust with the community, fix the exploit, suspend abusers (streamers) and lose free marketing.
For example, if you hopped 100 layers in 24 hours, this is likely an exploit. So you do a DB query of players who did 100 layer hops + gained ___ XP + gained ____ items, and with the query results you issue a ban.
Is 100 hops in 24 hours too much of a threshold to warrant exploitation of the game? Then do 50+ or 25+ or even 10+.
But in the end, it all boils down to database queries that return results and then acting upon the result set.
So no, it does not take massive manpower to individually go through the thousands upon thousands of exploiters. It is more of a database effort.
Will it take some time/energy/Blizzard-money to do this? Absolutely yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely yes.
I’m not sure what you mean, however, I encourage everybody to test things for yourself.
Do the two /who queries. See if the results are different. Based on what many people are seeing, including myself, you absolutely can tell what layer you are in and collaborate that with others, which is what people are doing right now to exploit layering for personal gain.
I wrote this post because Blizzard said it wasn’t possible, however, the data seems to disagree and show that it is possible.
Like if they were in a guild that started with Z, would show them. I actually didn’t know this was in the game forever? I’ll test this when I log on in an hour or so
So we solved the latency disparity.
I’m seeing different results now in wetlands. What I’m curious about is how do we know what you’re seeing is a layer disparity? We’d need more details on what exactly /who is searching through for keywords besides zone filtering.
I believe Blizzard more than these inconclusive tests.
Thanks for this! Now I really hope we have enough evidence of something weird happening that Blizzard can get in here and give us some clarifications. It’s ok to tell us that you were not sure what you were talking about earlier
It’s probably also a mix of your realm choice and not going to where most people go due to popular leveling addons (idk, somewhere on Eastern, in Blasted Lands?)
We got a lot of evidence on this thread of… something fishy going on, at the least. They say otherwise, I would like them to explain the results that we have on this thread, originally reported by OP.
