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Like many players that try to get the last bit out of their profession choice, some Ensidia players rolled engineering for the extra few dps they can tickle out with it. So, what happened? During the Lich King encounter Valkyrs grab players, pick them up and drag them to the side. Some of the sides fall and you have less time to kill the Valkyr, before players drop to death.

The use of Saronite Bombs default the sides as being available again, even if they were gone before.

Right after the kill we got this blue post:

We just made a hotfix that disables the siege damage dealt by Saronite Bombs and the Global Thermal Sapper Charge. The siege damage of the bombs was causing the Frozen Throne platform to rebuild, which greatly decreases the difficulty of the encounter.

We’ll reenable the siege damage in a later update when the issue with the Frozen Throne is fixed.

Daelo
Lead Encounter Designer

Ensidia replied on their website:

„Yes it seems this bug does relate to our kill. We had no idea that our Rogues using Saronite Bombs in their rotation (as they always do) was causing it and thusly it occured every try we did. Short version, we’re not going to stop trying the boss when all we are doing is playing our normal game. It would be nice if these kinds of things, much the same as Holy Wrath on Anub, were tested before release.

It does make the fight easier, but we are 100% sure it would have died either way. It only affects one of the easier phases.

As a side note this only occured in 25 man.“

Of course we can’t really know what happened, but if a structure rebuilds it is obviously not the intended behaviour. On MMO-Champion forums they stated that this bug happened only on a few tries and they just went on killing the Lich King.

I can fully understand that, after all it is not Ensidia’s job to blow their tries on the Lich King encounter to find and write a bug reports about these things. We are talking about a bug that should not have been in the encounter the first place, a bug that again the Blizzard QA failed to notice and a bug that could have been caused by hundreds of factors.

A few minutes ago Muqq posted on his Blog on Ensidia:

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Hello friends,

I got suspended today for supposedly and blatantly exploiting the Lich King encounter in 25-man mode. Here’s the mail:

Date of Violation: 03/02/2010

Character Name Involved: Muqq
Type of violation: Exploitation – Abuse of in-game mechanics or glitches with intent to exploit or cheat in World of Warcraft.
Details: Use of Saronite Bombs to bypass The Lich King fight mechanics Consequences for Account: Account suspended for 72 hours, all items and achievements gained removed

Greetings,

We are writing to inform you that we have had to place a warning on your World of Warcraft account and temporarily suspend it. It is with regret that we take this type of action, but it is in the best interests of the World of Warcraft community as a whole, and for the integrity of the game. The use of these items bypassed a major portion of the encounter, significantly reducing the difficulty in a clear abuse of game mechanics. After your suspension has expired, you will be able to access the World of Warcraft servers again.

Please note that should any further violations of our Rules and Policies occur, this incident will be taken into consideration when determining the consequences to your account. This could include further warnings, account suspension or account termination.

We strongly suggest you review our current Rules and Policies to avoid further action in the future, they can be found at:
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/policy/

You can also find further information on the different levels of account penalty we can apply at: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/policy/accountpenalties.html

If you have any further enquiries regarding your account status, please use the webform at the following address:
http://eu.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml?lan=en

Please do not reply to this email as you will receive an automated response.

Regards,

English Game Master Team
Blizzard Europe

First of all, I took the time to log onto the account management page and discontinue my payment plan. It’s been a long and good 5 years and 2 months since day 1 of the US release of World of Warcraft. Many good memories were made, and fun times were had. That’s over now. My subscription runs out of February 21st, which marks the last day of World of Warcraft for me.

Looking back, moving from Final Fantasy X! to WoW was a big step, and there’s times that I regret making that decision, while on occasion I was happy to have taken the step. World of Warcraft was different back then. It was new, challenging and interesting. undoubtedly though, it was nowhere near as feature-rich as it is today, but that didn’t matter back then. The game was a continuation of EverQuest, a game most of the senior development staff of World of Warcraft are familiar with on a very familiar basis. Many of them played the game for years, and I can see that it served as a major inspiration when I look at what World of Warcraft was when it was released. Being an avid EverQuest player myself during a time, It drew me in further into the game.

Things have changed since those days, changed a lot. The game stopped being that fun. Less challenges were present in the game, and as we got through TBC and more so in WotlK, homogenization started to rear its ugly face in World of Warcraft. Everyone running around with identical gear, looking the same, doing the exact same things. With arenas, changes were made on a monthly basis that affected the way classes were developed, and subsequently also lead to how PvE was being done in the game. It got stale, predictable and repetative. The whole notion of hybrids in the midst of all this was just a fucking slap in the face by Blizzard. If you’re going to remove everything unique and interesting about the classes, at least make them equal in the roles that they are performing.

Their idea of hybrid was something taken from classes in EverQuest, where people played classes that were jack of all trades, master of none, or very specialuzed roles, such as a pure buffer (bards etc). Classes that existed for one purpose, and nothing else. They removed most of those in WotlK, but still stick with the notion that hybrids somehow offer something special just because they have the ability to respec to a different role. Kind of a strange taken on the whole thing, considering what they’ve already to make it easy in leveling and gearing up characters on the same account, with more and more things being accountbound rather than characterbound. Two-faced by Blizzard in my opinion. Removed the boundary between characters on one hand, and at the same time claim hybrids needs to be penalized because they have the option of respeccing to perform different roles that a simple log out/log in would take care of.

Let’s face it. This game is boring for veterans. The only reason it’s still being played is because there has never been good alternatives during these 5 years. Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and Aion fucking flopped like shit. Really developers, if you want to make an MMO, don’t go and fucking try to copy WoW. If people wanted to play WoW, they’d play WoW, not your shitty gimp ass version of it. Let it be a lesson to all you developers out there.

Anyway, back to the subject. This was as good time as any to drop this game and move on. Had been considering it for a while, and I always said to Buzzkill and the gang that I was just waiting for the sign. A sign from heaven to guide me on my way. Today, I received it. I doubt we’ll ever get a perm-ban, as the loss of PR from banning topguilds is going to hurt their subscription numbers much more than quelling angry cries of the fucking noobs in this game ever would. Really, if you don’t know shit about this game, just shut the fuck up and do something else. You level 1 fuck posters and the forums can honestly go f yourselves, since you’re too shit to know even the basics of this game.

Finally dear Blizzard:

Fix your goddamn buggy bull##@% half-assed encounters. The amount of time and effort we dedicated to get through Wrath of the Lich king and Icecrown to see this guy die and take a turn at the Arthas is just sick. To finally see him die only to have the ENTIRE raid banned is simply an insult. It’s cheap enough to make a bugged fucking encounter, but to ban people when they do not know what’s causing the bugs is just a fucking joke. Whoever came up with this sheer *fisting* of an idea can go fucl themselves. Do me a favor so I don’t waste my guild’s time on this kind of jackass ##@%-fest again, send me an email at mupp@gavle.to when you decide to A) Implement an encounter that wasn’t designed by a retarded chimp chained to a cubicle B) Get a Quality Assuarance Department C) Actually beta test the !**#ing thing and D) Patch it live. And please for god’s sake — do it in the order I laid out for you. Don’t worry, I won’t charge you a consulting fee on that one. And for good luck you might as well E) Pull your heads out of your asses. While you’re at it rename the game to World of Betacraft.

Rethink your fucking bullshit. Fix all the buggy motherfucking ICC encounters (I suggest you let whoever made the Blood Queen one do this since that dude apparently laid off the crack the rest of you were smoking). Fix fucking arenas, or better yet, remove that shit. Fix heroic modes (just guessing it’s !**#ed up considering your track record). Don’t have the resources to fix this stuff? Move the ENTIRE Cataclysm team over to fixing Icecrown Citadel AND DO IT NOW. If you don’t fix this shit, you jackassess will be the only ones playing the Cataclysm.

You got 1 week.

Thank you Blizzard, for these 5 years, but also, fuck you Blizzard, for these 5 years.

I just got banned, and I liked it.

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A few years ago I would have been sure that blizzard did investigate it thoroughly, but seeing the customer service go down more and more I am not so sure if Blizzard lives up to the quality of service they would like to be. A friend got banned 2 weeks ago, when I borrowed him 10k gold for his 25 Saronite. BAM – suspicous online trading activites. 1 week later they excused and gave a few hours free play time, less than he was banned for.

We can never be sure what exactly happened there, but I find it very plausible that Ensidia did not realize what was causing the platforms to rebuild. I guess every competetive guild would have just filed it under „buggy design“ and went on competing for first kills.

Edit:

Just found out that the last part in Muqq’s rant was made with this in mind:

http://www.legacyofsteel.net/oldsite/arc27.html

Scroll down to April 13th:

Anger Is An Energy, Saturday, April 13, 2002 —  tigole

Fix your goddamn buggy bullshit half-assed encounters.  The amount of time we dedicated to get our keys to see this guy die and take a turn at the Emperor is just sick.  To finally see Blood die only to have the ENTIRE raid DT’d from anywhere in the room was simply an insult.  Blood dies, there are two earrings on the corpse, yet no matter where you are in the room, the Emperor DT’s.  So congrats rot on those.  It’s cheap enough to make a mob DT in the first place.  But to have his agro radius extend to the entire room is ridiculous.  So let me get this straight — and this is how you guys envisioned this in San Diego:  You spend months farming keys to get up to the room.  Months farming Shissar Bane weapons (and the recipe is where?).  You kill Blood while dealing with 8 other snakes in the room.  And immediately after that fight you’re supposed to engage the DEATHTOUCHING-FROM-ANYWHERE-IN-THE-ROOM Emperor along with the 8 snakes?  Whoever came up with this sheer *fisting* of an encounter can go fuck themselves.  Do me a favor so I don’t waste my guild’s time on this kind of jackass shit-fest again, send me an email at tigole@legacyofsteel.net when you decide to A) Implement an encounter that wasn’t designed by a retarded chimp chained to a cubicle B) Get a Quality Assuarance Department C) Actually beta test the fucking thing and D) Patch it live.  And please for god’s sake — do it in the order I laid out for you.  Don’t worry, I won’t charge you a consulting fee on that one.  And for good luck you might as well E) Pull your heads out of your asses.  While you’re at it rename the game to BetaQuest since you’ve used up you’re alotted false advertising karma on the Bazaar and user interface scam of ’01.

Fix the Emperor encounter.  Fix Seru.  Rethink your time-sink bullshit.  Fix all the buggy motherfucking ring encounters (I suggest you let whoever made the Burrower one do this since that dude apparently laid off the crack the rest of you were smoking).  Fix the VT key quest.  Fix VT (just guessing it’s fucked up considering your track record).  Don’t have the resources to fix this stuff?  Move the ENTIRE Planes of Power team over to fixing Shadows of Luclin AND DO IT NOW.  If you don’t fix Luclin, you jackassess will be the only ones playing the Planes of Power.

That is actually quite funny to throw his own words at Tigole  and puts the post of Muqq into a new light 😀