So if you haven’t heard, the mega-European based guild Ensidia downed the Lich King and got a world first doing it. This guild live for world firsts. For some of them this is their actual paid for employment. So this is a big deal for them. Congrats all round, right? Well, no. They then got suspended by Blizzard and had their achivement and loot cancelled because they used an exploit in the game to effect their world first. Apparently this is bad. Whether this is bad or not does not interest me. What arouses my attention is Blizzards definition of the word, exploit.

In a nutshell, a rogue used a saronite bomb, (yey rogues!), to bypass one of the encounters hurdles. The siege destruction nature of the saronite bomb caused the platform during the encounter to respawn, thus making the fight easier. This apparently, is what Blizzard calls an exploitation.

So a player uses a legitamite device that is found within the game, (and has been used by dps for some time now), against a fight mechanic. If this is banworthy then just about anything within the game can get you banned if Blizzard decides it is in their own best interest to do so. The player used an item found within the game on a boss fight. That’s all he did. If this act had unforseen consequences, then how is this the fault of the player? Particularly after all of Blizzards so-called testing beforehand. There are seige weapons in the game, and you design a platform that can be affected by seige weapons. It doesn’t sound like rocket science to me.

This reminds me of the Martin Fury incident earlier this year. A Blizzard employee makes a mistake and sends a player something that he shouldn’t have, and it is the fault of the player for using it? And don’t trot out examples such as if a bank puts more money in your account than you should have then you can’t legally use it. This is not a bank we’re talking about here.

It’s a game.

That we pay money to play.

You give me the game then I will use it. Give me an article within the game and I should be able to assume that I can use it. You gave it to me, I spent time getting it, there was no label saying, ‘do not use in such and such situation.’ Whenever such a situation comes up it is called a BUG, or in the case of the martin fury incident, a mistake. And it is Blizzards job to fix those bugs after they have been identified, not punishing a player, (or in this case an entire guild) for using them. It was an important encounter? This was the Lich King? Well, so fucking what? Spend less time making paid for vanity pets or designing ipad auction house apps and get something right that you have had since November 2008 to get right.

The real reason Blizzard is pissed off? They hoped that the Lich King would be a big mean mother fucker who would cause guilds grief for a long time. The reality? Blizzard didn’t put enough thought into the encounter, and it is punishing real life high profile players who happen to be the messenger. I will finish this little rant with the words of one of the Ensidia team:

“… There are no exploits in the game. Full stop. Period. End of discussion. There’s only retard designers and good players. If retard designs a building and good player uses bomb which does siege dmg, who in this case should get the “ban”? Any person with any common sense would fire that stupid designer so fast he’ll be doing mcdonals free games for the rest of his life…”

I have to say that I agree.

edit: It seems in my haste to read info on this that I made a mistake. The quote above is not from a member of Ensidia but from Larisa’s guild, over at The Pink Pigtail Inn. Here is the link to that post and my apologies to the team over there for not sourcing them.