Ensidia’s 72-hour ban; or, Blizzard gets everything it wants for free
Loading ...(Largely copied from my comment on this WOW.com post.)
Yesterday, leading raid guild Ensidia claimed the world-first normal-mode 25-man kill of the Lich King. Last night, it was revealed that they’d used – knowingly or not – a bug that made one part of the encounter significantly easier. Early this morning, according to a blog post by raid member Muqq, they received 72-hour bans for using the exploit, and the achievements and items they gained from the encounter were stripped from the characters who participated in the kill.
Here’s the thing: It’s not about how easy the exploit is. It’s not even about whether Ensidia knew.
This is, to put it bluntly, almost universally a public relations coup for Blizzard. And Ensidia’s doing exactly what Blizzard wants them to do, whether they’re doing it consciously or not.
Consider:
Blizzard hasn’t publicly announced the ban. They know they don’t have to. They know that Ensidia’s going to rear up and complain about it. The people who care – the people who are gunning for firsts, the people who want to know about the fights ahead of time, the people who might exploit – now know that the top guild in the world isn’t immune from consequences; why should they think they will be?
Consider:
Blizzard says “We know about this bug and we’re fixing it as fast as we can.” hours before Ensidia says “They need to fix this bug!” All Ensidia’s doing is highlighting the fact that Blizzard’s on the job. Ensidia aren’t idiots. They know that an encounter that isn’t tested on the PTR is going to have bugs. There’s an in-game way to report bugs for a reason. In their rush to World First, they found a bug, and instead of being responsible as gamers and testing and reporting the bug, they were responsible to their sponsors and their egos and blew through the encounter anyway, and then downplayed the bug after they’d claimed World First.
Consider:
By saying “pull everybody off Cataclysm and put them on fixing this encounter”, Ensidia is saying two things: “the Lich King encounter is really important and everybody should want it to be right as soon as possible”, and “Cataclysm is huge, and its developers are the best at Blizzard”.
Ensidia isn’t even really taking heat – they just cool their heels for 72 hours and everybody rallies behind them for being underdogs. (Look at the comments here!) And Blizzard gets everything it wants – and all it took was a 72-hour ban. (Hell, I’m tempted to think that they knew about the bug and left it in on purpose.)
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I imagine the debate will go on for sometime as to whether or not they deserved the ban.
Personally, I think most raid level players know an exploit when they see one and players at the level of Ensidia should definitely know.
I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that they had members recently leveling Engineering.
Then there’s the fact they’ve been known to use exploits previously so, all in all, I’d say Blizzard has…finally…done the right thing.
Theliana´s last blog: Rise and Fall of the Lich King: World of Warcraft Developer Interview
[Reply]
Ensidia shouldnt have to report in game bugs. And do tell me a time where you opened a ticket and didnt wait 2 days for it to be responded to. It comes down to the fact that Ensidia didnt make the bug, its was a bug that shouldve been forseen. All Blizzard cares about is shoving new content out as fast as they can w/o makeing it worth while. Look at all the other end game bosses that blizzard released with bugs, Yogg, C’Thun, Kael, the list goes on. And it shouldnt be players fault for finding these.
[Reply]
Chris Anthony Reply:
February 11th, 2010 at 11:58 AM
Hi vlad, thanks for stopping by.
As a rule, I find that GMs respond to my tickets within a few hours, even when I ask to talk to a GM rather than just report an issue. Ensidia has it even better: it’s well-known, in the community and to Ensidia themselves, that Blizzard has GMs specifically watching world-first attempts. A member of a raid making a world first attempt would have a response within seconds.
As for the bugs themselves, I guarantee that every encounter in the game, even those with non-unique mobs, has bugs. They may never be encountered, but they’re there. Sometimes they’re not fixable without breaking something else; sometimes they’re minor and not worth delaying the patch for; sometimes, it’s just that nobody found them. Blizzard did extensive internal testing on the Lich King encounter, as they have on every other major boss encounter, but sometimes bugs just slip through. In this case, it occurred to nobody in the Blizzard testing team to use siege damage on the val’kyr adds. When they found out about the bug, they disabled the means of dealing the siege damage while they worked on fixing the bug itself.
Meanwhile, Ensidia knew there was a bug and used it to their advantage, even if they didn’t know how it worked. They are very, very well aware that when you know there’s a bug and you use it to your advantage, that’s exploiting. No, they didn’t have to report the bug – but they had a choice between reporting, not reporting and continuing to exploit, and not reporting and not continuing. Two of those would have resulted in Ensidia being allowed to keep playing. They chose the one that didn’t.
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