Comments on: Ensidia’s 72-hour ban; or, Blizzard gets everything it wants for free

By: Chris Anthony

Chris Anthony — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:58:19 +0000

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.

By: vlad

vlad — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:26:33 +0000

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.

By: Theliana

Theliana — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:14:21 +0000

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 =-.