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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© Noëlle for Duct Tape and a Prayer, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Achievements, Instances, Oops, Raiding

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So, sorry for misleading you – mea culpa.

For the record, you already have 6% from Enlightenment, and another 25% from Borrowed Time. Haste percentages stack multiplicatively (Haste Rating is additive, and then you multiply the percentage you get from HR into the rest of the haste percentages you have), so between Enlightenment and Borrowed Time you get 32.5% haste. Since haste is multiplicative, you can divide your target haste (1.50) by the existing haste (1.325) to get the haste you need; that’s 1.132, or 13.2% haste from gear and buffs. That ends up being a little under 433 Haste Rating. That’s still eminently do-able, but not nearly as simple as I’d made it out to be.

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© Noëlle for Duct Tape and a Prayer, 2009. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Oops, Priest

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