25 Lich King Ban

[Jartras]

So Ensidia got a 3 day ban for supposedly exploiting the encounter. Apparently high end rogues who are engineer's use saronite bombs for the damage boost. Well, apparently it caused the floor to reappear and make part of the fight easier.

Now, they had done Lich King 10 man, and this had not happened. Some say they should have known there was something going wrong, but even if they did, they would have no idea of telling what was causing it. On the logs there's no siege damage listed from the bombs.

Did it make the encounter easier? Probably.
Did the deserve a ban? Depends. We can't really ever know. No one else was there.
Should they have lost the loot and achievement? Yes. The encounter was not completed correctly.
Was it their fault? No really. Blizzard never PTR'ed this encounter. Use of saronite bombs isn't something new in high end raiding guilds. If this had been PTR'ed, this bug would have been found.

What I think they should have done was like, hey guys, we realize you beat it bugged, so we're taking away the loot you got, and the achievement, but respawned him for you, go give it another shot, thanks for finding the bug.

Now, either someone reported it as a "hmm this is weird" or blizzard was watching or checked their logs or something. If it was reported, why is Ensidia at fault (they were the only people there, so they must have reported it.) If Blizzard had some GMs watching them fight, why didnt they pop in and be like, "oh hey, that's weird. Don't pull, we need to hotfix something"? If they were going by logs alone, they have no way of knowing if it was intentional or not.

Thoughts? Comments? Tr011z?

[Spirithoof]

Ensidia is the first (and I believe only) group to kill the Lich King so I'm sure Blizzard can easily bring up how they did it...logs ftw.

My questions are...
Did Ensidia discover the bug as they got the kill or did they discover the bug, wipe a few times, and then use the bug to their advantage? One is an accident, one is a deliberate exploit. Apparently Blizzard thinks it was deliberate.

[xeroin]

Not knowing the fight or seeing the fight, having the floor re-appear suggests that the floor disappears during the fight. And of course, it probably disappears in random locations. If that is the case, I would assume the bombs would have to be targeted specifically to an area to cause it to re-appear. If that is the case, it is clear exploitation as it is not working as intended (tm).

The opposite of this is if the siege damaged caused by the bombs (to the LK) causes random floor locations to respawn.

Of course, assuming the floor drops out randomly etc. etc etc.

Wow.. what a total fluff message.

X.

[rambo]

I have an issue, and have stated this before, with blizzard punishing people for their own mistakes. This was a programing error, the user should not be held responsible for Blizzards lack of attention to detail. If anything they should look internal and punish the group that made the error in the first place.

Just my 2 cents.

Now I do think they should take the kill, loot, and achievement away, but a ban, come on....look in the mirror blizzard.

[Jartras]

From a programming perspective, you never ever catch all of your own bugs. You just dont. As for the other things. They supposedly wiped a few times, each time this seemed to happen seemingly at random. On the 4th attempt they killed the lich king, presumably standing on the floor that mysteriously reappeared.

[growp]

Based on the logs from mmo-champion it's clear Ensidia didn't do anything out of the norm. Ensidia provided a historical breakdown of previous raids where their rogues used Saronite bombs in order to maximize DPS. From that perspective, it doesn't seem like there was an intent to exploit. Then again, is intent a mitigating factor? The fact remains that a bug was exploited (multiple times at that). I suspect Blizzard probably expected the raid leader for such a hard core guild to raise the bug immediately. Ignorance may be a plausible defense for a causal guild. Not so much for a hard core guild like Ensidia. My two cents.

[Spirithoof]

Should they have lost the loots and achievements? Sure, they didn't complete the kill.
Should they have gotten a 3day ban? This is where intent comes in for me. If they didn't know what was causing the bug then they have as much right to try and kill the boss as anyone and a ban is overreaction. If they knew what was causing the bug and still used the techniques then they were exploiting and deserve a ban.

[xeroin]

In a way, Blizzard should be like "thanks for doing additional QA for us" and just take the loot / achievement away from them. But we know that is not how it works.

If Ensidia realized that the Saronite bombs were assisting them favourably in the encounter then they should have reported it. To continue would be dishonest and it appears Blizzard feels that way. At the same time, they were probably caught up in the "world's first kill" moment.

X.

[Lauvien]

To throw some more information out that I've gathered from the various similar conversations going on everywhere.

During the fight, concentric rings of the platform despawn, making the platform slowly smaller. Valkyr spawn, grab raid members and try to drop them over the edge, you have to kill them before they do so (think Kologarn's hand). If the rings are stopped from despawning, they get dropped not over the edge, but onto the platform again, so why bother dpsing the Valkyr (and this comes directly from Ensidia's statement). This appears to be the focus of an entire phase.

There also appears to be some kind of either "get out of the suck" or "get away from your friends" effect going off, with a larger platform that becomes more trivial.

I've also heard that to make this exploit work, you need to tank the LK in what would otherwise seem a "bad spot", off against the edge of the platform, but I haven't seen anything to prove or disprove that statement. I've also heard rumors that Ensidia streamed their attempts on 10-man LK, and that partway through an attempt, their vent went entirely silent, and then a few moments later, the feed was cut entirely. Considering the under-the-table dealings and general underhanded stories I've heard about Ensidia and their precursors over time, I chalk that up to "we found the bug in 10-man and immediately put a 25-man together, but we're claiming it wasn't in 10-man to make us look less guilty".

I don't really think this particular event was worthy of a suspension, but I think they've gotten away with stuff in the past that should have been a suspension.