Frostbolt, a World of Warcraft Blog

Has been a while after my last post, the mass bans affected us more than expected (this is taking in mind that after the mass bans incident two raiders of our guild got their accounts hacked), but we’re picking up.

But then, it makes me think, what is Ulduar? If you’ve been checking the updates for the past weeks you’d notice that, after the first week, the instance has been heavily nerfed, so encounters are basically a joke now.

Altho Algalon is not the last boss in Ulduar, unless you do all the hard modes and unlock him, and kill him, there’s no real merit in finishing Ulduar. Keep in mind that after he’s unlock you can only fight him for an hour per week.

While this is nice

Daelo:
Further adjustments are highly likely to some of the other encounters in Ulduar, but these were the highest priority encounters for us. We want to allow additional players to experience more of the cool Ulduar content.

After they took so long to put Ulduar (and all that supposed testing) Ulduar became some sort of tour place?

• Ulduar 10 man — Easy mode
• Ulduar 10 man — Hard mode
• Ulduar 25 man — Easy mode
• Ulduar 25 man — Hard mode

Heroic instances come to your mind? Having an heroic inside an heroic instance… that’s a nice new concept. Before Ulduar I don’t recall any instance that has been nerfed as much (and it’s still in nerfing process) as this one; how long until everything is on farm (easy-mode version) and people get bored again?

Daelo:
We’re currently in the process of making further difficulty adjustments via hotfix to the following encounters:

• Ignis the Furnace Master
• Razorscale
• XT-002 Deconstructor
• The Assembly of Iron
• Kologarn
• Auriaya

The difficulty of these encounters is being lowered in multiple ways. Some of the adjustments are live already, others will be live soon. Note that some of the spell tooltips for the encounter will not reflect the hotfixes being deployed until the next patch.

Maybe in the future we will have Raid Easy, Raid Medium, Raid Hard, Rare Legendary; the same thing of the same instance, for extra content; that is what will keep us busy (yeah, repeating the same fights with just “enhanced difficulty”).

It’s somehow dissapointing. I wish they made all those changes in PvP so my feral druid could rank 2k + (and some might say that there are ferals that have been able to do that, but if you compare the ratio with, lets say, Paladins and Death Knights, the story is different).

Gahlok
Frostbolt.com

As we were raiding Ulduar (this happened a couple of hours ago), after we killed Flame Leviathan and Razorscale, as we were about to do XT-002 Deconstructor I got kicked off the server, and most of my raid, with the message above.

I check several times my email, nothing there. I go check my World of Warcraft Account, and I read this

What the hell?!?! 4 days ban!??!?!

Let me construct this better. Last week, while we were doing Ulduar, there was a bug with one of the boss chests, specifically Thorim. After we killed someone in the raid found out the bug and kept getting Emblem of Conquest. As soon as more people in the raid realized about this, they kept doing it. I told them several times to stop doing it, but yeah, you know how it is.

I didn’t do anything wrong (and I bet there were others in the raid in the same situation as I am); the only badge I got off that chest was the single one you get when you loot it, and I don’t even know how they did it.

So the easiest thing for Blizzard to do, instead of investigating, they just mass ban everyone. It does annoy me because our server has been having so many issues, but then I guess that’s why the issues keep happening (so many restarts and extended maintenances for what?). Seriously, I’ve been playing this game for 5 years and I’ve never been banned before.

Later on, I get the email

Greetings,

Guild Name: Pro Baddies
Realm: Mal’Ganis

Account Action: 72 Hour Suspension
Offense: Bug Exploitation
Details: Intended Exploitation of Ulduar

The actions detailed above have been deemed inappropriate for the World of Warcraft by the In-Game Support staff of Blizzard Entertainment. During the course of our investigation, we discovered that your character was participating in instance exploitation and has received loot that was gained through illegitimate means.

They discovered that my character was participating in instance exploitation? Prove it. Because you can check the emblems I got, and you can track it easily. I don’t even have the achievements that happen after you get certain amount of them. So?

Then in the email they put a link and I read about Account Penalties, why am I almost at the top? I didn’t exploit, this is the first time ever this happens and they jump all the way to the top? Seriously, nice job, Blizzard, shows a lot about your team and your investigation.

72 Hour Suspension

72 Hour suspensions are assigned when a player needs to be removed from the game for an extended period of time or the player has repeatedly violated policy in a relatively brief period of time. 72 Hour suspensions are somewhat rare, as they are only given for serious policy violations or repeated policy abuse. The following are also true of 72 Hour suspensions:

• Serious account penalty
• Somewhat rare
• Extended service interruption

What!?!??! What happened with (1) Warning (2) 3 Hour Suspension (3) 24 Hour Suspension… and anything above it?

I remember back in time when Blizzard kept taking out hackers from Warcraft 2-3 and Starcraft, there was a lot of respect for them. But then, this happening, makes me wonder if all that people that they banned actually did something wrong, or they just did a “lets pick every account that starts from A to F and ban it, yeah, that would save us a lot of time, just copy and paste that email you have and send it to all of them“.

And this is how a company so famous and well known as Blizzard works. This is how a company with such “quality control” does their work. With 11.5 millions of suscribers, if they were a shabby company that would somehow make sense.

And if someone comes with “hey, you got pants last week, you bought it with emblems”, I was lucky that the screenshot didn’t get trashed with the rest earlier. These pictures are at full resolution without any resizing or editing at all.

Yep, I still want to know where they got their evidence and all the information for that investigation they did. Why do I even bother, do they even care?

For now I guess I’m going to be trying City of Heroes meanwhile, they also got a Mac Client. Hmmm… I could also go play some Tales of Symphonia for Wii.

Gahlok
Frostbolt.com