The Doggy Discount path to Paragon 100 is about to close, as Blizzard is working on a hotfix to stop pet kills in PvP from awarding experience. Lylirra was customarily thorough in her discourse:
In the meantime, since it’s not intended for pets summoned by players or items to grant experience, we encourage you to game responsibly and avoid exploiting this bug to gain an advantage. Not only can this potentially lead to your account being penalized (depending on the situation), but more importantly it’s not really fair to your fellow players. When exploited, bugs like this can negatively impact the enjoyment of others – which is why we’re working as quickly as we can to fix it, and why we’d appreciate your help in keeping the effects of the bug as minimal as possible until it’s resolved.
This issue was originally reported on our forums during 1.0.7 PTR testing; however, we unfortunately missed the reports before patch 1.0.7 was released, and as a result the bug went live. So, a big thank you not only to the players who reported the bug initially by posting, but also to those who helped bring it to our attention by contacting our Hacks team.
On that note, if you’re not sure how to report a bug or exploit, here’s a quick recap:
While not every report will receive a response, we sincerely appreciate everyone’s help in keeping us informed of possible issues as they arise.
For information on how to submit a good bug report, click here. To learn more about our exploitation policy, click here.
Not even trying to troll, I’m just a big fan of transparency when “penal[ties]” are involved, and am suggesting you could avoid a lot of heartburn by simply laying out the ban policy, rollback policy, etc. ahead of time.
Lylirra: Totally understand. It’s a legitimate concern. The best response to your question is actually covered by our exploitation policy, which I linked previously:
Bug Exploitation
Some bugs are minor and do not affect gameplay, but sometimes bugs can be used to provide an unfair advantage to certain players or negatively affect the game itself. An appropriate penalty for exploitation is determined by whether or not:
While certain exploits can be cut-and-dry, most are complicated beasts. Sometimes, players will use an exploit and not realize it. Sometimes, an exploit will exist, but it won’t be damaging to any other player or the economy. In those situations, our priority will always be to fix what’s wrong as quickly as we can so that the game is better for everyone (as opposed to calling down the banhammer). If someone is actively abusing an exploit, though, and doing so maliciously and knowingly, then yeah, we might step in — but it would likely be something that’s handled on a case-by-case basis. Again, our primary goal is it to improve the game environment, not get some sort of revenge, so whether or not someone is penalized really depends on the individual situation.
Even so, the best course of action if you know an exploit exists is not to use it. If you want to submit a report, you can (and we’d be thankful for it), but that’d be going above and beyond.
And somebody read the submissions from here: http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/submit/hacks.html Correct?
Lylirra: Correct, both our [email protected] and Hacks web form inboxes are reviewed. As noted, though, reports submitted via those outlets will not receive a response.
As you said it yourself, dev team knew about it, released it live and I bet many ppl already exploited game mechanic, that was implemented in the client via official patch.
Lylirra: On the contrary, I said that we did not know about the bug when the patch went live. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse in your mind, but it was issue on our end, and we’re already taking a look at our reporting processes to see how we can improve them to reduce the chances of something like this happening again.
We’re not infallible, though, and we may not catch every bug or report, but we can always do better. It means a lot to us that players submit bugs and report exploits, and we want to make sure they’re being utilized in the right ways.
So… are you guys happy to see the fix? Hoping the exploiting miscreants get smote for their sins? Or are you a bad evil exploiter who is sorry to see it go?
No matter where you stand on the those questions, I think we can all agree that it was nice that the game provided some reason to play a Witch Doctor, if only for a couple of weeks…