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…
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Penalizing for this bug is akin to penalizing people in D2 for desynching in pvp. It’s a bridge too far.
Lol flux, the pot shots at the witch doctor class really do not mean much coming from a monk player… everyone > monk still :O
“Hate hate hate hate hate”!
I’m going to start a WD pretty soon for my next HC char, so I’m just joking. After all, everyone knows that Wizards are the most useless and least fun char… Right?
Even with the lack of skill variety, WD is easily my favorite class for fun factor. 49 pickup radius with a skorn, or 69 with a thing of the deep = the cats ass. Grave injustice + circle of life with that kind of pickup radius is super duper fun and viable on any mp
Title of article calls it “cheating.” Poorly worded considering it requires the user simply to play to achieve it. And +1 to AxlStrife.
“it requires the user simply to play to achieve it.”
what do you mean exactly ?
people have not been “playing” with this “bug”
watch Moldran’s video form a couple of days ago
he lays an external hard drive on his mouse so that it constantly kills zombie dogs while he’s AFK
I don’t think its a bug or an exploit, but you certainly don’t have to play to gain tons of xp quickly
The issue isn’t the means by which you are automatically clicking or holding a mouse button. I can auto-click with my macro mouse or emulate it with a logitech keyboard.
The issue is zombie dogs awarding experience points for being killed. If that wasn’t intended then fix that. But I won’t believe that people(blizzard) are ignorant to the fact that players use such devices every day to play the game. And don’t call it a “cheat” as if to place the blame upon players instead of their QA process and not reading bug reports.
Blizzard didn’t want to fix on ptr then everyone should do this and not be penalized. Can’t fix bad devs.
I think the exploiters should be rolled back to the level that they were before they first abused the cheat.
I got a laugh out of the “please be nice and don’t impact other people’s gameplay” line. As if 99% of the internet is not based on being an anonymous Dbag… eh, maybe I’m just a cynic.
One of the main reasons I only play with my brother when I do decide to play online in any game at all
Don’t focus penalizing people who “cheat/exploid” to level up…make level up and FARMING, funny and WORTH…
So many newly minted paragon 100 WDs. Surely people will have fun now.
Hahahaha they screw it up again. They knew it and they let it go online?! You make me loose my last hopes on this game one by one with every new BS I read… c’mon Blizzy guys. You CAN do better. Wtf.
Nice to see the fix. Do not mind people staying after this exploit, even if there was a ban I couldn’t care less. Others being at paragon 100 does not affect my game play experience actually. And no, I have not done this exploit, I have some characters but none paragon 100.
basically blizzard fucked up by giving pvp kills xp,.. how could such an oversight be passing the QA department,.. lol.
So path of least resistance is ok with regards to alkaizer runs for exp, but pvp’ing zombie dogs is a no-no?
So basically its ok to do something easily over and over for exp, unless blizzard said that it’s not ok to do something over and over that is easy. Makes sense….
lol that’s a good one…one doesn’t even require you to be at the computer…big difference. Not like I care about the game right now, but please…
To me, this looks pretty much like “botting, the casual version”.
To NOT rollback, suspend or ban abusers of this would be pretty absurd.
Well said. I cosign the above.
I agree with punishing anyone who “automated” the exploit. Laying something on the mouse, or macroing, or full fledged botting. But that is all against the ToS on it’s own, and that’s why I’d be against such behavior. I disagree for people who just used the exploit but were actually at their computer. I don’t think they did anything wrong. I wouldn’t (and haven’t) done it, but it wasn’t clear that it wasn’t intended. The bug was pointed out in 1.0.7 PTR forum and went live anyways. So there is some argument that can be made that people thought it was intended for pets to give XP in PVP.
Telling them apart may be difficult, but not shouldn’t be impossible.
Let them keep their shiny “100” but remove all paragon bonuses for that character permanently. As in the stat bonuses AND mf/gf bonuses. Easier than determining a roll-back point for the many accounts that abused this.
How certain would you want their algorithm for detecting the exploiters be to levy such a penalty?