I don't care what people say, those 5-10 hour AVs were EPIC.
What about the 24-96 hour AV's. Were those epic?
Probably? I was never in one of those, but they sound more fun than the AVs where everyone just skips eachother and plows through all the NPCs and kills a mini-raid boss in under 10 minutes without seeing so much as a hair of the enemy.
They weren't, it really wasn't any fun going to sleep after trying to play AV, getting home from work the next day, and joining the same AV that you were stalemated in the night before. It was like groundhog's day from hell.
They were awesome.
I'm inclined to agree. At least you got to kill players, make pushes, try and recover from being pushed back yourself, take scalps off of enemies, turn them in, initiate lok'alar (or whatever his name was) attacks, send in the riders, etc.
I remember several that lasted over weekends and only ended due to maintenance
At least you could fish in AV then
Essentially they noticed that in mediocre gear he's plowing through ulduar, getting every "kill this boss in under x time/hard mode" achievement, and that his biggest hit is exactly equal to the hardest Flame Leviathan hard mode hp
and that his armory says he's wearing a dev item in the shirt slot (item ID 24, everything below 35 is a dev item)
therefore he probably has one of the items that has an insta-kill effect on it and that's how he's killing everything so fast
We first received a tip on a mysterious guild that was blowing through Ulduar's hardest achievements one after the other, all in one day, about a day or two ago. Their gear and raid experience stated very well that they were in no position to do any of those achievements, but we sort of shrugged and let it pass by. It was odd that these players were barely in Naxxramas gear, and their first recorded Kel'thuzad kill was only two weeks prior to their explosion of Ulduar achievements, but we initially ignored these reports because surely, nobody could be hacking the game. On top of that, the forum threads submitted to us all had so many posts deleted from them that they were completely incomprehensible. There was nothing solid about any of it.
Tips on it are still flooding our mailboxes today and a bit more information has surfaced, so let's look into it a little, shall we? The guild is The Marvel Family of US-Vek'nilash. The character Karatechop is the one that has attracted the most attention, and you'll see why in just a moment. If you look over his gear, it's not that bad, really. Epic tank gear, a lot of it from Naxxramas, so it's feasible that he could make some progress through Ulduar. It gets weird when you go to his Statistics and/or Achievements panels. Let's go to his statistics first.
If you can't make out the numbers there, his largest recorded hit is 353,892,967 damage. That's just shy of 354 million damage. There are a lot of solo quests in the world that let you put out insane damage (The Battle for the Undercity for example) but there are none that cause you to do damage in the hundreds of millions. However, there is something in the game that gives this number some significance. It's the total health pool of Flame Leviathan's hardest hard mode, leaving all four preceeding towers standing. Let's go take a look at his achievements...
Yep, there she is! Orbit-uary, leaving all four towers up on Flame Leviathan. Even more absurdly suspiscious is that they apparently did Shutout at the same time. How were they able to do both? Well, they didn't. Not legitimately. Somehow, Karatechop managed to 1-shot Flame Leviathan.
Flame Leviathan isn't the only thing that Karatechop massacred, either. His achievement list is highly suspect, to say the least. I'd bet that the list will disappear from his Armory within a day or two, so go ahead and look at them via GuildOx instead. For the bosses he's recorded as having killed, he has all of the "Beat X boss in under Y minutes" achievements. Why? He one-shotted everything. It's hard to stay in combat over that amount of time when you can hit things for their full health pool.
There has to be an exploit or something here, right? Surely Blizzard can't be hacked, right? Well, no. I wouldn't call what they're doing an 'exploit' in the traditional gaming sense, nor have they hacked Blizzard's servers. What we're seeing here is the result of an 'oops' by a GM (or developer?) hopefully. The possibility of malicious intent exists, but I have serious doubts anybody would risk their job over this.
What am I talking about, you ask? Let's look closer at Karatechop's equipment.
Hey, that's weird. He has something in his shirt slot, but it's not displaying properly. Error loading tooltip, huh? Well, alright. That's fine. This is the internet, our resources are endless. Let's just look it up elsewhere. You can see the item ID in the bottom left, and I've put the red box around it so you can't possibly miss it. Item #17, how curious.
Cheater, indeed. Martin Fury is one of those mysterious, fascinating GM/Developer items that were never meant for player hands. Items you only saw on Wowhead, WoWDB, or Thottbot. The only way to even have a glimpse of them was via datamining. Karatechop, however, woke up one day to one sitting in his mailbox.
Such is temptation. With infinite power at your fingertips, could you resist using it? Karatechop couldn't, apparently. As the saying goes, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That can certainly be applied to Karatechop here, but what of the person who awarded it to him? If this is an accident, it's on the list of most unlikely accidents ever.
If you look at item IDs on most any other item in WoW, a two digit item ID is an amazingly rare thing. Those items just aren't in the game itself whatsoever. Even items that drop in the earliest content of the game have at least four digits in their item ID. Almost every item after that has at least five digits. This has two. Either this was completely intentional, or a GM's keyboard stopped working in the middle of typing in an item ID and they sent item #17 to someone instead of, for example, item #17604. And they sent the item off anyway. The chances of this actually being an accident and not deliberate: Very, very low.
No matter how this happened, you can bet a pretty massive internal investigation is happening (or has happened) to find out how it all went down. A member of The Marvel Family posted on his blog about this event, stating that the entire guild has received bans over this even if they weren't present at any of Karatechop's miracle raids. How long these bans will last, we don't know. We can't ask, either. This event essentially brought the entire population of WoW down on this guy's blog like a nuke. It's down for the count.
The whole thing is essentially wrapped up now, the accounts are banned, the item is gone, but it's certainly a memorable event. It's not often someone gets their hands on one of those.
The link to the blog post by the Marvel Family member is on gayteenresources.org, and it's broken. In fact, the whole site seems to be down. Probably WoW's own rendition of the Fark or Slashdot effect.
There's another guild that managed a similar string of feats on Mug'thol US called WHY YOU MAD, who did it by using an old location hack that goldfarmers used to use to mine rich thorium to bypass Flame Leviathan and use vehicles on all the bosses in Ulduar. Much less information is available on them, but they've all also been banned.
I'm guessing they banned the whole guild so they can do a mass rollback and undo any achievements/gear the whole guild got without worrying about them getting more in the process.
ed: in the case of the dude-with-dev-item-shirt guy, not hacking-guild-with-vehicles guy
Man, how can anyone even think for a second that they could get away with this? I guess if they just wanted the attention, and planned on quitting anyway... but if I found something like that in my mailbox I wouldn't even take it out. Not that I don't think it wouldn't be fun to just one shot everything in Ulduar just to mess around.
I'm guessing they banned the whole guild so they can do a mass rollback and undo any achievements/gear the whole guild got without worrying about them getting more in the process.
ed: in the case of the dude-with-dev-item-shirt guy, not hacking-guild-with-vehicles guy
Why bother with a rollback? Just lock the accounts and delete the characters.
It's not like any of them could claim they failed to notice the bosses were dying in one hit.
Man, how can anyone even think for a second that they could get away with this? I guess if they just wanted the attention, and planned on quitting anyway... but if I found something like that in my mailbox I wouldn't even take it out. Not that I don't think it wouldn't be fun to just one shot everything in Ulduar just to mess around.
Karatechop posted around many of the shitstorm threads on the wow forum trying to defend himself. He claimed several times the GM gave him this item as an apology for mishandling an item ticket, and that he'd had it for months before actually using it.
Shame I ddin't screenshot or at least copy the text out of his posts before the threads were deleted, because the circumstances of what he did with it after getting it, and his flimsy explanations, all make him sound complicit. The theory I'm leaning towards right now is that somebody he knew, either in game or out, got or had a job with blizzard's customer service, and they decided to capitalize on the fact.
If that happend, the GM's the one who really fucked himself. Karatechop just lost the right to play a video game. The GM would have the black mark that he lost a job for abusing his power and breaking rules to obtain favors for somebody. It may have just been in a video game, but I know I wouldn't let him sell cars for me after pulling something like that.
Karate, and the people in his miracle raid, should be banned. Even if a GM fucks up like that, you should know better than to go exploiting it. Blizzard watches this kind of shit like a god damn hawk, we've seen examples of it before.
I had a guy in my guild not too long ago who found out you could DE one of the epic items from Wyrmrest Accord and he immediately said "I think this is a bug." He then proceeded to buy, DE, sell the crystals, buy and DE more for like 3 hours straight and a GM saw him and banned him for three days. He spent every night in our vent just bitching and moaning about being banned. Finally I told him to shut the hell up because he knew it was a bug and he deliberately chose to exploit it. His response was it wasn't his fault the programmers made an error but I don't buy it. Sure they may have fucked up but that doesn't absolve people of things like this.
There was also another guild I read about on the forums complaining about how they all got banned for a few days because one of the chests in Ulduar was giving an infinite amount of badges if you just kept clicking the icon. Now with the whole auto looting badges to the party thing I can sympathize with some people getting caught in the shit storm because of others but I still see it as a deliberate attempt to exploit a mistake. They tried to get their accounts reinstated earlier by using the same "Its not our fault you messed up" excuse.
I'm guessing they banned the whole guild so they can do a mass rollback and undo any achievements/gear the whole guild got without worrying about them getting more in the process.
ed: in the case of the dude-with-dev-item-shirt guy, not hacking-guild-with-vehicles guy
Why bother with a rollback? Just lock the accounts and delete the characters.
It's not like any of them could claim they failed to notice the bosses were dying in one hit.
Yeah, but the whole guild? Even the ones that weren't present in the raid?
I'm guessing they banned the whole guild so they can do a mass rollback and undo any achievements/gear the whole guild got without worrying about them getting more in the process.
ed: in the case of the dude-with-dev-item-shirt guy, not hacking-guild-with-vehicles guy
Why bother with a rollback? Just lock the accounts and delete the characters.
It's not like any of them could claim they failed to notice the bosses were dying in one hit.
Yeah, but the whole guild? Even the ones that weren't present in the raid?
It wasn't a very big guild. They may not have all been banned, either - the only one saying that is one of the people banned.
If they didn't, I still highly doubt anyone in the guild who wasn't banned (or is unbanned in the future) will EVER log into the character the had in the guild, though. Karatechop stopped logging in at all hours after his achievement sweep, probably got overwhelmed by the whispers from all the angry level 1 alts.
I'm guessing they banned the whole guild so they can do a mass rollback and undo any achievements/gear the whole guild got without worrying about them getting more in the process.
ed: in the case of the dude-with-dev-item-shirt guy, not hacking-guild-with-vehicles guy
Why bother with a rollback? Just lock the accounts and delete the characters.
It's not like any of them could claim they failed to notice the bosses were dying in one hit.
Yeah, but the whole guild? Even the ones that weren't present in the raid?
No, that's just caution. Security 101: when an intrusion is discovered, lock down everything and research what happened. Only when you seal off the method of attack should you start opening things back up. I assume most of the accounts will be unlocked after a while.
I'm guessing they banned the whole guild so they can do a mass rollback and undo any achievements/gear the whole guild got without worrying about them getting more in the process.
ed: in the case of the dude-with-dev-item-shirt guy, not hacking-guild-with-vehicles guy
Why bother with a rollback? Just lock the accounts and delete the characters.
It's not like any of them could claim they failed to notice the bosses were dying in one hit.
Yeah, but the whole guild? Even the ones that weren't present in the raid?
No, that's just caution. Security 101: when an intrusion is discovered, lock down everything and research what happened. Only when you seal off the method of attack should you start opening things back up. I assume most of the accounts will be unlocked after a while.
Man, how can anyone even think for a second that they could get away with this? I guess if they just wanted the attention, and planned on quitting anyway... but if I found something like that in my mailbox I wouldn't even take it out. Not that I don't think it wouldn't be fun to just one shot everything in Ulduar just to mess around.
Karatechop posted around many of the shitstorm threads on the wow forum trying to defend himself. He claimed several times the GM gave him this item as an apology for mishandling an item ticket, and that he'd had it for months before actually using it.
God, that's the worst excuse I've ever heard. I think even saying "my little brother did it" would be more believable.
Well, they can lock out their accounts sure. Can they stop them from playing the game? Nope, so saying the guy even 'lost the right to play' isn't true, he lost his character. The other guy is going to lose a lot more.
Well, they can lock out their accounts sure. Can they stop them from playing the game? Nope, so saying the guy even 'lost the right to play' isn't true, he lost his character. The other guy is going to lose a lot more.
The other guy being the GM that sent him that shirt? That dude fucked up in a big way.
Well, they can lock out their accounts sure. Can they stop them from playing the game? Nope, so saying the guy even 'lost the right to play' isn't true, he lost his character. The other guy is going to lose a lot more.
The other guy being the GM that sent him that shirt? That dude fucked up in a big way.
You mean the GM who's probably paid minimum wage to do the job, and sees the job as nothing but the next step in a long queue of employment failures?
Yeah, he'll be crying himself an ocean of tears as he hangs out in the unemployment line.
I wouldn't use the item, simply because I've had my account so long and have titles that I could never get again. But how many of you could say you've beaten the game by one shotting every boss?
I wouldn't use the item, simply because I've had my account so long and have titles that I could never get again. But how many of you could say you've beaten the game by one shotting every boss?
I wouldn't use the item on a raid, unless I was going to quit the game. Especially not a brand new raid that grants achievements. But running through a 5 man instance spam clicking the thing? Hell yes. That's basically what level 80 players do when they farm Strat, at any rate.
Soon as an item like that shows up in your inventory, you're gonna get your account locked for a period no matter what. Might as well do something worth the pain before it gets taken away.
The one time I got an item by accident from a GM (It was a WoW Vanilla collector's edition pet mail) I reported it right away. If I had probably gotten a GM artifact testing item I would have reported it and stayed off of that character until I had gotten a response. No way am I going to put my 6.5k Achievement points at risk.
I had a guy in my guild not too long ago who found out you could DE one of the epic items from Wyrmrest Accord and he immediately said "I think this is a bug." He then proceeded to buy, DE, sell the crystals, buy and DE more for like 3 hours straight and a GM saw him and banned him for three days. He spent every night in our vent just bitching and moaning about being banned. Finally I told him to shut the hell up because he knew it was a bug and he deliberately chose to exploit it. His response was it wasn't his fault the programmers made an error but I don't buy it. Sure they may have fucked up but that doesn't absolve people of things like this.
There was also another guild I read about on the forums complaining about how they all got banned for a few days because one of the chests in Ulduar was giving an infinite amount of badges if you just kept clicking the icon. Now with the whole auto looting badges to the party thing I can sympathize with some people getting caught in the shit storm because of others but I still see it as a deliberate attempt to exploit a mistake. They tried to get their accounts reinstated earlier by using the same "Its not our fault you messed up" excuse.
see, that's a really stupid way to do this. Why wouldn't you just buy a shit ton of the item, and then slowly sell the crystals at a steady rate. that guy was begging to be caught.
Same with the karate guy. Going in to ulduar? that's retarded. But! if you weren't in a guild, and you took one other person you trusted, you could go do sarth +3 for two weeks to get the mount/gear/title. Shit, you could two man naxx and completely gear up. As long as you both kept it on the dl, you could do later content like that further down the road (when getting the ulduar achievements would not be uncommon). Only put the shirt on while you raid, and take it off at all other times.
I mean, i guess I don't know how they monitor raids and such, but I think with two un-guilded people they would get lost in the mix, and go un-noticed.
honestly, i think honest people make better rule breakers
* New art textures have been added for Argent Tournament mounts. Any mounts already purchased from the Argent Tournament vendors will be updated automatically. Argent Tournament mounts with the old textures will still be available for purchase from the Argent Tournament vendors for a small Champion’s Seal and gold cost (standard faction requirements apply).
* Copied Test Realm characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.
PVP
* Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Lake Wintergrasp now scale with the item level of the operator’s gear. Power scaling is now 1% damage and 1% health per average item level.
Death Knight (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Improved Death Strike: This talent now also increases the healing from Death Strike by 25/50% and the tooltip has been adjusted to reflect the actual functionality after the hotfix in 3.1.0.
* Ghoul Frenzy: Now has a 10-second cooldown.
Druid (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid’s base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.
Mage (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Mirror Images: The images summoned by this spell will now target the creature that most hates the Mage, and should no longer cast Fire Blast or Frostbolt on targets that are affected by crowd control debuffs that break immediately on damage unless they are already casting these spells when crowd control is applied.
Priest (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Divine Hymn: Healing and healing scaling reduced by 30%. Buff on affected players changed from 15% to 10%.
* Renewed Hope: Effect can no longer be dispelled.
* Soul Warding: Mana cost reduction is now 15% down from 30%.
Warlock (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Nether Protection reduced to 30% damage reduction, down from 60%.
* Shadow and Flame: Now also includes Shadowburn.
* Fire and Brimstone: No longer increases the damage of your Immolate spell, but now increases the bonus damage your Incinerate deals to targets afflicted by your Immolate by 6/12/18/24/30%.
* Conflagrate updated: Consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 12 seconds of your Immolate, or 8 seconds of your Shadowflame.
Items
* Darkruned 2-Piece Set Bonus: The bonus critical strike chance for Frost Strike and Death Coil has been increased from 5% to 8%.
* Guise of the Midgard Serpent: The base attack power on this item has been lowered to balance it against items of a similar quality.
* Nightsong 4-Piece Set Bonus: Chance for Insect Swarm to trigger an instant Starfire changed to 15%.
* Scourgeborne 4-Piece Set Bonus: The runic power gain has been reduced to 5 runic power from 10 runic power.
Glyphs
* Glyph of Conflagrate redesigned: When you use Conflagrate, the damage done by your next 3 Destruction spells is increased by 10% for 15 seconds if the Immolate on the target has 5 or fewer seconds remaining.
* Glyph of Innervate: Has been adjusted to grant the Druid 90% of his or her base mana pool over 20 seconds.
* Glyph of Mass Dispel: Now only decreases Mass Dispel cost by 35%.
* Glyph of Penance: Now increases critical strike chance by 5% instead of its old effect.
User Interface
Equipment Manager
When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).
Bug Fixes
Death Knight
* Anti-magic Shell: Tooltip error corrected.
* Blood Boil: If no target is available for Blood Boil to hit, the spell will now cast and consume a blood rune but generate no runic power.
Druid
* Maim: Rank 2 of this ability is properly considered a stun and can be escaped by Blink.
Hunter
* Go For The Throat: Explosive Shot critical strikes now trigger this talent.
* Rabid: This Hunter pet talent no longer lists a percentage chance to be triggered, as that chance varies by the attack speed of the pet.
Paladin
* Divine Sacrifice: Damage done to the Paladin while this is active will no longer cause the effect to break early, and if it is dispelled or cancelled early, the damage counter will reset correctly the next time the spell is cast.
Rogue
* Shadow Dance: Issues with action bars and ability use arising from using Stealth while Shadow Dance is active have been fixed.
Warlock
* Demonic Sacrifice: This spell will no longer appear in any Warlock’s spellbook.
Bug Fixes - Dungeons and Raids
* Players can no longer become saved to a raid instance when they aren’t in the raid during a boss kill.
Ulduar
* The Spark of Imagination: Characters that release in part of the boss room will no longer be ported to Westfall or The Barrens.
I am truly thrilled about the changes to Destruction. Absolutely thrilled.
I wouldn't use the item, simply because I've had my account so long and have titles that I could never get again. But how many of you could say you've beaten the game by one shotting every boss?
I wouldn't use the item, simply because I've had my account so long and have titles that I could never get again. But how many of you could say you've beaten the game by one shotting every boss?
Yeah, I mean, if I had that item sent to me in the mail, I would have been veryvery tempted to go abuse the fuck out of it.
One last big hurrah. Run out, one shot Ironforge and Stormwind, take over all alliance towns by yourself. Go run into AQ40 and 1 shot C'thun, man, the posibilities...
I would probably wuss out, but still, I would be very tempted.
it would give me a good reason to finally quit the game...by being banned for basically destroying the opposing faction and all raid bosses. in one night.
I feel i could reach no higher plateau after that.
it would give me a good reason to finally quit the game...by being banned for basically destroying the opposing faction and all raid bosses. in one night.
I feel i could reach no higher plateau after that.
Running WoW patcher on windows 7 with and it says I am behind a firewall even though I have no firewall and I am plugged straight into a modem. What is wrong?
Running WoW patcher on windows 7 with and it says I am behind a firewall even though I have no firewall and I am plugged straight into a modem. What is wrong?
Do you have Windows firewall turned on? Are you using a router? If so, you will need to create exceptions and/or open ports.
delroland on
EVE: Online - the most fun you will ever have not playing a game.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
it would give me a good reason to finally quit the game...by being banned for basically destroying the opposing faction and all raid bosses. in one night.
I feel i could reach no higher plateau after that.
This.
People would do things like this in Everquest.. they'd basically suicide by interfering with people's boss fights, creating a torrent of user complaints, which would eventually get a GM down on their ass, and after an expletive-filled rant against said GM, their account would be banned.
Not quite as amusing as clicking all bosses to death, but people used the tools available to them.
Posts
I remember several that lasted over weekends and only ended due to maintenance
At least you could fish in AV then
MY.
GOODNESS.
THE SWORD OF 1000 TRUTHS.
Also, double bonus that the kid's blog is gayteenresources.org
Faaaaag.
Essentially they noticed that in mediocre gear he's plowing through ulduar, getting every "kill this boss in under x time/hard mode" achievement, and that his biggest hit is exactly equal to the hardest Flame Leviathan hard mode hp
and that his armory says he's wearing a dev item in the shirt slot (item ID 24, everything below 35 is a dev item)
therefore he probably has one of the items that has an insta-kill effect on it and that's how he's killing everything so fast
Tips on it are still flooding our mailboxes today and a bit more information has surfaced, so let's look into it a little, shall we? The guild is The Marvel Family of US-Vek'nilash. The character Karatechop is the one that has attracted the most attention, and you'll see why in just a moment. If you look over his gear, it's not that bad, really. Epic tank gear, a lot of it from Naxxramas, so it's feasible that he could make some progress through Ulduar. It gets weird when you go to his Statistics and/or Achievements panels. Let's go to his statistics first.
If you can't make out the numbers there, his largest recorded hit is 353,892,967 damage. That's just shy of 354 million damage. There are a lot of solo quests in the world that let you put out insane damage (The Battle for the Undercity for example) but there are none that cause you to do damage in the hundreds of millions. However, there is something in the game that gives this number some significance. It's the total health pool of Flame Leviathan's hardest hard mode, leaving all four preceeding towers standing. Let's go take a look at his achievements...
Yep, there she is! Orbit-uary, leaving all four towers up on Flame Leviathan. Even more absurdly suspiscious is that they apparently did Shutout at the same time. How were they able to do both? Well, they didn't. Not legitimately. Somehow, Karatechop managed to 1-shot Flame Leviathan.
Flame Leviathan isn't the only thing that Karatechop massacred, either. His achievement list is highly suspect, to say the least. I'd bet that the list will disappear from his Armory within a day or two, so go ahead and look at them via GuildOx instead. For the bosses he's recorded as having killed, he has all of the "Beat X boss in under Y minutes" achievements. Why? He one-shotted everything. It's hard to stay in combat over that amount of time when you can hit things for their full health pool.
There has to be an exploit or something here, right? Surely Blizzard can't be hacked, right? Well, no. I wouldn't call what they're doing an 'exploit' in the traditional gaming sense, nor have they hacked Blizzard's servers. What we're seeing here is the result of an 'oops' by a GM (or developer?) hopefully. The possibility of malicious intent exists, but I have serious doubts anybody would risk their job over this.
What am I talking about, you ask? Let's look closer at Karatechop's equipment.
Hey, that's weird. He has something in his shirt slot, but it's not displaying properly. Error loading tooltip, huh? Well, alright. That's fine. This is the internet, our resources are endless. Let's just look it up elsewhere. You can see the item ID in the bottom left, and I've put the red box around it so you can't possibly miss it. Item #17, how curious.
Cheater, indeed. Martin Fury is one of those mysterious, fascinating GM/Developer items that were never meant for player hands. Items you only saw on Wowhead, WoWDB, or Thottbot. The only way to even have a glimpse of them was via datamining. Karatechop, however, woke up one day to one sitting in his mailbox.
Such is temptation. With infinite power at your fingertips, could you resist using it? Karatechop couldn't, apparently. As the saying goes, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That can certainly be applied to Karatechop here, but what of the person who awarded it to him? If this is an accident, it's on the list of most unlikely accidents ever.
If you look at item IDs on most any other item in WoW, a two digit item ID is an amazingly rare thing. Those items just aren't in the game itself whatsoever. Even items that drop in the earliest content of the game have at least four digits in their item ID. Almost every item after that has at least five digits. This has two. Either this was completely intentional, or a GM's keyboard stopped working in the middle of typing in an item ID and they sent item #17 to someone instead of, for example, item #17604. And they sent the item off anyway. The chances of this actually being an accident and not deliberate: Very, very low.
No matter how this happened, you can bet a pretty massive internal investigation is happening (or has happened) to find out how it all went down. A member of The Marvel Family posted on his blog about this event, stating that the entire guild has received bans over this even if they weren't present at any of Karatechop's miracle raids. How long these bans will last, we don't know. We can't ask, either. This event essentially brought the entire population of WoW down on this guy's blog like a nuke. It's down for the count.
The whole thing is essentially wrapped up now, the accounts are banned, the item is gone, but it's certainly a memorable event. It's not often someone gets their hands on one of those.
Edited for beated.
The link to the blog post by the Marvel Family member is on gayteenresources.org, and it's broken. In fact, the whole site seems to be down. Probably WoW's own rendition of the Fark or Slashdot effect.
There's another guild that managed a similar string of feats on Mug'thol US called WHY YOU MAD, who did it by using an old location hack that goldfarmers used to use to mine rich thorium to bypass Flame Leviathan and use vehicles on all the bosses in Ulduar. Much less information is available on them, but they've all also been banned.
ed: in the case of the dude-with-dev-item-shirt guy, not hacking-guild-with-vehicles guy
Man, how can anyone even think for a second that they could get away with this? I guess if they just wanted the attention, and planned on quitting anyway... but if I found something like that in my mailbox I wouldn't even take it out. Not that I don't think it wouldn't be fun to just one shot everything in Ulduar just to mess around.
Sooo easy to get thousands of gold from MC, BWL, AQ40, etc.
That or I'd powerlevel an army of noobs one shotting all instances.
Why bother with a rollback? Just lock the accounts and delete the characters.
It's not like any of them could claim they failed to notice the bosses were dying in one hit.
Karatechop posted around many of the shitstorm threads on the wow forum trying to defend himself. He claimed several times the GM gave him this item as an apology for mishandling an item ticket, and that he'd had it for months before actually using it.
Shame I ddin't screenshot or at least copy the text out of his posts before the threads were deleted, because the circumstances of what he did with it after getting it, and his flimsy explanations, all make him sound complicit. The theory I'm leaning towards right now is that somebody he knew, either in game or out, got or had a job with blizzard's customer service, and they decided to capitalize on the fact.
If that happend, the GM's the one who really fucked himself. Karatechop just lost the right to play a video game. The GM would have the black mark that he lost a job for abusing his power and breaking rules to obtain favors for somebody. It may have just been in a video game, but I know I wouldn't let him sell cars for me after pulling something like that.
There was also another guild I read about on the forums complaining about how they all got banned for a few days because one of the chests in Ulduar was giving an infinite amount of badges if you just kept clicking the icon. Now with the whole auto looting badges to the party thing I can sympathize with some people getting caught in the shit storm because of others but I still see it as a deliberate attempt to exploit a mistake. They tried to get their accounts reinstated earlier by using the same "Its not our fault you messed up" excuse.
Yeah, but the whole guild? Even the ones that weren't present in the raid?
It wasn't a very big guild. They may not have all been banned, either - the only one saying that is one of the people banned.
If they didn't, I still highly doubt anyone in the guild who wasn't banned (or is unbanned in the future) will EVER log into the character the had in the guild, though. Karatechop stopped logging in at all hours after his achievement sweep, probably got overwhelmed by the whispers from all the angry level 1 alts.
No, that's just caution. Security 101: when an intrusion is discovered, lock down everything and research what happened. Only when you seal off the method of attack should you start opening things back up. I assume most of the accounts will be unlocked after a while.
Anyone who was on the raid though? Buh-bye.
XBL: Chewyy
Steam: chuvakie
Yes, that's what I meant.
God, that's the worst excuse I've ever heard. I think even saying "my little brother did it" would be more believable.
The other guy being the GM that sent him that shirt? That dude fucked up in a big way.
Yeah, he'll be crying himself an ocean of tears as he hangs out in the unemployment line.
I wouldn't use the item, simply because I've had my account so long and have titles that I could never get again. But how many of you could say you've beaten the game by one shotting every boss?
I wouldn't use the item on a raid, unless I was going to quit the game. Especially not a brand new raid that grants achievements. But running through a 5 man instance spam clicking the thing? Hell yes. That's basically what level 80 players do when they farm Strat, at any rate.
Soon as an item like that shows up in your inventory, you're gonna get your account locked for a period no matter what. Might as well do something worth the pain before it gets taken away.
I must say it's a good thing I didn't buy any yet because the only current one I want is the turbostrider and the new one looks like ass
see, that's a really stupid way to do this. Why wouldn't you just buy a shit ton of the item, and then slowly sell the crystals at a steady rate. that guy was begging to be caught.
Same with the karate guy. Going in to ulduar? that's retarded. But! if you weren't in a guild, and you took one other person you trusted, you could go do sarth +3 for two weeks to get the mount/gear/title. Shit, you could two man naxx and completely gear up. As long as you both kept it on the dl, you could do later content like that further down the road (when getting the ulduar achievements would not be uncommon). Only put the shirt on while you raid, and take it off at all other times.
I mean, i guess I don't know how they monitor raids and such, but I think with two un-guilded people they would get lost in the mix, and go un-noticed.
honestly, i think honest people make better rule breakers
* New art textures have been added for Argent Tournament mounts. Any mounts already purchased from the Argent Tournament vendors will be updated automatically. Argent Tournament mounts with the old textures will still be available for purchase from the Argent Tournament vendors for a small Champion’s Seal and gold cost (standard faction requirements apply).
* Copied Test Realm characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.
PVP
* Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Lake Wintergrasp now scale with the item level of the operator’s gear. Power scaling is now 1% damage and 1% health per average item level.
Death Knight (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Improved Death Strike: This talent now also increases the healing from Death Strike by 25/50% and the tooltip has been adjusted to reflect the actual functionality after the hotfix in 3.1.0.
* Ghoul Frenzy: Now has a 10-second cooldown.
Druid (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid’s base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.
Mage (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Mirror Images: The images summoned by this spell will now target the creature that most hates the Mage, and should no longer cast Fire Blast or Frostbolt on targets that are affected by crowd control debuffs that break immediately on damage unless they are already casting these spells when crowd control is applied.
Priest (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Divine Hymn: Healing and healing scaling reduced by 30%. Buff on affected players changed from 15% to 10%.
* Renewed Hope: Effect can no longer be dispelled.
* Soul Warding: Mana cost reduction is now 15% down from 30%.
Warlock (3.1 Skills List / 3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.)
* Nether Protection reduced to 30% damage reduction, down from 60%.
* Shadow and Flame: Now also includes Shadowburn.
* Fire and Brimstone: No longer increases the damage of your Immolate spell, but now increases the bonus damage your Incinerate deals to targets afflicted by your Immolate by 6/12/18/24/30%.
* Conflagrate updated: Consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 12 seconds of your Immolate, or 8 seconds of your Shadowflame.
Items
* Darkruned 2-Piece Set Bonus: The bonus critical strike chance for Frost Strike and Death Coil has been increased from 5% to 8%.
* Guise of the Midgard Serpent: The base attack power on this item has been lowered to balance it against items of a similar quality.
* Nightsong 4-Piece Set Bonus: Chance for Insect Swarm to trigger an instant Starfire changed to 15%.
* Scourgeborne 4-Piece Set Bonus: The runic power gain has been reduced to 5 runic power from 10 runic power.
Glyphs
* Glyph of Conflagrate redesigned: When you use Conflagrate, the damage done by your next 3 Destruction spells is increased by 10% for 15 seconds if the Immolate on the target has 5 or fewer seconds remaining.
* Glyph of Innervate: Has been adjusted to grant the Druid 90% of his or her base mana pool over 20 seconds.
* Glyph of Mass Dispel: Now only decreases Mass Dispel cost by 35%.
* Glyph of Penance: Now increases critical strike chance by 5% instead of its old effect.
User Interface
Equipment Manager
When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).
Bug Fixes
Death Knight
* Anti-magic Shell: Tooltip error corrected.
* Blood Boil: If no target is available for Blood Boil to hit, the spell will now cast and consume a blood rune but generate no runic power.
Druid
* Maim: Rank 2 of this ability is properly considered a stun and can be escaped by Blink.
Hunter
* Go For The Throat: Explosive Shot critical strikes now trigger this talent.
* Rabid: This Hunter pet talent no longer lists a percentage chance to be triggered, as that chance varies by the attack speed of the pet.
Paladin
* Divine Sacrifice: Damage done to the Paladin while this is active will no longer cause the effect to break early, and if it is dispelled or cancelled early, the damage counter will reset correctly the next time the spell is cast.
Rogue
* Shadow Dance: Issues with action bars and ability use arising from using Stealth while Shadow Dance is active have been fixed.
Warlock
* Demonic Sacrifice: This spell will no longer appear in any Warlock’s spellbook.
Bug Fixes - Dungeons and Raids
* Players can no longer become saved to a raid instance when they aren’t in the raid during a boss kill.
Ulduar
* The Spark of Imagination: Characters that release in part of the boss room will no longer be ported to Westfall or The Barrens.
I am truly thrilled about the changes to Destruction. Absolutely thrilled.
Don't know about the other stuff though.
Heh. I could.
Yeah, I mean, if I had that item sent to me in the mail, I would have been very very tempted to go abuse the fuck out of it.
One last big hurrah. Run out, one shot Ironforge and Stormwind, take over all alliance towns by yourself. Go run into AQ40 and 1 shot C'thun, man, the posibilities...
I would probably wuss out, but still, I would be very tempted.
I feel i could reach no higher plateau after that.
This.
Do you have Windows firewall turned on? Are you using a router? If so, you will need to create exceptions and/or open ports.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
People would do things like this in Everquest.. they'd basically suicide by interfering with people's boss fights, creating a torrent of user complaints, which would eventually get a GM down on their ass, and after an expletive-filled rant against said GM, their account would be banned.
Not quite as amusing as clicking all bosses to death, but people used the tools available to them.