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How's this for some action? Players on the newly-created-for-Burning-Crusade server MokâNathal had an Alliance faction guild that was slowly but surely going through the Scepter of the Sands questline in order to open the gates of Ahn'Qiraj. It's a one-time event per server that's a fun experience to see and participate in. Obtaining the Scepter requires taking part in World of Warcraft's most epic questline by far, with a player unable to even begin undertaking it until they are neutral with the Brood of Nozdormu faction. This requires a hell of a lot of grinding of rep by killing bugs in Silithus on a guild-wide level.
Cleoboltra's still undergoing this quest, by the way, with the only thing in her way from completion being three Fragments of the Nightmare's Corruption. If four brave souls are ever willing to give up a few hours of their time to farm for these with her, she'd be most grateful. Eranikus must be freed!
Anyway, for months, the participant in the guild involved was posting on their forums detailing his progress. He was letting everyone know when they could expect the gong to be rung so they could plan on attending. Ringing the gong is sort of a big deal if you're the first one on a server to do it, or one who rings the gong within 10 hours of the first person - you get a title (Scarab Lord) and a legendary black-colored Ahn'Qiraj bug mount that can be used outside of AQ40. Needless to say, it's a rare honor, and people do some wacky things for such rare honors.
Like convincing their entire guild to transfer to a new server just so a member can "ninja ring" the gong there and get the title/mount.
And that's exactly what a guild called SiNiX did on MokâNathal. They transfered the guild over and rang the gong at 3:00 AM, just as the guild that's been working for months to build rep and get the questline done was nearing completion. They scrambled hard, got the questline finished, and rang the gong themselves in time (before the 10 hours was up) to get credit as well, but the whole server is in an uproar.
It's far easier to transfer a character over to a new server from one where the gates have been opened already and ring the gong than to engage in the questline from scratch. The huge farming effort for rep is circumvented because you can gain the rep in the AQ20 and AQ40 instances instead.
Because SiNiX cheated the system, many of the players on that server never got to see the opening event or battle the Colossi, something I remember doing with mixed results when Stormrage's gates opened. The lag on Stormrage from so many people flooding Silithus crashed the server multiple times, and the Colossi that were killed respawned. Bleh. Players on MokâNathal probably wouldn't run into that issue, and from what I hear they did not. But since the gong was rang at 3:00 AM there, most everyone missed it.
Blizzard should never have allowed a transfer to ring the gong, because this happens a lot from what I understand. Hell, Cleoboltra could finish the questline here and jump servers herself to do the same thing if she were willing to leave Stormrage for months just to get that mount. That's broken, and it screws over servers where people are working for it. Blizzard has bigger fish to fry, true, but I personally wish they'd thought of stuff like this. Many new servers don't even try to go through the quest because they expect some transfer will just pop in and ring it anyway.
Discuss. :)
-Bolty
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That is just bloody low.
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Do you hear that, mister Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.
You spend a while giving detailed accounts about just how far you are along the questline, generate a lot of interest in the event, and you completely fail to expect that someone is going to pop over and pinch the hit just as you're ready to bong the gong?
Anybody who couldn't see that was going to happen needs a generous slice of reality pie. Of course it was going to bloody happen. When an entire server's desire to open the gates relies on just one person, that gives plenty of time for people to secretly get into a position to ninja the event.
Is it fair? Hell no, but show me anything that is these days.
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Quote:Cleoboltra's still undergoing this quest, by the way, with the only thing in her way from completion being three Fragments of the Nightmare's Corruption. If four brave souls are ever willing to give up a few hours of their time to farm for these with her, she'd be most grateful. Eranikus must be freed!
You know who to call.
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An entire guild spent how much money to transfer - $25 each , or was it free ? Only one gets the mount ? And will they retransfer their toons after for the same amount ? Too bad some stuff doesnt disappear after the second transfer ... :whistling:
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Quote:You know who to call.
Ghostbusters? :whistling:
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Quote:Anybody who couldn't see that was going to happen needs a generous slice of reality pie.
But WoW isn't reality. Blizzard should really be able to foresee and prevent such things. There are just too many incidents where things are seemingly set up for large doses of griefing, and this, to me, is mega-griefing. It is almost as if Blizzard is anti-non-pvp and they feel they need to inject pvp into the play of those that have no desire for pvp (pvp ≈ grief to me). Blizzard knows how many people they have hooked anyway (I just saw a Tacoma truck ad on TV that used WoW graphics, interface and all!) so they can be lax about stuff like this and with testing their own stuff.
Quote:Cleoboltra's still undergoing this quest, by the way, with the only thing in her way from completion being three Fragments of the Nightmare's Corruption. If four brave souls are ever willing to give up a few hours of their time to farm for these with her, she'd be most grateful. Eranikus must be freed!
Tell me where and when and Lochnar is in.
Lochnar[ITB]
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10-10-2007, 07:14 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-10-2007, 07:15 PM by Bolty.)
Quote:You spend a while giving detailed accounts about just how far you are along the questline, generate a lot of interest in the event, and you completely fail to expect that someone is going to pop over and pinch the hit just as you're ready to bong the gong?
Possibly, but it still ignores basic tenets of common decency and respect for other people. This guild (or rather, the one specific member of it) had absolutely none.
It's one thing to transfer onto a server with the intent of grabbing the title and the legendary mount. One can investigate to see where the server is progression-wise on opening the gates, find the frontrunner(s), and work out with them a date/time to ring the gong together - remember, ringing the gong gives credit to anyone doing so in the first 10 hours. This is the timeframe of the once-in-a-server invasion of all Kalimdor by the Silithid. It could simply be a matter of "hey there man, I'm going to ring the gong in a week, so get moving and we'll do it together" thing. Common courtesy.
It's another thing entirely to look at a server, think "haha, NINJA!" and pull the stunt these guys did. Inevitable? I guess, considering the preponderance of asshats on the Internet. But the amount of time and effort needed by an entire guild to get someone a Scepter should weed such people out. No person can ever assemble the Scepter alone, or even with a handful of friends, even at level 70. There are too many raid bosses/zones that need to be cleared to do it (read up on the questline if you've forgotten/are unfamiliar with it - link is in my original post). So for a gong ringing to be ninja'ed, it basically requires a whole guild of asshats who agree with the Scepter-owner's intent to essentially "ninja-loot" a whole server.
Remember, an entire server, both factions, have to hand in thousands upon thousands of materials to make ringing the gong possible. It's more than just having some guy with the scepter. Having the scepter alone won't let you ring the gong.
Impressive. And it's why that guild will be hated on that server for all time. The icing on the cake was doing it at 3:00 AM so that most everyone playing on that server missed it. That's just sand in the face. As a contrary example, Stormrage's gong-ringing guild did so in the early afternoon, so that the 10-hour timeframe extended (and ended) in primetime hours. In retrospect, maybe they should have done it at 3:00 AM anyway because the server died over and over and over again. They also tried to arrange a set time for summoning Eranikus, if I recall, and when half the server's population tried to cram into Moonglade, the server bombed a few times before they gave up. IIRC, they had to "ninja" it at a later unannounced time by necessity; nice job there, Blizzard.
Memories of two hundred characters charging a Colossi naked, with 8000 ping latency, corpse-running and whittling it down to 3%, when the server crashed and it came back at 100%...good times. :)
-Bolty
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.
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10-10-2007, 08:10 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-10-2007, 08:12 PM by Monkey.)
Quote:Blizzard should never have allowed a transfer to ring the gong, because this happens a lot from what I understand. Hell, Cleoboltra could finish the questline here and jump servers herself to do the same thing if she were willing to leave Stormrage for months just to get that mount. That's broken, and it screws over servers where people are working for it. Blizzard has bigger fish to fry, true, but I personally wish they'd thought of stuff like this. Many new servers don't even try to go through the quest because they expect some transfer will just pop in and ring it anyway.
So...no one born on the server can become Scarab Lord? What, exactly, do you have against Ahnold running for US President, anyway?
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal and don't forget to tip your waitstaff. :D
More seriously, Blizzard has measures in place to prevent this. From the transfer FAQ:
Quote:A realm may not be an eligible destination for a variety of reasons, including:
* The realm is full or densely populated at this time.
* It has been fewer than 180 days since the realm was launched
* You are attempting to transfer from a PvE (normal) realm to a PvP realm. Characters currently located on PvE realms are only eligible to move to other PvE realms.
* There might be an upcoming free character migration to or from this realm.
The aforementioned restrictions may also apply to the eligibility of source realms. Keep in mind that we are constantly evaluating these populations and availability may change without notice.
Please note that Blizzard reserves the right to disable paid character transfers to or from any realm at its own discretion.
So fresh servers have 180 days to open the Gates. That is arguably too short to protect level 60 content in a post-60 world, but the precedent exists for protecting content via a transfer moratorium and not via some bizarre spaghetti code addition to the quest eligibility.
It would be much less elegant (and unpredictable for the player) if transferring removed your ability to do certain quests, a list of which can be found on the WoW website...in a locked file cabinet in a broom closet with 'Beware of the Jaguar," on the door.
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Quote:It would be much less elegant (and unpredictable for the player) if transferring removed your ability to do certain quests, a list of which can be found on the WoW website...in a locked file cabinet in a broom closet with 'Beware of the Jaguar," on the door.
Actually much easier if certain world events have not occured (i.e. the gong ringing in this case), that characters transfered in will have their appropriate reputations reset to starting values and any related quest items removed from inventory. Have a warning when attempting to set up such a transfer that these actions will occur to te character.
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Quote:It would be much less elegant (and unpredictable for the player) if transferring removed your ability to do certain quests, a list of which can be found on the WoW website...in a locked file cabinet in a broom closet with 'Beware of the Jaguar," on the door.
Blizzard doesn't use the power of threat and power of GM enough to control stupid behavior. A simple line of "Players must play fair and earn rewards as the game designers intended." in the license would work wonders. This would cure the ills of many exploites of the game. The wasting of time programming the battleground afk honor system, the exploits in instances and now the exploits of transfers.
When I go hunting, at the start of the season at just the crack of dawn, the first kill of a deer is easy. But after a few hours the deer know something has changed and react by being very hard to find. People are no different; especially smart people, who are looking at the rule book trying to find ways to exploit it. Let people drive at 5-10 over the speed limit, it just becomes part of the norm. Put up a photo radar van in a school zone and set it to 1mph and everyone's behavior changes (even if it only took one photo per day).
If blizzard wanted to do right by their gaming community, they would have pushed the server back one day, resetting the event, removed the reputation from the transferring guild, charged them a 2000 gold penalty per toon, and made a big announcement on the front of their website (like they did about gold farmers and spammers) saying exactly what they did and why they did it. As a company in it for profit they need to make such decisions in such a way that the majority of the player base can say, yeah that was fair and those cheaters got what they deserved. I didn't cry over the gold spammers and I wouldn't cry over these assholes either if they get punished, but I am really starting to get pissed at blizzard for allowing cheating to become the norm of wow.
Quote:Cleoboltra's still undergoing this quest, by the way, with the only thing in her way from completion being three Fragments of the Nightmare's Corruption. If four brave souls are ever willing to give up a few hours of their time to farm for these with her, she'd be most grateful. Eranikus must be freed!
I got one Fragment... let's get the other 3 sometime, I'm game!!! I still want to finish that questline also.
Quote:Blizzard should never have allowed a transfer to ring the gong, because this happens a lot from what I understand. Hell, Cleoboltra could finish the questline here and jump servers herself to do the same thing if she were willing to leave Stormrage for months just to get that mount.
Let me know where you're going so we can go together... :D
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10-11-2007, 03:06 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-11-2007, 03:07 PM by Pantalaimon.)
Steamwheedle Cartel had a guild do that waaaaay back when before BC came out. Mind you, maybe "not as bad" because I don't believe we had a guild very close (e.g. able to kill nef at the time in under however many hours) but the server still imploded for a while in drama.
Ravenholdt had AQ drama too... horde and alliance were both working, but alliance as a guild and horde as a small group. Alliance posted they'd open, horde said "wait 2 months for us to catch up plz!!111!!!1!", Alliance said no, horde showed up en masse (H:A was about 3:1 at level 70) to PvP-barricade the gong, so alliance just ended up ringing it at some obscure hour like 4:30 in the morning. Server missed the event too.
The AQ event was really really fun for servers that were mature when the AQ patch was released. But for all the new servers, you seem to always get drama with it.
Edit: sorry posted in a hurry, this is in reply to the wrong post I believe, but gotta scoot!
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The gong on Tich was rung at midnight on a monday. Most of the event occurred during server maintenance.
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Epic.
Haven't seen something this good since Serenity Now crashed that guy's funeral.
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What is fair is subject to interpretation.
ArrayPaladins were not meant to sit in the back of the raid staring at health bars all day, spamming heals and listening to eight different classes whine about buffs.[/quote]
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Quote:What is fair is subject to interpretation.
Bleh, if its there the strong/most ruthless will take it huh? This kind of attitude is what makes me *sick* of WoW when its foisted on people who have no other recourse than to roll over and take it.
But hey, the top 2% aren't catered to enough, eh?
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The top 2% are more likely to continue paying their monthly fees if they're catered to;)
ArrayPaladins were not meant to sit in the back of the raid staring at health bars all day, spamming heals and listening to eight different classes whine about buffs.[/quote]
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Quote:The top 2% are more likely to continue paying their monthly fees if they're catered to;)
But it's 98% that keep the game going...
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Einstein said Everything is Relative.
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