Stupid Is As Stupid Does
Should we feel sorry for Ensidia? Larísa over at the Pink Pigtail Inn asks this question in a recent post of hers.
My answer is “yes, I really feel sorry for Ensidia”, but not because they lost their achievement and not because they will be out of the game for three days. I feel sorry for them for being so utterly stupid.
As I see it, Ensidia’s action and their subsequent ban and revoked world first Lich King kill is a direct result of one of two things: Either they knew they were doing it wrong, or they did not.
Doing it wrong
Now, I don’t play this game at Ensidia’s level, I am not in a sponsored guild getting payed to play, so I can only guess at what obligations comes with that sponsorship, and what pressure they are under to provide results.
I am not a top player but that does not mean I can not personally feel the competitiveness and the will to get better, to desire to top those charts, be it as dps in a 5 man dungeon run or a guild member in a server wide guild ranking. I guess Ensidia would feel the same way, regardless of whether they are sponsored or not, and lately the competition at the top must have become a lot more intense than in previous raids. Never before has so many guilds been at the top, competing for those world first kills. As I write this, four guilds have defeated the Lich King in the 25man version according to GuildOx, with many more to come soon as many guilds have already defeated the first two bosses in the Frost Wing, opened their way to the Lich King.
I guess every one of those four guilds, five with Ensidia, were desperate for that little extra edge, that little extra boost that would push them to the top so they could claim their victory.
So when they noticed that their use of Saronite Bombs actually had a very very positive effect on the encounter, it actually seemed to trivialize it or a part of it as far as I can understand, did they stop to consider that this must be a bug, that this was not the encounter working as intended? If they had been using these bombs in their usual dps rotation, would they not be surprised that they did not only do damage in this encounter but actually helped rebuild the throne?
Or did they make a simple cost-benefit analysis and came to the conclusion that the risk of using the bombs was worth taking in order to get that first kill? Was the competition so fierce that the possible delay of asking a GM what was going on might result in another guild claiming the kill? Did they gamble on their legendary guild status to protect them should they be caught?
I don’t know, I can only speculate. But no matter why, the question is how they could be so incredibly stupid and believe they would not get caught? Every other world first and first kills have been scrutinized and achievements have been revoked during the entire WotLK raiding season, so how could they be so stupid and think their kill would survive if there was even the slightest whiff of something funny about it?
Granted, they have apparently been treated leniently by Blizzard before, but on the biggest bad guy of them all in this entire expansion? Come on.
Or did they not know?
But what about the other scenario? What if they didn’t know they were doing it wrong then?
You know, I have a co-worker whose mantra is “it is not criminal to be stupid”. He is right of course, it is not criminal to be stupid, to sit on a chair all day and do nothing except being stupid.
But while it is not criminal to be stupid it might well be criminal to act stupidly and most people do stupid things once in a while, some more often than not, and with very different consequences.
If you construct bridges, you are expected to dimension them properly or you might end up with a collapsed bridge.
If you are a construction worker, you are expected to know that using a power tool to cut reinforcement bars comes with certain restrictions or you might end up with a burning building due to a stray spark.
If you suddenly find 300 million Euros on your bank account when last you checked there was nothing but an overdraft, you are expected to contact your bank and not run off to South America for a life long vacation.
If you had spent years playing a computer game, analysing it into the smallest detail, poring over logs and videos to perfect your performance, knowing every spell in the book and having done all bosses many times on 10mans and 25mans and in both normal and heroic versions, if you were that player, facing the last boss in the game, the biggest badass of them all, and if you find that the platform you are standing on, the one that is slowly falling apart, suddenly stop falling apart and instead start to rebuild itself and thus making the entire encounter so much easier, negating the need to deal with the adds, would you not be expected to suspect Blizzard might consider that an exploit? Especially given their track record with exploit bans in this expansion?
The first three are examples of criminal stupidity, the last is an example of plain simple utter moronic stupidity.
So should we feel sorry?
I have made my thoughts on using so called exploits clear before, I think it is Blizzard’s job to make the game fool proof and if anyone finds a way to use the game or fight mechanics to work for them in a way Blizzard has not foreseen, then all the cred to them. If Blizzard does not like it they can always fix it, but why punish the players?
If I had my way, Ensidia would keep their achievement and would not be banned. They found a way around Blizzard’s encounter and beat it fair and square with the tools available to them.
But Blizzard obviously think otherwise, and we all accept their right to run their game their way every time we log into the game, so even if I don’t like their way of handling these things I have to accept it and be aware of if I want to keep playing. And anyone who plays this game at the top end can’t be unaware that Blizzard comes down hard on players they think are guilty of exploiting the game.
I don’t know the whole picture, I was not there, and I haven’t tried to look into it anymore than the posts on wow.com and Ensidia’s own site, but I can’t see it happen any other way. If they did know what they were doing, or if they did not, it does not matter, either way it was so senselessly stupid to not alert Blizzard to the fact that there seemed to be something smelly going on. It seems like such a waste.
Or is this entire thing a publicity stunt?
It was “only” a normal kill, after all. Maybe they are so sure of their own superiority that they believe this three-day ban will not interfere at all with their getting the world first heroic Lich King kill that they don’t mind giving the competition a three day head start.
And that would indeed be an achievement.
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The head start is far more than 3 days if I’ve understood it correctly. The guilds that got their kill approved can start working on the heroic version on tuesday/wednesday. Ensidia will have to go through the instance once again getting Lich king dead in normal. And then wait another week for hc. I may be wrong but that’s how I thought it would be. And that’s why the three day ban is far worse than you may think of. It’s all about the lockouts.
Larísa´s last blog ..Should we feel sorry for Ensidia?
If they will be a full week behind the rest then this whole thing was even more stupid than I first thought!
“… if you find that the platform you are standing on, the one that is slowly falling apart, suddenly stop falling apart and instead start to rebuild itself and thus making the entire encounter so much easier, negating the need to deal with the adds, would you not be expected to suspect Blizzard might consider that an exploit?”
What if they considered that a mechanic that is there to actually help the players win the fight? It’s not so easy. Nobody has seen the encounter before the release night. Nobody knew what to expect. What you are saying that you would recognize the exploit from the intended mechanic on first sight. I doubt it.
I would not recognize it as an exploit , with so many things happening in a 25man boss fight it usually takes me several weeks to fully understand any encounter.
But these are professional players I am talking about here, who if I understand correctly are analysing every little bit of the encounters in real time to understand what is happening and how to beat it, and not just randomly hope they will get lucky and nail it.
That not one of these players would suspect that something was amiss there seems highly improbable to me, and not saying anything about it at all in these days of Blizzard bans is what makes it stupid.
As I said, they likely noticed, but it is entirely possible that they couldn’t tell whether this is an exploit or an intended mechanic. Things like that are only obvious in hindsight.
There are many situations where it is to this date unknown whether something is an exploit or not. Two examples on Prof Putricide:
- mages can blink despite being rooted by a green ooze,
- DKs can slow a green ooze by putting a gargoyle on it.
Blizzard has been asked numerous times whether the above things are exploits or not. I have yet to hear an answer. If you know of a bluepost that can clear things up, please point me to it. I looked for weeks and I couldn’t find anything. For all I know, I might have used an exploit a couple of times. And this is an encounter which has been there for much more than a couple of hours, which is how it was with Ensidia.
The world is a complex thing… You are being too fast in your judgements.
The exploit and Ensidia’s use of it is not the point here.
Like I said, if I had my way Ensidia would have kept their kill credit and achievement. Players should not be punished for finding and using something that the developers at Blizzard missed.
But if your job is to kill WoW bosses before anyone else in the world, and you have seen other guilds lose their kill credits and get banned due to exploits and you know that a lot of people will watch your kill videos and still you completely fail to mention – to Blizzard or anyone – that there was this odd thing during one of the phases that seemed to simplify the fight a lot, is that really supposed to be that way?, if you fail to do this then you are being stupid.
You are just reiterating what you said before, that Ensidia should have somehow known that they are stepping on an exploit. This is something I replied to at length.
You have no basis to call anyone stupid.
By the way, your “completely fail to mention” phrase is not true at all. You are misinformed. It was Ensidia who brought the issue up.
Yes, I think being the top guild in WoW and not notice that something may be smelly in an encounter is stupid.
Yes, I think not reporting it asap when you know how liberally Blizzard swings the ban hammer is stupid.
But you are saying Ensidia did not realise that the encounter was bugged and yet it was they who brought the issue to Blizzard’s attention?
Sorry for shooting from the hip. I got this wrong.
The sequence of events was:
Blizzard watches Ensidia’s attempts and the kill and notices the issue. They then hotfix the issue and issue a note explaining its nature. Ensidia confirms that the issue was present on their kill. They say they noticed the issue, but had trouble linking it to anything they did and so, being unable to get rid of it, continued as before. Ensidia gets their ban.
My words still stay. You overestimate the abilities of professional players to judge what happens in an encounter and why, while staying under heavy pressure, with limited attempts and in the limited timeframe.
You have no basis to call these players stupid. Or rather, your basis for doing that is your unwarranted assumptions on what professional players should and should not be capable of. You just don’t know what you are talking about.
Over.
I guess they proved a point with killing him on an alt raid yesterday so they should be fine competing for hard modes on Wednesday.
Good – I never doubted their ability to kill the Lich King “as intended”.