Exodus Guild Banned!
 

Exodus - Ysondre was caught!

As most of you know, the raiders from the popular World of Warcraft guild Exodus on US PVP server Ysondre have been banned for 72 hours because a major exploit in the Ulduar boss fight Yogg-Saron. Currently there are no guilds in the World of warcraft community that have beaten this boss because of his, calculated by Elitistjerks.com, impossibilty of downing him. Shortly after the exploit, the Exodus members received an email from Blizzard Entertainment addressed saying the following:

Offense: Abuse of Game Mechanics
Details: Circumvention of normal combat mechanics to defeat the Yogg-Saron encounter inside the Ulduar raid instance.

They were caught, mainly because Blizzard knew that the boss was impossible to kill and because it would be the first kill on the entire world! (of warcraft)

The Bug

I bet you're curious on how they actually pulled this off. Well the Guild master told us the following:

In our many attempts at trying to figure out a way to defeat Yogg zero watcher, we found a way to make smart use of game mechanics to make phase 3 easier in zero watcher then one watcher.

The bug is when someone is left inside the brain room of Yogg-Saron, they can still get aggro on the adds that spawn in phase 3. That means if you have someone getting healing aggro in the brain room, they will get aggro on the adds, which cause them to evade in place and allows for all of your raids dps to be focused on Yogg.

We discovered this mechanic on a wipe, and decided to see if we could actually get it to work. The first attempt after that wipe, we realized it worked, and went with it and killed it on that attempt. We also filed a formal bug report on Blizzard's website.

How about now?


Now your probally wondering, well does this still work, the answer is sadly no. A WoW developer by the name of Daelo submitted this on the forums:
Immortal Guardians are now able to target players in the "illusion room" of Yogg-Saron with their summoning ability. This hotfix has been fully deployed to all regions.

We're also in the process of deploying a hotfix for an issue with Immortal Guardians that could cause them to pause their movement before reaching melee range. This fix will also prevent the Immortal Guardian from running away if their target is stunned.

Why they? Why not Ensidia?


What bothered us is that guilds like Nihilum/Ensidia can get away with this stuff, they've gotten world firsts with many, many bugs so why is it a problem now? Neither we, as the newsteam, and Exodus agree with this but we thought we'd look in to the bugs used in earlier fights to see what is different now.

C'thun (There used to be a glitch with macros to rapidly summon/unsummon disgusitng oozeling you'd get the oozleing debuff repeatedly until you hit the debuff limit (debuff limit used to be relativly low) where you had multiple copies of the oozelings debuff and coudln't get debuffed by bosses - Used by Kungen on C'thun world first)

Lady Vashj (The bug was when she gets to 20% you wipe and have a paladin DS. Then she will go back into phase 2 when the encounter is resetting it knocks off her hp per pylon then she will be left on 1hp(5% per pylon) Then a priest will ss and sw:d her. - Used by Nihilum on world first)

Twins (No video from worlds first, used a bug?)

Hodir (Kungen admitted to using flower power to kill hodir on the "impossible" fight.)

Mimiron (Nihilum, the raiders are using an exploit where if two paladins simultaneously cast the same judgment spell, both will be applied but will take the coefficient of the highest one. Not only that, but because they only have two paladins in the raid, and they are world class players, they are intentionally exploiting this mechanic to get ahead in the race for Ulduar. If they were not and this was a small error, it wouldn't have occurred constantly throughout the fight, especially because one of them would be using Judgment of Wisdom to increase DPS. )


Exodus Guild released their video on the kill, it has already reached 275,741 hits at the time of this post.

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We had set up an interview with Shibou, the guild master of Exodus and this is what he told us.

The Interview With Shibou

-JD-
We've seen your posts and we've read everything and that brought up the question, what is your opinion on blizzard banning you but not banning Ensidia/Nihilum for earlier "smart uses of game mechanics"? What is the difference between you two guilds?

Shibou
well, we reported the bug through the system, i guess that's not quite the same as emailing a dev personally

-JD-
Okay, and Nihilum does have a Dev to talk to?

Shibou
I'm sure they won't admit to anything but we've heard rumors that they talk to daelo or whatever, not certian

-JD-
Okay, that explains some things.
Do you think that Blizzard did the right thing by banning you and did you ever think that they might ban you for using the bug?

Shibou
At the time it was sort of a let's see if this actually works, never really intended to kill him because we figured if something that simple worked, other guilds would have tried it

-JD-
Right, so you weren't looking to kill him, you were just testing to see if it worked

Shibou
Well, we saw it worked, and it was a very easy decision to keep goign rather than wiping it haha

-JD-
Haha, I can imagine
In your opinion where is the border between use of clever game mechanics and exploiting/bugabusing?

Shibou
At this point, yogg has been live for months, i'm not sure how blizz has yet to catch that bug
I mean, that was probably definetly not intended and we knew that.

-JD-
So would you say that you were using clever game mechanics or bugabusing?

Shibou
I think it's more of a bug than a game mechanic

-JD-
okay
Would you have been able to achieve what you've achieved without using the bug?

Shibou
Well, yogg +0 is practically impossible and since blizz hasn't hotfixed it to be doable like they did with hodir, i can only assume they don't intend it to be killable with current tier gear

-JD-
Okay, then my last question, did Exodus ever use a bug like this (On Hodir or C'Thun) to get bosses down?

Shibou
nah, this is definetly our first not even jol on mim

-JD-
Nice, okay, well, is there anything you'd like to say to the MMOwned members or to blizzard?

Shibou
Haha uhm, i can't think of anything atm, it's 5am =/

-JD-
haha, okay, well, good luck with getting more world firsts and I hope that the guild will do well. Thank you for this interview.


Again, why is this Exodus kill different? Why was Exodus banned? Discuss!


Article by -JD- and Intu for MMOwned

Great post JD

Blizzard is a bunch of bitches.

the banhammer strikes again

Awesome post, looks professional :D, blizzard are so sneaky!

Crazy... why do they create a boss which is impossible to kill?=S

Because there @ssholes and they can.

This is why i cheat every god damn time I can when I boot up the live realms, accounts and toons are a dime a dozen At least I can make some other peoples life a living hell for 72 hours at a time

Because they want to slow the progress down so it's not as easy as Naxx was (all the kills in like 3 raids?)

The difference between Ensidia and Exodus is obvious. Ensidia Spell Stole a buff that probably shouldnt have been able to be stolen however this at the time required no abuse to use and there was no Post saying Pollinate is not to be used by spell stealing mages. Exodus however forced mobs to Evade bug , Note the difference. Sure they used normal mechanics to stay inside the brain room however by no means was it normal for mobs to Evade bug compared to the mages spell which steals a spell from mobs/players. be serious stop hating cuz the power player guild literally tried something smart where as exodus CHEATED.


In addition Ensidia Reported that the spell was buffing there mages way too much to be working properly w/ spellsteal. However the crew of exodus reported HI we just bugged a boss fight to get a world first and umm were trying to be the only ones ever to get it so yea. Yogg 0 keeper is damn near impossible and is supposed to be as such go through the story and you see Yogg corrupted Loken brother of Thorim who then killed Thorims wife Sif making thorim a key element in the fight against yogg.

Its not like they tried it 100 times to bug him. They thought they found the bug and it worked, you cant stop at 50%, no way ensidia would do it

:3 as always, a good read JD

Good read indeed JD.

And I was about to get really happy to see some else guys than Ensidia / Nihilum in glory. Then Blizzard comes and ****s everything over.

Grr.

Not taking sides or anything but, Nihilum did release a eredar twins first kill, it was from the point of view of Toorum the troll hunter, no exploit was used. The bug people claim at mimiron is impossible to pull off, say one person has 60 ms and one has 65 ms, you would have to wait 5ms before recasting the second, and with different people having different ms, this is near enough impossible to pull off. If you even watch the exodus mimiron video, you can even at some points see a double light tick, along with a judgement bigwigs timer.

I would say ... whaha Blizzard! You couldn't handle the fact you immortal boss got downed lolz

Informative article. good job. kept me interested all the way through.