Lets Talk Exploits
stargrace I am a firm believer in the fact that there is a difference between exploiting, and “taking advantage of a game mechanic” that is NOT exploiting. Let me specify. Killing a ring event over and over again so that you can get the drops from it doesn’t constitute as exploiting in my books. You’re standing in one spot, not doing anything outside of the realm of the game. You’re not manipulating anything, you’re not being sneaky about it. You probably should report it because you know it shouldn’t work this way, but you’re not doing anything specifically WRONG standing there killing encounters. If for some reason said ring event goes through a fix so that it only spawns every 4 hours instead of every 10 minutes that is a result of a game mechanic that has been fixed. If you stand there all day and get reported for it (we’re not talking about using any third party programs here) chances are you’re not going to get in trouble.
Now. An exploit. Lets say with the newly released battlegrounds you figured out that if you transmute an item on the battleground server from your inventory, it would then clone itself as you returned to the regular server and you’d end up with the item back in your inventory along with the transmuted result. In this case you are blatantly abusing a game mechanic, manipulating it in order to make the game do something that it shouldn’t be doing. Cloning items is bad m’kay?
Lets take it one step further. Lets say you figured out a friend from your guild was taking advantage of this exploit, and heading off to battlegrounds every chance available so that they could clone items and mute them then sell them on the broker for huge sums of cash.
What do you do?
Do you bother reporting them? Do you just wait for the game company to look into it and take care of it? Does your opinion of your guild mate change at all?
Whether or not to exploit something is always a personal choice that every individual has to make for themselves. The truth of the matter is that in pretty much every game if there’s a way to break it or find a way to gain an advantage over someone else, there will be people looking to take advantage of it. Whether or not they actually get caught at it, is another issue.There are always stories about raid guilds trying to break the avatars in order to find an easier way to kill them, or break a raid encounter (pulling Veeshan’s Peak mobs through the barriers anyone?) in order to accomplish their “goal” easier. How do you decide whether or not you’ll participate in something like that? Are the risks worth the rewards?