Exorsus reacts to Blizzard’s ban. How can the race for Firstkills in WoW be made exciting and fair again?
Recently, Blizzard imposed a ban on certain guilds in World of Warcraft after they exploited an issue with Helya – the currently toughest boss. While some guilds, like Limit, accepted their ban and acknowledged the mistake, Exorsus accuses Blizzard of double standards. In a lengthy post on Reddit, Exorsus provides insight into the lives of elite raiders and the issues that currently exist.
Blizzard: The flag in the wind?
According to Exorsus, “tricks” and exploiting small bugs have always been part of the race for Firstkills. Exorsus accuses Blizzard of having a “creative interpretation” of the rules by the developers. What exactly constitutes a legitimate tactic and what is an “exploitation of a bug” is not always so obvious. For instance, there was a similar case with the kill of Archimonde in Warlords of Draenor, where a tank was made to die at a specific time to circumvent a mechanic.
This was not punished by Blizzard. In fact, all 5 top guilds at the time exploited this fact, making it a “valid tactic”.
No incentive for Firstkills
Another issue Exorsus sees is the lack of incentive for Firstkills. Blizzard is trying to push into the eSports market across all sectors, but PvE in World of Warcraft is slowly dying out – at least among the professional guilds. Being part of the elite is difficult, time-consuming, and exhausting. Few players want to endure this stress for “a few words of recognition on Twitter.” One possible solution would be a prize pool that makes the race for Firstkills exciting again and also gives players new incentives.
Exorsus may not have a perfect solution, but they have some ideas, such as this:
“Implement a small prize pool for the top X guilds in the world, with clear rules (it must be the final boss, max X players per guild, etc.). This would bring masses of players back into the hardcore scene. They could even introduce additional pets (like a small version of the respective final boss) and sell them as a kind of “crowdfunding project” (5%/10%/20% of all income would then go into the prize pool).”
The “Legendary soft cap” of 4 items was also addressed. Professional raiders felt compelled to level multiple characters of the same class to 110 and then hope to get the right two legendaries to keep up. However, this problem is already a thing of the past. See our post on the removal of the soft cap for legendaries.
You can find the full post by Exorsus as usual in our sources.
Cortyn says: I find it hard to take sides here. On one hand, I absolutely cannot accept cheating and exploiting – that has nothing to do with “fair play” and a fair race for the First Kill. On the other hand, it’s also difficult when Blizzard judges “sometimes this way and sometimes that way” what exactly is prohibited and what is not. Some proposals, like selling the final bosses of a raid as minipets and allocating part of the income as a “prize pool” for legitimate Firstkills, I find good and would probably support… and then also be interested in Firstkills again.
What do you think about the whole matter?
We discuss the race for World Firsts in this article:
