At a tournament in World of Warcraft, the winners were crowned. The problem: They secured their victory through cheating.
The Plunderstorm game mode is considered controversial in the community, yet it is loved by many players. It is a fresh PvP variant that can be easily joined. A bit chaotic, but fundamentally easy to understand and quite entertaining due to the fast rounds. Additionally, there are plenty of rewards that can be earned within one or two evenings.
Blizzard held a tournament for content creators, which was quite popular last time. The somewhat sad result: The victory was achieved because an exploit was used.
What kind of exploit is this? In Plunderstorm, like in most Battle Royale modes, there is a so-called “storm”. As time progresses, it causes the play area to shrink continuously, forcing all remaining characters to converge at one location. Staying in the storm usually results in death after a few seconds – as one takes significant damage every few seconds.
However, a bug made it possible to move high up onto one of the towers and wait there – a place where the storm does not inflict damage. It’s a clear exploit, as this is evidently not intended.
How did the exploit affect the outcome? The tournament had a special scoring system, where it was not even necessary to be the last survivor. The last 10 remaining characters in a match receive points, which are then accumulated over several matches. This allowed the winning team in the end to secure the victory simply by ensuring that Gingi and Meeres lived as long as possible and avoided fights – all thanks to the aforementioned exploit.
As a result, they secured the overall victory without actually participating in a final battle.
This is how the community discusses it: The victory is viewed critically in the community. There are several posts in the WoW subreddit, and even on Wowhead, the outcome of the tournament is seen rather negatively.
KunshiroSan writes in his post:
The Plunderstorm tournament had a player sitting outside the game boundaries, circumventing the mechanics that were supposed to punish him, through which he won. A whole raid group lost their World First Kill back then and was banned for 72 hours when they pulled something like this against the Lich King, a non-human, soulless PvP boss who doesn’t drop $50,000 upon death […].
It’s simply crazy if they do nothing against this cheater.
The incident that Kunshiro refers to involved the guild Ensidia, which sought to secure the World First Kill from the heroic Lich King and was punished for exploiting.
This time, however, the tournament was about $50,000, and many believe that such cheating behavior based on an exploit should be punished.
Did Blizzard already know about the bug? Probably, yes. Because the exploit existed already in the first edition of Plunderstorm and has not been fixed since. Why this is the case is hard to answer – perhaps the bug was not seen as serious enough or did not receive enough attention.
In any case, it is unfortunate that the otherwise enjoyable mode of Plunderstorm is overshadowed by such an incident. Because Plunderstorm can be a lot of fun, even if it can sometimes bring out the worst from the depths of the demonic soul.
