Teleport Hacks in Ranked PvP? Blizz says ‘No Problem’!

A friend of mine recently showed me a funny little trick one day while we were out killing ghosts in Netherstorm. “Watch this”, he said, and proceeded to run straight off the edge of the world, which is usually a good way to die and incur a 10% item durability loss. “Yeah, wow. That was pretty sweet”, I began to say as his character disappeared over the precipice. I turned to the next ghost, to continue the grind while he made the inevitable corpse run. He was standing right beside me again.

“Umm… but I just… you were… uhhh… wtf?”

He demonstrated again, this time running straight into a pack of mobs, before popping back to beside me. None of the mobs aggroed, nobody seemed to care.

I was intrigued.

Apparently there is a macro you can write that, when spammed, will confuse the computer of anyone standing nearby. The person spamming the macro has his or her screen lock up a bit, and anyone standing near him assumes he’s lagged out. Your computer continues to report back that he is still performing whatever action he was doing, in hopes that the connection will be restored in a second, and picks back up again where he left off. This results in the person in question being able to ‘walk forward, spam the macro, stop walking, keep spamming’… and have their character just ‘run forward’, but only according to everyone else’s screen.

We’ve all seen this phenomenon. The warrior is running forward to pull the next pack in UBRS, and just… keeps… going. There’s that instant when you get ready to freak out on them in vent, and then nothing happens. He just runs harmlessly through the mobs, and a second later you find that he went line-dead. I just never realized there was a way to do it intentionally.

This doesn’t fool anyone that isn’t human, though. Server-side, the mobs know you stopped running forward and don’t aggro. A hunter’s pet will still chew on your face where you stand (and you won’t even know, as your screen is frozen), and unless a mage is trying to frost nova or AOE you, you’re probably still in range of their pyroblast. It’ll just go ‘where you actually are’ instead of ‘where he thinks you are’.

The obvious implication of this is that melee classes (and casters, to a lesser degree) are stuck in a bind during ranked PvP arena matches. Now, I won’t go all doom and gloom about it, but in my limited arena play (maybe about 50 matches), it’s happened to me about 5 times. Ten percent is not a huge number, but it’s not 1 in 50. One of these times was a druid; stuck in bear form with no rage, at about 10% health, with me hovering around 20. I had a full energy bar, and was chasing behind him backstabbing backstabbing backstabbing, and getting ‘out of range’ errors. Suddenly he blinks out of in front of me, and I spin around to find him sitting on a full health bar 20 yards back; popping back into bear form again for the clean up. Apparently, some mastermind on the forums has said that this is impossible, and even went so far as to call me a liar… the /sit portion of the macro would interrupt a druid’s slow heal spell casting, but maybe he popped instant casts (Rejuvenation + Swiftmend), or maybe he used a Nature’s Swiftness + Big Slow Cast for a full heal. The fact is that had he gone caster in front of me chasing him, he would have been dead; with a shiny new pair of stainless steel antlers growing out of his back.

Remember -- while the person’s screen locks up, the server doesn’t. This means it’s possible to start running forward, spam the macro, start walking BACKWARD, cast some crap, push some buttons, all while spamming that macro, and still have stuff happening -- all while your character’s ghost form (with his new ghost points, no doubt) is running away from your original position. Rogues can even sprint and use it, and it shows them as sprinting away. I wonder if it works during whirlwinds or anything fruity like that..?

So. What to do? Well, I posted a thread on the general boards with the words PvP Exploit in the subject line, which is always a guaranteed way to get views (because honestly, everyone WANTS to cheat in PvP), and asked for a hot fix ETA. Everyone laughed, and pretty much said ‘welcome to last year’. This is not only ‘not news’; there are many ways to go about doing it. If you play in windowed mode, just dragging the window’s title bar around while walking forward is enough to set the condition off. Then you’re not even using a /sit macro, and would be perfectly fine to cast a 25 second heal that hits for 800 billion!

The best part is that Blizzard has apparently known about this since the introduction of Warsong Gulch, and has just never done anything about it. Warsong Gulch has always been a hotspot for such antics as wall walking and rooftop camping, so that doesn’t surprise me, but ranked PvP arenas? Does this fall under the tried and true “clever use of game mechanics”? If so, I think I’ve just figured out the name for my new 3v3 team.

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Introducing “Ghost Points”

The world is full of stupid people. I realized this a long time ago. Some days, this knowledge fills me with a great sadness. Some days, I revel in it, like a child might revel in knowing ‘next Tuesday is Christmas’. Sometimes, I’m just caught off guard, and I don’t quite know how to react. I’m simultaneously filled with disgust and utter indifference… it makes me a bit light headed, and I stare vacantly into the fridge looking for cold beer that I know is already long gone.

Today I came across a new post on the Rogue Boards that has apparently figured out how to ‘fix imp sap’. Being the trash rogue that I am, I never even noticed it was broken! For the non-Rogues out there, let me explain. In World of Warcraft, after reaching level 10, talent points are gained with each level. These allow you to customize your player in ways that allow you to be different than every other Rogue (or whatever class you play) on the server. Let's put aside the fact that everyone just copies one or two players' builds, and everyone is running around with cookie cutter specs. Let's just say maybe you choose to specialize in the use of daggers. Your critical strike rating for using daggers then goes up, and you are more likely to cause a ‘big hit’ with a dagger. Specializing in maces gives you a chance to stun your opponent on successful melee attack.

Some talents add completely new abilitites, and some just refine the use of existing abilities. One of these talents is called ‘Improved Sap’. Sap is an ability that allows the rogue to incapacitate a humanoid opponent for 45 seconds. Your group is then free to pull the enemy's pals without worrying about the incapacitated target. The rogue must be stealthed to activate this move. Upon sapping a target, the rogue is removed from stealth, and the enemy's friends usually proceed to pound the rogue in the face with their weapons, and this makes the group of heroes playing with the rogue unhappy. By putting points into the Improved Sap talent, a rogue can maintain stealth after the sap, and tiptoe away from the enemies, allowing the pull to proceed smoothly.

Some rogues feel like this is a huge waste of talent points for them, because sap does no damage. They feel like being delegated to crowd control is belittling to them, never mind the fact that rogues have a hard enough time finding groups in endgame instances as it is. Sap used to be 21 points deep into the Sublety tree, and used to require 3 points spent in it to acquire a 90% success rate. Imp Sap is now only 7 points deep into the Subtlety tree, costs only 2 points, and has a 100% success rate.

These people still aren’t happy.

Enter Desana. This is a rogue that has come up with the most awesomest idea in the entire game, and will surely win the developers over with her unique insight. She proposes ‘ghost points’. 10 EXTRA talent points that only work inside instances.

Let’s just stop before we take a look at her actual post. Let’s just get one thing out there on the table, and then bask in her infinite wisdom. Talent points are meant to be like ‘specialties’. Like, I went to the community college Ninja 101 course and trained in how to use Nunchuks under Nunchuk Master Joe. Hand me a Bo Staff and I probably won’t be as effective a killing machine. It was a tough decision, but with Nunchuks in my hands, watch out! Desana basically wants to undo all my ninja training by saying I could also have 5 talent points in Bo Staff Skillz, BUT ONLY IN AN INSTANCE. Like that suddenly makes sense. Let’s take a look:






While we’re at it, why should we be constrained to our own classes talent trees? Why shouldn’t I be able to train Mortal Strike on my Mage? Why can’t I put points into Natural Shapeshifter on my Priest? Wait, make it only work in instances, then it’s cool, okay? Anyway...






My uterus is flaring again, I need to go lie down. I think I have cancer. Christ, I need a fucking beer.

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Don't Read This Post

Consider this fair warning to the whiners. I'm sorry, y'all. I just can't do it right now. The internet is a woeful place, and has taken its toll on me. Today I went in search of new information on Warhammer Online. Usually, I like new games to be somewhat of a surprise, so I don't read up too heavily on things. I managed to make it all the way to the checkout with the new Zelda game in my grasp, really having no idea about the game as a whole. That was quite an accomplishment, I think.

Today, however, I was weak. I went to the official site and began to look at a few screenshots. One thing led to another, and I found myself following a link to a Gamespot interview where the 'Witch Hunter' class was to be revealed.

The article itself was pretty much a fluff piece, and was a quick read.

Now, many times at the end of articles these days, you can find a little box where you can 'contribute' to the article at hand... effectively adding your own little 'two cents' to the article in question. Usually, I can ignore that section of the page like I used to ignore The Family Circus in the Sunday Paper. Today, I found myself drawn in by one of the posts on the first page. It was so long, that it must have taken a bit of effort to churn out. Intrigued, I began to read:

Keep in mind this isn't an article having anything to do AT ALL with World of Warcraft. It's a "reveal piece" for the new Warhammer game, focusing on a playable class.

I began to feel drowsy, and skimmed my way down to the bottom of the page. The posts are sorted 'newest at the top' by default, so I was intrigued when I read "Nishua" commenting on the excellent posts preceeding his own:

Nishua wants everyone to realize what a braniac he is, so he uses a lot of 'smart guy' sounding words. Accolades! Informations with an S! Too bad he struggles with punctuation.

ANYWAY! I'm excited to see what he was excited about!

Exhibit A:

Hm.

Exhibit B?

Yeah. Wow. These are "educated minds" in Nishua's little corner of the world. If you guys are looking for some choice humor to liven your day, please... be my guest and read the full 'discussion' taking place RIGHT NOW at Gamespot. Me? I think I just need to lay down a bit... my uterus is aching for the children of today.

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Will the real Isobelle please stand up?

People sometimes ask me where my name comes from. They might even ask silly questions like “Why use a girl’s name in the first place, when you are clearly a man?” And yet, these same people clearly have names, but choose to post on the Guest or Unregistered account here. HYPOCRITE MUCH? God!

Anyway, here’s the mystery, solved and laid out bare for all the masses to know and understand: The name Isobel was always my first choice, but it was also always taken. Isobel is the name of a Björk song. Let me give you a little background on Björk and I. During the year 2000, Björk was the only thing I listened to, music-wise. If there was music playing, and I started it, it was Björk. I became really heavily ‘into’ her, I really liked all her songs, and there wasn’t a lack of material to download and listen to. This was around the time Napster was in full-blown swing, not like just starting, and not trickling off yet. Napster was huge, and there were approximately 8 zillion Björk songs out there to download at any given second.

Björk was (is?) very large in the whole “DJ / Club” thing, and just about every song she had done had been sliced and diced and remixed a hundred times over. The club scene was something I never really got into. I just used to listen to her songs in my room or driving around in my car, with the windows down late at night ‘shout singing’ her songs as I drove around in ghettofied Oakland. She had a lot of material when you started to dig deep. Her first album was made when she was 11 or 12 in Iceland, and it sold a zillion copies. Her whole family was really musical, but the instant celebrity thing kind of rubbed her the wrong way. She went on to join teen angst little punk rocker bands like KUKL, and later came into poppy tracks with some Icelandic poets (and the father of her child, Sindri) in the SugarCubes. There’s a lot I’m glossing over. It isn’t really important. My first real exposure to Björk was her solo album that my brother owned, titled Debut.

If you went looking for a random Debut track on Napster, you would come up with hundreds upon hundreds of results. Not like ‘search for all songs off the album Debut’, but ‘search for all versions of the song Big Time Sensuality’. One day, I tried to see if I could find a list of all the remixes that people had done of certain songs. I don’t still have the link for what I found, but I remember starting to print the list of remixes for JUST the Debut album, and stopping the print job after 9 pages of packed text. It was an uphill battle I would not win. Björk’s own “third” solo album, Telegram, was actually just a bunch of remixes of her second album, Post.

One of the songs off these albums was a song called Isobel, about a woman that lived alone in the forest, “raising wonderful hell”, and so on. Moths delivered her messages to people, but the people couldn’t understand what the moths were saying… all they could hear was Na Na Na Na Naaa…

ANYWAY. One aspect of the song that I really liked was that she lived alone, “married to herself”. At the time, I was just out of a crappy ass relationship, and kind of had the attitude that I didn’t really need anyone else for a while. It all just fit. Whatever.

Along comes the original WoW beta. My roommate had a friend that worked at Blizz, and got us both invites. We logged on in the early closed beta (not the alpha, but early on), and I immediately rolled an undead warlock named Isobel. The name was taken, so I tried Isobelle. Bingo. To this day, all my undead girls have the same face, skin tone, hair style and color as my original undead warlock. I created an identity that day, and use it to this day. Why undead? I can eat people. (Click here for a little background on that one)

I forget how the next step happened, but I think it was when the PvP servers emerged. I tried to roll Isobel on there, and the name was available. I was pleasantly surprised. Björk fans are known for their tenacity, and surely someone else wanted to be running around raising wonderful hell. What happened next was a little weird, because people kept sending me tells just saying “Isobel LOD?”

It took me a while to figure out, but apparently the ‘old’ Isobel was in a guild named Lords of Death (or Destruction, or something… whatever), and had made quite a splash. Everyone thought I was he or she, and it really just got annoying after a while. Sometimes I would just reply “YEAH THAT’S ME, I NEVER SAID IT BEFORE BUT I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU WERE A DICK”, to which people would give me little 'frowny' chat faces, and then I’d /ignore them. That was fun for a week or so (I seriously got like a billion “Isobel LOD?” tells, it was fucking nuts), but it really ended up just being lame. I wanted to be special, dammit! So I latched onto the –ELLE suffix, and have stuck with it.

All my characters are named some variation of Isobelle (my 61 warrior). I have Izobelle the level 70 rogue, and Ixobelle the level 13 mage. Ixsobelle, Izzobel, Izzobelle, and Izobel are the names of my alt banks. Any one of them that I intend to actually play is made to be the undead girl with the same face and hair. Anyone I just intend to be a bank is an orc or troll for quick and painless runs to the OGR auction house and mailbox.

Fast forward to sometime last week, when the general forums caught fire over some crap called the ‘Armory’. Apparently, Blizz introduced some new part of the web page where you can type someone’s name in, and see what spec they are, what gear they’re wearing, and what guild they belong to, etc.

Personally, I think it’s great. I've managed guild websites in the past, and getting people to sign up to use the wowroster addon was a huge pain in the ass. This is all done for you now. I love it!

Of course, everyone else immediately went into bitch-fest mode and starting creating apocalyptic threads on the forums about the ‘end of privacy’. Thousands of Q keys screamed out in pain, and were ultimately silenced. Here’s these people’s main argument: “I don’t want anyone to be able to see what spec I am, since I lied to my guild about being a holy priest. Apparently the trash heals, purple glow, and the fact that they can see through my body didn’t give it away yet, and I’m hoping to win more ‘healing’ BOEs on the next run.” Good luck with that, Liverlips. Apparently, their privacy is being invaded, and they’re feeling all violated about it.

	Instant credibility. Misspell the main word outlining the 'point' of your post. Guaranteed 20+ pages of feedback.

Hey jackass, how do you feel when someone inspects you? Do you cry about it and report them? What happens when you’re in a run, and don’t want someone to find out you aren’t combat swords? Do you just not hit the Hemo button all run long? Are you afraid people will notice you aren’t a protection-specced tank when you’re swinging around the [Big Fucking 2h Axe of the Erect E-Penis]? Here’s a tip if you don’t want other people meddling in your business online: Play Final Fantasy 7 again. No one will ever know you suck at pulling off Tifa’s Limit Break, because you’ll be ALL ALONE!

I digress. Once I saw the armory, I immediately saw the light! I could find out whom all these haters are that keep taking my name! I could find out once and for all, just how special I really am!

The results:

Isobel = 169!
Izobel = 43!
Isobelle = 27!
Izobelle = 9!
Izzobelle = 3!
Izzobel = 2!
Ixobelle = 1!

The first result doesn’t surprise me in the least. If anything, I’m surprised it’s such a small number. Although, when you think about it… given that there are only 222 realms TOTAL (I counted), having a 76% chance that there is one toon named Isobel on your server is pretty large. There’s a 12% chance that you’re on a server with an Isobelle; it’s a much bigger leap. My mage, Ixobelle, is unique in all of the game. I kind of always liked that spelling of it too… maybe if I bring my druid (1 of 11 toons named Yasei) back over to Daggerspine from Scilla I’ll name her that.

I wonder how many Isobelles are people that read my articles here and have made an alt ‘in my honor’? That’s kind of weird to think of, but I imagine there are plenty of Tychos running around in WoW (lol, I can check! 62!), so that’s cool. If it’s the price I pay for internet superstardom, then SO BE IT!

In the end, though, the whole “privacy” thing just makes me laugh. People will complain about anything. The thing that strikes me as funny is just how silly it all is. This is an MMO we’re talking about. We don’t even ‘own’ the characters in the sense that we own the shoes on our feet, so why make a fuss over nothing? Plus, who really cares about privacy on the Internet, unless you’ve got something to hide? I’ve got digitized movies of people having sex on my hard drive. There, I’ve said it. I’ve already detailed my adventures on Napster in search of Björk songs. I’m all caught up with season three of Battlestar Galatica, but it isn’t shown on TV here in Japan. I’m hardly foolish enough to think I’m alone in this kind of thing. On the other hand, it’s not exactly a secret that gmail parses my emails so it can make targeted ads appear in the right hand pane while I read my inbox. I don’t pay for gmail, so whatever, let them have their revenue. But I do pay for WoW! But I don’t get ads on the loading screen. The cycle can go on forever.

I hope blizzard doesn’t buckle to the whinging of the vocal minority on this one. I, for one, would love if they listed all a person’s alts on the armory as well. There would be no point in ‘hiding’ behind a level 1 alt anymore on the forums. Post on your main, or GTFO. Feel free to run a search on the WoW general or rogue boards for posts by Izobelle or Isobelle. I’m pretty much a dick 90% of the time, but at least I’m not doing it from a level 1 gnome account.

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