The situation
Since the late arena saison 2 I hear an increased number of players telling me about exploits. My problem is, that I often don't even recognise them. Are most of them urban legends like Onyxias breath being more deadly after each patch ? Is the game economy actually influenced by technics like duping ?

wowwiki lists the following under exploits:

The question
How to deal with it. How can I recocgnize if something like a lag-hack exists or if it's just a bad connection. Is it just a lie, that the same priest used shadow form and pain supression in the same match ? Did I just miss the flag carrier or does something like running under warsong gulch actually work because positioning is made on the client side ?

The solution ?
I read it more than once, that the best idea to bring in fixes for exploits is to descipe as detailled as possible. Of course this actually could increase in players using these exploits.

This thread:
could be a place to discuss on how to react and how to detect these things. Wether it is useful to write tickets and how to distinquish between actual exploits and rumors and also if publishing the how-to is actually a good idea. Of course if this topic is inapropriate or redudant just delete it.

If you suspect another player is cheating or using a hack of some sort, submit a brief ticket explaining the situation in as much detail as is warranted, and leave it at that. GM's will investigate it with much better tools than any player has, and appropriate action will be taken.

That's pretty much all there is to it.

There's plenty of people botting (to level up and earn gold) and using powerleveling. I seriously doubt the prevalence of cheats/hacks outside of those two categories. The others definitely exist, but Blizzard is extremely adept at catching people. Any serious exploits (duping, teleporting, stat boosting) don't last long in the wild, if they ever get there in the first place.

I'm personally very dubious of melee classes who warp all around a caster in pvp. The typical excuse is lag while using sprint, but I don't buy it, at least not in every case. Sometimes it's not even rogues but warriors. I've watched warriors duel and warp over a large distance, using no speed buff or anything, and right after the duel they are back to normal running with no hint of lag or anything else.

Somehow I doubt people would risk getting their account banned by turning on hacks for duels. ^^

It's lag, relax.

The most they would probably be doing is interfering with their own internet connection to produce extra lag.

Pretty much. Bots are fairly prevalent and they are pretty slack at cracking down on those but anything really major is filtered out and/or clamped down on extremely fast via hotfixes.

The AV AFK bot that constantly recalls is pretty high in usage, I'd say. :P

I agree with the first part of your posting, I too doubt that people who use serious exploits stay around very long. But there definitely is at least one program I know of which allows you to "Speedhack", and it's been around for ages. It's not specifically designed for WoW, kind of generic for pretty much every game. I think the gold-selling-advertisers also use it, I've seen plenty of them running to the capital citys fast as hell.

The best solution is, of course, the most difficult one. While the answer to this topic could be a simple “report everyone and cast out cheaters,” that doesn’t strike the heart of the issue. Moreover, it is undeniably ineffective on any large scale. The only true, effective way to combat cheating and exploiting lies in the hands of the game developers, not by any of us.

There are some important points that need recognizing before moving on to the topic of solutions. Primarily, that there are two types of users who practice exploitive behaviors. First, there will always be people who actively seek out exploitation practices for entertainment purposes; these people will always be here, because it is what they do in every game and it is what they enjoy. Second, there are the people who seek out exploitive measures either because of boredom or poor game mechanics that force the situation. Let's follow this rabbit hole a little deeper to understand my point.

In every role-playing game I have played, there is usually some method of leveling or stat-gaining to some degree. Often enough, these "timesinks" are not competitive, challenging, or entertaining in any way. Like Trouble said, this area probably contains the most prevalent forms of cheating in WoW, (and in my opinion, any game) and it makes sense. In Warcraft, is leveling the most challenging or entertaining aspect of the game? I suspect a vast majority of users would respond that it is indeed not. Taken a step further, it is often viewed as an uninteresting, repetitive, but perhaps necessary evil (in part to possibly keep the rest of the game interesting by comparison, but that’s more on the psychology side of game design than I’m willing to venture for this thread). Either way, people who do something primarily for entertainment purposes will always seek to maximize that entertainment potential with the least amount of effort. To see it in another light, people play games that maintain a balance between challenging and beatable. Games that are too easy or too difficult soon lose their appeal. This is all common sense, of course, but it bears iterating.

Anyway, my argument is that most people do not enjoy leveling or grinding and will actively seek to circumvent it if the situation arises. Now let’s start getting into real-world examples to make the situation clearer.

Leveling in WoW, especially when having leveled up, say, five times to max level (a personal number) becomes ridiculously monotonous. Grinding up to a possible million honor** for all of your PvP characters and all their possible specs becomes ridiculously monotonous. Farming mats for your other character’s gems, enchants, and third epic flying mount becomes about as unappetizing as a meal eaten from a New York sidewalk. These types of structures should not ever be the centerpiece of a game, mostly because it is extremely difficult to make them enjoyable over a long period of time. Organized PvP and organized PvE raiding situations are, however, enjoyed by many players. These aspects of the game instill a feeling of competition, success, teamwork, and entertainment unmatched by, in my opinion, any other timesink in WoW. People don’t play because of their desire to perfectly slay their five-thousandth kobold, they play because of the people and because of the competition.

By now I think you’ve realized my first point. A major advantage to combating cheating in any multiplayer game is to instill a feeling of competition and teamwork with entertainment in the most amount of users possible for the longest duration. (To those wishing to form a rebuttal to this statement, realize that I do understand that this goal is quite difficult to attain, and I congratulate Blizzard on their monumental effort.)

This can be done in a handful of ways.

First, make repeating repetitive tasks less punishing. What do I mean by this terribly worded sentence? Well, take leveling as an example. Why shouldn’t your second, third, fourth, fifth or more alt level as slow as your first? By this point, the thrill of leveling up and exploring old content has lost its value. Why shouldn’t Blizzard implement a scaling (to some maximum threshold, of course) leveling system whereby repeating this massive grind takes less and less time? An experienced Warcraft player would say, well, they in fact do have institutions already set up for this very purpose. It’s called powerleveling (and twinking, to some degree). Although these systems are flawed, I think it is in Blizzard’s best interest to keep them and perhaps enhance them so that fewer players would seek out exploits to level faster. (Personally, I will never level another alt unless it is through some form of powerleveling to save myself literally days if not a week of play time.)

Second, instill a sense of competition in already established junctions of the game. Premade-only rated battlegrounds. Reward-based competition between raiding guilds. The possibilities could expand into almost every aspect of the end-game.

Third, continue to move away from grinding as the de facto way to keep clients. Obviously a grinding paradigm has worked so far (from closed beta up until the installation of raids and battlegrounds), but as the player base becomes more and more experienced with the game and its repetition, their continued monthly fees will have to be earned through more interesting venues. Leave the “find-mob kill-mob” ideas for an end-game back in Westfall where they belong.

Getting back to the reasons behind cheating, some users begin to look for exploitation methods because of their lack of interest in current game content. The only solution to this problem is, of course, to release more content. While I’m sure that Blizzard is working at a feverish pace to release Sunwell and Wrath of the Lich King, the matter-of-the-fact is that the game is stale and bored players are either going to leave or find new, exciting approaches to the game, such as exploiting.*

In essence, the best ways to combat cheating should aim at preventing reasons behind its occurrence instead of attempting to find and punish all offenders. Then, the problem will resolve itself.
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*As an aside, I model edited my Tauren because I was tired of looking at him. Model editing, if you’ve ever been around the block, is a great “gateway drug” to get people interested in more advanced methods of hacking and exploiting. Give us some cheaply-made engineering items that allow us to see whatever race we want to see, and Blizzard has just eliminated a massive entrance to getting involved with exploitation.

**A further aside, classes that are "hybrid" in nature must grind up to three-times as much gear in order to fully utilize their character and each talent spec. At least being able to exchange vendor restoration gear for equivalent feral gear would be a great step in the right direction, but I digress.

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TLDR:
People turn to exploiting because of problems with repetitive gameplay or because of boredom. To fix cheating, their underlying causes must be addressed. Blizzard needs to reduce massive problems with repetition in WoW and release more content to alleviate boredom.

A VERY lot of people change their models, many people are bored of being an ugly NE hunter and would rather be a much cooler Troll instead. In my old FPS background, models were locked down because of the danger of people using spiked models that popped through walls. Don't know if there's any possibility or use for this in WOW. Never seen user created models for WOW, come to think of it.

Model editing can and has been taken to full-out game exploitation. Paths under Warsong Gulch from one flag room to another. Paths all the way from Undercity to GM island. These are all extensions of the same exploit. Model editing was the basis for making a certain block of ground disappear, allowing entire guilds to go straight to C'thun (ever heard of Overrated?).

Custom skins are indeed a big thing too. For instance, there are custom-made skins involving changing your mount into a red Toyota truck (akin to the World of Warcraft commercials).

These are the serious side effects to a small problem that Blizzard could have implemented a fix for themselves.

I agree with you on this point.
I think that the main problem with this is not the fact that those borderline things can be considered as "unfair advantages" for the people that do them, but the fact that it's the only way you have to experiment "hardcore" solo content. I won't derail on the whole "Is the game too simple ?" topic, as it's already covered somewhere else in those forums.
However, I don't have any problem with someone getting some "big rewards" if he can do something really hard/unexpected, as long as he do it without 3rd party programs.

About the others exploits (botting, teleport-hack, etc), they may be bad but I think that the context should play a larger role when sanctions are decided
For example, if I saw someone botting to raise its Syndicate/Shen'Dralar/etc faction, I would just pat him on the back and smile. As well, if someone is using a teleport-hack to explore things (the underground of Karazhan, the Old Ironforge or whatever), I think he should just be warned but not risk its whole account.

Finally, what I don't like about the way those things are handled is that you know that some things are borderline, but you don't know where the border is exactly. What is an Exploit, and what is just a Creative Use of Game Mechanisms ?

Exploit Early.
Exploit Often.
Exploit until you get caught.

(But only bugs in game aka creative use of game mechanics, running 3rd party software/editing the game files is a no-no)

I haven't seen it in the past few weeks, but I think I still periodically see people use the sit/stand macro in PvP. You can identify it when someone "lags" in a straight line but they're actually moving very differently. People like to pick a flag in WSG, run for the tunnel, hit their macro, then run to the door. You see them go in the tunnel, but they're actually going for the door. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the teleporting melee people really just had it macroed to their abilities.

This is a very commonly-adopted strategy and a lot of people get away with it. The trick is being able to recognize what crosses the line, which isn't very hard, but apparently some people aren't the brightest crayon in the box.

Examples of overstepping: Recent shadowstep exploit, espeically when used for significant gains. Repeatedly vendoring the arcatraz key. Sharding a billion copies of tier6 shaman armor when it could be purchased without tokens.

Examples of no punishment: Pulling magristrate barthillas through the entrance gate to farm death grips back at 60. Ignore macros in arena. Shout spamming for full rage in arena. Gnomes walking through the blood furnace gate for ezmode talisman of the breaker and nethers (this one was borderline). Spyglass ressing in molten core. Using spyglass to stop ALL knockbacks for world first ragnaros kills. The list goes on.

I tend to observe and find all of the above very amusing, but I usually abstain from all but the most tame "exploits" (and only in-game non-3rd-party stuff of course). Pretty much all of the ones in the no-punishment list there (and lots more) did nothing to detract from gameplay in any way and really did enhance my play experience with their existence, however brief. The less harmful Creative Use of Game Mechanics are definitely a good thing.

I wasn't aware that you could run any particular heroic dungeon more than once a day. Are you talking about taking different alts through? Or was there an additional "multiple heroic dungeon in single day" exploit? Or am I missing something else entirely?

I believe that if you killed the boss with DoTs during his fire AE animation (while he was immune to everything - except dots) it didn't save you to the instance. And since you didn't kill any other bosses in the instance, obviously none of that was saving you to it either. There also used to be a trick to not getting saved to heroic durnholde - I think for a long time as long as you 1shotted the thrall event, you wouldn't get saved. But that one you still had to run normally. To my knowledge both of these have been fixed for a long time, if not then I'll delete this.

One question is, wheter it would be usefull to actually name the exploits quite early to force the fixes to come sonner. I tend to not exploit at all, except for visiting some places like Hyial before TBC. So I tend so search solutions to actually decrease the usage and ways to detec if someone actually uses an epxloit in competetive areas like the arena.

In my experience, the only way exploits ever get fixed in a timely manner is for them to go public, and many many people to start abusing them. Only then will the devs actually fix something quickly.

This was one of the points, why I started this thread. I hope, that we will see some of the current exploits listed here soon and I plan to update the first page, if the moderators think, that this is ok. Also we should perhabs discuss this point a bit further.

So the question is:
Is the best way to stop exploits to publish them ?

I would say absolutely yes.

One of the things that sticks out in my mind comes from way back. I used to write content for a MUD years ago and it was fairly common practice at the time for the builders to slip in little bonuses for themselves and their friends that often hung around until the general playerbase found out.

Now, I have absolutely no idea if that story carries over to WoW or any of the other modern MMO's but I'd be quite surprised if the idea didn't at least cross the mind of someone at one level of the process.

Just look at something like the Halaa disenchantable throwing weapon, for example.