The trash does give fast rep but killing bosses also gives good rep and token turn ins for even more good rep. You can get rep to hand in the armor quests really quick. Towards the end the rep is only meaningful for upgrading your ring.

I do not recall the exact amount but killing C'thun gives an absurd amount of rep too. (Well over 1000)

Also the trash in question is in the second half of the zone. Any guild learning AQ will have the requisite rep for quest completion before even encountering the trash being complained about.

If what I read back in the days was right, Conquest was sending rogues to various bosses then summoning them back to the raid, to pull the bosses directly to the raid instead of having to clear all the trash inbetween. Back then, you could summon in combat, it was fixed soon after.

There's quite a lot of guilds who cascaded, and it's not like it was hard for blizzard to find out, but most of the time they decided to simply take no action at all because of all the "noise" people would make of such events on the R&D and general boards, or at least that's what I think it was.

As for the whole griefing thing, having been banned from most of the games I played before wow when I was younger, for all kind of griefing/hacking/cheating, and playing with those same people in wow but staying in the bounds of legality, while still griefing, I can't say I haven't seen ventrilo spying wars and world bosses griefing. It's partly blizzard's fault for creating world bosses on PvP servers. It's one of the few places where you can actually meet some guilds, that are PvE in spirit but playing on PvP servers. It's somewhat like sharks and blood, when people who like PvP find out about PvE(carebears as they used to be named ^^) people trying to get more epics, it's somewhat a natural reaction to go and kill them. And if you're stupid enough to give these immature PvP lovers access to your PvE ventrilo/TS, I won't say you DESERVE getting griefed, but you sure didn't take precautions. Same people who get their accounts stolen because they lent it to a "friend" they met online 2months before.

However, even if from this you could think I side with them, I don't. I did know a few people in the guild, when our guild decided to disband, some of our officers and the GM went there, so I guess they got banned too. But in the end, I'm past the age I enjoyed cheating, and even tho I still enjoy griefing people on PvP servers(you know the whole, PvP happened on a PvP server, where's the police?), I'm not really into cheating/exploiting/hacking anymore, and I do actually enjoy raiding(a thing I wouldn't have considered a few years ago when we were pwning it up on AC Darktide). I feel somewhat old remembering these past memories of Diablo town hacks and Speedhack CS, and now I understand all those posts about me being a loser better thn I did back in the days. It was actually amusing to read flames.

Anyway enough ranting, Overrated deserved what they got, when you exploit, you can't say you'll be ok, it's a risk you take, sometimes it works out, other times it doesn't. It'd be another issue if they went past bosses using soulstones/summons and such, but simply modifiying your client to remove the door that was added by blizzard during the PTR for a reason is a valid reason enough to instant ban someone. And if they actually did it 3weeks in a row, it's a good reason to ban everyone who was there.

Just to make things clear, all we did was wallhack to C'thun, and this was well after we killed Kel'thuzad. It affected nothing in Naxx.

As far as why we did it? We were bored, it sounded fun, and AQ trash sucks.

I love how this thread is 6 pages of people saying "how could they be so retarded?" and then three posts from guys in OR saying "cos we felt like it".

It's pretty damn comical that people realise they were one of the most advanced guilds in the world, and then yet assume that they temporarily went completely insane. Did they underestimate the punishment? Probably. Were they totally unaware of what they were doing? Take a wild guess.

There's several reasons for not implementing "extreme" data validation. The main reason being; if it's made by man then man can break it. Meaning that anyone that wanted to break security can do it. Microsoft has pushed millions of dollars into developing a secure DRM for movies, yet it's broken a few weeks later by a single curious/clever programmer.

But in Blizzards case I believe it's because of their patch system and the fact that they have to support multiple countries with multiple languages.

If you look in the WoW data directory you'll notice 1-2 files that wasn't included in the original installation; "patch*.mpq". In order to avoid updating all the other file archives, which is a pretty daunting task, they simple put all updated files in those patch archives. Everything from graphics, landscape, icons and sounds are located in that file. So when the WoW client looks for a file, it checks the patch archives first and then the original archives.

The hack that Overrated used was just adding a new patch file (hence the Patch 5 name, which is actually just "patch-5.mpq") with an edited AQ40 zone and the client just used that one, assuming it was a legal update. In theory it should be easy to implement a checksum validation of the zone geometrics that a player is using. In reality it'll most likely block out more legal customers than illegal ones.

Then you have to at least put some of the responsibility on the people who gave them access to their vent. Its not a difficult concept, if you don't want outsiders listening in on your vent conversations, don't give them the server address and password, password protect your raid channel, and if you see someone you don't recognize in the server, ban them.

If you hate AQ trash, you take up smoking and go afk between bosses. I love AQ40, with the exception of the Pre-Emps trash, and I can only guess that that's a large part of the reason why. Post-emps trash never really bothered me.

As far as the whole account cancellation thing: It strikes me as a good way to quit after suffering from horrible burnout. The untagged trial members probably have a valid complaint, but not with Blizzard, with their guild members, who used their acquiescence in an effort to "fuck the man".

This would be an amusing argument, though:
"3 weeks of C'thun-only loot seems only fair given the 3 months of clearing the rest of the instance with an unkillable C'thun".

See how they respond to that one.

No, that WAS my point. There is no appeal available since there is no fact in controversy.

This whole thread is retarded.

I would guess an easier solution would be to crosscheck boss status on kills. Whenever a boss dies, the raid ID information is updated with the boss kill. It would be pretty easy to implement a check saying "If this boss died, these other X bosses should be dead. Are they?" and if something looks fishy, it would raise a flag and send a warning somewhere.

A GM could check to see if there was a serious violation, and act appropriately. After a quick look at the logs they would know that Skeram and C'thun died, but none of the other bosses died (most notably the Emps). Once they know there's a problem, they could watch the guild for a week or three to verify that it was a recurring issue that required action.

It's funny how things get distorted with the passage of time. "What Conquest did" is one of the most confused memories out there.

Conquest was one of a tiny handful of guilds making any progress in MC right around the end of January/beginning of February. FoH and Afterlife had too, but I'm not sure who else, if anyone. They were the first guild, I believe, to make it to the final portions of the zone. Anyway, they were obviously being watched since they were basically testing this raid content for the first time as they did it. Initially, they discovered a simple hunter split-pull trick where you could pull some mobs over a frost trap and then feign them back, and from then on you could single-pull the mobs without them linking. They used this to kill Garr more easily (though they'd already killed him previously). Then they got a first Sulfuron kill doing this, which they admit didn't really count. In EQ, using weird mechanics and tricks to split pulls was kind of standard practice, so they didn't think too much of it. A GM appeared and told them splitting linked mobs was an exploit, and not to do it. "Ok," then said. Anyway, later on in that clear, they had reached Golemagg, but wiped to him. In the interim, all the lava packs had respawned. They were standing in Garr's room faced with a choice of "call the raid because it's too late to reclear, or see if we can somehow pull Golemagg out here."

So they did -- a rogue stealthed to Golemagg, got a summon, and then attacked Golemagg and accepted his summon. Golemagg ran out to Garr's room, aggroing everything along the way. But bosses move faster than regular mobs, so he was in front of the pack when they reached Garr's room. (No zone pulse or anything back then.) The rogue vanished, and everything else, while Golemagg prox-aggroed the raid in Garr's room. They fought him there. Now, there are two versions of what happened, and why it happened. When they had Golemagg down to low health, he was despawned.

They were suspended for exploiting. Now, a post on the forums by a blue poster said it was for bypassing content via the stealth/summon/vanish trick. But apparently Conquest was told that it was for getting Golemagg's adds stuck in the geometry in Garr's room and using LOS to negate their attacks. Overhangs in MC used to be horribly glitchy with LOS, but they didn't work the way the GM apparently thought they did (one theory is that the Core Rager offtank was using improved shield block, back when a shield block completely negated physical attacks like Cleave/Whirlwind/Mangle/etc. -- remember that, anyone? -- to pretty much neutralize all of the dog's attacks so it looked like he wasn't actually hitting the tank at all to an observer).

Either way, it's a far cry from what happened here.

I agree, there isn't much more to say. The guild in question knew what they were doing, and have to take the consequences.

Like if you drive while drunk, you could get a DUI or get nothing at all.

This is a good life lesson for them.

Based on what Zagzil is (and is not) saying they appear to all have moved on with their lives and there is not a lot more to say, although my money is on this thread reaching at least page 8.

What I want to know is, how much more arcane WoW history (that most people couldn't remember if you paid them) does Gurgthock have stashed away in his head?

more than Tseric, for sure.

My oldest fact is that Ascent were the first guild to kill Ragnaros and open Ahn'Qiraj. Gurg's knowledge stretches back beyond the Dark Portal.

They probably already do something like this, since they were obviously caught rather quickly. You don't hear of a lot of people getting away with skipping bosses.

Like someone else here said, I enjoy the post-emps trash. It's fun, chaotic fighting, and even though the zone is on farm for us, we can still easily lose a couple people each time, which makes it a challenge to perfect our playing. I wouldn't mind them taking out a nullifier pack or something, but come on... the game is a time sink. It's about 100 times more interesting than MC trash, and 10 times as interesting as BWL trash. I'd say that's a steady improvement.

Thanks for the Conquest backstory. It's a shame there is no site keeping track of things like this; but I guess that would be a pretty steady investment into WoW being your entire life.

Mostly, I agree that this thread is kind of lame. They got banned for exploiting. Do we really need to all talk about our feelings?

No need to talk about your feelings but this thread is turning into a "one day at band camp.." type of thread.. wich is midly entertaining :)

In theory, but in theory its also really easy to get around this as memory changers already do to warden. Its one of those things where Blizzard seems to rather try to just scare people than spend time implementing something that will be undone within a day of anyone who could care less what Blizzard thinks. Basically Blizzard just wants to scare off the majority.

Currently Blizzard does some sort of CRC/hash on your Login Interface files and won't let you load WoW if it thinks they have been altered. They could easily extend this to other files and check them on loadin gof the files. Also there is an issue due to Blizzard changing their patching methods a few times early on that many people have several different versions of files that might not agree with other player versions.

Those curious about permabans they do seem to spend some sort of time trying to figure out whats going on before outright banning you. A friend decided to test them back in February to see what he could provoke out of Blizzard on a secondary account he rarely used anymore, so he went to GM Island using a method that you won't be able to find any information on (no it doesn't involve boats or teleport hacks) then posted a GM ticket that said he "togled autorun" went AFK and somehow ended up here on GM Island. He was eventually ported to Darnassus then suspended till they could check up on it. Took them about a week to make a decision but they first Permabanned his account then sent him an email saying his account was opened again then permabanned it again. All for supposedly witnessing him "togling autorun", lets say the technique would produce really weird logs for Blizzard which prolly created a lot of the confusion for them.

http://img325.imageshack.us/img325/8379/autorun6pt.jpg

What about all the bosses inbetween Skeram & C'Thun is there any point to kill them also?

I wasn't in conquest back when they were suspended, but gurg summed it up nicely. Basically they were warned for splitting garr off with hunter traps. Then they cleared up to the bridge overlooking golemagg and as the story on vent went it was getting late so they thought hey lets see if we can gimmick pull golemagg from here. I got the second hand impression that the gms watching didn't know what to do as the fight lasted a very long time (no melee) and he was only despawned around 5%. As for the imp shield block thing back then the 31 point prot talent was shield discipline, I don't recall exactly how it worked but I seem to remember it adding 225 block value for 15 seconds with a 30 second cool down or something along those lines.

Honestly the Conquest ban still irritates me to this day - and I'm not a member, or even remotely associated with that guild. I'm supposed to "not care"... but what happened there was utter horseshit. They used pulling mechanics that were more or less completely within the bounds of current modern MMO tactics and were warned for it - then banned for something else entirely. THEN, they were publically called out on it. It was plain as day this happened because of the previous EQ ST incident... calling them out and making examples of what was basically nothing. It was poor CM/GM judgement at its finest - overzealous and simply thinly veiled.

This was no worse than doing heigan in his room when he was buggy, or doing Chromaggus with LoS exploits. Although, everyone loved the MC strat guide they published - seriously that was one of the biggest events in the course of WoW (and honestly how I met most of you forum trolls).

This incident however is a different situation... and no one needs to keep saying that I think.

The funny thing is that you can still do this, I accidentally pulled him once almost a year ago by being too close to the edge of the bridge, and then about 3 months ago we tried it out to see if we could avoid the trash. Turns out you just need to clear like 3 packs of mobs ahead of the bridge and then you can do it with no problems (we decided to just not bother after we wiped to the entire hallway of trash pulling on us). Once you clear those 3-4 packs the other ones between you and Golemagg won't be pulled with him.

Man I love to try exploits though. Back when I still had my Shaman main I did that totem trick that permanently increased your stats and I ran around with 6k attack power and 100% crit and dodge rates. Went to have some fun with the Dire Maul Ogres outside the instance (zoning would cause everything to reset, and they were the closest elites on the continent I could think of back then), and I got jumped by a 5 man party just outside the West entrance zone-in. 20 Seconds later, 5 completely bewildered Alliance folk lay face down in some Ogre poop.

I then alt-f4'd and didn't log back on for the day because I was scared shitless I'd get the virtual equivalent of a tap on the shoulder and a stern "We need to talk, Sir". I don't know if I ever got reported or that I have a little red flag next to my account name right now, but I'm pretty sure that at the very least I helped perpetuate the "OMG SHAMANS R IMBA" line of thought ;p

One other thing I can recall was setting up and posting a video where the Reckoning bug was displayed in its full glory in a PvP environment -that earned me a 7 day forum ban too. Think the last thing I did with my former guild was the Heigan thing just to get some attempts in without that damn trashrun.

Anyone recall any more old and patched exploits? Might as well make the thread worthwhile :)

I'm not sure if a perma ban on all the accounts was really justified. Yeah they hacked the MPQ file and got rid of some textures to get to C'Thun and get his epics. Is this really harming the integrity of the game when a guild has already killed him legit? I'd probally give them a massive ban, 1 month maybe, and I'm sure they'd get the picture.

And as for linking CQ to OR's exploits is folly. CQ simply abused mob AI where OR hacked the game. Doesn't matter, CQ got the last laugh at Blizzard anyways by publishing extremely detailed MC strats and having <Insert Non-Cutting Edge Guild> blow thru the instance well before Blizzard expected the population to. I know I cracked a smile everytime I loaded up the CQ strats :)