wow Guild Spots Crucial Potential Exploit for RWF and Blizzard Fixes It Almost Instantly

[Starym 3,801]

 

This is one of those stories that actually happens quite a bit when the Race to World First comes around, as the top guilds notice bugs and potential exploits, report them to Blizzard and it gets fixed - usually without the rest of us ever knowing about any of it. This time around it was our own Impakt from top US guild BDGG who spotted a potential exploit in item trading, which could and would have massively impacted the race.

The method involves the base craft legendaries, some old enchants and tinkers, and the somewhat strange loot sharing rules in place, as Impakt explains:

Quote

We discovered that there are several old enchants in the game, specifically engineering tinkers, that do not have any sort of level restrictions or ilvl requirements on them, which will make the targeted item soulbound when applied. This is important, because a soulbound item enables gear trading in the affected slots.

Normally if you equip one of the 235 white quality legendary crafting pieces, it is meaningless since the item is not soulbound. As per the rules for loot trading in the game, to be able to trade an item drop, you must have already equipped an equivalent or higher item level soubound piece of gear in that same slot.

However, because we could use several old enchants and engineering tinkers to make a few of the pieces soulbound, we essentially could trick the game into thinking our characters had equipped 235 pieces in those slots, meaning our alts could trade any Castle Nathria gear to our mains in those specific slots. We couldn’t do this for every slot, but we were able to successfully make Belts, Cloaks, and Chests soulbound. There are probably others where this could work, but we immediately reported our findings to Blizzard and it was fixed before we looked further.

This is why you might have noticed a part of today's hotfixes and been somewhat confused by what the change meant exactly:

Hotfixes, December 7th (source)

Corrected an issue that could allow crafted Common-quality base items for Runecarving to incorrectly affect tradability of items obtained in raids and dungeons.

And so the race might have been seriously affected by this, not only in as much that guilds would have better geared characters, but some competing guilds might not have heard about the method and been left behind, or worse, wouldn't want to do it for fear of suspensions, which then might not come.

The behind-the-scenes in the Race to World First and the very common instances of talking to the devs directly about bugs, exploits and similar aren't that publicized, but suffice it to say that the bosses (and even other mechanics like the trading issue today) that those of us not in the very top guilds encounter are very different than those that were originally present.