The Queue: Exploits and dirty cheats
by Alex Ziebart 
Aug 11th 2009 at 1:00PM
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.
The video embedded in today's edition of The Queue isn't a silly music video this time around, I'm afraid. No funny business today. Today is for game faces. Today is for serious business. Today is for italic letters.
Sashay asked...
"I have found a glitch that has caused many people to have their hearts broken.
This glitch is the "underground" mining technique that people use so they will not be attacked by enemies. Does this happen because they found a "Under Stormwind" glitch somewhere in Northrend? Maybe they put their toon in the tourney castle before it was built and now they are under everything?"
This is an exploit that many gold farmers are using these days to stripmine Wintergrasp, Sholazar Basin, etc. It's basically the same technique they use to get themselves killed in capital cities to spell out their website URL. It's something of a teleport "hack" that lets you warp short distances. If you see someone doing it, just report them to a GM. It's a bannable offense. The video I embedded up above from Youtube user LostShard will give you a pretty good idea of what the movement is like.
Arrowsmith asked...
"Why is it that whenever I open a GM ticket, I'm given a big text box to type in but can only use 5 lines of that box? Wouldn't it make more sense to give a text box the size of the amount of letters or lines or whatever I'm allowed to use?"
What a silly gripe! The box is big because when you first open the GM report UI, it shows you a whole lot of other information before you can actually fill out your ticket. Since filling out the ticket uses the same UI element, it doesn't resize.
hokiebuddy asked...
"Not sure if this has been asked before but what's the deal with the Ebon Blade at the Argent Tournament? Do they offer quests, partake in NPC conversations or anything like that?"
They're specifically there for Death Knights. All of those Champion-level dailies most of us pick up from the Argent Crusade in their tent? Death Knights get them from the Ebon Blade instead.
ch0ke asked...
"Because of my limited playtime and my in-game preferences, I never completed a single quest with the Argent Tournament. I have no reputation, token or whatever badge they give. Will I be able to join the 5-10-25 man Argent Coliseum's instances like anyone else in my guild, or to I need to grind something before I can enjoy that new 3.2 content?"
You'll be able to go into the 5, 10 and 25 man instances in patch 3.2 without a problem. There's no prerequisites to them besides having the appropriate gear to match the difficulty. You won't be able to get some of the new items off of vendors, which do require reputation and tokens, but you can go into the instances just fine.
Terethall asked...
"Is the depiction of Lady Vashj in the most recent comic on worldofwarcraft.com not disturbingly sexy? ...I'm just sayin'..."
Well, that's actually Queen Azshara. And... yes. Yes.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW.com crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column! Leave your questions in the comments and we'll do our best to answer 'em!Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Death Knight, The Queue
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 8)
Suzaku Aug 11th 2009 1:10PM
Mmm, Queen Azshara. She's a bit more clothed there than she is in the official artwork from that RPG guide, though. :(
Wonder how closer her in-game design will be to it.
mightywhitemage Aug 11th 2009 1:10PM
hackers make me a sad panda :(
Drow Aug 11th 2009 2:06PM
I hate it.
I use to see my friend on gatherer, mining titanium node one after another along with saronite and rich saronite. I had leveled a DK just for mining, and asked him how he does it. I told him I'll probably need flying before I can farm like he does. He told me his farming toon doesn't have flying. He just goes to WG. Makes sense, Blizz told us the best farming stuff would be there since it's PvP and lvl 80 mobs.
He takes me out there, shows me his route, it's AMAZING!
The next day, I go out there, and I'm the only one, and I get TONS of good stuff! I was able to put stacks in the guild bank for when 3.2 came out to prospect into gems for the guild.
The following day, it all went to ruin. 2am, no battle for an hour and a half, and there is NOTHING. I did my route, did it backwards, just ran in circles. No other horde or allie at all. Yet I got barely anything. Then I finally saw a titanium node. YES! I run to it, kill a mob, and go to it. NO ONE is around. I click. "It can't be used right now"
WTF?
Then it disapears.
Combat log shows someone casing mining, yet HE WAS NEVER THERE.
I now farm regularly, and do my route, even if I don't get a single piece of ore, I get one thing. Names. And I report them all, every time. My buddy started doing this, and I got my realm involved too if they mined/herbed the area. And it seems to be working.
Unfortuantaly, it's a lot of hacked accounts that are doing it. So real people having real problems, so it sucks for them. But as long as their are stupid people that go to the web site they were whipsered to them by "Blizzaccnts" about new mounts to try, there will always be hackers taking our nodes.
Ben Aug 11th 2009 2:12PM
It's all that remains for us.
I would add that I see opposite faction mining with this exploit/hack by two means. 1) I have enemy name plates on 2) I use an addon named 'Witchhunt', which essentially shows you enemy actions that appear in your log except in a frame on your screen. I use it primarily for pvp so that I know someone is nearby, but I also see 'hackinghacker casts mining' (something like that). I have intended to look into the addon in more depth and see if I could possibly filter/highlight mining events by anyone somehow.
Nick S Aug 11th 2009 3:27PM
This seems to have ramped up dramatically in recent weeks.
Sholazar is one of the worst places, on my server. I hardly see a mining node that's not in the process of being mined by a toon that then vanishes into thin air.
Since many of them are guilded, I suspect they're hacked accounts. Really unfortunate. I hope Blizz makes this fix a top priority.
jfofla Aug 11th 2009 4:22PM
If every account had an Authenticator, there would be no accounts to hack.
Croe Aug 11th 2009 5:27PM
That explains a lot. I was wondering why there was never any nodes in WG. It also explains why so many level ones had so much Titanium ore to sell so cheaply.
So how do we report someone? I mean, I know you can right click the name and report, but really, how effective is that? Will Blizz investigate it and know what it is they are investigating?
RogueJedi86 Aug 11th 2009 5:45PM
@Croe
Click the Red ? on your toolbar(far right side of it, near your bag icons). Then click either Report Issue or Talk to GM, and input all the relevant info on the bot. Both methods will deal with them, though Talk to GM seems to get them to try slightly harder to deal with it. Beware though, you'll have 20+ hour wait times on Talk to GM tickets, at least as of late. The times will only get longer with people having 3.2 issues. If you don't want the wait, just do Report Issue, put in the info, and forget about it.
If you encounter multiple bots, you can put them in the same ticket, just include the relevant info. If you run out of room, you may need to file the ticket on an alt(I've had to before, lots of bots everywhere).
On-topic though, I thought Warden was supposed to check for Hacks. Why hasn't Blizz flagged this hack for Warden to keep people using hacks from logging in or whatever Warden does?
annerjb Aug 11th 2009 6:09PM
I think the best solution is to make everybody have a blizzard aunthenicator. that way a account cannot get hack unless you have the Keychain and that's assuming you also have the username and password most of the accounts that get hack are by key loggers so this will reduce the amount of people hacking by a lot. assuming that blizzard have the ability to manufacture 11million blizzard aunthenticator's :p
MazokuRanma Aug 11th 2009 9:57PM
Well, I just placed my order for an authenticator. I use a ridiculously complex password, involving both lower and upper case letters, numbers, and symbols, but I still worry that I might lose all the effort I've put into my toons.
It's actually a much better deal than I thought. $6.50 for the authenticator and they've waived the shipping fees on this item since they want people to use it. Just thought I'd put this out here for those who were also thinking about it. The only thing I was slightly disappointed in was that I couldn't choose to pay for a faster shipping method. I'm glad ground shipment is free, but I would have preferred the increased security as rapidly as possible.
stephaninator Aug 12th 2009 7:50AM
WoW passwords aren't case-sensitive, so it doesn't matter how many upper and lower case characters you have in your password. For example, if my password was PaSsWoRd, I could type password, or any other variation on it.
tryllofanto Aug 12th 2009 9:23AM
blizz passwords are not case sensitive
MazokuRanma Aug 12th 2009 8:52PM
I never actually noticed that the case didn't matter. I guess I've never messed up when typing my password.
Considering how important account security is, though, you'd think they'd implement this. My password is now one less level secure than before. Technically it's actually the same, but I now have less faith in it.
Learning this just makes me even more eager to receive my authenticator.
Rob Aug 11th 2009 1:10PM
I have a question. For the content patches that Blizz releases a trailer. The video of players in the new raids, are those the GM's playing? Or are those live players on the PTR that they "film" and edit? Or do they get it from just animation? Or some other place..?
Griffe Aug 11th 2009 2:02PM
More importantly, in the trailer, during the brief clip where it shows that group of Horde walking into the instance, What race is the DK in the back? Also, What's the deal with not haveing any HORDE statues in the Turny grounds? "Joint Effort" yeah, right.
Xirifus Aug 11th 2009 1:17PM
I would also like to get answer for this one.
Tori Aug 11th 2009 1:49PM
I've always been somewhat curious about this as well.
NekoDaimyo Aug 11th 2009 3:33PM
That DK must be an Orc. At first I thought Tauren, 'cause he looks pretty damn big, but if you look carefully, he has feet, not hooves. Add the hueg shoulders, and it all adds up to Orc.
Stouph Aug 11th 2009 1:10PM
I've seen Saronite nodes disappear before my eyes as I was mining them and no one around to be seen... how can see what the name of the player who is underground mining is? I would report this happening because its annoying as hell, i've had it happen to me many times.
Rob Aug 11th 2009 1:13PM
I believe its a hunter tracking humanoids. But, a trick is to look at your combat log when they do it. It should say mined..ect.