WoW hosts tournament for $50,000 – winners cheat their way to victory

The winners were crowned at a tournament in World of Warcraft. The problem is that they secured their victory by cheating.

The Plunderstorm game mode is considered controversial in the community, but is loved by a lot of players. It’s a fresh PvP variant that’s relatively easy to get into. A little chaotic, but essentially easy to understand and quite entertaining thanks to the quick laps. There are also lots of rewards that you can easily earn within one or two evenings.

Blizzard organized a tournament for content creators, which was already quite popular last time. The somewhat sad result: The victory came because an exploit was exploited.

What kind of exploit is this? Actually, in Plunderstorm, like in most battle royale modes, there is a so-called “storm”. As time progresses, this ensures that the playing area becomes smaller and smaller and all remaining characters meet at one position. Anyone who is in the storm usually dies after a few seconds – because you take a lot of damage every few seconds.

But a mistake made it possible to go high up on one of the towers and wait there – a place where the storm would not cause any damage. A clear exploit, because that’s obviously not the intention.

How did the exploit affect the outcome? The tournament had a special rule system in which it was not absolutely necessary to be the last man standing. The last 10 remaining characters in a match receive points, which are then added up across several matches. This made it possible for the winning team to essentially secure victory in the end by ensuring that Gingi and Meeres simply ensure that they live as long as possible and avoid fights – precisely through the exploit in question.

This allowed them to secure overall victory without actually taking part in a final battle.

This is how the community discusses: The victory is viewed rather critically in the community. There are several posts in the WoW subreddit and wowhead also sees the outcome of the tournament as rather negative.

This is what KunshiroSan writes in his post:

The Plunderstorm tournament had a player sitting outside the game limits, bypassing the mechanics that were supposed to penalize him for what he won with. An entire raid group lost their world-first kill and was banned for 72 hours when they pulled something like that on the Lich King, a non-human, soulless PvP boss who doesn’t drop $50,000 upon death […].

It’s just crazy if they don’t do something about this fraudster.

The incident Kunshiro is referring to involved the guild Ensidia, who wanted to get the world first kill from the heroic Lich King and were punished for exploiting an exploit.

This time, however, the tournament was for $50,000 and many believe that such fraudulent behavior based on an exploit should be punished.

Did Blizzard already know about the error? Probably, yes. The exploit already existed in the first edition of Plunderstorm and has not been fixed since. It is difficult to answer why this is the case – perhaps the error was not considered serious enough or did not receive enough attention.

In any case, it’s a shame that the actually nice mode of Plunderstorm is overshadowed by such an incident. Because Plunderstorm can be a lot of fun, even if it can sometimes bring out the worst from the depths of the demonic soul.