Comments on the Encidia Ban.

Of the things linked in the wow.com article I did take a peek at was the novel that Muqq wrote on Encidia's website. It's definitely not safe for young eyes.

In it he specifically states a few things;

1) They knew it was an exploit.

The tactics used are provided by game mecanics yes, BUT they completely trivialized a stage of the encounter. An end of expansion encounter. Think about it, back in the MC days, or BC days, you had to work for it, for every last percentage of health on that damn boss. Even Encidia took time to clear this stuff back in the day. Every single one of them knew that stage 2 or whatever it was, was basically turning out to be nothing more than a walk in the park for an end game boss. When you can kill the boss in the first 24hours from it's release, you're not doing it right using fucked up game mechanics, you're fucking exploiting.

2) They didn't care that they were using an exploit.

They found a way to avoid one of the hardest stages of the encounter, and it was like like putting candy in front of a hungry child, they used it so that they could be the first. They do get paid to do this thing we call raiding, and they get paid well to be the first and arguably the best.

3) This stage of ICC was not beta tested or on the PTR.

Simple proof of this is in the pudding so to speak, with the death of Arthas cutscene only recently being leaked and that from game files once the patch downloaded. You can't throw something like that on the PTR without it getting leaked all over the world, so they (Blizz) chose not to. Do I blame them, yes a little bit. The cutscene could have been left out of the PTR and the encounter could have been fully tested. This group of developers working on WoW right now scares the hell out of me. Especially Ghostcrawler.

4) Muqq has cancelled his account.

My only comment is good, one less asshole in the game after the 21st (the day his subscription runs out). This is after all the guild that talked about transferring to other servers an entire raid team and "stealing" any missing server firsts that are as yet unaccomplished, and then transferring back.

They should have permabanned them. Maybe I'm jealous about the getting paid to play thing, maybe I'm not... but you do not have to be a complete and total dick to be good at playing the game, Encidia has accomplished that and more. Now you would have to pay me to raid with people like that, and pay me very fucking well. I'm talking 6+ digits here people.