It looks like some World of Warcraft Classic players might not have been playing fair. Developer Blizzard has said that it’s identified a bug in the game that has meant people can farm final dungeon bosses over and over, without having to re-do the mobs leading up to them in the instance. The studio has created a fix for the problem, but it’s said it’ll also be looking for those who exploited it intentionally and will be handing out some “appropriate” punishments.
On the WoW Classic forums (via WoWhead), Blizzard says “we’ve recently become aware of a bug that could be exploited to allow instanced encounters to be completed repeatedly. We have developed a fix for the issue, and we are in the process of deploying it worldwide.”
It also adds that “as soon as possible, we will identify those who knowingly abused this bug in exploitative manner. We will then take appropriate punitive measures,” reminding the community that it defines cheating in-game as “methods not expressly authorised by Blizzard, influencing and/or facilitating the gameplay, including exploits of any in-game bugs, and thereby granting you and/or any other user an advantage over other players not using such methods.”
What these “punitive measures” might be if any players are found to have taken advantage of the bug isn’t clear, but it’ll likely be welcome news to the rest of the WoW Classic community as there’s a lot of loot to be gained using this method, which could lead to an unfairly imbalanced game.
With realm restarts, we're deploying a bugfix for the exploit that allowed instanced encounters to be completed repeatedly:https://t.co/BOauqHEzj2
— WarcraftDevs (@WarcraftDevs) September 16, 2019
As WoWhead highlights, in theory players could have farmed the goodies up for grabs from bosses like Firebrand Pyromancer, Balnazzar, and Darkmaster Gandling unfairly, and perhaps also side-stepped the five hour lockout period for dungeons, as they might not have left them at all.
Blizzard rolled out the realm restarts for the bug fix starting at 3:00 AM PDT (6:00 AM EDT) as of their post yesterday, so it looks like the exploit should now disappear from the game, and players can be sure that loot will be earned the old fashioned way.