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Blizzard Removes Anti-Exploit XP Nerf Mechanic

by - 9 years ago

Ever since Blizzard introduced an anti-exploit mechanic that would nerf XP from mobs that people tend to grind – and exploit – for XP, there have been problems for players who would get caught in the cross-fire while leveling.  Icecrown mobs in particular seemed to have been hit hard, resulting in leveling players seeing their mob XP drop to only 10% while questing.

Blizzard has announced that something went awry in the algorithm and they are pulling back on the nerfing mechanic.

This isn’t intended to be an “anti-grind” mechanic. It’s intended to be an “anti-exploit” mechanic that programmatically addresses power-leveling abuses, with the aim of letting us reward legitimate players more generously. In the past, we’ve often had little choice but to drastically reduce the experience awarded by certain respawning bosses or enemies that are locked in combat with other NPCs, because otherwise they’d be abused. That always felt bad to the regular player who was just passing through in the course of questing or exploration and got unexpectedly little or no experience for killing something. The goal was to come up with an approach that would be invisible to most players, but discourage sitting there and repeatedly farming the same mob for long stretches of time in order to gain experience. Alternatives like questing, dungeons, or PvP are all supposed to be more lucrative than that – WoW has never been a game in which mass-killing mobs for experience was the most efficient route.

That said, clearly this implementation is far too strict, and is triggering from a wide variety of normal activity. We’re going to disable the functionality entirely and look into a much more narrowly targeted approach if and when we reintroduce it. Apologies for the inconvenience and the lack of response on the issue – we were working on understanding exactly where the algorithm was going awry, and now that we’ve done so, we’ll be taking action in the near future.

So it appears as though Blizzard plans to bring it back, but under far less restrictive circumstances to prevent the exploiters from gaining from it while not hurting genuine players leveling through zones that have been impacted by exploiters.


posted in Warcraft
JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


0 responses to “Blizzard Removes Anti-Exploit XP Nerf Mechanic”

  1. David M Juiliano says:

    I thought the game was about being something for everyone. If a player enjoys grinding mobs to level then they should be allowed to.

    • PJ Bombardier says:

      I think it’s less about stopping people from grinding these mobs to level, and more to allow people working on quests to have targets available. If someone is killing all of the quest targets to grind, then they can’t complete their quests.

      • Ian Norton says:

        And it’s always easier to nerf one thing than to buff a multitude of others to balance them.

      • Chris says:

        excatly i seen that so many times it gets old trying to quest when you cant even get your quest item

    • uhiuhiuhiuh says:

      Exactly what makes you think people arn’t allowed to grind mobs in wow?…