So Blizzard has taken at least some action to prevent further shenanigans like this from happening, and it clearly wasn't an intended feature. Also, this was allegedly written by a GM to the Stars raid:
The supposed translation is "Dear player, Fireland 25men Heoric mode is not yet released so we gonna force to port you out of instance and thanks for your understanding."
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It seems Stars, the Chinese guild playing on Taiwanese servers, were very eager to start the new Heroic progression race, so much so they decided to skip the whole "wait a week after Normal modes" part of the race. They did a faction change which doesn't lock you to your Raid IDs and so got to start on Firelands Heroic bosses, since they had already killed Normal modes earlier. They also took down Shannox on heroic mode already.
Apparently the Taiwan faction transfer service is "under maintenace" now, so it seems Blizzard have in fact noticed.
Here's wowprogress talking about the faction change mechanic, from one year ago:
"There is now possibility exists to get additional attempts via faction change and Blizzard is a bit slow fixing it. Just wanted to note that those guilds who will use it to buy advantage in heroic progression will be banned on WoWProgress.com.There seems to be some "proof" at last, as well as many people saying their site claims they are 3/7 on Heroic modes. There are other claims that they killed Shannox and then got kicked out of the instance by a GM, or that they were only trying out the first three and killed Shannox, but all of it is pretty vague and certainly not definitive.
So don't use the faction change service!
It will be allowed here in only one case: if Blizzard officially approves this path of buying additional attempts for real money (which I hope will never happen)."
The current story is that they transfered their alts in order to try out Heroic modes, as they didn't have the opportunity to properly test during the PTR stage (presumably due to lag), and then get their "real" kills next week when Heroics legitimately open.
When go outside in sunmmer,then a pair of Ray bans cheap is essential,if not wear sunglasses,you can take your umbrella in order to avoid strong UV damage and protect your eyes.
I really hope Blizzard do something serious about this, because if PAYING for a head start isn't considered an exploit...
There's been so many obvious exploits lately with no action, and I don't expect this one to be any different. Double standards? Yes.
Instead of entering any sort of argument that touches the topic of bans and illegal/legal actions, I simply think it's a ridiculous move from a guild, who usually considers itself to be amongst the top10 in the world. At least wowprogress' policy is pretty clear on the matter.
Haha! You must at least admire the creativity behind this move.
But I will laugh even more when they still lose the race for Ragnaros heroic WF.
Go go! Catch up! :D
Your only source is a troll on mmo-champion? Really?
@Qriz creativity by who? Not Stars at least, because this is old. (as indicated by the 1 year old wowprogress post)
Actually it's being talked about all over IRC, by a lot of the top guilds, so that lends some credibility to it, but can't really link to chats.
And it's a pretty specific thing to mention for it to be just someone making it up, although you're right in pointing out it is a bit shaky as far as sources go.
But my train of thought here was "it's being discussed actively by the WoW raiding community, so it's worth posting about". I tried to keep it as clear as possible that this isn't pure fact and if that doesn't come across clearly enough in the article that's completely my fault and I apologize.
http://bbs.ngacn.cc/read.php?tid=4363273&_fp=1
Might want to use google translate to read the text. Sure hope they fix this so we can have a proper race.
well first of all this is not a trolling news.
the achievement is indeed the heroic one but what actually confirms this info is the fact that all of those names in the guild achieve pane seems to be lvl 372+ itemized characters who also just received all initial achievements of alliance (means they actually race changed). but also the achievement earned in the guild chat doesnt match with the boss achieve in other screenie so yea they did transfer that is certain however the boss kill is not yet confirmed.
@eoy Okay. I didn't knew that.
Then there is only the patheticness (if that is even a word?) back :)
and the joke - I still find it quite funny that they really think they need a week head start.
If true it's not really an exploit so they won't get banned by Blizzard, it does ago against what the top guilds would consider an equal race however and it's very unsportsmanlike to do such a thing.
Either way the only thing they have done is screw themselves over. People aren't going to take this guild and their kills seriously anymore and I guess places like mmo-champ/wowprogress will ban them from showing up too. More importantly their kills will be hollow victories to themselves and the epic nerdscreams that frequent many kill videos won't be there because they know it doesn't mean anything to kill a boss no one else has legitimately reached yet. Very bad decision making by whoever runs that guild.
I would like to congratulate Stars for their progress so far aswell as their insane creativity. Noone else would have ever thought of this at any point had they not been this bright example.
edit: it is now confirmed starym
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17237672/StarsShannox.jpg
3/7 Heroic according to their web side.