You can find more about what he does on his Youtube Archvaldor's Warcraft Hacks
First of all long time no see I hope everything is going well. What has Archvaldor been up to in the past couple months?
This year's been pretty good with a ton of world pvp and visually spectacular exploits I really enjoyed, particulary demolishing Icecrown with an over-powered buff.
Let's get right into the meat and potatoes and talk Burning Crusade. I know in the past you mentioned you had slight blow back when you attempted to integrate Classic content into your Patreon. Should we expect to see some exploit related guides coming from the Archvaldor network in regards to Burning Crusade?
I'll be doing TBC exploits. I have some ideas of what to look for. Because TBC still exists in the modern game its not like classic was where stuff had to be found and tested. I will be producing guides.
Like most you agreed BC was next and Wrath would end the trilogy of Classic servers. In your mind is there any chance it goes past Wrath? Why or why not?
I think it may well be difficult to go past wrath, as there's too much overlap between classic and cataclysm. Although I started playing in cataclysm seriously and in many ways its my favourite expansion, it is also one of the worst in other ways. The amount of waiting around in cities for ques to pop was just crazy, the world was really under-utilized. I think there would only be much interest in MOP and Legion xpacs past wrath and neither of those would approach tbc or classic levels of interest. One of the reasons classic worked so well is that for many players it was literally completely new content they'd never experienced, once you get into cata the content is all recognizeable to modern players and there's too much overlap.
It's funny you mention MoP because whenever this discussion pops up on other forums even tradchat it seems the consensus is "skip cata and give us MoP" According to Limit Maximum, GM of Limit, MoP changed the retail raiding scene to what it is today as far as mechanics and difficulty levels. Which is no surprise because WoD was known for its great raid scene also.
That is definitely true. The thing is about raiding is that apart from LFR it has never been a mainstream thing, relatively few players actually do it. While I have enormous respect for skilled raiders, in order for wow to be successful is does have to concentrate on things which the majority of the playerbase will actually do. I'd be more interested in whether regular players will want to do Isle Of Thunder again or something where there was mass participation.
I imagine Blizzard would not have the balls to skip Cata though which in turn is admitting that was a terrible expansion right?
Oh yeah, they really do think like that. Which is sad. I don't want to hate on cata too much, it had stuff like Gilneas which was fantastic. But a lot of that content can still be experienced in retail so there's not enough unique content.
Some people are already craving a Classic fresh. Does that surprise you? Could you see Blizzard doing a Classic fresh? If so when?
Yeah I think there was universal agreement that the launch of classic was fantastic. Whether you can do that every few years....its not going to work as well obviously. Whether it works well enough that you could make it financially viable...probably...but the external media is going to lose interest and there's going to be less buzz. You'd end up with...essentially...a smaller private server type community...no bad thing imo but not exciting.
The whole thing stinks. I, personally will be using the boosts because I need to minimize my leveling time and maximixe my exploit-finding time-but its a scummy move by Blizzard and I wish they hadn't done it. I would expect gold botters to bleed the servers dry, as happened in classic. But much worse because of boosts. I appreciate it will make TBC more attractive to casuals but I'm not sure why you would promote TBC to casuals given that TBC is legendarily hardcore.
You mention with boosts will allow botters to bleed the server dry. Let's talk gold and economy. Classic Gold had a lot of gold sinks especially during decent sized bot ban waves with consumables to allow you to raid in any guild that planned on killing everything. TBC I think has lighter consumes and not many gold dumps outside of your epic flyer and maybe like aldor/scryer rep to not grind. Do you think there is any hope for gold inflation inevitably coming in BC? What are your thoughts on Classic having these natural gold dumps to participate but also serving as a massive barrier to entry? At the end of the day are botters the issue and would all expansion economies be in great shape if botting didnt exist?
Sinks and Dumps. I don't think I'm as good an economist as you are Kenneth, I couldn't really hazard a guess as to how the sinks impact on botting and vice versa. My take on botting in classic was that it was kind of a sitting duck for the bots because of the very small amount of space wow classic occupies on your comp.You can run endless versions of it relative to retail.
I am morally neutral on botting, I don't do it but I have patreons who do and its intellectually fascinating. Some botting may actually help new players with supply of certain mats. I think it got out of hand in classic however.
What really surprises me is that Blizzard is incapably of writing a simple Turing test program. You can get a pretty accurate take on whether someone is botting by whittling down the probabilities by running a checklist of common bot behaviors. It is not that hard. You have to send in a human for verification in edge cases but Blizzard still have the manpower for that.
Compare retail to Classic Gold. It seems to some degree retail doesn't even have an economy anymore. Materials get so cheap on these mega servers that consumables are in the dirt by first months end. The only gold sinks are pets, mounts, and BMAH stuff. What is the cause of this on retail? Am i exagerrating or do you see what i am seeing? Are mega servers bad for the games health overall and in economy? Is retails gold inflation an issue for the games health and takes away from what little MMORPG aspect retail has left?
I'm guessing that cheap mats are due to people unloading inventories bought with gold made in previous expansions. I don't think you are exaggerating. I can't really see how you can run a game the size of wow without server consolidation-people want to go where other people are, its a very powerful law.
For casual players I am not sure how much gold inflation impacts things, for more serious players, yeah its an issue.
Let's jump into retail for a bit. Covenants were a thing of note when referring to your quote of "Covenant stuff looks like a series of disasters waiting to happen." Did Covenants end up being as big of a disaster as far as breaking the game as you anticipated?
A lot of the covenant powers are exploitable and can't really be balanced. There are so many interactions with class abilities, racials and items and other weird synergies. You kind of see this with what was happening with convoke and rogue one-shot stuff. This is probably the best expansion for one-shotting. You can do a ton of interesting in dungeons and raids with them also.
Perhaps the word "disaster" was hyperbolic the truth is that it is kind of exciting for a while to get something totally broken in the game before it gets fixed, it is not necessarily a bad thing. What is a bad thing is the lack of oversight from Blizzard to stop the situation getting out of hand.
I always notice you do a lot of your game breaks on a mage. Is that a class at an advantage when breaking the game?
Most youtubers use a mage as main simply because they get around quickly, its noticeably faster. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to do anything good on youtube so anything that minimizes production time is useful. That said mages are above average for exploits, spellsteal is something I have found consistently broken, it is too complex a spell to fix properly. Then you get things like polymorph and blink which never really worked properly from day 1. When Blizzard double-down on this stuff with things like covenant abilties they can really mess up. I'd say overall mages beat everything except hunters and druids
Mage was in a lot of peoples mind the god class of Classic with gold farming, exploring, and all things outside of the normal pvp/pve realm. Are you on this new hype train of Prot Paladins for TBC being in a similar regard the god class when it comes to things such as gold farming?
Yeah it is interesting how mages became that since that was not the perception in 2004. It was a function of min/maxing. I could well see prot paladins becoming that, though it s the class I'm least familiar with so I couldn't be certain.
9.1 is right around the corner probably coming out this summer. Have you dabbled in the PTR or gotten any insider information on potential game breaking mechanics?
I'm arrogant enough to think I don't actually need to mess around on the PTR to find stuff. And there's another issue: on the Shadowlands PTR I think I was being watched by someone at Blizzard all the time. Stuff I discovered which I told no one about mysteriously got fixed. In some cases it might have been from reports from others, but there were a few things I tested which I seriously doubt any one would have known about which got hotfixed literally hours after I tested them. I had been warned previously an individual or individuals was watching me which I never took seriously at the time despite the fact the warning came from an extremely credible source who had personal experience of Blizzard's security operation. After the SL PTR I became a lot more paranoid.
The thing about retail is that you have numerous incompatible systems scattered all over Azeroth, Draenor, Outland and the Shadowlands. There is no way to make that mess of stuff work even if you had the staff and payed people enough to care. With classic we found much less, and by me I mean the exploit community. It is simple mathematics - the more permutations of game functions there are the more glitches you will get. So, yes, the current wow expansion will always be the one where most glitches are found.
Do you see the MMO Space ever expanding again or is it on its last leg?
The problem with MMO's is that players won't join a dead or unpopular game so you tend towards one game with a monopoly, which is why wow has remained dominant despite other mmo's being technically superior in many ways. I do think Blizzard are eventually going to be completely displaced by an MMO which gets EVERYTHING right. They can't go on underpaying people, and there are all kinds of problems developing because of that. There will probably always be niche MMO's on the fringes which to some extent act like a testing ground for wow to steal ideas from.
Have you considered expanding your business outside of WoW into other MMOs or game genres entirely?
Expansion into wow/other games. I've looked at some other games and I was surprised how game-specific exploitation is. Some games simply don't produce that much in the way of interesting glitches-wow classic producing less glitches than retail as we discussed. I have considered setting up a kind of franchise where I could supply someone talented at exploiting another game with the tools to profit from that expertise: very few people really understand how to do that-knowing how to find glitches is only half the battle.
Going into BC do you have exploits in mind that you want to try or how does one go about starting to look for exploits in such a unique situation as an old game brought back from the dead?
TBC exists in retail so there's a jumping off-point there for trying stuff. This may sound obvious but few people actually do it: the OC archives gives you some pretty good leads to test stuff. I can't overstate the value of the OC archive. Believe it or not there are actually powerful exploits that have survived since TBC or even classic. Worth bearing in mind that TBC classic is more of a frankenstein's monster: its half TBC but relies a lot on the Legion client for functionality, so some generic glitches in retail work well.
Does anything major differ from finding exploits in BC than Retail?
Difference between TBC and retail. There are certain game protection measures which are commonplace in retail which aren't as common in classic so with TBC I'd test a lot of things that would be a waste of time in retail. Like, does this op buff zone? Are their zone restrictions on this quest item etc? Basic stuff like that.
Where can the community find you?
I tried various things but the strange thing is what seems to work best is to contact me here on ownedcore via message. This is actually the best place to get hold of me if you aren't a patreon of mine.
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