OwnedCore Report #31

**Kenneth** · 07-22-2018

Welcome to our 31st OwnedCore Report. Here we cover all things OwnedCore with a sprinkle of gaming news from all over the globe every week. Today we have a great community interview with one of, if not the, most consistent WoW exploit finder and poster today, Advanta. Along with the interview we have community highlights and some News From Around the Globe to top it all off. Hope you enjoy.

Community Interview

He is no stranger to interviews here on the report. Advanta and I discuss his recent troubles with Blizzard trying to shutdown his Youtube channel, BFA and its terrible pre-patch launch, and more.

So I have to start with the copyright takedown requests on your videos. You said Blizzard was taking down your channel in 7 days but it is still up today. Can you go over what happened with the Youtube issues?

What happened was roughly this. I uploaded a video on demon hunter exploits a few month ago. Although that video was actually meant to help Blizzard fix a very broken rated battleground system, someone at Activision Blizzard got triggered by it for some reason. They issued copyright strikes against around 30 of my videos, some of them very old. They issued a strike against anything with the word "glitch" or "exploit" in it. More than 3 copyright strikes on youtube means your channel is automatically deleted after 7 days unless you successfully contest it. I'm basically a calm person, but that was a pretty dark time. Four and a half years of content just gone like that. And it has happened to so many Youtubers for bogus reasons, I really feel for those people. I contested the claim with a counter-infraction. Various people recommended I get help from people like Jim Sterling and the video game attorney, but they are not easy to get hold of. The worst thing about the situation was that I could not get word out on my channel as you can't upload while multiple strikes are active.

I contacted my Patreons and told them the situation. They were amazing. Multiple people backed up my videos across the internet. I was offered a nice deal to upload on another website. I got a surprising amount of support from everyone who knew about the situation including some very mainstream Youtubers I didn't really expect. I contacted Youtube themselves who offer a support service for Youtubers with 25K+ subs. They responded after a week by cutting out an irrelevant section of their t&c. I tried to negotiate with the Activison blizzard team, but at no stage did they respond. Several people have suggested Blizzard are not behind this: that does not seem possible to me however. The address was a longstanding mail address used by Activision blizzard dating back many years. It does not seem likely to me that someone could spoof it without Blizzard's knowledge. Even if it had been an independent actor, Blizzard would have had to effectively endorse it by neglect.

I researched the legal claim and found that the precedent for strikes was this: Blizzard give essentially blanket permission in their t&c for Youtubers to use their art assets in the form of video. However, in the glider botting case they had successfully argued that glider had violated their copyright since they were violating the t&c. I'm certain that this does not extend to the use of exploits. The problem is that Blizzard prohibition against the use of exploits is so vague it couldn't possibly be considered reasonable by any court. What is an exploit? They've never defined it. I often call things exploits in my video titles but I really don't know whether they are or not. You get a different answer depending on who you talk to at Blizzard. In several high-profile cases, notably they Lich King world first kill and the Cata race to 90, they banned the winners for using exploits then reinstated them after a subsequent investigation. Blizzard are never going to be able to take legal action against anybody with a policy that vague.

In addition: what no one in the video game community seems to be aware is that there is a broad precedent for the use of exploits that was set in the casino world. It is perfectly legal for example to count cards at blackjack. "Front-loading", a technique that is essentially an exploit, where you read the dealer's hole-card when a poor croupier exposes its value through poor technique, was declared legal in the "State of Nevada vs. Einbinder and Dalben" (1983). These methods can yield hundreds of thousands of dollars to an expert in these fields, it is way more important than jumping over a wall in a video game or something. The crux of the legal position is that if a casino (and by implication a video game developer) screws up it is not the job of the customer to police themselves. Anyway, this was what formed the basis of my defense. After 14 days the ban is supposed to be lifted if the party issuing the copyright strikes doesn't respond to a counter-infraction notice. It actually took 16, but all of the strikes were lifted but one (which expires in august), weirdly the strike that still stands is on a video that is almost four years out of date.

The whole experience was pretty bloody horrible and I was very glad when it was over.

If you're channel was deleted were you going to retire from what you're doing or find another outlet to continue your passion?

The main effect of Blizzard trying to shut me down was that I got enough publicity that I could now actually survive a complete Youtube shutdown relatively easily. My Patreons have grown in number, I have a new twitter account, I've explored options with the interesting new alternative video-sharing site Dtube, I'm developing an audience on Reddit, and of course there's Ownedcore itself where I built up the following on my channel in the first place. Youtube itself has never been terribly profitable. If I make $300 in a month it is a good one. I do that mainly because I want to provide content to people with no money. I'd be really sad if they closed it down because I enjoy it but, yes I could carry on indefinitely without it.

The BFA pre-patch is out and with it came an insane amount of bugs and server issues. This may seem broad but what is you're outlook on all of the failures so far with this BFA launch

I'm tempted to say "Karma". Blizzard have a real problem in that their culture just stinks when it comes to fixing bugs. You can tell if you read bug report. Whoever they employ to fix bugs is underpaid and under-incentivized generally, poorly valued, and their work reflects that. There's serious bugs, I'm not just talking about exploits here, which never get fixed from year to year and sometimes attract hundreds of complaints. Nepotism is probably a factor. Unless the bug report spells out in very exact terms where the bug is they don't have the initiative to go and work it out: which is often where I come in. Additionally, they've been using beta access as a means of controlling Youtubers and other influencers, and limiting dissent. That's not what it is for. It should be to test the game, not as a publicity tool or a way to get undeserved good reviews. It was obvious to any one who studies the situation that they were not ready for the major overhaul they undertook. It is a horrible mess-I cannot remember a worse one, vast areas of the game are simply unplayable five days after launch.

Does a buggy start make your eyes light up because it can also mean more potential exploits?

Usually, yes. In this case I am seriously worried they are going to kill the game. Most people only see the in-game bugs they indirectly encounter or hear about on the forums. I have to know about them all. The scale of the problem here is huge and I'm not sure they can cope.

"Im seriously worried they are going to kill the game. most people only see the in-game bugs they indirectly encounter or hear about on the forums" Is this hinting at a huge underlying issue that came with this pre-patch? Is there something bigger going wrong here than meets the eye? If so could you maybe go into that a little bit as much as you feel comfortable with?

Regarding the follow-up, the issue is that Blizzard attempted to automate the stat squish across multiple forms of content. This just has not worked. Literally EVERY form of content is broken 6 days after launch. PVP ques are not working at low-level, much current instanced and in-world pve content is impossible to complete, even things like pet battles have major game breaking flaws. Really, it should have been obvious that there are too many non-linear functions in wow: any kind of band aid they put on anything since classic is now broken.

How has the exploit finding been so far? Do you have big things in the works?

There's a lot of broken stuff active right now. Yes, there are big things in the works.

Are you afraid that your Youtube channel becoming so popular is making the exploits too popular? Even with something like a Patreon couldn't Blizzard just use you to almost find the exploits for them and than fix them faster?

If you've seen the excellent film Codebreaker you'll know the problem with that strategy. If Blizzard fix everything I publish then it becomes apparent I have a mole. That gives me an informational advantage. Fixing every exploit I come out with, while not having an understanding of the fundamentals, would allow me to get them to break things which are currently working fine without their knowledge. I've already done this on occasion with public content. You get into this complex game-theoretic duel of information: Blizzard are not going to come off best in that situation.

What is your opinion on BFA just as an expansion so far? Things like class development being kind of stale, taking away things like the 60 boost profession thing, adding back old items such as the chromatic sword, and whatever else.

At the moment I am very concerned that BFA may be the last ever significant WoW expansion. There is literally nothing I am excited about. I could name at least twelve things about Legion I was hyped for. It just seems like a filler expansion.

If you could make any major change/addition to WoW what would it be?

I'd like them to take a more relaxed attitude towards "subversive" groups of players, be they exploiters or private server players or twinks r whatever. In the early days they'd get a massive bug like the corrupted blood incident and they'd turn it into an amazing pre-launch event. Nowadays they seem to want to impose their version of accepted content on everyone without listening to the players.

What is the future for advanta?

Pretty good. For the foreseeable future I'm devoted to wow, but at some stage I'd like to expand what I'm doing into related areas of video gaming and beyond into subjects
like applied psychology.

To end: Can I just point out Kenneth's articles are really good. For any one remotely interested in exploits I'd recommend looking through the archives here. There's a few gems of insight that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere and were personally useful to me.

Want to support Advanta or get in contact with him? Check out the following links.

Youtube Channel

Patreon

Twitter

OwnedCore Account

Community Highlights

With one of the worst pre-patches to date we have a ton of exploits rolling in for WoW. One of them by Limes shows us how to use Fighter Chow in combat. Very useful to have out of combat healing while in combat.

Check out the thread HERE

Attention! Check your inventories if you have completed the Shadowmourne quest chain. Blodyclan96 found out even though he sold his that Blizzard gave it to him in his mount journal. Great find.

Check out the thread HERE

This is not necessarily an exploit but great news for those who have not been in the loop. Timurkilic lets us know that Unobtainables such as the Chromatic Sword and Jeweled Dagger are not dropping again in WoW. Apparently this is on purpose therefore not an exploit but great news to share regardless!

Check out the thread HERE

Need to get heirlooms/transmog off a banned account? This EU only exploit has hit us by storm thanks to lolilolilol. God Bless GDPR? Here is to hoping for an NA version soon!

Check out the thread HERE

Raw gold is the best gold to farm. This one has been nerfed but thanks to HunterHero and Mmrrggll some of us got a quick taste of the good life.

Check out the thread HERE

Hate the guild roster integration with communities? You can bring up the pre-8.0 roster using command /guildroster. This is all thanks to WhisperCrystal and his post in our WoW Guides section.

Check out the thread HERE

Gaming News From Around the Globe

Fortnite Tournament won by a possible Cheater?

Over the weekend Epic Hosted its second tournament in its $8,000,000 Summer Skirmish. This weeks method was to have everybody play 10 solo games on their given hardware whether that be console or PC and based on their performance throughout all 10 games win a lot of money. Placement, eliminations, and victories were all worth points. Adding eliminations was a breathe of fresh air because unlike the first week it made going out of your way to kill your opponent worth it. Not to mention if you dropped a 20+ kill game you gained an extra 10 points and $10,000 USD. Besides that the tournament was extremely RNG. Did you get complete bots in your game? Did you drop at a hot location but nobody was there for some reason? Typical Battle Royale E-Sport problems. But what if the biggest issue was a possible cheater taking home a whopping $130,000?

I was watching this tournament no and off personally and when I checked the leaderboards I noticed something very fishy. The top player "IDropz_bodies" was not only in first place by a gigantic margin but he had like half the games played than everybody else did meaning that margin was most likely only going to get more ridiculous. Turns out a lot of people noticed this along with some of the pros competing. It didn't take long for accusations to start coming out and one of the most common I saw in the twitch chat was "He is using mouse and keyboard on ps4". Now I am sure all of us reading this understand how insanely broken that would be. Not only would it improve your skill over a controller ten-fold just due to lack of limitations but you would be going against all controller using players most likely in your lobby. Making the competition floor extremely low while increasing your skill ceiling insanely high.

After all of this got so much attention came this gigantic and extremely well written Reddit post by user u/Sora26 about the crime that was committed in this tournament referring to IDropz_bodies. Sora goes on to explain how the IDropz had a 4.0 K/D in Season 4 but in the tournament had a 45 K/D, a 1000% increase. Also included was the suspicious replays.

After being accused of not being the one playing his matches (having his account recovered by someone else), he quickly shut down those rumors by streaming his replays on his Twitch channel. By doing this, he didn?t know the biggest suspicion of all was about to unfold.

During the streaming of his replays. Viewers noticed there was countless players who did not shoot at him at all. Instead, these players just ran up to him and although moved around, didn?t really attempt to shoot him at all. There were even instances where players stayed in 1x1s within 5 yards of each other, yet didn?t shoot at one-another. Instead, both waited for iDropz_bodies to easily build up, and without even breaking a sweat, kill the players. There was also instances where iDrop jump padded right to where multiple no-shooting-back players were, as if he knew their location precisely. This apparently happened multiple times.

When some viewers backtracked some names of the ?easy? kills iDrop got. They found out something very worrying. These players accounts were brand new, and their first games just so happened to be during iDropz tournament matches.

Viewers of the stream accounted for as high as 10 of these ultra no shooting back players during both of iDropz 20+ kill games.

But what was most suspicious of all about these players.. was what was in their inventory. When iDropz killed them, they did not have any shield he was burning through when shooting (they were 100 health 0 shield). However, in their inventory, they had minis, half pots, med kits etc.

As far as the mouse and keyboard accusations, they seem to have come from a post on twitter of his asking how to setup a Xim 4 but was taken out of context because it was in the same conversation as him wanting to hook up his ps4 controller on Xbox. Whether that was a cover up we won't know.

Epic ended up responding to all of this with an investigation stating that every kill he got was a Unique IP and they didn't find any suspicious activity. Most of all Epic stated that even if he was using M+K on console that is okay by them. This was a HUGE statement by Epic because now I can't seem to think that people who play on the PC are now going to increase their odds of winning tournaments setup like this by just playing M+K legally on console against handicapped players.

For more information on all this here is the full reddit thread. There is a LOT of information here but evidently the guy is seen innocent at the end of the day but it is definitely fishy nonetheless.