Archvaldor Interview: WoW's Biggest Exploiter

[Kenneth]

Archvaldor aka Advanta here on OwnedCore is one of the biggest exploiters in the game. With 75k Youtube subscribers and growing alongside his Patreon, Archvaldor has proven to be one of the best and most consistent exploiters in the scene. He was nice enough to answer a few questions in this interview about Dragonflight, Classic Hardcore, and what the future holds for him in the exploit business.

Q: First of all how have you been and how has the exploit business been?

A: Exploit business has been Pretty good mostly. I had a rush of members early on in Dragonflight that's subsided a bit now but there was clearly a lot of interest in the new xpac.

Q: If you had to rank Dragonflight amongst its expansion peers where would you slot it in terms of most buggy?

A: Dragonflight has been the buggiest expansion so far. The crafting professions have been consistently exploitable/dupeable.

Q: Are the exploits found today utilizing a lot of old methods that have been broken for awhile or has all the new systems and features created new ways to exploit?

A: The new systems and features have created new ways to exploit, though often we are breaking new content with old methods.

Q: I noticed you created a video on leveling in Hardcore Classic safetly. With Official Hardcore coming later this summer can we expect you to dabble in coming up with ways to break the game without dying or perhaps even grief others?

A: I'm planning more on hardcore, though there are limitations on what you can find in a 20-year old game. Griefing has never really appealed to me. I mean, a little trolling is fun for everybody provided the negative consequences aren't too severe, but killing some guy who has put 2 weeks into leveling a toon for the sake of it is just being a twat in my opinion. I might actually do a "be aware of these griefing tactics" video so that people know what to look out for.

Q: What are your thoughts on Hardcore Classic as not only a community mode but a soon to be official playstyle for World of Warcraft?

A: I think the idea of hardcore is very appealing but you can write volumes on how difficult it is to implement in a fair and balanced way. When you describe something as very hard to obtain it becomes very desirable to people-something you can see with youtube video titles. They like the idea in practice-But the truth is mostly people don't actually want to do hard things in practice because they are hard. So I'm not sure how much longevity hardcore will have. I hope I'm wrong it has been a positive thing in general.

Q: Would you ever have thought Blizzard would take a large community made mode and implement it into their official game?

A: Here's an example - in BFA I found that running the BFA intro scenario was slightly faster than conventional leveling. Blizzard removed the experience from the scenario as a direct result. Why? It was no different than running a dungeon. They simply ruined it for no other reason than I suggested it. People were having a lot of fun doing that-it is a good scenario. They've been cracking down on harmless activities like exploration for years now. They just shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly trying to ban activities people were paying them to enjoy.

So Blizzard embracing hardcore is a really good thing. Hopefully it signals a change of attitude. I am not sure they understand what they've taken on though. There are going to be major problems.

Q: If you were the lead developer of WoW right now what are some things you would change, double down on, or simply add?

A: Some suggestions:

• Stop trying to prevent exploration. There must be 100,000 players (at least) who have done some form of exploration. They are paying you. Stop trying to alienate them.

• I would bring back GM's and extend their powers to generate some forms of content. Very few things excite players like the appearance of a game master. It would be enormous fun if they just
  appeared randomly and unleashed an elite Yetin in Elwynn or something. It would make the world feel more spontaneous and organic - they've started on right level with this with the Dragonflight zones but they need to go further, you can't just make a world alive with procedural generation alone.

• Bring back boss kiting. Stop sharding everything.

• More short-term events with bigger risks taken. Let things break sometimes. People still talk about the original scourge invasion and the opening Ahn'Qiraj because they were chaotic and had unpredictable consequences. Chaos is exciting. It is more important that you give players have exciting experiences than it is than Dave can do his dailies without interruption.

• A MUCH bigger focus on things ordinary players actually do. I don't think it is commonly understood how few people actually raid beyond LFR or how few do competitive pvp. Raiding and arena are by their natures limited niches too intense and repetitive to ever find mass acceptance. It is crazy to focus your entire game around stuff no one actually does.

• Support the role-play community properly. They get thrown under a bus so often by sharding changes and the like. These are players CREATING CONTENT IN YOUR OWN GAME THAT PEOPLE PAY YOU FOR - they are doing Blizzard's job for them for free. Treat them with some damn respect.

Essentially everything I'm saying can be summarized as "If players are doing something they enjoy either help them or GET OUT OF THE WAY".

Q: If somebody wanted to get into the hobby of breaking WoW what advice would you give them?

A: Breaking wow is a lot of work. Most stuff you try will just not work. You have to be quite patient. Essentially you just have to test out as much stuff as possible as fast as possible whilst playing. You need a screen recorder on at all times and follow-up any glitch including those which don't seem to be beneficial. A big part of it I think that people miss is that you are much less likely to find things in current content where everyone is playing because any glitch that exists there will have been discovered by someone else, so you will be spending an awful lot of time in old content doing obsolete quests-Blizzard will only fix that stuff if they absolutely have to. Once Blizzard do fix something I notice a tendency among newer exploiters to try and re-create an exploit they enjoyed using which is now fixed: it is better to just move on usually as when Blizzard actually bother to fix something properly the play is generally completely dead. The exception would be major patches/xpac releases where rollbacks in certain areas can break things again which were previously fixed.

For a good exploiter anything you test is generally less than 1% likely to produce an exploit even when you ar targeting vulnerable areas of the game so you need to be able to handle long periods of finding nothing.

Q: What can we expect from the Archvaldor hacks in the future? any big exploits being worked on? maybe a hint into the behind the scenes?!

A: Hmmm tricky to give too many hints away but let's say that Torghast has a lot of stuff that's still exploitable. I'm going to try and work on my editing skills to make longer more watchable videos in the longer term. I have a huge pvp video coming that's taking forever I don't think there's anything like it anywhere.

[Scumstation]

Griefing has never really appealed to me. I mean, a little trolling is fun for everybody provided the negative consequences aren't too severe, but killing some guy who has put 2 weeks into leveling a toon for the sake of it is just being a twat in my opinion. I might actually do a "be aware of these griefing tactics" video so that people know what to look out for.

BASED

/10char

[TheoGrant]

It's interesting thanks