The first World of Warcraft Midnight raid race is on and Blizzard has already had to disqualify one group of players for breaking the rules.
While players from around the world race to gear up and take down the boss Chimaerus in the recently released Dreamrift raid, a guild known as RAoV QA Strikes Back walked right in and took first place using exploits. Their names went up on Blizzard’s hall of fame list before being removed a few hours later.
The first red flag was how fast they killed the boss, but the fact that they were all playing warlocks wearing low-level gear confirmed that there was something fishy about their strategy. And if you look at their character names, they’re all jokes about breaking the game, like “Exploitearly,” “Exploitoften,” and “Betatesters.”
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Someone from the group uploaded an obnoxious video of the kill on YouTube that features memes and a clip of a world-first raider amused about the news while working on doing it for real on stream. Blink and you might miss the actual footage of the group defeating the boss—which is about three seconds long. They simply walk up to Chimaerus and pop him like a balloon. It doesn’t seem like anyone is aware of what method they used, but whatever it was let them deal almost 300 million damage instantly.
This isn’t the first time they’ve done this: The same group of players downed a boss in the last expansion with half of a raid group before Blizzard wiped them from the list of successful kills and banned them. Exploiting bosses for 15 minutes of fame seems to be their entire goal, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they show up again for the next race.
Their guild name “RAoV” stands for Random Acts of Violation, which was also the name of a group of exploiters that Blizzard sent a cease and desist letter to in 2018. Nobody knows if the two guilds have any relation or if it’s just a new generation of players who enjoy toying with Blizzard.
Meanwhile, no other guild has managed to defeat Chimaerus the old fashioned way yet. The guild Melee Mechanics nearly got him halfway down after seven attempts, but has joined all the other players who are focusing on completing Voidspire, the traditional, six-boss raid that was released at the same time as the Dreamrift. I suspect most guilds will ignore the Dreamrift until they’ve completed the main raid of the patch, leaving the glory to the exploiters for the next few days.
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