AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Don't feel sorry for Athene. He's a known exploiter who loves to pull this shit every expansion. He gets smacked down every time too.

If by exploiter you mean tries to get world record speedlevels a lot. It's kind of hard to do that if you have to wait for permission from the devs each time. Not that I feel sorry for Athene, all this does is give him more attention and he achieved his goal.

He tries to get records through exploitation. When people find something like that Blizzard expects them to report it. Those who decide to abuse it instead will have the hammer come down. Everyone who plays this game knows and understands that.

Define exploit though. If it's in the game, it's in the game. If Blizzard puts a mob giving a ton of xp that respawns in the game, and gives an achievement for reaching 90 first, they should be able to expect what happens. It shouldn't be up to players to figure out what devs intended as they play the game. Some bugs/exploits are obvious though, and I agree that Blizz should take measures especially if they ruin other's game (dupes, glitched stats), but you can't speedlevel without trying to cut corners.

It's basically a loophole, which are bad, to get out of actually playing the game. There are people out there who do so, and for a guy to get the level 90 world record by just killing a respawning mob over and over is kinda fucked.

Yeah, but it's Blizz fault for putting it in there. If a guy says to himself "I'm going to try and level as fast as I possibly can", and then comes across a way to easily do it that doesn't even look like a bug, he'd be pretty weird not to do it.

Blizzard didn't put it there for the express purpose of grinding though. That's like finding out a way to scam people out of their cheddar legally. Is it wrong? Yes, but it's not illegal so it's fiiiine.

Except scamming people out of their cheddar directly harms people. Levelling faster doesn't. If he used an exploit to to steal people's items or something, then yes, he would have definitely been in the wrong.

He's scamming people who would've have legitimately gotten to level 90 first.

I can almost guarantee you they would have used at least one other, smaller loophole/shortcut.

That doesn't make it any better.

The thing is that they're punishing a player for a mistake they made, while they at the same time indirectly encouraged the player to do what they punished him for (giving the achievement). It's not that big of a deal in this case since neither party lost, but it's a disturbing trend in MMOs.

Dangle the carrot and players will do everything in their power to get it, unfortunately.

Which is exactly what the devs want, so it's their own fault if a player outsmarts them.

It's not the player outsmarting the devs. It's the player finding an oversight of the devs.