Experience gained from Greater Rifts is no longer inflated by the game mode difficulty (9/8)
The way this exploit worked was via co-op by having a party clear through as high a tier ranking as possible while one player (the leecher) afk’s in town in Torment VI difficulty. The difficulty inside of Greater Rifts is not based on the difficulty of the regular game mode though.
But that is where the exploit takes place because the Greater Rift experience gained by the town leecher, was multiplied by the game mode difficulty (T6). Players in a party took turns being the leecher in order to get the XP gains.
Some players were able to log huge amounts of experience (up to 70 billion an hour) – thus there are P500’s already in Season 1. Put it this way; I’m only P338 on non-seasonal softcore. The exploiters are already P400+ in the short amount of time this exploit has been abused in seasonal play. It’s almost comical now.
I temporarily unbanned myself to see what kind of threads are on the Bnet forums. Unsurprisingly, there are players asking for the exploiters to be banned. To be perfectly honest, I highly doubt that Blizzard will do anything about it. Aside from the auction house gold duping bans, most other major exploits that involved huge XP gains did not involve any bans or roll backs.
Some folks will say that was before Seasons (aka any form of competition). I’ve already given my personal take on Seasons as not being serious competition (too much RNG involved) where even the developers know that it’s just a faux “competitive” environment. This isn’t a competitive ladder in the same sense where there is something serious at stake; compare with actual e-sports where there is real money at play. Diablo’s ladders are nothing like this and will never be. Thus I’d be surprised if they actually implemented the granular backend tools to be able to specifically rollback and/or ban players who exploit the game (especially in terms of incredible experience gains) during an actual season.
There is no Paragon ladder per se either; the only thing is that since Paragon is now account wide, all of this excess experience will roll over to their non-seasonal account Paragon. The way I look at it is this though; it doesn’t affect me any because I’ve already opined in the past that the competitive angle in Seasons, is a joke. The fact that many are going to be able to hit P1000 that much sooner on their non-seasonal characters once Season 1 ends and everything rolls over, also doesn’t make much difference to me.
True, the ones who don’t exploit, end up paying the price since the devs then have to try and balance the game around these folks who have progressed much faster than intended. Furthermore, the ones who exploited the game since May 2012, have always tended to come out farther ahead anyway (like those early folks who made big $ once the RMAH went live given that many of these folks were using several bugs to be able to farm early Inferno Act 3 where the best loot was during a time when there were several gear walls to get there). This is why I’d be surprised if anything of substance actually came out from this. With this D3 team, that would be a shocker if they actually did clear out some of the exploiters.
