Ensidia Got Banned

So, I was going to write a post about Ensidia getting banned, and what I thought about it, but when looking for a blog I read earlier I found this Blessing of Kings take, which was pretty close to my own, which is that Ensidia are big boys and had to know that their encounter was bugged.

When you are raiding there is this strange kind of go-with-the-flow thing where you don't worry too much about encounters being bugged if it benefits you. There was a lot of this back in the days of Blackwing Lair, Blizzard's second raid and buggiest piece of content ever.

At one point a GM showed up in our Molten Core raid while we were killing Garr and started talking to us. Fortunately it was about a bug that prevented us, or anyone, from continuing in BWL (which you do care about and report). After a lot of goading we got the GM to make himself visible. I've lost all the screenshots, but I remember he had a male model with a shirt with the stomach showing (female clothing model on a male model?). His character was level 60, and it was pre-TBC announcement, so we asked him if he could level up. He obliged us by leveling (animation and everything) ... to level 1.

On top of getting to meet a GM which was cool, one of our hunters was furious. When the GM in the instance the hunter got booted from the instance, and an item dropped from Garr that he had been waiting for for a while. So he not only didn't get to meet the GM, he also was cheated out of gear. Which made one of the coolest moments I've had in WoW also one of the most hilarious.

I thought about writing a nice email to Blizzard's GM-Feedback email address but never got around to it. I later learned that the guy who talked to us was the actually the head GM.

I'm guessing that Ensidia probably has a closer relation to Blizzard than most ordinary raiders do. If they really didn't know what caused the bug (which they insist they didn't, but probably should have anyway) they should have reported it and I'm sure attention would have been quickly paid. Even if they had completed the encounter with the bug, if they had reported it they probably would have escaped the ban, while still losing the achievements and gear.