Our good friends in Special Olympics decided the best way to kill Rusila Dreadblade was to exploit it. Apparently, using Wrathful Flame, you can easily defeat the boss by reflecting Dread Shot for about 45% of her health. You can see the exploit on Sharog’s stream, starting at about 3:50:00. I expect they will take this stream down soon, but I already recorded the exploit and will instantly post it on youtube if they do.

Normally, I wouldn’t care except to shake my head, but Special Olympics is one of Trion’s Chosen Few guilds who were allowed to test most of the bosses in Infernal Dawn before release. Obviously, they used their testing privilege to uncover and then conceal an exploit so that they could claim “server first bro” status. It’s all about epeen.

My guildmate, the incorrigible Primalthirst, made a thread about the exploit, which Trion promptly deleted. Fair enough, but with guilds already using the exploit to defeat the boss and anybody who’s anybody already knowing exactly how to do it, I don’t see the point in this belated cover-up.

Special Olympics is just the latest example of the culture of egotism and corruption that permeates the top tier raiding guilds who get special permission to fight bosses months and weeks before the rest of us. They only do it so they can lord their kills over us, and they clearly don’t even do the job of testers to identify and fix bugs, because that conflicts with their agenda of getting world/server first kills.

Its easy to blame Voodoo for using their test server experience with multiple bosses to gain a massive unfair advantage. It’s easy to blame them for starting and running a progression site to document their “accomplishments” of killing bosses they had on farm status from the test server. Its easy to blame them for releasing strategies for bosses in ID the same day ID was released, thus ruining the raiding experience for the “lesser” guilds, like yours and mine (don’t try to say we can just not look at the strats–when the info is publicly posted, it will find its way into your raid). Its easy to blame Voodoo for violating their NDA by strat-swapping with other testing guilds

Its easy to blame Voodoo, and I do blame them. But the real culprit here is Trion. Despite having dozens of 11/11 guilds signed up to test ID, Trion chose only a handful and let that handful each test multiple bosses. These tests began months ago and continued until the release of ID, giving these guilds vast experience in Infernal Dawn before most of us even knew how many bosses there would be.

Even if Trion can’t afford proper QA testing, and needs to rely on players to test their concept for them (unlikely), there is still no way that any guild should be allowed to test more than one boss. Trion claims that no one tested Laethys or Maelforge, so that leaves 50 guilds volunteering to test 5 bosses. Why do you need to let Voodoo, Special Olympics and Maximation test 3, 4 or 5 bosses? Simple solution:

• Divide it up so no one gets to test more than 1 boss. 50 guilds, 5 bosses. Pretty easy.
• Modify the NDA so that no one in testing can release strategies for bosses for 1 month after that boss becomes available. If someone wants to release strategies sooner than that, then they can’t test.
• Enforce the NDA. Anyone who violates it should be permanently barred from any future testing on Rift or any future Trion games. Serious breaches should result in complete account bans for life. If someone can’t abide by that, they don’t have to test.
• Stop using the same guilds. Voodoo, Special Olympics and Maximation should not be allowed to test the next tier of content at all. They’ve had their privilege. Choose other world top guilds with too much time on their hands like ParaBellum and Rift Runners, and don’t let them test more than 1 boss each.

I don’t expect the last one to actually happen, but I think Voodoo’s reaction if they were not allowed to test while other guilds were brought in would be priceless.

Trion, get your act together.