The race-to-world-first for World of Warcraft: Midnight lasted about as long as a warlock's cast time before Blizzard had to reach for the ban hammer. A guild known as RAoV QA Strikes Back claimed first place on the single-boss Dreamrift raid using exploits. Within hours, their kill was scrubbed from the record books.
The exploit itself remains somewhat mysterious. The group dealt almost 300 million damage instantly, and they were all playing warlocks wearing low-level gear, which immediately raised red flags. Their character names were all jokes about breaking the game, like "Exploitearly," "Exploitoften," and "Betatesters". The kill footage, when shared on YouTube, lasted about three seconds.
Blizzard's response was swift. Their names went up on Blizzard's hall of fame list before being removed a few hours later. For most guilds, that would be the end of the story. Not this one.
The Repeat Offence
Hours after the bans, the players returned with fresh accounts. They created a guild named "ecnarussAeR ytilauQ VoAR" which, as you might surmise, is their guild name backwards. The swagger here is almost impressive. One player by the name of BadLuckMax wrote on their raider profile: "[Quality assurance] is really hard", before quoting Blizzard's official response to the first exploit.
This is not their first rodeo. 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. That incident occurred during the Liberation of Undermine race in the War Within expansion, where they used an "internal spell" to kill Mythic raid bosses, including Chrome King Gallywix.
The History That Keeps Repeating
What makes this saga particularly notable is what the guild name itself reveals about World of Warcraft's past. 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.
WoW's race-to-world-first has always attracted a mix of serious competitors and mischief-makers willing to test Blizzard's systems. The guild's namesake is dubbed after an exploit and hacking group that was shut down six years ago; WoW has always had an incredibly organised base of trolls ready to stir the pot for kicks, and the tradition endures.
Meanwhile, the actual raid competition continues. No other guild has managed to defeat Chimaerus the conventional way yet; guilds have instead focused on completing Voidspire, the traditional six-boss raid that was released at the same time. Blizzard would prefer you didn't think too hard about why it apparently took an internal developer spell to balance the Dreamrift properly.