The great aura scandal of 2009

If you've ever attended a busy Fortress or in fact any of WAR's other lag magnets, you may have encountered the DoT Aura of Doom. Just in case you've never encountered it, basically this is what happens.

Chosen and Knights of the Blazing Sun auras take 12 seconds to deactivate, so when you click a new aura the old one lingers for 12 seconds before turning off. It's something that is part of the class, players "twist" their auras by clicking a new one before the previous one deactivates and by doing so will often run 3 auras at once. This requires a lot of monotonous clicking or the use of the Twister add on which helps make it easier.

That's fine and just the way the class works, nothing wrong there. However when you twist your auras in a laggy environment, the game freaks out and auras do not shut down properly. End result of which is massive amounts of stacked auras. We're talking double figures... Normally this doesn't really cause any problem to anyone except the Chosen/KotBS themselves, because stat buffs don't actually stack, it's just a visual thing on your UI. Damage Over Time auras are a totally different kettle of fish. In these laggy situations they DO stack, causing huge amounts of damage to any poor soul within 30 foot... This is generally considered as an exploit.

I'm not going to argue with that, though it's not as clean cut as some may think and there is a lot of misinformation going around. I'll quickly clarify a couple of things:

- The Twister add on does NOT cause this. Actually it's a case of twisting auras in any manner whilst lagged can cause it. It's a flaw of the chosen/kotbs mechanic when the game is lagged.
- It is impossible to twist auras and choose NOT to lag stack them. If you play your class as intended and twist auras, then there is a risk of this happening.
- Once it's started its hard to stop, logging out is more than likely not going to work, so you're left with ctrl+alt+delete to shut down WAR.
- People can just choose not to use a DoT aura in forts at all... That doesn't fix the bug though, just avoids it.
- BOTH factions are "abusing" this exploit. People can deny it all they like, but if there's an option to cheat, then some people will.

Get your asbestos lined suit and factor 9000 suncream, then have a look at this thread in my server's forum on WHA: http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=289186

I'm sitting quite comfortably on the fence about the right and wrongs of that night's events. Otherwise I'll get dragged into all the rambling about two wrongs, ivory towers, glass houses and all that crap. There are some good points being made by both Order and Destruction players in that thread, but as so often with a topic coloured in dramatic shades of grey, they're being smothered by all the bile and trolling.

All this anger, rage, denial and nonsense caused by the laggy servers/code/etc. Mythic you're about to cram us all into Land of the Dead... With lag as it is, I'm not alone in feeling a little bit uneasy...