Exploit

An exploit (short for exploitative method) is a way of playing World of Warcraft in a manner that was clearly not intended by Blizzard Entertainment, in order to gain an advantage over other players.

An example of common exploit was the use of to communicate between the Horde and the Alliance. This has since been stopped by modifying the linguistics engine to remove punctuation, symbols and numbers from the text.

Common exploits
Blizzard will take action against anyone who exploits the game by temporarily or permanently suspending accounts. Blizzard makes heavy use of a system known as Warden in order to detect third-party programs, such as botting software.


 * Speed hacking, teleporting, subterraneous travel - since character position in World of Warcraft is determined by the client side, it is possible for players to send out artificial positional data and be instantly transported to any part of the world, even underground, or to speed up traveling speed by increasing positional deltas.
 * Botting - a player who runs a third party program to control their character and automatically perform repetitive tasks such as killing monsters, farming materials like ore and herbs, and gaining levels, without the player having to be in front of the computer.
 * Duping - the action of duplicating or replicating items or money.
 * Game mechanics or bug exploits - exploiting the physics of the game, sometimes in conjunction with items, to perform actions or reach destinations that should not be possible such as wall-walking to get into unfinished areas or using certain abilities to become unattackable.
 * Emulated server - the game's server architecture in order to get the World of Warcraft client running in a private environment such as sandboxes or private servers.
 * Power leveling - while not technically an exploit, power leveling often requires the player to hand out their account to another party to play in their stead. Accounts have been suspended over power leveling due to Blizzard's no account sharing policy.