A farewell to yaks
It was an evening in early December when I logged in and heard the news. I hadn't taken two steps across the Valley of Strength when a whisper popped up in my chat window.
"There is a Ruthers exploit!"
A rush of excitement shot through me. What kind of exploit could have existed for my beloved yak companion?
"What? How? Explain!" I typed back.
When the answer didn't come immediately I began tugging at my brain for possible explanations. Was there some sort of raid boss mechanic that could be negated with Ruthers? Could Ruthers kill raid bosses?! I became giddy at the thought.
After minutes of trying to work out how Ruthers might tank Sha of Fear, a reply finally came.
"Ruthers isn't on the GCD. You can make a macro with '/cast Ruthers' Harness' a billion times and spam it. Raine just summoned like a thousand of them."
I booked it out to the Barrens straight away, assembling the macro as my Mimiron's Head carried me to a secluded little spot -- If this exploit did what he said it would, I couldn't go spamming it in the middle of Orgrimmar.
After a mere 11 lines I hit the 255 character limit.
"This will have to do," I thought as I landed on the grassy mountain side. Dragging the macro to my action bars, I took a deep breath, then pressed the key.
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In an instant 11 yaks appeared in a circle around me and I squealed with girlish delight. I moved about to watch them gallop beside me, and to hear their hooves trampling the earth in perfect unison. Such elegant creatures. Then, one by one, they affectionately rended my little blood elf ... I felt so contented.
That was when it occurred to me that I had to tell Olivia, for I knew no other person whose appreciation for yaks matched my own. In a rather verbose e-mail, I told her of the exploit and how I didn't know what to do with the information I held.
We weighed our options. In one reality, Olivia painted the majestic image of a thousand happy yaks, led by a hundred WoW Insider readers, galloping across the rolling green hills of the Valley of Four Winds. In another reality, we saw servers crashing and burning at the hands of malicious yak abusers ... And we both agreed that yaks should never be used for evil.
So ultimately we decided to keep the exploit to ourselves, vowing to at least catalog it so that we'd be able to share it one day when it was finally fixed.
Today that day has come.
