Oakianus wrote on Aug 12
th, 2011 at 9:31pm:
Looking on Google told me nothing other than people trying to wag their fingers about how the dirty exploiters were dirty and exploitative, so I'm very curious now about how the blue flag worked.
There were several aspects to it. The one that was server-wide was that if you "blue flagged" - assigned someone to a PvP team while in a Raid party - they wouldn't get a quest completion. This was way before 20th completion reward lists. It was also way before many flagging mechanisms were changed. So, for example, instead of running the three desert quests, DQ1 and DQ2, then waiting three days, you could run DQ2 20 times in a night.
There was also a godmode effect that most didn't know about. I may have forgotten the exact details here, but it went something like: zone into quest, get blue flag, get into position, log out, log in. You were then stuck in place, invincible, but able to affect your environment (spells, throwers, whatever). To get unstuck (and able to be killed again), you had the leader take the flag off you, then you logged out/in again.
This was all around a time of some other exploits too. One was a safe spot in the Abbot - on the edge of the barrier near the entrance. At that time, you could still just beat his ass down and skip puzzles. So 12 party members throwing shit could take his ass down. I think the blue flag made you invincible to Abbot lava as well, so it really helped. They put out a patch that made it so the Abbot couldn't be killed without completing the puzzles, I used the godmode blue flag exploit to verify that it was really true (74 mana pots and hundreds of heal scrolls later, lol).