I'm going to add Moonraker's topic on the EU forums here, because that shows just how much confusion there has been over this, as well as giving several points of view on exactly whether this is exploitative. I posted something half way down which explains my perspective.
At the start of the week an in-game GM proclaimed that, "if these players have the pre-Cataclysm expansion then they can fish these fish" [specifically Deepsea Sagefish and Fathom Eel from Tanaris], and at the end of the week people are being banned for doing just that.
Not to mention that this was all avoidable - Blizzard would have saved an awful lot of support staff time by reading their own test forums.
I'm starting to worry what other bugged fishing features may be deemed exploitable. For example:
- Fishing lava without using a Heat-Treated Spinning Lure: It's described as "Even works in lava!" unlike all other fishing equipment. Meanwhile most areas of lava can be fished with skill 1 (with no junk), well below normal zone skill requirements, without special gear.
- Cooking Lavascale Minestrone below cooking skill 500: Its skill-up profile matches recipes trained at 500, making leveling cooking trivially easy, since 1 recipe remains orange from 450 to 515.
- Looting an Abyssal Clam from a naga to complete The Oceanographer: The achievement clearly states "catch". Disregard the fact that (to our knowledge) Abyssal Clam cannot be caught.
- Fishing in Blasted Lands' Tainted Forest with less that 425 effective skill: Low-skilled anglers should be catching vast amounts of junk. Instead they are guaranteed to catch mid-skill fish with just 25 skill.
- Fishing "(TESTING) School of Fish" for infinite Peacebloom: Is that pool ever going to get taken out? [Edit: It just has been removed!]
I could probably go on, but I'll just get frustrated.
