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Unfinished Area Exploration in WoW
TubaJon writes "Exploring all of the maps in World of Warcraft can be very interesting, especially to see the parts that Blizzard is still working on. Silithus is one major zone that Blizzard is still working on, which a guy got to and took screenshots of. He also went to the airport in Ironforge and the Wetlands Farms, both of which are still areas in development. There are even whole websites devoted to getting to these areas."
There isn't really any challenge in getting to these areas. People who are running emulated servers can use hacked clients to fly to any area they please.
Heck, they can even teleport directly to some spot on the map if they want to. No point in trying to get to these on the live servers unless you have too much time on your hands.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
I actually did all of these with my Character, Ayoshen, on the live server Terenas. It took a little bit of work, but not an exceptional amount. All the areas (except Southern Silithus) you can get to in about 10 minutes, if you know what you're doing. And on flying to these places: It's not very easy to do this, as most private servers are laggy, and vary as to what versions their servers support. If they use the newest patches, most hacks will not work.
"The Matrix has you."
One hour, 3 reples later, and all the links are fried. Hilarious!
"If Common Sense was so common, it wouldn't be such a valued trait."
As much as I would like to play WOW and explore the world I have no interest in supporting Blizzards game until they do the right thing by Australian players and put a server in Oceania. Its not like they are short on cash.
Is that what happens when you connect to WoW without protection?
I did some exploring myself during the closed beta, and ended up swimming around half of Azeroth (almost literally; I started from Westfall) and sneaking into the Eastern Plaguelands before the area opened. Used Blink (was a mage) to jump past a solid wall blocking a city, and had fun looking around there until I walked out the back of a building and suddenly found myself falling to my death (similar to the tunnel in the article). Still have some screenshots from it.
http://wowmapview.sourceforge.net/ is availible for anyone to download and you can access and view pretty much all areas in-game, including instances, outlands, the emerald dream and some other not implemented and impossible to reach on normal server areas.
If you swim down the eastern shore of the eastern contienent (Sorry I can't remember the names, but I quit WOW a few weeks ago), there are two interesting places. One is a small little village with nothing in it. The other (hidden in the hills) is a huge valley with absolutely nothing at all in it but the base world texture grid. I ran around that place for about an hour checking it out, it was pretty sizeable.
I spent quite some time swimming around everything and doing some investigation. Found a lot of small things, but never anything really big and cool like the airfield, which is only place I never made it too, just not -that- good at climbing I guess!
After WOW made their 'get caught exploring and we'll ban you' rule, I stopped looking around. (which was one of the many things that led to my eventual quitting).
After going on a few exploration trips and seeing realy cool sights, I realised how lame the actual game was. It was way more fun for me to set off on a glitch hunt, climb a huge mountain (East of Loch Modan), and try to jump to the ocean (90 second fall) than it was to keep killing the same stupid monsters for an hour to level up or to get gold.
I wish Google Earth had a little guy I could control and walk around the same way. Virtualy climbing everest would rock.
-John Fenley
Up, up, up the stairs we go!
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
...is already open and is now "itemized" (i.e. the mobs there have appropriate loot tables for their difficulty). The only thing closed in Silithus is the area at the southern end of the zone that will, eventually, lead to a new instance.
Ok, I'm one of the folks that's done a bunch of exploring in Azeroth. Here's a list (I think fairly comprehensive) of places I've been to or seen people get to. Much of this has been done on the live servers, with the threat of banning over my head. I'll list places I've seen with the http://wowmapview.sourceforge.net/ utility when appropriate.
===Azeroth===
1) Airport above Ironforge (and surrounding mountains)
This is kind of neat - it's the area you see when flying from Menethil or many other northern places to Ironforge. The trick is to walk from Dun Morogh to Loch Modan through the north gate pass. Once you exit the tunnels on the Loch Modan side, immediately on your left behind some trees (very very close to the gate) there's a small gap in the mountains that has a diagonal you can climb. After that it's all exploration through the mountains.
1.5) Village between Ironforge and Loch Modan
Jumping down from the airport or the mountains above Ironforge leads to this very interesting little village. It has a ramp that leads to nowwhere and some animals. It's apparent Ironforge was originally meant to connect to this village, and this village would lead to Menethil via a path in the mountains (possibly the one above the excavation site with the raptors). Ironforge was likely meant to use the flightpath at the airport via the blocked off tunnel up there.
2) Old Ironforge
This is curious. Apparently a remnant of Ironforge from the beta days, the doors at the throne room in Ironforge can be walked through in ghost form. Die close to them (I use Divine Intervention, but you can jump in the Lava instead) and then resurrect on the other side (after a brief walk from Kharanos). You'll need to hearthstone out. This would make for an awesome inside-the-city instance like the Orcs have.
3) Area behind Stratholme
Nothing much to see here. When swimming along the coast northbound from the Hinterlands, you can eventually climb up the mountains next to the Eastern Plaguelands and get into the unfinished terrain. Continuing north eventually leads to some somewhat interesting areas, such as the gap where Stratholme should be (it's in a separate instance, not the main map), as well as a little house in a path leading North from Eastern Plaguelands (I think this is supposed to be the old Elven Kingdoms - they're on the map as the northeastern most section, but do not exist for now - maybe in the expansion)
4) Village east of Arathi Highlands (south of Hinterlands)
Easiest way to get here is swimming south from the coast of the Hinterlands. Neat, kinda peaceful.
5) Broken down bridge near Dun Modr (Between Wetlands and Arathi)
You are actually meant to get here, but few people know about it. In the Thandol Span bridge, the Eastern bridge has been destroyed by the Dark Iron dwarves. You can get into it by drinking a potion or using some speed ability (a horse will do). There's a small quest here for a delivery. There's another quest on a scroll hidden in the water underneath.
6) Little house on coast west of Stormwind
Swim north from the coast of Westfall. You'll eventually reach an abandoned house with a sign "Newman's Landing".
7) Early entrance into Stranglethorn Vale instance
I was once poking around as a ghost in Stranglethorn Vale when I managed to climb the mountains directly south of the SV instance and get inside. Neat architecture, not sure if it can be done alive.
===Kalimdor===
8) Jump off Teldrassil
This is neat and easy as a Paladin. Get to Darnassus, exit into the tree, and go to the southern border. There's a couple spots here where you can get on a branch on the outside of the tree (this overlooks the Rutheran Village area). Climb out as far as you can on the branches, and using a horse or a speed potion, jump out as far as you can (otherwise you'll hit other branches on your way down). Once you're close to the bottom (you'll be able to see it with plenty of tim
Hah, they mentioned they are going to explore GM island for their next article. Good luck on them losing their accounts. I remember reading over at Blizz Hackers there was a guy who used a teleport hack to get to GM island. He claimed to have walked around a bit, and found a room with a big table and a bunch of chairs around it. Another member claimed that while walking around on the island he got a whisper from a GM saying "You shouldn't be here", and his account was banned. From the stories I've read it's somewhere in the middle of the world. People claim to have been teleported there when accused of hacking into an questioning type room that was totally dark with the exception of a beam of light coming through one window.
If these places are unfinished, why is this content even on the live servers?
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This guy did some exploring ass well.
http://gallery.l0ser.net/exploring
Disclaimer: I haven't exploited those, didn't get banned in any MMO, and I'm not against banning people that used exploits. But if I put on my "let's think about security" cap, I find the it laughably unprofessional to put that content there and accessible in the first place.
I mean, for example, stuff like "playtester only" flags, and the corresponding player/playtester/builder/admin/etc permission levels for the characters, have existed on MUDs for ages. I'm not even a game designer, and just off the top of my head, I can come up with stuff like:
- flag a map as incomplete: if the server gets your coordinates there and you don't have the flag that says you're allowed in restricted areas, just get teleported out.
- flag incomplete/unreleased NPCs as such: if you don't have the right permissions flag, you can't attack or interact in any way with such an NPC
- ditto for treasure chests, mineral deposits, and the other interactive objects
- and for that matter, again, check the released/unreleased flag for the whole area where that object is, as a second line of defense in case the devs forgot to flag one item or NPC as such
See, it wasn't even that hard to come up with something more effective at stopping those exploits. Without needing any bans. It just needed some 5 minutes of thinking.
By comparison just placing there an aggressive NPC with an insta-kill attack is an unbelievably _cheap_ hack. It's such a slipshod solution held together with duct tape and band-aid that's outright laughable.
Not to mention the whole putting that content on the live servers and connected to the to start with. They did what? Place test content simply past some body of water and hoped noone will swim/water-walk some 2 miles in that direction? Even as security by obscurity goes, this is _the_ lamest thing I've heard in ages.
Geesh, didn't these guys ever hear of _test_ servers? Or for that matter of having development servers before allowing content even on the test ones? Developping directly on the _production_ servers (and pushing that incomplete stuff to the clients too), is the kind of thing that FFS, even in web stuff is right fully considered the mark of the unprofessional and probably incompetent. In a major MMO, from a major developper and backed by a major publisher, there is _no_ excuse for something this unprofessional happening.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Anyone been in the area between Badlands and Redridge? there's a spot in southern badlands you can walk right up, and there's a clear path to Redridge, loch modan, wetlands, searing gorge, burning steppes, and Arathi. there's an especially good angle on the Dam, if you want a good screenshot of it. That patch of white land they used as a "plug" to keep people out kind of tipped me off, and it's a cool place too.