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."

Comments

He still has a point, though

[Moraelin]

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.