World of Warcraft General Guides - Someone Call Merry Maid Guides
Developers will go to great lengths to make sure their game is not leaked. Many place watermarks over their game client in order to identify you as the user. In-depth logs are usually kept to make sure any screenshots from the game can be traced back to the original player. Yet, with WoW, Blizzard allows their client download to be open. So basically, one person in the beta has to take their downloader and send it to someone else who can spread it across the Internet.
A group of inquisitive players, with a penchant for coding, can take the client and emulate the server allowing them to view all of the new areas in the game. Additionally, content can be datamined from the client’s files themselves in order to pull out sounds, textures, and models. This information can be disseminated throughout the Internet and Blizzard is left without the ability to trace back the original player while information that’s under the NDA is spread like wildfire throughout the net. The consequences can be major.
Security Concerns and the Failing PC Market
The word “consequence” is not inherently positive or negative, but is a way to express the phrase “cause and effect.” The consequence from the leak can either be positive; drumming up interest for the game, or it can be negative and highlight the games early failings. More often than not the latter is the problem many developers run into. You can lose a lot of interest in a game from bad press on an early release of an alpha client, especially when it’s plagued by bugs and graphical glitches.