It looks like an old idea from the TBC Beta has returned to the game. Ever since patch 2.1.2, when you enter "unreachable" areas like Mount Hyjal, you receive a debuff called "No Man's Land" that tells you "You are where you should not be" and teleports you out. Rumor is that it also reports you to a GM for account actions, but that hasn't been corroberated with any evidence.

People who enjoy exploring unreleased/rare content are upset about this change, and have posted threads on both the US and Euro forums. The explorers make some pretty persuasive points. There are no mobs in the unreleased areas, so the players aren't getting any material benefit out of being there. And since most of these areas are found by cliff jumping and regular game mechanics, Blizzard could automatically make them off-limits by changing the terrain or putting in instance gates. It's not like explorers are removing walls to sneak into other areas. Plus, exploration gets us great movies from Noggaholics that help give us an insight as to what Blizz is planning for the future.

I'm a bit of an explorer myself -- I swam around both the bottom of Kalimdor and the top of Eastern Kingdoms before BC, spent a long time cliffwalking to get into Hyjal and see Archimonde's skeleton, and used to lead expeditions to the Caverns of Time and got to watch as certain reckless mages blinked themselves into the abyss ("Summon me quick! Summon me! Summon ... too late.") It makes me sad that you can't do that anymore. If they have to do something about exploring, can't they just bring back the Guardians of Blizzard? Then at least we'd get to watch poorly-informed raid groups attempting to take on invulnerable bosses.

What do you think of this change?