Wowhead Beta key contest cancelled

by Adam Holisky Aug 23rd 2008 at 7:00PM

Wowhead has put up an announcement this afternoon that the beta key contest they were running has been cancelled. The announcement tells us that the distribution of the keys were exploited. Though there is no official word on what exactly the exploitation was, there is some unconfirmed talk about the beta keys being ebayed.

This is most unfortunate for those wishing to participate. Malgayne, the "Voice of Wowhead," does go on to say however that the remaining prizes will be given away using a different method soon. We'll get any more news up on this as soon as it becomes available.

Tags: beta, beta-key, contest, exploit, malgayne, voice-of-wowhead, wowhead

Filed under: Events, News items

Subscribe to these comments

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Ed Aug 23rd 2008 7:09PM

I know this is also a rumor, but I thought the reason for the competion being cancelled was due to outright cheating - people got the URL of the screenshot, and indexed it against a list of all screenshot URLs on Wowhead, getting the answers almost immediately.

If Wowhead hosted the screenshots on a different server, it would seem to solve the problem, but I guess the same people who cheated using that method could find a way to compare the screenshots using software and cheat that way.

Cohen Aug 23rd 2008 7:27PM

That's the conclusion that I came to as well. It sounds like you could just look at the image source url and easily find out where it came from.. Wowhead should have thought it out properly before people had the chance to "cheat".

Pzychotix Aug 24th 2008 11:00PM

It's not even that hard to rectify. All they would have had to done is repost the images under new names or take a resized version of the images, and voila, it's fixed.

TotalBiscuit Aug 23rd 2008 7:31PM

I feel for WoWhead. Our contest would have suffered similar issues had we not put a strong system in place at the last minute against such cheating. Having said that, that probably wasn't 100% effective either. Chin up WoWhead, there are still those who appreciate what you're doing, best of luck.

Merah Aug 23rd 2008 7:35PM

The trust I revealed it, he used to post images link without changing the screenshot ID they have on the page you have to find. Scanning any html source file of an item, npc, objet reveals the screenshot ID in the html source of the page or downloading the entire website and searching in file with a text editor is another exploitation.

Greg Aug 23rd 2008 7:40PM

Aww poo

TotalBiscuit Aug 23rd 2008 9:42PM

Wrong site bro.

scw55 Aug 23rd 2008 10:49PM

Shame, I enjoyed taking part the one day (as because of my active raiding/wow usage I check this site after midnight in my area so I mised the first day) I did. And I actually did look forwards to today's contest, slightly disappointed. I hope wowhead invent a fun and exciting contest for the remaining keys. Honestly the WoW Olympics although was a good idea, was boring and the winning entries weren't really that innovative.