I am still curious for the technical explanation of what happened … or rather how a problem this obvious and this severe made it through alpha/beta.
I can think of only a few plausibilities:
- Clientside vs. server updates are likely distinct development branches, and not all dependencies were properly tested during alpha? (which still sucks, but let’s keep the speculation simple)
- Maybe the beta servers (if they are distinct from the live/release servers) didn’t have automatic hack-detecting bans enabled (because beta is limited to a smaller pool of to-certain-degree “trusted” users), thus making it legitimately impossible to discover during beta? This would still be poor design because the whole point of beta is to mirror the release environment in every detail possible (other than sheer scale).
- Since there seems to be a latency between the suspected cause (using Kris Krinkle in battle) and the actual bans, depending on the length of the beta period maybe the bans did occur but not in enough time to get reported before release?