All hail the Land we....fall...through??

Whenever I play a game, I have to first test if the physics team got the character movement right. When someone mentions geographic land within a virtual world, I have to think back to how many (if any) times I either fell through the world or got stuck on a slight incline, or how bumpy the area is. Within the good ol' comparison (Because all of you can't get enough of it) of Second Life (SL) and World of Warcraft (WoW).

WoW in itself is a good game because it actually took it's time to brush it's teeth before it was slung out the into the real world. Therefore, the landscape is rich and smooth, very few world holes (area in which the avatar can fall through the world and die/float around forever. But when I say very few, I don't mean every now and then a character will instantly disappear on a nice golden brick road, it's when someone tries for an area that's not normally taken or shouldn't be used. I would personally know this from when I used to try to get to random places in order to have fun/ cure boredom/ show the blizzard team what's what!! But when it's broken down, the avatar is just tacked to the ground and walks around on an invisible trail and when they jump it just registers as move character box and sprite up a few and make it seem like they can jump.

Second Life on the other hand chooses to be goofy with the ability to detach the avatar from the ground and make the virtual sky it's home. The land for one is broken up into sims and sections that can easily make cracks and loopholes that people are just waiting to fall through. When creating something, the item can be placed within, in, or even under the land and if done right, can force the avatar under and through the whole ground to fall endlessly through. So, removing the creation variable from the equation, a normal virtual user would see that it's almost like the land of WoW, minus some weird areas. And yet, the biggest factor that is why I chose these two (yes, I choose my comparisons with care and thought...) is that the fact that at any time and point, the player may push the jump key and gone is land! Like stated above, WoW has characters tacked upon the land. Second Life, has the character as a free-moving object and can with enough force/determination/stupidity can fall straight through the ground.

All in all I think that games should check for anyway the player can break their barriers they set. Second Life nor WoW shouldn't place invisible walls, that's just lazy and tacky of a designer, but they should at least test to see if someone can fall through something and if so, how. It's not a bad thing, but it makes them seem more professional as well as gather respect from someone such as myself (who actually looks for ways to fall through and know a little about how they make the landscape).