Early in the development of World of Warcraft, when battlegrounds were made, there was a battleground called Azshara Crater. Azshara Crater would’ve been in – you guessed right – Azshara. It was intented to work in a similar fashion to Alterac Valley. A funny detail is that the entrances was already made when the battleground got cancelled, and is still in the final game. The entrance for the Alliance is south of the Forlorn Ridge and the entrance for Horde is north of Forlorn Ridge. Go check it out if you’re bored.
Even if the battleground wasn’t implented in the game, it’s still in the games files. Even so, the only way to see it is through third party programs such as WoW Map Viewer. From these map viewers, the layout is a square, with one Alliance settlement, one Horde settlement and one neutral settlement.
The Horde settlement is of Orc and Tauren architecture, the most of the settlement is filled with Tauren tents, which may indicate that it would have been Tauren leadership.
The Alliance settlement is filled with night elven architecture. This isn’t so weird because of that there’s only one Alliance camp in Azshara, which there’s only night elves (excluding the Tauren there, of course). The only odd thing about the base is that in the middle of it all is a big Orc building. This may have been a placeholder.
The third place is filled with night elven ruins (or Naga architecture as some call it), particularly a large temple behind two large statues of dragons.
The center of the map is likely the battlefield itself with a number of different places such as caves, pools and rivers and may have been a function for flag capturing.
As for the goals of the battleground is currently unknown. Though I believe that it may have been a beta for Eye of the Storm. But who knows. The reason for that Azshara Crater was put on hold was because of the balance problems in Alterac Valley. In an interview Blizzard said that Azshara Crater will NOT be implented in the next expansion Wrath of the Lich King.
Only because Azshara Crater was unreleased it doesn’t mean that it may be worked on again, though it’s unlikely. Blizzard has said that they may work on it once again though, so keep your hopes up.
MP: We’ve heard rumors about a battleground in Azshara, is it still on the table?
Tigole: We have worked on an Azshara battleground very early in WoW’s development. At the same time we were building Alterac Valley we were starting production on a zone called Azshara Crater which was in the moutain in Azshara. We halted development of that and we might go back to that at a future date, but we’re currently putting that one on hold.
Also, in the World of Warcraft beta the professions (also known as “trade skills” until patch 0.10) weren’t as different as they were in the final game.
At first professions were learned through “skill points” gained throughout the world. Major professions (leatherworking, tailoring for example) weren’t restricted to two at a time, a two-professions restriction were first put in use in patch 0.10.
However, the most notable change is the secondary skill called “Survival”. This profession was largely based on making campfires for the Cooking profession. Blizzard Entertainment thought that the Survival profession didn’t have a major role in the game (new awesome sparkling sounds were added to the campfires in patch 0.8 for example) and decided to morph it into cooking as of patch 0.10.
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Fun fact: The files for Azshara Crater have been updated thru version 4.0 of the game, which is pretty surprising as Blizz changed the map format entirely between previous versions and version 4.0. There may be future plans for this battleground. The other thing that’s interesting is that one of the large zones, the Emerald Dream, has also been updated, despite never having appeared in the game. Here we are, 7 years after the alpha leaked, and many of the unfinished zones are still in the game, waiting to be completed.