Captain Noteo
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Captain Noteo and Captain Placeholder were temporary measures put into place during the World of Warcraft beta when the Menethil and Auberdine boat paths weren't implemented.
They appeared once again when a glitch in the retail caused many servers to crash.
Quote from the WoW Community Forums explaining what the glitch was...
Last night (1/31/2005 10:49:46 AM PST) , we took down 20 realms for emergency maintenance. The boat between Menethil Harbor and Auberdine was disappearing intermittently, dropping players into the ocean and crashing the servers. Passengers on this boat who were disconnected and tried to reconnect would crash the server yet again when trying to log on. We knew that this was unacceptable and immediately took down the servers when we discovered the problem in order to implement a fix. That occurred at 6 p.m. PST, but unfortunately, complications arose while we were testing our fix, and we were unable to bring those servers back up until more than a few hours later in the night.