Data mining is a plague for the developers of World of Warcraft. And yet there is always admiration for the energetic fans.
For the developers of World of Warcraft, it is becoming increasingly difficult to hide new content from the players. Long before a patch is released on the live servers, it can be extensively tested on the PTR. This applies not only to content patches but also to complete expansions such as Battle for Azeroth.
Data mining examines patches for many small hints that could reveal the story of Warcraft or upcoming features before the developers wanted to share this information.
In an interview with PCGamesN, Ryan Shwayder, Senior Game Designer at Blizzard, talked about the problems of data mining.
According to him, Blizzard uses various encryptions, so that some files are only readable when players actually find and need the corresponding event in the game. However, it doesn’t always succeed in hiding this data, as mistakes can also happen.
“Sometimes it’s really frustrating when you think you have hidden something well and suddenly people find a single voiceover where Khadgar reveals the whole thing because you forgot to mark that exact file as secret.”
It almost sounds a bit wistful when he wishes that he could “reveal something someday without people already knowing about it”.
Admiration for the endurance of data miners
However, Shwayder also has some admiration for the data miners. The mere fact that players invest so much time to meticulously search through all the files and find small clues about how the story and WoW will develop, he finds impressive.
Shwayder hopes that as many players as possible will experience the game without prior influence and, if they do not want spoilers, avoid corresponding websites.
However, there are also many cases in which the developers unintentionally mislead the data miners. Files in the game often receive labels before the developers have thought about a real name. Since these internal labels later have no meaning, data miners and the community often come up with wildest connections that turn out to be completely inaccurate.
What do you think about data mining in games and specifically in World of Warcraft? Is it a cool scavenger hunt for upcoming features and secrets? Or does one ruin the finished game in advance with these spoilers?
