Season of Discovery is a brand-new event Blizzard introduced to World of Warcraft: Classic last year. With a unique twist, the game mode allowed players to experience a traditional MMORPG that was released in 2004. To change their characters into bizarre new types like shaman tanks or mage healers, players would be able to gather “runes.” Some dungeons were transformed into bigger, more difficult raids with new bosses and new loot, and there were rumored to be additional missions and other secrets scattered across the realm. It was a thrilling occasion that depended on surprise and, as the name said, revelation.
The issue? mining data. Curiosity-driven players could “find” all the new enemies, spells, runes, and loot before they had ever set foot in Azeroth thanks to data mining.
It is true that not everything was spoilt right away. In its most basic form, data mining allows users to access virtually any file in the game, including text strings, locations, and photos. However, the context of any of those files is not available. While all the runes’ names and applications were visible to players in Season of Discovery, they still needed to locate the runes in the game, which frequently meant cracking riddles or going off-beaten-path. However, the fact that many secrets were revealed ahead of time for the event did make some players joke about the irony of data mining during a “Season of Discovery.” Well-known World of Warcraft tutorial website Wowhead ultimately decided against posting datamined information after receiving criticism from the community. On the matter, even developers left comments.
Although World of Warcraft’s Season of Discovery provides a particularly moving illustration of the game’s continuous interaction with data miners, this has been the case for years. Data miners may easily find new details to post on websites, guides, forums, and social networking platforms before the bulk of players come across them during normal gaming because Blizzard tests content on Public Test Realms (PTR) before it launches. Furthermore, Blizzard is not by itself. A lot of games that revolve around ideas like exploration and secret hunting have had to face data miners’ hurdles in recent years.
Even single-player games that are built around mysteries, like Tunic and Animal Well, have found inventive methods to conceal their biggest, most intriguing turns. Live service games, like Destiny 2 and Helldivers 2, face similar issues to World of Warcraft.
It is a hopeless struggle to try to hide secrets from data miners, which is why some developers are trying something else. More and more, designers are basing the biggest surprises in their games on the notion that someone, somewhere, would open them and discover everything about them at once.
Flavor Crystals
Although Jeremy Feasel works as an associate game director on World of Warcraft, he quips to me that his real responsibility is to add “flavor crystals”—that is, hidden passageways or other entertaining minor diversion—to the game. He began his career in the Cataclysm expansion, focusing on uncommon spawns, which were typically hard-to-get mounts. However, he claims that he would get up to some crazy things anytime he had some free time.
It is how Dormus, the Camel Hoarder, was first introduced to gamers of World of Warcraft.
For the uninitiated, Dormus is a link in an entertaining little chain that leads to gamers receiving a rideable camel as a prize. In Uldum’s vast, sandy area, players first discover a “Mysterious Camel Figurine,” a little sculpture that can be found at random in one of 50 locations. Generally, locating a figurine and clicking on it will only make it vanish into dust. Even if you know exactly where to look, it will only very seldom teleport people to Dormus to give them the camel, making the mount itself extremely uncommon, unpredictable, and difficult to locate.
“What can I do with this now that I have access to World of Warcraft?” Feasel thinks back. “Will it allow me to try adding 50 spawn points? I found there were restrictions on what I could do when I attempted to enter the 51st spawn point and encountered an issue. I then set it on an insane timer to make it much more challenging to get. Then it occurred to me, what more could I possibly do with this? You will be forced to combat a person once I transfer you up to the steam pools. How about if he carries camels around and hurls them at you? Since, naturally, why not?
At that moment, I forwarded the email to the WoW directors. But I am proud of myself. I will never forget the very first thing I added to the game: Greg Street, our lead class designer at the time, sent me an email stating, “Hey, this is exactly the kind of stuff that makes environment Warcraft a great environment to explore.” And I believe it is what initially motivated me to pursue more of those.
One of World of Warcraft’s first attempts at purposefully keeping these kinds of mysteries was Dormus and his camels. Subsequently, Feasel and his associates have endeavored to incorporate additional secrets—particularly those that data miners were unable to uncover. Feasel informs me that they “tried every trick in the book,” mentioning that they had hidden pages with riddles in Battle for Azeroth all over the place. The puzzles themselves would still need to be answered, even though data miners could readily determine every one of the riddles.
“We found that 50,000 individuals can visit World of Warcraft and look at everything quite successfully in a week,” adds Feasel. They do not need that much time to explore the entire cosmos. And that is when I realized that I would need to do better than I had. I will have to work harder to make it harder to figure out each piece.
With time, WoW’s love of riddles gave rise to a thriving secret-finding subculture inside the game. Discord servers dedicated to uncovering secrets exist, and websites such as Wowhead frequently monitor and commemorate possible clues, secrets, and their final resolutions. Feasel has had to get more inventive because there are so many individuals who are always trying to figure out the puzzles he makes. For instance, he “added a bunch of stuff and a bunch of quests that simply went nowhere and accomplished nothing” in an attempt to hide the Lucid Nightmare mount from users. And more recently, Feasel contributed to the Treasure Hunting-themed in-game event, Secrets of Azeroth. He hopes that the event provided people who were fascinated by the concept of secrets but typically lacked the time or motivation to join community organizations dedicated to finding secrets with an “on-ramp.”
Inscrutable Quantum Devices
Although Jeff Hamilton made it apparent to me when we met that we were simply talking about his prior experiences working on RIFT and World of Warcraft, he is currently a game designer at Riot Games. As an experienced dataminer dodger, Hamilton has some views on why players find data mining so fascinating from the standpoint of a developer. Players “want to know everything as fast as they possibly can so that they may make all the best judgments regarding all their resources,” particularly in live service games. “Information is power” in their eyes.
He says, “They want to know how everything works together, and sometimes there is this conflict because the games are so permanent that they want to feel like they do not make any mistakes.” Datamining needs to give themselves a sense of security, a guarantee that their assumptions about how they want to develop their characters are accurate, playable, and defendable. And throughout the years, we have observed this tendency in a ton of other games.
According to Hamilton, there was a helpful guideline for everyone while he worked on World of Warcraft: if you make changes on your computer and click “Save,” other people will see it. He claims that this has been the case for many years, dating back to the height of Everquest’s popularity, when players would meticulously catalog every item, spell, place, and detail in the game. These databases still exist today, but players frequently look to theory crafters and influences for assistance in sorting through the enormous amounts of data, which furthers the dissemination of the information.
