Datamining WoW Forever

So, Blizzard just announced WoW: Forever, AKA Project Camelot and I think we need to have a conversation about datamining, spoilers and all that again. I'll have a longer post reviewing/reacting to all the things announced at BlizzCon soon after this one, but I wanted to get this down first.

In the grand scheme of keeping the mystery and not spoiling story beats, I think the WoW community is in a unique position with WoW: Forever being what it is, an effectively new game with new stories built on top of Vanilla. It would be nice to keep said mystery and story intact, at least while it is still fresh. I believe not datamining bits specific to story/content and all that is beneficial for the game, the community and its overall enjoyment of it.

With the Forever Beta starting in only a few days, I wanted to get my thoughts in a row on what I'll be doing and what I won't be doing. While I can't really control what decisions are made at work or what certain other people who are known to not give a crap about spoilers will be posting, I can control what kind of things I'll be doing in regards to the things I am responsible for.

My hope first and foremost is that Blizzard are going to be encypting everything past beyond level 30 (which is how high the beta goes) and only making that content available when it becomes available whenever that is after launch. Granted, their encryption often isn't perfect, but hopefully people will use their brains as to what to post.

File formats

With a significant content update, let alone something like this, there's usually new file formats or updates to existing ones. We've already seen some of the Forever file format changes in Retail and I'm sure there's way more we haven't seen. While things should largely work as is, I will be updating tooling to work with any changes as well as documenting then when I can.

Database tables

Forever will without a doubt have a few new database tables to support its new systems/changes, I will be updating definitions for these tables the same I do for Retail.

Filenames

I will not be doing the same work for Forever as I do for Retail in terms of filenames. While community-submitted names may be accepted to the community listfile (the amount depending on Forever having filename lookups or not), I will not name all the new models/files in the same way I do for Retail. Auto-generated filenames will likely still happen, but no targeted manual effort to name things.

Maps

This one I had my doubt about, but I will be updating map.wow.tools with Forever maps. I don't think maps alone are very spoilery, but I won't be doing this immediately so I can still do a manual pass to make sure there's nothing crazy in there.

New systems

Any new client tech or systems I will be figuring out as usual and posting about if it's not spoilery, but anything story/content related I won't be posting about.

Quests/story/models/voice lines/whatever

All this is stuff I'm not going to post on social media unless I run into something neat while actually playing the game. I too want to experience the game without spoilers, while still providing minimal support for the above things as well as being able to do the stuff I need to do for work.

In closing

Hopefully that clears up my stance a little, while I fully expect others in the community to not give a crap I do think this is a cool chance to do better in regards to spoiler culture. We'll see what happens, I guess.