World of Warcraft - Excessive Datamining in Alpha & Beta Destroys Motivation - MMORPG.com

SBFord

World of Warcraft - Excessive Datamining in Alpha & Beta Destroys Motivation - MMORPG.com

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth has been in alpha / beta testing for the last several months with regular updates adding more and more content for players. Of course, with every testing opportunity, players are exposed to more of the gameplay details and the story behind the expansion, this time namely the ongoing battle between Horde and Alliance. However, without an NDA in place and data miners going at it hard with every alpha update, when is knowing everything simply TMI?

Read the full story here

meonthissite

When it comes to class balance, never.

When it comes to lore, always!

JeffSpicoli

Twitch streamers playing ALPHA & BETA before every launch has become a bigger marketing tool then any commercial on TV or gaming website ad. I do agree with you it takes alot of magic out of the experience knowing everything the xpac has to offer before even playing

Remember the old days when you went to buy a nintendo game or pc game and all you had to judge the game was the back of the box ? I remember as a kid me and my brother use to judge & joke whether a Amiga game was going to be good or not by the weight of the box lol . If the box was HEAVY it meant there was a huge booklet/instruction manual which in our opinion made the game more deep/complex.

SBFord

meonthissite said:

When it comes to class balance, never.

When it comes to lore, always!

While I theoretically agree with you, I propose that the devs don't listen to the MOUNTAINS of feedback they're provided from passionate players across every spec and class. Pages and pages and pages of constructive criticism is always given without any feedback from devs or rationale for the changes they're making. 

And balance....LOL...please. WoW has never been balanced.

BillMurphy

This is one of those main reasons I've been avoiding all big news outside of feature previews for BfA.

SBFord

BillMurphy said:

This is one of those main reasons I've been avoiding all big news outside of feature previews for BfA.

I think that the over-abundance of information makes more players the type that plays the expansion for 2-3 months and quits again until the next one. It's like WoW isn't being designed for longevity anymore, but for the $$$ that are made when an expansion releases.

Shodanas

The only youtube content regrading BfA i watch is the one portraying changes in certain classes and game mechanics, like this new global cooldown BS Blizzard is bringing to the game.

So, no spoilers for me.

Rukushin

I agree with you Suzie. I've been like a kid in a candy shop just gobbling up all the info I can find, but it always disheartening to find out your favorite class has been nuked with changes that do not seem for the better.

An IRL friend of mine actually refuses to watch boss guide videos for raiding because he believes THAT strongly that you should be wiping and learning bit by bit while playing in game. When you have to do things outside of the game, about the game, without actually playing the game....then there is a problem.

This is why I have always advocated for someway for the devs to incorporate Diablo-like procedural generation to WoW dungeons. They obviously already have the tech and know-how in house. It really is just about one dev team talking to the other and swapping knowledge.

At the very basic of iterations, you can have lets say 4 bosses in a given dungeon, but the order in which you face them can change each time you do the dungeon. Also, take 1 ability that each boss does and have it be a shifting or swapping ability with 3 other possibilities that are randomly swapped each time you do the dungeon.

This, I believe, would take a massive amount of the grind and boredom that dungeons provide 4 months into an expansion.

Also, why not try adding to dungeons instead of adding new ones. Perhaps a secret path that opens up. A stone wall that gets broken down the last time you delved in and now you come back and it's time to check out what's behind said wall.

k61977

Basically by showing the entire game over and over before it even launches people are already burned out without even having to play it. That is the main downfall for this early access/alpha/beta ect... There isn't anything left to find for yourself or explore as every thing in the game has been blasted all over the internet, an unless you don't plan to go online at all you will end up seeing the majority of it over time before it releases.

Manestream

There is actually 1 good drawback to this. You can see and tell whether that expansion would be worth getting, of course you would need it eventually but you could always take an expansion break if the next one after is good. At least you can get this expansion at a good discounted price (and save a year or so on monthly subscription costs too).

BillMurphy

It does happen with ESO and the like, but maybe not to this extent, because it's not quite the powerhouse that is WoW. Same with GW2. 

Jaedia88

Well said. I have to go out of my way to avoid spoilers and even with tag/keyword muting and avoiding WoW sites/youtube & twitch channels/articles as much as I'm able to, it's not possible to avoid everything. It's kinda exhausting. I just want to enjoy the game I love when it's ready without already being bored of everything that's new. /shrug

Asch126

SBFord said:

meonthissite said:

When it comes to class balance, never.



When it comes to lore, always!

I propose that the devs don't listen to the MOUNTAINS of feedback they're provided from passionate players across every spec and class. Pages and pages and pages of constructive criticism is always given without any feedback from devs or rationale for the changes they're making. 

And balance....LOL...please. WoW has never been balanced.

Hehe, Blizzard listening to feedback.

Horusra

I was invited to beta, but I do not use them since Burning Crusade because it kills the game for me.

Albatroes

Well, to talk about your main issue, instead of WoW's main issue, Blizzard simply does not care about that. If you look at who was getting alpha invites, it was mostly streamers/youtubers/the like, not so much the people with the latest legion achievements at the like. If they were serious about testing the game, then yeah half these streamers and youtubers wouldn't have gotten into alpha. That said, I'm honestly happy they did what they did, but not for the reason they did it but to actually show the general problem with WoW, which is, its not an actual mmorpg. It does have mmorpg elements, but its honestly just a league game. Look at the start of Legion. Up until that point, there was at least a little element of cohesion between the expansions, like players being able to remember what levels they got what abilities and what they learned the latest expansion.

laserit

IMHO datamining and sites like WoW Head are totally destructive towards MMORPG's

They take away any sense of mystery and discovery, they destroy the journey.

belghast

The biggest thing to come from the datamining... is that this expansion is going in directions I am not entirely certain if I want to follow. The devs are making a lot of decisions that I don't agree with and I am going to have to decide if there is still a game there for me carved out in the middle of it all that I want to keep playing. I am not a fan of the red versus blue rivalry, and considered Stormheim and the factional nonsense the worst part of Legion. Battle for Azeroth triples down on that concept in a big way, starting off with an big opening event that asks you to do a bunch of stuff in the name of a team that I don't actually care that much about. I personally had hoped that WoW would eventually shift towards a theme of the races of Azeroth against bigger and badder cosmic horror style evils... but that isn't happening. Once again we are fighting amongst ourselves because its Warcraft not Lovecraft... even though Lovecraftian Horrors are way cooler.

jgDuffay

gotta agree with the guy above here a bit, if you want to know .. then you follow wowhead and other sites that provide the information the is mined from the game, if you don't want to know you don't. simple as that, it has much to do with filtering the information available to you.

Avarix

laserit said:

IMHO datamining and sites like WoW Head are totally destructive towards MMORPG's

They take away any sense of mystery and discovery, they destroy the journey.

Isn't this a self-control issue? I understand the problem for Suzie since she has to scan and read all these sites as part of her role on this site. For the rest of us though, I don't get it. I know about the burning of teldrassil, the battle for lordaeron, and the new zones and islands from the preview at Blizzcon. Besides character models of the new races, which I actively sought out, I don't know anything else. I avoid all this information so that it will be interesting for me to actually play the expansion when it's released.

I even have content creators like Taliesin & Evitel and Bellular on my Youtube home page. Still I don't know most of the information that everyone else seems to about this expansion.

kabitoshin

This is why I hate sites like MMO-Champ everything in alpha / beta is exposed leaving no surprises. Burning Crusade was the only expansion I knew almost nothing about after that sites like MMO-Champ started data mining.

I also dislike the addition of dungeon journal giving away all the mechanics of every boss fight. Dungeon journal should exclude heroic and mythic so that guilds have to learn by trial.

MadFrenchie

SedrynTyros said:

I have mixed feelings about the datamining.  On the one hand, yeah it does remove a lot of the discovery involved with experiencing a new expansion, which kind of sucks.  On the other hand, I now know not to waste another second leveling up First Aid on any of my characters.  The thing is, when you only have so much time to play, I think it's kind of nice to have some information about what's over the horizon so that you know how to most effectively utilize your time.  And with datamining, I can get some helpful info without having to play the alpha/beta myself, which I have not done since the original beta because that really would burn me out on the new expansion.

On another point made in the article with how classes play now: Ion mentioned in last week's developer Q&A that the goal is to establish a good baseline for how classes play that persists going forward and then you'll have additional abilities added during an expansion that don't persist beyond the life of that expansion.  And he implied that this is all very much still a work in progress, so hopefully the classes continue to improve during Battle for Azeroth beta.  He did admit that the way this approach was handled in Legion turned out not so good when it came to time to move classes into Battle for Azeroth.  Perhaps they'll do better next time?

They really plan on continuing the "temp powers" in BfA?  That's disappointing.

Theocritus

SBFord said:

BillMurphy said:

This is one of those main reasons I've been avoiding all big news outside of feature previews for BfA.

I think that the over-abundance of information makes more players the type that plays the expansion for 2-3 months and quits again until the next one. It's like WoW isn't being designed for longevity anymore, but for the $$$ that are made when an expansion releases.

That's pretty much what EQ has been doing for years.

simsalabim77

If it weren't for datamining, I'd have absolutely zero hype for this expansion. All the information that's come from an official source has not done a good job getting me excited to play BFA. 

laserit

Avarix said:

laserit said:

IMHO datamining and sites like WoW Head are totally destructive towards MMORPG's

They take away any sense of mystery and discovery, they destroy the journey.

Isn't this a self-control issue? I understand the problem for Suzie since she has to scan and read all these sites as part of her role on this site. For the rest of us though, I don't get it. I know about the burning of teldrassil, the battle for lordaeron, and the new zones and islands from the preview at Blizzcon. Besides character models of the new races, which I actively sought out, I don't know anything else. I avoid all this information so that it will be interesting for me to actually play the expansion when it's released.

I even have content creators like Taliesin & Evitel and Bellular on my Youtube home page. Still I don't know most of the information that everyone else seems to about this expansion.

It goes deeper than that.

IMHO It's the main reason that that people can level a toon in two weeks instead of two months and then complain that there isn't enough content.

It makes it impossible for developers to keep up and it makes certain kinds of progression meaningless and/or a waste of development time.

IMHO These things restrict design options. They make these games less fun for the ones who use these sights as well as the ones who don't.

IMHO there is more meaningless grinds because of data mining/ spoiler sites

Alienwaldo

If you know what you want to learn about and what you don't want to learn about it's pretty easy to not to watch/read spoilers. I agree, if you indulge in this content it kills the game faster. I experienced this with the WoD beta, but that is why I now avoid all that stuff. First looks at zones, class changes and the like are all I look in to these days. That helps build hype for the game, without killing the story. Even titles that seemingly have a spoiler in it are usually just really misleading or purely speculative, stated as fact as clickbate. If you apply that fact to all titles of the sort you can easily consider none of them as matter of fact, therefore preserving the surprise. I mean for some people it may require a certain amount of mental conditioning, but completely within the realm of possibility.

Kyleran

SBFord said:

BillMurphy said:

This is one of those main reasons I've been avoiding all big news outside of feature previews for BfA.

I think that the over-abundance of information makes more players the type that plays the expansion for 2-3 months and quits again until the next one. It's like WoW isn't being designed for longevity anymore, but for the $$$ that are made when an expansion releases.

Err, for the last 7 or 8 years actually, just took you longer than some others to notice.

Is OK, you had more fun than they did.