They said there wasn't gonna be a PTR. Wtf
Why the hell did Blizzard make this dataminable. Might as well have a PTR at this stage.
The best part is that the people against the datamining generally have some arguments as to why it shouldn't happen in sod, whereas the people for it don't have any justifications or reasons why they should do it that apply to THIS game and sod. The arguments here for it are the same bull!@#$ arguments hackers use for why they have no skill or intuition. Stop being afraid to fail make a build that is weird af that no one would think of, have fun to win don't win to have fun for once.
It's 2023, we're fully aware of how quickly information spreads, right? Let's not pretend that any rune locations will stay "undiscovered" for long with metagaming and datamining. The first three days will be the most "discoverable" time of the game; Being the first to actually PLAY the game not just see it's code.. Again, this isn't news, and shouldn't have been alarming for anyone. I do feel for those who want to truly "discover" their world, especially when we're told certain expectations, (*NO PTR*). However, even IF zero datamining occurred, what we'd be left with is a small percentage of the players within the world hoarding knowledge and selling it for profit. Y'all think bots and gold buying ain't gonna be an issue? There's already videos promoting easy gold farms specifically to inflate the raw gold market from day one, for gold sellers. At least with websites like WoWhead I can get my advantage for free. This is nothing compared to the literal hundreds of youtubers/streamers who'll post the same click bait video the second something they deme noteworthy becomes news..
Honestly, I don't want to think about even more world buffs to get before raids. Also, this will be another reason to make Horde only and Alliance only PVE servers so we finish the PVP quickly to get a world buff and just have an alt on other faction to help trigger the event (like making a level 20 Horde toon to MC Alliance raider for horde WB in Barrens). These are nice ideas but rather them only be available to use either in Ashenvale zone or maybe not in raids, idk.