Blizzard Interview with MMORPG.com
New Gear Encryption in WoW Forever
Josh Greenfield breaks down to us how they plan to increase loot encryption works in WoW Forever:
Oh boy! So I have something to tell you. One of the things we're doing is we're actually obfuscating all items in the game. So you will not see an item's stats until it drops for you, until it drops for someone on your server. So that means you will not go into the first raid tier knowing what your bis list is. The first week will be the Wild West of people getting items and going up on Wowhead or whatever. That has a transformative effect on that early meta. There's a degree of players will discover things, and they will write guides, and there will be bis lists, and there will be kind of like a meta. But I think one of the things we're committed to doing is continuing to kind of shake that up.
Gear will not be the only thing restricted from datamining, as Aggrend would continue to explain that raid PTR's will cease to be a thing come WoW Forever, and all players will go in blind for every raid tier:
You won't know what raid bosses you're going to fight until you go in for the first time. There's not going to be a dungeon journal telling you what to do right at first. And I think for some classic players, that's going to be an adjustment, right?
We're already seeing this in initial datamining, with stats on gear being completely obscured:
If you're looking to help us build out the database during WoW: Forever Beta and beyond, the best way to do it is with the Wowhead Client! The Client includes the Wowhead Looter, which gives us the best information on what players are seeing in-game every time they log in.
Download the Wowhead Client
Since gear is a mystery before it's discovered for the first time, the more players using the client, the better - you'll have the best information as soon as it is available with the Client providing data.
More Information:Please note: there is no Wowhead Client for MacOS. The Client is only supported for Windows PCs - we apologize for any inconvenience.
