So the questline starts by you having to use a seemingly random and rare toy next to an unmarked, small, non-unique bone pile.
My question is: Why? Why make it so obscure without any in-game clues that it’s literally impossible for any player to find on their own? And at the same time, you also release the information.
It could have been a nice detective work / treasure hunt for those who enjoy such things, but the way it is, there is either zero challenge because you made the information public even before releasing the patch, or it’s impossible for those who don’t read the guides. There is no middle ground.
Why hide the quest in-game if you make the solution public anyway?
So yeah. Too bad now “secret finding” isn’t in game and discussions and theorizing based on vague clues, but rather just looking at the data when it’s on the PTR.
Still, I think Blizzard should be mindful of that. If any content is found immediately when it’s on the PTR, they might as well just include it as a regular questline, even if a hard one.
The only way that questline could possibly be found was through datamining, using that one specific toy (Out of hundreds) next to that one specific pile of bones isn’t something that people just blunder into doing by accident. (Especially since there were no in-game clues to the whole thing)
Datamining is here to stay, if they can’t do it with PTR data, they’ll do it when the update is pushed to live servers, so keeping testing closed off would only slightly delay the inevitable.
You say that but the toy does come from the dungeon in question and the room you use it in is the room where the boss you’ve turned yourself into presided in the original scholomance, there being a connection isn’t exactly unlikely once you know that “Something” scholomance related exists. Hell I’m pretty sure I’ve done scholomance as Doctor Krastinov before just because I like not looking like a goblin.
Also worth noting people didn’t find it in the PTR, it wasn’t on the ptr at all and it was only doable on live. What people found were spell names / event triggers that indicated blizzard were adding something to do with scholomance, which told people that they should probably start looking for scholomance related secrets.
The same thing has happened for scarlet monastery. We don’t know exactly what’s going on but we know something is, so when it goes live people will go looking.
Might have a skewed view of back then of like most things. I was in a competing server first guild called Omen on Emerald dream and were one of the first to clear ICC.
So yeh you might be right my view might be rose tinted.
Even if Bliz didn’t announce anything and wowhead et al didn’t datamine it the secret would be cracked by Secret Hunting Discord group in a few days anyhow (assuming they even knew to look).
