Much to my surprise, Blizzard sent over a care package to celebrate the launch of Hearthstone Mercenaries.

Let's Talk About Datamining

Elephant in the room! I was considering writing an article about this weeks ago and ultimately decided against it because I wasn't sure how much I wanted to dive into it, but I think now is a good time to bring the subject up. After many hours of debating what I wanted to say on the situation and many rewrites, here we go!

Before we start, I want to make it very clear the relationship that I, and by extension, the site, have with Blizzard.

  • Blizzard has never paid us.
  • Sometimes Blizzard sends over promotional products for a new release.
  • We have in the past been promoted on Twitter & Battle.net because we created content as a part of an expansion launch.
  • Blizzard never requires us to post about anything they send, but if we do, it must be disclosed that it was a gift.
  • Blizzard has no control over, and never will have control over, what is posted on the site.
    • Unless they specifically give us information that is under an NDA or an Embargo, but that should go without saying.
  • If we decide to hold back information, we're not doing so because we must, but rather we think it's the "right thing" to do.

Now, with that out of the way, let's talk about Mercenaries and datamining because I considered talking about this weeks ago and decided against it because I still considered it advantageous to not talk about it. Sorry to the folks on Twitter that wanted to read my thoughts on it sooner, but I got you covered now.

Fact vs Friction

In case you were not aware, there was some friction between Out of Cards and Blizzard when it came to Hearthstone Mercenaries. Surprise!

We had an opportunity to datamine the new game before it released and for the most part, accomplished exactly that. Out of Cards has always been a site that has prided ourselves on datamined information, just like the many sites in the overall gaming community that have done exactly. Datamining is not a new concept, developers should have an understanding that anything that becomes public is going to be ripped apart and made even more public into the community. I did not expect Blizzard to be happy about it and rightfully, they were not.

I was contacted by a member of the Hearthstone Community Team stating that they would appreciate us to refrain from posting "non-public" information.

"Non-Public" Information

The idea that what we had was "non-public" was non-factual; An alternative fact if you will. We'd be having a very different conversation right now if Blizzard provided us the client, or if someone that had access to the client provided it to us in a leak. However, the second that your company pushes code onto a public CDN that is known to be logged by numerous places, you've lost.

The internet is an interesting place. The internet does not forgive, as seen with the Blitzchung saga (players still rightfully so blast Blizzard for this), and the internet definitely does not forget, especially when one considers the Streisand effect. The moment anything becomes public, you have to expect that someone has it in their control. Blizzard made the mistake of pushing a pre-release client onto their CDN so that a select few - Slysssa, Trump, Alliestrasza, and Kripparrian - were able to check out Mercenaries before it released. Blizzard should know by now that anyone that knows where to look, would be able to access the exact same information these streamers were able to and this was finally our moment to act on it.

You see, normally when you can pick up client information early, there isn't much interesting going on. You might get to see a handful of changes before they get announced or we might get to see all the golden animations for an expansion, or maybe there is some internal code you've decompiled and can get an idea of what's going on, before they go to the live client, but it's never anything as major as a brand new game mode.

The second you make anything public, it becomes fair game. Early on in my career, I learned from some great people that you always go live with public content because, legally, you're in the clear and it's going to be a large boost to traffic. The "fansite" business survives on traffic and the more interesting stuff you can post, the better you're going to do. With Mercenaries being as large as it was, this was finally our opportunity to use this as an advantage.

Withholding Teh Dataz

To give you an idea of our timeline, when the pre-release client was first pushed up, the first thing that happened on our end is we needed to see if there was anything of value in it. It was immediately obvious that this has Mercenaries data in it - finally a client worth diving into - and it was time to piece it all together. The clock was ticking though because you always know it's possible someone else knows exactly where to look and they could beat you to breaking the news. There is significant value when you get to be the first to break news, there's a reason why one of our most popular articles of all time was the original Battle Pass (Rewards Track) information, and Mercenaries was that opportunity to strike.

I waited. I waited a few days with content ready to go to see if anyone else had anything ready. I decided I'd wait for two reasons:

  1. If any leaks pop out we'll be second, but hopefully with more information than the original leaker, so the traffic hit will be negligible;
  2. Maybe this pre-release build is Blizzard ramping up for some content this week.

Well, when no one else decides to pull the trigger on it, and Blizzard decided to remain silent on Mercenaries all week, I decided it was time to get the ball rolling and post some content. This is also known as an excellent start to a weekend. 

The community was starving for information about Mercenaries. After the abysmal announcement stream that left everyone with more questions than answers, it was the right time to finally show people what Mercenaries looked like. Were the pre-order bundles going to be worth it? Are any of my favourite characters confirmed? What hasn't Blizzard communicated yet that would show everyone the mode isn't going to be as bad as the Doomsayers made it seem like it was. More on Blizzard in a moment though.

To give everyone some better insight in how stuff works on a site like ours, here's a quick recap.

  • We make the majority of our money through ad revenue.
  • More pageviews, more viewers, more money. It is a simple formula that pays the bills and keeps our wonderful community online.
  • Content from a single drop is split up into multiple articles for two reasons:
    1. It performs better with traffic from news and search engines because we can write better titles and targeted articles.
    2. We can delay the release of content over a period of time, keeping people active on the site longer.
  • The more someone shows up on the site, the better chance we have at retaining them as a a regular visitor.

This isn't rocket science, though it sometimes feels like it when you figure out a formula that works for content and then it doesn't perform as expected down the line. But, that's not as important right now. What is important is our slow release of information over a couple of weeks.

It was obvious no one else wanted to report on Mercenaries datamining after we sent out the initial batch. We did see Zeddy and a couple of other folks on YouTube and streams talk about it, but the core pillars of the streaming and youtube portions of the Hearthstone community weren't touching it. This was because there was going to be a Mercenaries Summit where everyone would get a chance to check the game out and hear about it directly from Blizzard, so no one wanted to ruin their chances at attending that.

And I don't blame them, we're talking about livelihoods here and it wouldn't be a great idea to put it in harm's way.

Scared Streamers

Blizzard puts a huge focus on streamers, and to a degree it does make sense. It is very easy to show your boss how cool it is that you got someone with ten thousand live viewers to play your game. Metrics are huge in live streaming and it's easily the fastest growing media with the lowest barrier of entry - maybe outside the child data harvesting scam that is TikTok.

Because of this, and Hearthstone really pushing their streamer game hard on the community side, everyone that becomes a part of that "old boys club" doesn't want to do anything that might jeopardize their inclusion in the future. I find it really funny at how the different Blizzard communities have evolved over time. World of Warcraft is an ancient game and was around before YouTube even really blew up in accessibility in creation & viewing - you were lucky if your computer could play the game itself, save the complexity of recording videos. Because of this and the whole "influencer" situation being non-existent, no one in the WoW community has ever been afraid to talk about datamining.

Wowhead, which is the primary source of fast and accurate datamined content these days for World of Warcraft, is where most of the streamers and YouTubers get their content from to report on. Everyone that reports on content from Wowhead still holds a relationship with Blizzard and it's the understanding from the WoW developers that if they don't want something datamined, they need to either not include it in a public build, or they need to encrypt it and provide decryption keys through Battle.net at a later date when the content is supposed to be unlocked. We see this in more recent years with cinematics being locked behind an encryption key or special mounts hiding until a blog announcing them shows up. They aren't perfect though and sometimes not all assets get hidden, but the team has gotten very good at dealing with the "problem" that datamining can be - I'll touch on that again in a minute.

Which brings us to Hearthstone streamers. Honestly, spineless. If as a community, everyone talked about datamined content more and really got people talking about it, Blizzard would no longer have the kind of control they have over our beloved Hearthstone streamers. I don't know if that will ever be possible, but I'd certainly love to see it evolve that way. It was a shame that more people weren't talking about Mercenaries and I can tell you that there were folks that were 100% not under any kind of NDAs that also avoided the leaks.

I remember when I was asked "how long have you been streaming" which held more value of anything else that was said, because the live view count is the only thing anyone there cares about anymore, so it puts some serious pressure on the streaming community.

The Datamining Problem

I have a love-hate relationship with datamining, and I know many in the community do as well.

I love that datamining gives us insight into what we can expect.
I hate that datamining can ruin surprises.

I don't really have a hate relationship with Hearthstone datamining, and maybe that is me coming at it from a biased point of view, but card games just aren't very interesting when you keep things a secret. Could you imagine pre-ordering an expansion you never saw a single card from? I know many of us as children went into card games not knowing what a full set looked like and would buy a pack or two at a time, adding to the collection of cards we'd carry in our pockets to the local playground, but that isn't the space anymore. Card games, for the most part, show you everything you can obtain before you make your purchase. If you want to go into it blind, that's fine, but you need to not participate in the overall community near a new expansion (complaining about card spoilers is such a silly thing to do) and do so with the understanding you are at a huge disadvantage since others have been able to theorycraft before you.

A game like World of Warcraft on the other hand where there used to be real discovery in a huge world, and yes, I'm aware it hasn't been like that for some time, datamining ruined that. Long public test realms and alphas and betas ruin that too. The moment a new expansion goes live, someone is already max level because of how min-max the entire game has become. It would be so cool to me if we legitimately didn't know how to get several things in the game. I've come to peace that it isn't a priority though and the team although they do keep things under wraps for certain cinematics and such, the rest isn't exactly a priority.

Fortnite, although it isn't a game I've played very much nor am I very familiar with the community as a whole (possibly thankfully), has a great datamining scene where players get excited over all the new skins and modes that get datamined in the client when patches hit. I think Fornite is a great example of a game where datamining only has positives since everything that I've seen only seems to be hype. Epic does seem to do a good job at understanding, much like the WoW team, that the game is going to be datamined and they should only let loose stuff they're comfortable releasing - though I know mistakes have happened with some of their Marvel related content.

Developers, the ball is 100% in your court.

Developers, Developers, Developers

I know I've used that heading before, but who doesn't love a sweaty, passionate Steve Ballmer?

The year is 2021, if you don't want your game leaked by folks that are known to be datamining your clients, find a way to work together. Historically speaking, any time we've had information ahead of a launch, it has been kept safe and sound, released only on the agreed upon times. I value those relationships that we have with different game developers because it lets us get a real idea of what is happening and gives a chance for communicating together about said content to ensure the message gets reported on correctly. I think a great example of bad messaging is when they dropped those Mercenaries bundles this week and had to temporarily remove one of them.

Buying products should never be that complicated, though Blizzard proves us wrong again when they put up pre-orders for Mercenaries without properly showcasing their value. To my knowledge, the only time that prices were referenced for Mercenary Packs prior to launch were the prices we provided in datamined content. The incompetence in communications is truly astonishing and it's no wonder the developers pushed a pre-release build to your public CDN.

Truly a Masterclass

Communication incompetence. Blizzard, you dropped the ball so hard with the Mercenaries reveal stream.

I know that's fairly well known at this point, but it really boggles the mind when they have so many smart people at the company, and so much historical data on what works and what doesn't for a new content drop, why did you pick that as the way to announce the game. Who was the target audience of the lightning round stream where you managed to say so much but say so little. Your audience had to be the Hearthstone community itself since it was clearly not presented in such a way that someone who had no familiarity to Hearthstone would understand anything, so why did you make everyone feel like an idiot and throw vague pre-orders in our faces.

RidiculousHat wrote an excellent article on PCGamer about the spectacle - Blizzard just delivered a masterclass in how not to announce a game - and if you never had a chance to see it, I highly recommend it because it's one of the better pieces on the topic.

I Blame Myself

We need to jump back on the datamining and content train because we're about to be arriving at our last stop.

I much prefer working with developers than leaking content. It's more satisfying to be able to help relay a message and I've had success with it in the past. Not leaking some information and being told about it in advance and coming up with a plan with an exclusive lock on something is way more beneficial for both parties. You're probably wondering why I blame myself, and it definitely isn't because I didn't reach out to them initially.

You see, I knew that Blizzard would not want to communicate. When you have enough communication over time, you know the patterns and know for certain what is going to get a response. You could call it a dick move to not notify them that you were going to go live with something, and I know mentors in the past that would say exactly that since it's an excellent bargaining chip to bring to a table, even if you are planning to leak stuff anyway if there isn't any cooperation.

It's very clear to me though that Blizzard doesn't want to connect the dots and instead, a site like Out of Cards has to. I blame myself for not better communicating to the community more about Mercenaries in a timely manner. I thought that Blizzard had the minimum amount of common sense that would be required to see it would be advantageous to work together on further Mercenaries content and so we wouldn't leak anything else and instead work on a message together.

When you go days without a response though, but you immediately get a response after you post something else that has been datamined, you know that they're just stringing you along. When I had originally spoke to a good friend of mine about the whole situation, he called me an idiot and told me to leak it all and not to bother trying to work with Blizzard. I told him that was the old way for sure, but there was value in working together. The cycle of message, no response, leak content, response is hilarious.

It amuses me that I can still fall for a trap like that; I am indeed an idiot. Believing Blizzard of all people knows the correct thing to do after we've spend years in mana-cheating standard hell. Granted, game balance is way better now than it was in previous years, but part of that also is because the cards they are designing now require so much more balance.

So, sorry everyone for not showcasing a more eye opening experience prior to the launch of Mercenaries. The amount of doubt about the mode that I saw disappear after we started releasing datamined content was proof that Blizzard fucked up their communications and with the extra data we ended up not publishing (for a lack of time and partly due to non-cooperation, but definitely not because Blizzard was on our back) we could have painted an even better picture of the mode.

The Out of Cards Promise

Out of Cards will continue to take your public clients apart, and report on them. I promise you we will continue to not hold back and make sure the community has the full picture any time Blizzard leaves bits of information lying around.

With everything said though, I do still believe that Blizzard has some great folks working at the company and there is almost always more to the picture that a few isolated incidents. I know they have some major issues in their company culture, as evidenced by the ongoing lawsuit, and there 100% is a huge bias towards how they work with the community, but damn, the communication that we've seen from select folks on the Hearthstone team has been such a welcome sight compared to the past.

Dean/Iksar, in my eyes, is the core when it comes to Hearthstone insights. Which is a crazy weight to bear but I'm glad he's taken charge of it and always look forward to covering his weekly Q&A.

Chadd/Celestalon has been an absolute champion when it comes to promoting the community. He's used his Twitter account for some serious good when it comes to promoting cool stuff people are making, sharing information, and just generally being a cool dude.

I won't name anyone else because now I'm afraid I'll miss someone that also deserves to be mentioned. I just hope this trends upward and for the sake of the game and the community, we get more of it.

The Good Stuff

As much as you may not like me right now Blizzard, and how much I may think you've got some serious work to do, I do thank you for the gift you sent my way to celebrate the launch of Mercenaries. The game is a hit and everyone who worked on it should be proud of the work that was put into it - just figure out that whole Alliance and Horde thing because it's silly people need to have a lore catalog to know who is where.

I know there is a very high chance this is the last time I receive anything, knowing this was ready to go prior to datamining. That doesn't really bother me all that much because at the end of the day I'm going to continue datamining anything you push out there since you clearly don't want to work together and that's my duty to the community that I don't plan on breaking.

So, I'd like to share with everyone still reading the goodies that were sent to me.

  • Jacket with a Mercenaries logo.
  • Leather dice bag with 7 dies featuring Mercenary role colors.
  • An amazing Mukla coin.
  • 3 bottles of hot sauce with incredible custom labels.
  • A Hearthstone hat.
  • 3 glasses with engraved role icons.
  • A Mercenaries bottle opener.

Remember, this was a gift from Blizzard, they definitely didn't ask me to make this post (or any content, I could have chosen to not show anyone the goodies).