Some of you might remember that I used to do data mining for Warhammer Online and more recently, SWTOR. I stopped doing it a while ago for a couple of reasons. One, I was just running out of time. My interest was also waning at that point. The second reason was there really wasn't a need. swtor_miner, from Reddit, was doing a better job than me. No need to duplicate efforts.
Recently, some news broke that swtor_miner was put on BioWare's 'blacklist'. Any fan sites that promote his work would also loose their 'official' status. Oddly enough, I too received a bit of backlash, but not from BioWare. I was denied entry to a guild because of my past data mining efforts even though it was a year ago.
I don't think BioWare took this step because just because he was data mining. This all happened around the time he was making known possible ways to abuse the Conquest system. In fact, he was on podcasts talking about how to do it based on data mined information. Whether or not he should be punished for making these flaws known is a very old argument. My personal opinion is that he should let BioWare know, but not make it public.
Swtor_miner is a valuable asset to SWTOR. Where the community teams hands are tied to talk about upcoming plans, his are not. We MMO players love our information about the future. So in between official announcements, we have bits and pieces from data mining. However, it also means that some discretion must be shown by the data miner.
Stolen Realm - Review
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