Nasty WoWhead?

[Deleted]

Thank god I'm on an unlimited internet package.

I'd be scared as hell to use WoWhead if my internet package had caps.

[Kokolums]

I'm glad it sounds like they are fixing it.

To be honest, I'm not sure I would still play the game without wowhead. The real problem is not wowohead, it's Blizzard. Blizzard has (unfairly imho) dumped a lot of their work in quest design to wowhead. Rather than take the time to write meaningful quest descriptions that have enough detail to actually complete the quest, in many cases Blizzard just list the objectives. Without wowhead and the tomtom addon, many quests would be extremely frustrating to complete.

It's gotten so bad, that leveling without wowhead is basically torture.

Blizzard didn't dump any of their quest design onto WoWhead. An online database describing how to tackle everything in the game simply was never considered by them, and there's plenty of people who would say it streamlines the game too much. It makes it very difficult to design challenging content when everything has a how-to guide the moment it gets released.

Some may argue that more RNG in WoW is mandated because its the only way to counter Wowhead. Really the RNG needs to be in boss design. A boss should have 1 (maybe 2) standard mechanics. The boss should then draw 3-4 mechanics randomly from a pool of 100 or more. The random pool of mechanics should be updated every so often to add new ones and remove others. This way you destroy online guides because they can't know what mechanics ANY boss has anymore.

[Noradin]

Is thottbot or alakazam still a thing?

wowhead buyed them.

[Hawg]

Blizzard didn't dump any of their quest design onto WoWhead. An online database describing how to tackle everything in the game simply was never considered by them, and there's plenty of people who would say it streamlines the game too much. It makes it very difficult to design challenging content when everything has a how-to guide the moment it gets released.

Some may argue that more RNG in WoW is mandated because its the only way to counter Wowhead. Really the RNG needs to be in boss design. A boss should have 1 (maybe 2) standard mechanics. The boss should then draw 3-4 mechanics randomly from a pool of 100 or more. The random pool of mechanics should be updated every so often to add new ones and remove others. This way you destroy online guides because they can't know what mechanics ANY boss has anymore.

Having a quest where it says, "Character Name, I need your help. I'll reward you handsomely if you recover 8 balls of joy I left when I was still alive" is not RNG. Its lack of effort to describe the goals to the point where they are achievable.

[Kokolums]

Having a quest where it says, "Character Name, I need your help. I'll reward you handsomely if you recover 8 balls of joy I left when I was still alive" is not RNG. Its lack of effort to describe the goals to the point where they are achievable.

I didn't say that was RNG.

And wow you must never have played games before the internet. There were some mind boggling puzzles and no hand holding at all.

[Tharkkun]

People still have flash installed on their computers in 2016?

That's not smart.

There's many websites including commercial ones that don't work without flash. It's not going away any time soon. While businesses are migrating to HTML 5, it takes years to complete. I keep one browser configured with flash enabled, the other disabled.

[Banquetto]

The takeaway from this for me at least is that I've been playing WoW for 7+ years and i didn't even know wowhead premium was a thing.

Haha neither did I. I just tossed them five bucks for some premium access, I figure I've easily gotten five bucks worth of useful info out of them over the years.

[Piplupzero]

She's not the PR person though. It's technically not her job to deal with the public. Also not quite sure it would be to the same scale, since I imagine she has quite a larger number of "customers" coming at her right now for an issue she didn't even cause (regarding the ads). Could she of handled it better? Yes. Should she of had to even handle it in the first place? No.

And yes I'm a volunteer, but my point was more of that it's not something even connected to her.

Except as a public representative of a company you have a PR duty whether you want it or not. Remember how Ghostcrawler used to (and actually still does to an extent) interact with people on twitter? His job was not PR yet he always attempted to maintain a calm, professional approach because he understood that whether he wanted to be or not, he was the face of the company in response to that individuals query.
I'm not sure if its a recent trend but all this "qq but that's not my exclusive job title qq" is a really bad, entitled attitude to hold.

[Kinjin]

Panser has always been a halfwit shill. Don't worry though, she will shake the bewbs and go back to being loved shortly.

[athrian]

Hey everyone, I was one of the guys helping out with detecting the issues and getting people set up with adblock filters. Just wanted to pop in with some info:

Wowhead has mitigated some of the issues, but they are continuing to use auto-refreshing ads it seems with no plans to stop that in the future. Be careful leaving a browser window open on Wowhead without an adblocker/noscript for a long time, especially if you're on internet with a data cap, because the constant connections to the ad server will burn through data even with their new changes. The cpu/memory spikes when the ads get pulled down have been lessened, but they still get problematic, especially when a bad ad with video/audio gets pulled down. Because the scripts run and javascript is....not the most optimized language, you'll still have a huge memory usage issue after awhile if you stay on wowhead.

As others have mentioned, a noscript plugin or an adblocker that includes noscript is the way to go. Wowhead is continuing to use monkeybroker for now, so I'd keep using the filter mentioned before:

*.cloudfront.net/mb*.gz.js

In addition, it seems they at least temporarily stopped using whatever was injecting some inline javascript into the pages that caused all the g00.wowhead.com redirects when a page loaded. Interestingly I did notice the same thing here on mmo champion when I was setting up my account. If you want to block this in the future, you need an adblock that supports advanced filters for blocking inline javascript. Ublock supports this and you can find documentation about how to make such a filter at:

github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Inline-script-tag-filtering

If you make a filter that blocks if the script contains one of these phrases, it *should* work:

INSTART
ad-instart2
/g00

Just tested with uBlock origin using a custom filter:
mmo-champion.com##script:contains(INSTART)

And it stopped the g00 redirects when loading mmo champion's page. Unfortunately, it seems to only work in Firefox and not Chrome. You should be able to do the same thing with wowhead if they ever bring back that script using something like:

wowhead.com##script:contains(INSTART)

[Hawg]

I didn't say that was RNG.

And wow you must never have played games before the internet. There were some mind boggling puzzles and no hand holding at all.

I played a lot before the internet. Zork etc. But those were games where the intent was to solve puzzles. The internet on wow for the most part is not puzzle solving.

The RNG part came from your second paragraph here:

Blizzard didn't dump any of their quest design onto WoWhead. An online database describing how to tackle everything in the game simply was never considered by them, and there's plenty of people who would say it streamlines the game too much. It makes it very difficult to design challenging content when everything has a how-to guide the moment it gets released.

Some may argue that more RNG in WoW is mandated because its the only way to counter Wowhead. Really the RNG needs to be in boss design. A boss should have 1 (maybe 2) standard mechanics. The boss should then draw 3-4 mechanics randomly from a pool of 100 or more. The random pool of mechanics should be updated every so often to add new ones and remove others. This way you destroy online guides because they can't know what mechanics ANY boss has anymore.

[Deleted]

Here's the friendly Wowhead stuff chiming in with their opinion on this issue:

I just wonder that this cam whore is even able to write.

[manypillars]

If there was a textbook example of why users make use of ad and script blockers it would be Wowhead. It's even better that realizing this, they don't try to evaluate their site to figure out how to make it a better/safer experience for users to rebuild trust and get people to whitelist them again, but instead do anything they can to break ad and script blockers effectively making their site more dangerous. They then cry how mean everyone is to them or how we should be worried about bigger issues than Wowhead giving out Locky and Powleks infections when the problems they caused boil over.

Wasn't there even a stickied thread on the tech support forums earlier this year about how Wowhead was locking up and crashing WoW if you had it open while you played? Nevermind all the reports of crashing and locking up browsers, the obnoxious video and sound ads, or the malware, people couldn't play WoW with Wowhead open.

[Doombringer]

I just wonder that this cam whore is even able to write.

I'm not surprised she put her two cents in here, and yet when called out on it throws up the "I have nothing to do with the coding, I can't fix this" defense.

Well, gosh, then don't weigh in on the subject at all? Or take a stance that is user-centric and neutral, and not laced with political commentary and snark?

All show and no go. Of course, people like her will use any chance they can get to make their point of view on <Unrelated Issue> known.

[avahle]

She's not the PR person though. It's technically not her job to deal with the public. Also not quite sure it would be to the same scale, since I imagine she has quite a larger number of "customers" coming at her right now for an issue she didn't even cause (regarding the ads). Could she of handled it better? Yes. Should she of had to even handle it in the first place? No.

And yes I'm a volunteer, but my point was more of that it's not something even connected to her.

What is with people saying this? The first week I start a job in any self respecting company; they tell us that if we put the company's name in our social media profile and answer questions about the company then people will assume we are talking for the company and so we should act accordingly. Just ask the "Deal with it" guy from MS.

[MrExcelion]

Hey everyone, I was one of the guys helping out with detecting the issues and getting people set up with adblock filters. Just wanted to pop in with some info:

Wowhead has mitigated some of the issues, but they are continuing to use auto-refreshing ads it seems with no plans to stop that in the future. Be careful leaving a browser window open on Wowhead without an adblocker/noscript for a long time, especially if you're on internet with a data cap, because the constant connections to the ad server will burn through data even with their new changes. The cpu/memory spikes when the ads get pulled down have been lessened, but they still get problematic, especially when a bad ad with video/audio gets pulled down. Because the scripts run and javascript is....not the most optimized language, you'll still have a huge memory usage issue after awhile if you stay on wowhead.

As others have mentioned, a noscript plugin or an adblocker that includes noscript is the way to go. Wowhead is continuing to use monkeybroker for now, so I'd keep using the filter mentioned before:

*.cloudfront.net/mb*.gz.js

In addition, it seems they at least temporarily stopped using whatever was injecting some inline javascript into the pages that caused all the g00.wowhead.com redirects when a page loaded. Interestingly I did notice the same thing here on mmo champion when I was setting up my account. If you want to block this in the future, you need an adblock that supports advanced filters for blocking inline javascript. Ublock supports this and you can find documentation about how to make such a filter at:

github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Inline-script-tag-filtering

If you make a filter that blocks if the script contains one of these phrases, it *should* work:

INSTART
ad-instart2
/g00

Just tested with uBlock origin using a custom filter:
mmo-champion.com##script:contains(INSTART)

And it stopped the g00 redirects when loading mmo champion's page. Unfortunately, it seems to only work in Firefox and not Chrome. You should be able to do the same thing with wowhead if they ever bring back that script using something like:

wowhead.com##script:contains(INSTART)

Thanks man! I was wondering why mmoc had g00 redirects too. @chaud maybes (sorry I've been @ing you too much lately)

[Kushana]

...

Just tested with uBlock origin using a custom filter:
mmo-champion.com##script:contains(INSTART)

And it stopped the g00 redirects when loading mmo champion's page. Unfortunately, it seems to only work in Firefox and not Chrome. You should be able to do the same thing with wowhead if they ever bring back that script using something like:

wowhead.com##script:contains(INSTART)

It looks like the script::contains filters depend on the beforescriptexecute/afterscriptexecute events, and the Chrome devs have stated that because they're not part of the spec, they won't be implemented. So ublock is going to have to find a new way to detect the scripts if Chrome is to get protection.

[MrExcelion]

It looks like the script::contains filters depend on the beforescriptexecute/afterscriptexecute events, and the Chrome devs have stated that because they're not part of the spec, they won't be implemented. So ublock is going to have to find a new way to detect the scripts if Chrome is to get protection.

Can confirm, the g00 blocking for mmoc works on FF but not chrome. Mmoc pages are done loading instantly, like before, on FF, but it takes a while to finish to chrome, guess I'll be using FF for awhile again

- - - Updated - - -

Also I've seen the g00 thing pop up on a couple of other sites recently too.

[carlos9949]

Burn WOWHEAD webpage!!!

[Kyanion]

Is anyone getting the same style of issue on MMO-Champ now? All the other websites I go to are just fine, but MMO is now running slow as hell causing the same style of lag in WoW that wowhead did.