Where does information come from?

[gambit2312]

Hi im now questing in outland, i have a question, Where does information come from, like the creatures, were they should be and what they should do? and the gathering ores and flowers and so on, is this extracted from the wow client? why is it so poluted, with rubbish?

greets Marcel

[madmax]

Most of the data was gathered from retail when the servers were live back then. Even the classic data is mostly from there.

[Olion]

The information on creature/GO spawning and creature behaviour is being provided by the server dynamically. The "official" sources are sniffs and client-cached wdb-files from offy, that does not exist approximately 10 years (considering Zero). Another source is addon databases, like Gatherer one. You can imagine yourself the quality of the data. But even these scraps became polluted further by developers trying to make an incomplete server playable. The recently mentioned example is the Stranglekelp planted on a dry land: older server versions did not enable (erroneously) many underwater player actions including gathering, so an underwater plant was unusable (this picture I myself saw on an ancient emu based probably on mangos).