NicaraoGaming

To give context to this, Blizzard has removed almost all file names from the dbase, which makes model work and datamining very hard. Like, if every file on your computer was renamed to random characters and moved to a single folder....https://twitter.com/Stiven_SRB/status/1118371415873478658 …

For the big sites like Wowhead it’s a pain, but they can afford to pay people to puzzle it together. For small, independent sites like us, and for machinima artists, it’s a potential death knell.

We’ll need to stick together and help each other, and support people like @Marlamin who make great tools. But we’ll always run the risk that our database-derived content will be weeks behind. And that’s death for small fansites. Cross fingers it doesn’t come to that.

I want to note that it’s unlikely this change was made in order to screw up fansites and creators! It’s actually probably for database streamlining. But the result is potentially devastating for us.

isnt it just a mapping then? If wowhead can do that, then they could openly publish that mapping

The database that maps file names to IDs isn’t published, unfortunately. Wowhead are just looking at other databases and file contents and puzzling how they fit together, without knowing file names at all

yes, but that "puzzling together" is a mapping of IDs -> filenames that other people could also use to process the game database (I assume that those IDs are the same for all clients). or?