All of the so called hidden and discovered mechanics in EQ were in part to the internet still being relatively new to most people. If you think Pantheon won't be data mined with every quest, secret, easter egg, and every other feature mapped out on some site you are naive. The world has moved on, if Brad had any foresight or skill this guy would be working on bringing this type of game to a new medium such as VR instead it's a tired EQ clone. It's also amusing how many people state that he is going to add in all these so called "features" when all we have seen it more of the same.
I know you're mainly here to troll, and I won't stop you. Do your thing bro. But you bring up a good point.
No doubt it will be data mined and mapped out- just like EQ was. You can't stop dissemination of game knowledge any more now then you could in 1999, or 2000, or 2001. The Internet wasn't "new" in those years, and we all knew where to find that type of info. Hell, I'm sure the data parsing will be even more refined now then it was then, too.
However, by deciding to limit the player's access to in-game metadata, a company does a few things. First, it gives the option for players who don't want to focus on metadata to ignore that type of thing. I'm personally not that kind of player. I am completely unable to ignore metadata analysis and will look for it in any mmo (not so much in other games) because of the way I play mmos. That said, enough players out there are able to ignore metadata to the extent that keeping a lot of that stuff "under the hood" has intrinsic value.
Second, leaving it up to the players to find all that stuff out for themselves turns fact into conjecture. Instead of relying on the game itself to tell you things, you rely on the
community to gather, analyze, and disseminate info. Whether that dissemination comes in the form of websites, guild chat, or just one player talking to another player, it puts the focus back on community interaction (which is obviously something important in mmos).
Finally, there the actual
discovery process itself is fun. A big mmo has a lot of spells, items, mechanics, NPCs, POIs, and a ton of other things to discover. Sure, once that info is discovered, confirmed, and put out there the initial discovery process is over, but it takes time to do that with every single part of an mmo. The race to discover is part of the fun. Then those who made the discovery have the option to put the info out there or keep it to themselves. Then the community has to decide whether the info is even good.
At the end of the day, a company can add quite a bit of entertainment value to their game just by choosing not to advertise metadata.