There are many sites dedication to bringing the casual (or hardcore) player information about very specific quests, monsters, and items in any given game. Clearly the usefulness of these sites increase linearly with the amount of precise information available on them (more is better); so what happens when the game adds and entirely new level of complexity to this information?

Standard strategy guides are so helpful for getting through single player games. These games are generally very linear (or at least very “event” linear, meaning that while you’re free to go wherever’s available at that time, you may not be able to go everywhere since you haven’t progressed that far yet), which means that someone with some time and energy to spend (and a fat paycheck waiting) can sit down and pound through an entire game and document every event that happens with relatively little ingenuity or effort. Then they can compile it in an easy-to-read book that follows the linearity of the game to a tee.

Then you’ve got the online games to which there’s really no possible strategy guide at all. The completely unscripted, non-linear games like Starcraft, Warcraft, Chess, and most online First-person shooters. These games have no plot, and the entire point is just to have a higher skill level than your opponent. I conjecture that in order to write a complete strategy guide for a game like this, the amount of pages (paper or electronic) you’d have to use would be monstrous, because it would have to account for every possible situation.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this fall those MMOs which allow character progression via quests and other means. This is where popular sites like allakhazam and others come into play. They amass unbelievable amounts of information about every quest, NPC, and item available in these games. They do an amazing job of it. However, most of their assumptions are based on a large, seemingly-dynamic world in which the characters remain completely constant. All of the NPCs are completely lifeless automatons that sit out in front of their shops or in their houses for you to find at your convenience.

My question is: What happens when these NPCs and other world-characters start moving?