It’s one of the fastest ways to get the general population to start doing the “most optimal” and “most fastest” ways of things, and heavily affects social aspects of games when it comes to sharing information, understandably wikis and such also apply to these but generally these are handed from player to player and can cause some quite fun things.
Like for example the Kateen Forest mystery that is going on around, that’s not datamineable since it’s mostly hidden behind in the background of the server and you can see groups of people having fun playing amateur detective in the search for new quests and cute hats, creating rumors and lore by themselves.
aka Emergent Gameplay at it’s finest, people searching for something that can NOT be made meta trough digging trough files, despite it having nearly no relevance to progress or the journey of getting better loot.
EDIT: And let’s be honest, social interaction is what keeps most MMOs going.