How Bad do you Wanna Know?

I've been thinking about spoilers lately. It seems almost like you can't play the game fresh. If you walk into an instance, especially as a tank or a healer you are expected to know the fights, and in doing so, you probably have to read up on any lore concerning them as well. It's impossible to avoid spoilers in chat without turning off your channels. If you read gaming sites, it's rife there as well. Even though some sites will "try" to put up warnings in their intros, usually the title of the post gives half or more of it all away anyways.

Just today the rumor came out the Friends and Family Alpha for the new WoW expansion Cataclysm is coming soon. Next Tuesday, if the rumors or true. This has spurned a whole new discussion on how soon we will see leaks of information. When the WotLK was in Alpha and Beta there was a site that had all the spoilers, NDA be damned. If this site: Cataclysm Wiki has any truth to it, than the same people who leaked all the WotLK info will be doing the same for the Cataclysm stuff.

So, I'm down to asking myself. Do I want to know? With Wrath I didn't mind one way or the other, but part of me felt it lost some of the newness going into the game knowing everything ahead of time. Do I really want that going into Cataclysm? How much will I let myself be spoiled? Just what Blizzard tells me? What the blogs sites are talking about? What the spoiler sites are saying? And even if I want to avoid it all... how can I, when everyone will be talking about it. At the same time, if I hadn't know about the Achievements ahead of time, I might not have gotten my Violet Proto Drake that next year...

Just some food for thought, going into this next, possibly laden with spoilers, week.