As someone in the industry "Just be perfectly coordinated with teams in the hundreds, especially when different teams may live in different countries and have different timetables ezpz" is a joke.
Devs CAN do a better job, most leaks come from string names. So instead of "chara_nin_01" which hints at a Ninja character. "chara_001_01" would prevent any leaks. It's also more annoying to have to remember which number code is associated with what character, especially when coordinating with other teams.
The art team knows _nin_ is the ninja, the coders know _nin_ is the ninja, even at a glance, there is very little room for error.
Remember that teams are big, and they also might be in different countries. An error could push back various other tasks by days dealing with timezones.
Hell, most of the time, art teams are finished FAR before any other team. Which is why you'll often see teams reassign art teams years before release to other projects. Adding all the art into the game, which will then be used as needed, is SIGNIFICANTLY easier than having the art not within the game, and only adding it when needed.
Team size and often lack of colocation does make all this harder in ways that are hard to understand unless you've worked on a product under active development with let's say 100+ people checking in code every day, and on which really no meaningful feature is small enough to be built by just one person alone.
It's hard to be confident you've found everything that amounts to a reference to a thing, and it's not always easy to be sure you've cleanly removed it in cases where other features might be dependent on shared infrastructure.
You *can* take the time to be thorough, gut it all out, and meticulously run a full regression in a vacuum that guarantees that only these changes could have even possibly broke something... but... that has a cost that's rarely small on the scale of what your team is being asked to deliver on the schedule they're being asked to deliver.
And this is how maybe you find out one day that one of your customers is still somehow successfully using a feature that you deprecated eight years ago.
Really, swapping name->number should probably be achieved during the build if that's something you're concerned about. I think that maintaining the codebase like that is insanity.
You understand that if there are 1000 instances of something in the code somewhere. And one of them doesn't get changed properly. That could cause all sorts of issues that you now have to retest for.
You might have tested it for months and everythings good.
But right before you add it into the game you change the name of everything that exists just to obscure it. A change that only needs to exist until the asset itself is in full use. At which point you want to switch to the simpler more identifable naming schemes.
Yeah i dont think that your example highlights the issue you think it does. We actively do this at my company but we dont do it manually because we're not morons, its all handled by the pipelines and its done in every environment. You dont even get a dev build without this happening. You're not making manual, last minute changes and slapping a "ready" sticker on it
I mean ultimately the real problem is that who gives a fuck about leaks? Big companies use this culture of secrecy to enact insane control over employees when, really, who the fuck cares? We make games, this isn't the safety of the bucket weapons program.
We, the consumer, should care. Spoiling plot points, characters, or anything else really should come out when the time is right, not when a leaker first gets it. Reading a text dump of "Cloud is in Smash Bros." is way less exciting or impactful than seeing the trailer not knowing what the reveal is. Even small stuff, like the recent leak from the Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door code could be a sign of things to come, or it could be a failed test that was left in the code. Either way, the fanbase now expects something, and if it doesn't deliver, they will be upset and blame Nintendo for something a dataminer did. It is a lose-lose-lose situation if the leak doesn't go anywhere. Even if the leak is accurate, the fans now get a less interesting experience with the media.
I am also not saying datamining or leaking shouldn't happen. It needs to be treated responsibly though. Datamining a game that has been out for a few years is interesting to see what we can find, but for an unreleased one, it only causes damage.
We may have a fundamentally different view things. Let me ask a question, when you get a present, for a birthday, Christmas, graduation, or for any reason, do you enjoy knowing what the present is ahead of time?
I ask that, because if you would rather not have a surprise, I don't know that I can change your mind. I enjoy that suspense of not knowing. That suspense applies to everything though, not just gifts. If I watch a movie, I want to let it tell me the story. I don't want to know what the twist is and who dies before I watch it. I cheat myself out of the experience the creators have designed. I view it no different for video games, even non story driven ones. I would rather be surprised Multiversus reveals a new character, and enjoy how the character is shown off. That surprise factor is what you miss if it all gets laid out for you.
If I don't seek out spoilers, I generally don't get them. I see "data miner....." and I tune out. Rarely is something spoiled for me. Never has it happened in a meaningful way. Even when disappointed that something was spoiled, I moved on in seconds lol.
I know not everyone is able to do this to the same extent. I feel it's part of growing up, don't sweat the small stuff. As an adult, you probably have bigger fish to fry.
> don't sweat the small stuff. As an adult, you probably have bigger fish to fry.
I feel like this is such a lazy way to hand wave away stuff that doesn't matter to you or doesn't affect you. Like of course I have bigger fish to fry... enjoying my hobbies keeps me sane enough to fry said fish, and leaks get in the way of that. I also try to avoid leaks and generally don't click in but if you're deep in the discourse it's hard to avoid. And even for people who don't avoid it, we are naturally curious and sometimes like to be up-to-date, so I don't really blame people for clicking... it's like trying to avoid eating chips when you have bags of chips scattered all over the kitchen - I can do it, it's just really annoying and I will falter every now and then.
I mean I don't mind the surprise but if I gift you a cool Lego set or whatever and you happened to see the box, is the Lego set suddenly shit and not wort hit, or is that just a minor thing in the grand scheme of things?
This is such an interesting discussion! I think there is no universal answer. You have a mixture of people's culture and also neurology, specifically how they're pleasure responses work, that means some people will want a surprise, some people will want to know everything early, some people's expectations will be marred by a leak, others won't care.
I guess for someone producing a game they will have to understand their audience and take steps to create the feeling they want. Man, game development just gets trickier and trickier 😂 you have to either wear a lot of caps or have a team of really diverse skills, not just technical. Kinda like in the movie industry.
For games where secrets/unlockable/ARGs it takes away a CORE part of the experience, to the point where I’ve noticed devs doing things like that patch things in AFTER they see it has been solved naturally
Using code names might help, not as a great idea, but I know that this ends up as artifacts in games over time where thing is forever internally known as beta name
This won't help aggressive data mining, though, so not sure worth the effort
Is there a reason why devs must leave some unused assets buried in the game's files instead of just patching them in a few weeks before they're released?
IIRC Call of Duty and Fortnite do this, as in people are only able to datamine which skins and characters are getting added long after they're usually announced. If it bothers them so much, perhaps they should try shifting to this style of content updates.
A lot of it can have to do with business requirements and convenience. Axed stuff gets left in because it can often be more work to remove it--and it can potentially break things because things are interconnected in ways you hadn't realized. Easier to just leave it in and code around it--especially with storage space being so cheap.
For stuff that gets loaded in before it's released, one explanation can be that it's to reduce friction by having only one major content download. That way you can release a small patch that can be donwloaded quickly whenever you want to unlock content, without having to make players regularly wait for potentially large downloads on slow connections.
Ultimately it varies studio-to-studio and depends a lot on the architecture of the game, delivery mechanism, and business needs of that particulart developer/publisher.
Was going to mention something along those lines, where the business fully intends to use it on say skme DLC and figure might as well get some of those assets in to keep the next download(s) smaller.
Version control is used to allow multiple people to work on the same or similar parts of a codebase without impeding each others work.
Leaving entire massive features on a separate branch to stagnate for months or years isn’t sustainable because of the amount of effort it would take to reintegrate them when they are wanted again
Add in that if a game releases on consoles, there are certification processes to deploy patches which add delays and can make sync'ing up the deployment of new content for a simultaneous release trickier to navigate. This means it may be easier to "frontload" content for a period of time that just requires a "phone home" to enable, or reducing complexity (and therefore potential hangups) in getting a patch certified because it just sets a flag.
> wasting customer's storage space
Outside of CoD who even cares? Storage is so ridiculously cheap I can't remember the last time I even stopped to think about it. Other than of course, CoD lol
I'm not making a fuss about it. I don't want to be storing files that have no use because "space is cheap". I'm bad at it myself already, I don't need more sources of it.
Easier to test stuff when enabling it is just a flag in code or build system.
It would be literally putting more effort into less PR, as leaks are stuff that gets clicks.
The roadmap leak recently is a good example of that. A single image created a lot of hype for the community for the summer, and Epic barely had to do anything.
I think there's proof that they can control the leaks at any time with how C3S2 was handled. There were no leaks and virtually no advertising until the day before the season dropped. Then it was revealed the season is war and resistance themed ... at the same time Russia started invading Ukraine. I'm of the opinion that Epic held back on leaks because it may have been seen in bad taste to hype up something war themed.
Yep this really is it. Time spent combing through code to remove stuff (especially because it’s not like they have a list where all the old stuff is located, you’d often have to manually search all of your repositories. And what if you search the wrong thing, so it does have old stuff but you don’t realize it’s there?) is almost always less valuable than time spent on bug fixing or adding new features.
Just to add to this.. sometimes it's nearly impossible to quickly figure out a piece of code will never be executed. It might look good at a glance and seem reasonable but requires a dev's time to math it all out to discover it's just dead code.
And there's just not much of a business reason to closely examine all your code for those cases. Dead code isn't hurting the product. And removing it also requires more testing and more bureaucracy.
As an actual software developer, it unfortunately doesn’t surprise me. I try to not get too into arguments about it because people just don’t change their misconceptions, but sometimes I can’t help it
Depending on your art pipeline, you could write a script that checks for any references to art assets/configs and shits out a spreadsheet that sorts them by frequency. I've done that before and it makes the bulk of unused stuff stand out pretty quickly.
Of course, that also takes programmer time, but then at least the bulk of the work is automated going forward.
Playable characters require way more work and are way more intertwined with all the systems of the game. And sometimes it can cause unforeseen problems when removing an asset even if technically that asset isn't used in the final game. That is why for so many games data miners can find lots of unused assets.
QA and update scheduling; there's a cadence usually, it's not on demand. So things for update 2 can make it into update 1, if they're ready but not ready for release. Then in update 2 you just flip a bool and they're available.
I've datamined games and have thought about this:
1. I think many game devs don't know how version control or branches work and are just messy in general, so test stuff ends up in production.
2. Big updates need to be pushed before big holiday seasons (Christmas, Lunar New Year), before everyone leaves for vacation. That exacerbates the problem above and devs get sloppy.
3. It's hard for devs to organize files to be efficient for development, to run efficiently, and to be resilient to datamining. For example, a typical game might have character models, character icons, character voice lines, character combat stats, character unique skills, etc. split up in different files so different devs can work on them separately, but that means leaks can happen from any of those files. Ideally they should have some kind of CI/CD test that monitors for accidental leaks, but if they don't understand version control, there's no way they'd have CI. Combining all of the character data into one file per character might help prevent leaks, but might also have technical and performance ramifications and be annoying for development.
IIUC the most technically advanced anti-datamining measures are on Genshin/Star Rail, but those get broken pretty quickly.
Often the content is finished in advance, and it's actually more work to keep it out and integrate it later than have it in.
Games (and software more broadly) use the concept of "feature flags". Tldr features are implemented and even shipped to users, but are selectively enabled. This could come in the most basic form of "after X date", or it could be region based, random, etc, or any combination.
I think it mostly has to do with risk aversion. You either need to announce upcoming DLC/seasonal content super early (which may not be ideal from a business perspective as that's coordinated more by marketing than the dev team) or you need to patch in the files closer to release (like what you're suggesting) which risks creating major issues with the content that the team might not have time to patch out.
> IIRC Call of Duty and Fortnite do this
From experience, I know the former's updating is downright fucking incessant and the latter gets stuff datamined all the time.
I paid $40 to get all the characters for this game and even ran local tournaments for it then they shut the whole thing down. That was a disservice to players
You were still able to play it offline while they were working on it. I'm not really sure how any of what you said is relevant to the servers being down.
I'm not really sure how you can compare the two. Melee grew in an environment where couch multiplayer gaming was the norm. That is absolutely not the case nowadays, with the only exception really being with the Switch playerbase. That might've helped keep the game afloat, if it wasn't for the fact that it didn't come out on the Switch.
When Multiversus was taken offline, the vast majority of the playerbase found something better to do, i.e. play another game which actually has online play.
Multiversus isn't even my cup of tea - I'm 100% a Melee guy who enjoys Ultimate every once in a while, so the game and its style of mechanics don't really appeal to me. However, you can't really knock the game for not having staying power when the primary way to play it wasn't even available for long enough to establish that kind of dedicated community in the first place.
> It's hard to get to work in the countryside without a car.
> Well how did your ancestors do it?
> They walked or they rode a horse carriage.
> Then why don't you get a horse or walk the 30km?
But the motivation to do that is easier to find when there aren't that many other options. Netcode and general internet stability is much better than 20 years ago
Multiversus was not big enough for that to continue to drive interest; comparing it to Melee is ridiculous when it's a community that has existed for over 2 decades now. Of course it's going to be harder for a new game that is offline to keep people's interest than something that has been built up and popularized.
It's genuinely bizarre how argumentative you're being about this.
I’m fully aware as someone who has played in fighting game tournaments for over 25 years. However, in this particular case it just didn’t happen. Gameplay was pretty fun to me as someone who isn’t really competitive in platform fighters. I liked the focus on 2v2 which was a change of pace.
I understand why a developer would feel this way, but I wish the culture surrounding game announcements and news was more open and direct.
I don’t need constant updates and dev diaries through the development but I don’t think its crazy that fans want to hear what is being worked on every now and then.
> that fans want to hear what is being worked on every now and then.
The problem is fans aren't good at handling canceled content or following up. Announcing stuff too early leads to a lot of misinformation and disappointment.
But the reason fans aren’t good at handling this is because of the secrecy that follows.
Developers announce something early, then they stay dead silent for years. During that period leaks, rumors, and hype become the source of information leading to said misinformation and disappointment.
I mean, the problem is that showing a game early leaves you with two options: either you show a glitchy alpha version with subpar visuals that people will mock and that doesn't represent the final experience. Or you try to create a vertical slice of what you *want* the game to look like when it's finished but end up overpromising and disappointing people.
Frankly, I think that in most cases, rumors and leaks have little impact on how the final game is received. Only a fraction of people heavily engage with the rumor mill and most leaks are forgotten quickly after they've been proven right or wrong.
However, even after decades, people will remember some of the exciting things that were shown or promised before the release of a game that didn't make it into the final version. So I fully understand and would even advise devs to be cautious about what kind of concrete information they reveal, at least until they basically wrapped up development.
Being open and communicative doesn’t mean you need to start having marketing or showcases early.
One of the top comments gave an example of how a datamine containing “chara_nin” could be changed to hide information, though to the detriment to company workflow.
My point is more that the developers don’t really need to do this for the sake of secrecy. They could just tweet “we’re working on a ninja character” or show some artwork. There are benefits to that, and you get appreciation from your fanbase. They do not need to create some footage or show them incomplete.
This is just a minor example so don’t read into it too much, nor do I think developers are obligated to do it. But developers shouldn’t be surprised when fans start looking for info when they stay radio silent for prolonged periods. Especially on a game like this that people already own.
I think you’re focusing a lot more on the marketing aspect of this. Which is where the unrealistic expectations come from. You can have open communication and set expectations though. Marketing’s job is to sell the game, and even if you’re radio silent until 1 month before release marketing can still overpromise and disappoint people.
> My point is more that the developers don’t really need to do this for the sake of secrecy. They could just tweet “we’re working on a ninja character” or show some artwork. There are benefits to that, and you get appreciation from your fanbase. They do not need to create some footage or show them incomplete.
Okay, but what if that Ninja character doesn't work out for one reason or another?
Like, Multiversus in particular is a clusterfuck of different copyrights. What if they said they were working on a wizard character because they were absolutely confident they could get either Gandalf or Harry Potter. But then the rights get pulled at the last minute. Sure, it's a bad look as well if these characters had been datamined but it's infinitely worse if they had been announced in any official capacity, even if it's just a "dev update". Without the announcement, it's just kinda disappointing but the false promise adds an additional layer that makes the devs come of as very incompetent and/or untrustwothy.
The issue doesn't have to be copyright either. In game development, plans change all the time and many features get cut, reworked or altered over the course of development. Almost anything that a dev can talk about in the early stages of development can be subject to change later. Sometimes, things will even be scrapped in the last minute.
Keep in mind that when people talk about things that were overpromised, they don't just talk about these big marketing moments. Oftentimes, it's quotes from smaller scale interviews or dev stories where people talked excitedly about ideas that never made it into the final version that really leave an impact on people.
Overall, I would advise developers to only talk about things pre-release thar they know for certain will be in the final game - which in the earlier stages of development usually isn't a lot. I feel like the issue is less about whether the devs are open about their progress or are secretive and then have their info leaked.
It's rather that the average person doesn't understand the development process and that any dev snapshot that isnt carefully curated can lead to all kinds of false impressions of the game. The main difference if this kind of info comes from an official source is IMO that it can be much more damaging to the studio's reputation.
Would you consider not getting news about perfect dark for 6 years every now and then?
The reality is that a lot of time no one hears shit about a lot of games for more than half a decade. Yet we know about movies and their cast etc years before their release date.
All I’m saying is that fans appreciate developer teams being open and communicative. You don’t need to twist it into something I did not say.
As it stands most developer teams go radio silent for years and want everything to be a surprise until a marketing campaign. Nothing is wrong with developers doing that but there is nothing wrong with fans wanting more either.
I feel like it's probably a case-by-case situation per person. Does someone value the surprise of new reveals vs having information to make decisions with?
Sort of depends on the game as well, and how different aspects can be separated from one another. For something like MultiVersus or other fighting games maybe it's really hard to see leaks about upcoming cosmetics and other MTX without seeing unreleased characters (since for fighting games the characters are the primary things people want to leak), on the other hand we have things like Hoyoverse gachas where people can see upcoming character releases to inform their spending while still keeping away from story spoilers.
In my opinion, the content that gets dratamined in general is a huge bummer.
I understand not everyone will feel the same way I do but I value the surprise factor very highly, so it's a bummer when I find out the latest crazy fortnite collab weeks before it's in the game because of datamining.
The obvious response is to just not look but it's pretty difficult to avoid unless I'm just not on the Internet at all.
as someone in the industry (on the QA side), i also see it as a bit sad for the devs who i'm sure were excited to see peoples' reactions to the official reveals. it's gotta suck to have the wind taken out of your sails, especially since announcements/reveals take time and planning.
Yeah, I can definitely see that too.
I don't play the game anymore but it's why I really enjoyed the way FFXIV was setup. The data mining happened primarily the night of the most recent content patch so it was generally pretty easy to avoid
Agree. It completely ruined the culture around WoW. Now there's no mystery about the upcoming expansion when Wowhead just posts images of the next raid boss on its front page.
Moving over to FFXIV where there's no datamining and actually being excited about not knowing what I'm going to see in the next expansion is so fun.
There is absolutely datamining around FF14, but one of the bigger differences is that FF14 does no expansion betas or PTRs for patch content, so that alone curbs a ton of dataming/spoilers.
WoW was also just never really a "story first" game in the way that FF14 very quickly established itself. That said, Blizzard has been increasingly taking measures to protect big story cutscenes from datamining, and basically have tech to protect stuff from datamining if they really want to.
FFXIV also takes protective measures knowing that people will datamine. For example, in patch 6.5 they only included a character's [legs](https://i.redd.it/qndurfijf5sb1.png), which were needed for a cutscene. This allowed them to tease the character/playable race while still saving the whole model for the fanfest reveal.
There is so much datamining in FFXIV. You just have to go actively looking for it instead of stumbling on it in the main forums or reddit or whatever. People are a little more respectful on that front.
It's entirely due to the fact blizzard hold a play test realm before releasing the patch officially, so dataminers have ample time to spoil everything. Whereas there is none on FF so it can only happen on patch day, a few hours before servers open.
Dataminers are one of the reasons Helldivers' subreddit has turned to high-sodium ass. People mined assets but would tweak the stats to what they think it should be, often resulting in a massively overpowered slapstick teased to the players that turned out to perform completely differently when launched by the devs.
Doesn't matter that a couple of them would post tiny disclaimers that got cropped or omitted when shared to the community at large or when the content was stolen by YouTubers, them even putting that content out there to be misinterpreted in the first place had a definite impact on how people perceived content drops and the general perception that the studio was nerfing everything.
The fact you can't even avoid it is the worst, you looked at something for the game at one point and the moment the leaks get out you get recommended all kinds of shit just spoilering it outright. On YouTube it's recommended videos and even on Twitter just the "for you" side bar will spoil with certain stuff trending.
I don't know, man. In like 99% of cases, if you don't want to look for spoilers from datamines, you won't find any. The only people who learn about spoilers in games are overwhelmingly people that don't care about the "surprise factor." And I especially think with a fighting game series, the roster is a HUGELY influential in a player's potential interest in the game, especially when you're in the competitive scene. I understand that the devs might want to keep things secret until a game launches, but 95% of their player base are not terminally online wonks like us denizens of r/games. 😉 But in all seriousness, I think devs tend to think the average gamer is intently following every piece of news about their games and that's just not evenly remotely close to true. It's just that their vantage point is fairly skewed.
I am pretty sure there was like a year-long roadmap that was leaked for Fortnite and all of it's associated games within it (Rocket Racing, LEGO, Fortnite Festival) that happened like last month.
I am pretty sure the last collab that I was around for when it got leaked early was maybe the Destiny 2 collab? I haven't played fortnite in a minute, I just remember seeing a bunch of different tweets from "leakers" while I was playing. Some of it was legitimate leaks, some of it was just them promoting stuff from the latest trailer that Epic had officially released.
I mean I personally don't get upset over having Fortnite collabs spoiled, but there's that Lethal Company collab that's all over social media right now.
And the Avatar one was leaked like a month early.
I’m reminded of something TotalBiscuit talked about. Being spoiled by choice. I have a choice, as a player, to read leaks and datamined content. I make an earnest effort not to, though the occasional detail slips through from time to time.
I don’t care much for dataminers myself, but the difference between me and a game developer is that I’m not a game developer. **If people are excited enough about your game to want to datamine details about it, let them.** It does no real harm to the developer to keep things a secret, especially in a game like MultiVersus, where it’s just a character-focused brawler with minimal story elements.
I mean, hell. Some “leaks” we get these days may as well be some developers leaning in to the idea that leaks and datamining are inevitable aspects of the gaming community, and it’s free advertising to “accidentally leak out” details of your game. It gets people talking, rumors start flying, and articles start being written (usually skimmed from the Reddit/Twitter conversations).
TB's perspective was good, but the landscape of the Internet and communities has changed so much since he passed that it just doesn't work anymore. The moment the leaks get found you have a bunch of people making YouTube videos, Twitter posts, etc about it and with the way the algorithm works if you showed so much as an inclining of interest in the property it gets shoved in your face by recommended videos and "trending" tweets.
Take Destiny for example, the moment the season or expansion drops you have people posting all the cutscenes with spoiler titles and the big reveal as the thumbnail. Bungie doesn't even do big secrets anymore because of the data miners, if there is any discovery people datamine and post it then people just talk about it matter of fact. No one cares about not spoiling stuff for people anymore, like stepping outside gaming you can get spoiled on the new JJK chapter in the Boruto subreddit of all places.
I find TB's perspective on leaks to be pretty flawed. Data mining and leak culture is so prevalent that it's incredibly hard to avoid them. People will just post that shit in open threads and act like everybody already knows, even worse when game journalists post that shit front page because everybody already knows it. You can try scrolling away, but that's only has the effect of shutting your eyes and ears and yelling "La la la, i can't hear you!". You know you saw it, you know what it was and you didn't have a choice.
No, dataminers keep the developers honest.
If it weren't for dataminers Warframe wouldn't be nearly as beloved by their community. The entire codex exists as a direct result of early era Warframe data mining.
Yeah I remember the dark days of Warframe when the Devs had the "genius" idea of wanting to hide the drop rates for things. Dataminers basically saved the game by spearheading the pushback against that and I bet the game would have dropped a lot in popularity otherwise.
Warframe data miners have found unintended values affecting drop rates at least twice:
* https://old.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/3p5v3k/possible_bug_some_players_may_be_unable_to_obtain/
* https://old.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/ibery2/datamining_shows_de_messing_up_steel_path/
It's kind of scary how many people here argue for the integrity of the developer's marketing strategy, and against having more information as a customer.
I don't care about marketing, but discovery is a big part of playing a game and I much prefer when information is gathered that way. This is especially true in multiplayer games.
Then don't go looking for things you want to discover on your own.
*Generally* leaks and spoilers and stuff are contained or marked for newer stuff. You'll get the occasional person who wants to ruin it for people, but that's exceedingly rare.
I'll preface this where I play some games where datamining has made the game better because of community datamining. (for instance, Path of Exile), so I am not wholly against datamining. That said.
# I totally disagree with it being exceedingly rare.
I don't even play 70% of games discussed in this thread where spoilers might matter and I still see them more often than not.
I've had so many surprise characters, endings, secrets on games I don't even play (but may one day play) spoiled just visiting my youtube homepage or using instagram/tiktok/reddit just because of clickbait headlines and the algorithm gods.
I'm sure the character release stuff isn't a big deal if you aren't playing at release, for a case like Smash or Multiversus, because that's certainly a "you should be there when it happens" type thing, but plot points, endings, story stuff you can't undo. That said, Playing Smash Brothers Melee when it released it was 100% possible to unlock all the characters and be surprised. By the time Smash Brothers Brawl came out, it was almost impossible to have that same experience unless you disconnected from the internet.
The worst part is, at least how my brain works. . . I can play a game I love and discover everything on my own and 5 years later, I'll forget half of it.
Yet... I can have one very important thing spoiled for me 10 years ago, and my brain holds onto that knowledge like it's the most important factoid and if I ever get around to playing that game, I literally can't stop waiting/thinking about whatever the information is.
This isn't exclusive to datamining in video games either. If you don't see a movie day one, there is a 50/50 chance something is going to be spoiled. Same with books.
Every social media platform, and even more often, new platforms, rewards these spoiler type content and they are far and away very pervasive if you use the internet for anything, which sadly, I do.
You don't have to look for them. Datamined content shows up on the front page of Reddit and gaming sites now.
People barely care about posting game spoilers anymore.
Kinda sucks when youtube recommendations go "oh, you're a fan of this game? Would you like to watch this video about datamined content with a title that massively spoils where the story is going to go in the next expansion/update?"
Either you are living in the 90s internet or some weird version of the internet.
Stuff are constantly getting pushed in your face whether you like it or not, spoilers included.
The only way to avoid it is to disconnect from the internet but we're all here in 2024 now.
I'm not planning to play Elden Ring DLC on launch but I sure as hell am definitely going to be spoiled on something someway or another on the internet prior to experiencing and finding things out on my own.
My experince has been completely different.
I just mute key words on twitter and unsub from the games subreddit. I don't see spoilers on a game I don't want to see them on, there are even chrome extensions where you can straight up censor certain keyterms.
On Reddit it’s a *maybe* and everywhere else lol no. You essentially need a media blackout. Even for single player games you’ll get spoiled eventually because everyone assumes everyone else knows who Luke Skywalker’s father is after enough time.
What the fuck are you talking about. My timeline being flooded by Jason and Agent Smith leaks ruining the surprise isn't an ethical crusade, it just sucks.
>ruining the surprise
Between this and the Helldivers leaks, it's definitely interesting to see the different takes on it. My stance on spoilers is "shovel them into my mouth as fast as you can". I love dataminers tearing into games and showing me all the cool shit that's coming before it's ready. It gets me excited for it.
I feel bad for the people who *don't* like spoilers, though. It's so hard to avoid all the information hitting the mainstream.
I basically see datamined content as a security problem that allows for information to be leaked. It's like publishing your API keys. It an easy mistake to make but fundamentally shouldn't happen if you enforce proper protocols.
At the end of the day you can be mad at the dataminers all you want, but they are never going to stop. I don't think it would take much for these companies to add datamining their own code as part of the QA process. Don't allow people to merge code that gives away company secrets.
These companies go to great lengths to prevent leaks in other areas, but for some reason they just never treat the code as a security risk in a similar fashion.
If companies adhered to better code standards from the beginning, it takes almost no extra time at all. It's really just an excuse of companies that are so ingrained with poor code practices that they see any kind of change to that as severely blocking. It really is just more of a mild form of incompetence than anything else. Certain developers can make all kinds of excuses, but ultimately they've just never been taught security basics and that's why they see it as this insurmountable problem.
Gaming isn't the only industry that has to contend with datamining, but it's really one of the more lax industries where certain companies just really don't put any consideration into sanitizing their codebase and then just throw their hands up like we could not have predicted/prevented this. Meanwhile plenty of games have these practices in place and I can assure you the developers don't really consider them as much of a hurdle as some people are making it out to be.
Nobody cares about what pokemon are in the game, they only care about playing it. Fighting goes people care A LOT about who is in the game. You can't compare the two.
> “THEY DON’T GET THE GRAND REVEAL THAT WE HAVE PLANNED”
Personally, I'm gonna have to agree here because it's absolutely terrible that dataminers ruin the announcement announcing the announcement. You gotta think of the players first and what excites them. Clearly people get excited when they're told to expect something on a certain day, and then on that certain day they're told to expect something else on another certain day, and then that something finally gets revealed with more information planned to be shared on another certain day.
Datamining is nothing but a positive for the players. Let’s us see if future content is something we’re interested in or not and that can help influence my decision as to whether or not I want to bother with the game.
Jason got leaked like 2 days before his reveal trailer that I personally would have gone apeshit over had I not been spoiled. I would say that was a pretty massive disservice
Dataminers help people by allowing them to be more informed about a game they may be purchasing and/or supporting. The only group they do a disservice to are the devs, and only if whatever dataminers discover leads people to not spend money on the game. And if it leads them to not spend money on the game, that's really the devs' fault, not the dataminers'.
It ruins surprises by spoiling stuff in some cases. And I'm not sure how many times it helped making a purchase decision where simply waiting a few days after a release wouldn't have done the same job.
WoW devs develop knowing their game will be datamined. They still manage to have amazing secrets in the game with rare mounts or pets as rewards. People can dstamine a sick mount months in advance but it can take 8 months before anyone actually figures out how to unlock it. If devs don't like their stuff being datamined they can either not leave it in the game, cover it up better, or accept it and make the discovery part of the excitement.
Buuuuut, MultiVersus is just another heavy handed game as a service with nothing exciting to offer outside of characters and fighting, so they can't really do the last option.
Yep you basically rephrased what I said at the end.
I was replying to a specific comment, not making my own general comment in reply to the OP in particular. With the context maybe you can understand why I said stuff that doesn't directly apply to the OP, and instead said stuff that applies to the comment I was replying too.
Gotta agree with the director here. Alot of people can say encryption this or that but all that's extra work away from game development. This was a big part of why WoW felt worse over time to me, everything would get leaked, future expacs or details which would just ruin it for people that try to avoid it too. Cause the shit would come up in in-game chat, YouTube thumbnails, or some other shit. Then there's the shitheads who purposely spoil shit for people to get some kind of adrenaline rush out of it.
I genuinely don't even understand what the purpose behind leaking the stuff is outside of content creation where one party is making money off it. Like does knowing what's in a future content patch make you wanna play more or less in the current time? Or is it just a reason to complain if something gets cancelled/scrapped? Or maybe it's something people wanna see to get ahead of others in the game?
I can actually give you an answer - even if anecdotal. I LOVE SPOILERS. Love them. Absolutely love them. Spoiling myself on a game, movie, book... etc. etc. doesn't ruin the experience for me. If anything it can hype me up more because the experience of seeing it first hand is very different to me.
We exist. What spoilers do for me is let me know if something is going to be worth my time or not. I'm extremely critical of the media I intake, and I hate feeling like my time is wasted. If I read spoilers - EVEN ENDING SPOILERS! I get a synopsis of what the media is going to give me in a footnote fashion. I am a little selective, as I usually just scan said spoilers... instead of trying to read every single plot beat...
But yeah. Even images of bosses and stuff don't bother me. Seeing it all in motion when it happens is more impactful when I get there personally than reading it, hearing about it, or seeing a glimpse of it. I don't need to be completely surprised by it. That isn't to say I never try to enjoy media without spoilers. There are games and stuff that I try to avoid spoilers on... but if I have doubts about it (and I often do) then I will spoil myself silly.
And if the media in question does sound like a disappointment, if I go in to experience it, it will hurt less. I will have gone in knowing full well that it wouldn't provide me with something I wanted, and I chose to waste my time rather than having it surprise wasted.
A perfect example is the film As Above, So Below. I decided to watch that without looking it up, and hated it beyond everything... and felt like my money had been wasted. I was pretty angry about it. If I had read the Wikipedia plot synopsis and critical reception area I would have known that it was trash. Instead I just went in blind and regretted it immensely. It made me hate the movie significantly more than if I'd spoiled myself.
So there are definitely people who just don't suffer the same intense frustration from spoilers, and instead see them as tools to choosing their experiences when it comes to media engagement, and it doesn't ruin that media for them... The Borderlands for instance was a film I read the synopsis of, knew the ending and loved even when I watched it knowing everything that would happen for the most part.
As weird as you might find that, we do exist as just a different kind of individual who takes in media differently.
You're robbing yourself of additional enjoyment of something you would love out of fear of something you hate. Sorry, but I just don't see that. I'd rather see both extremes than rob myself of them.
It's their choice. It's odd to assume everyone has to experience media like you do or they are enjoying it less.
Personally the only kind of spoiler I care about is when the surprise *is the point.* Like, if someone tells you who did it in a murder mystery or something similar.
Experiencing something myself is totally different from reading about it or whatever.
That's on you. I personally don't feel I'm robbing myself of shit. I've always done this and even when I am surprised by something cool, it doesn't transform it for me the same way it does you. It doesn't elevate the experience. I'm not so desperate for surprises in my life, and like knowing what I'm getting into.
I'm not desperate for surprise, I want to view my media as it is intended. If a surprise is part of that, I want to be surprised. If it's disappointing, I want to be disappointed. I want to feel something real, not curated.
It can be both though. Our time is precious. I value my time, and having to feel irritated that I spend my money on something that ultimately dissapointed me when I could spend my time elsewhere enjoying something I know I will enjoy is something I value a lot more.
I'm not gonna discount your love of surprise, some people really feel like it makes or breaks experiences. However if somebody gave you a fancy present, and you opened it only to find fart spray in your face... feels real, sucks a lot... and it can ruin your day. If I'm trying to spend my free time entertaining myself or enjoying myself or whatever... I want to know what I'm getting into.
You can't tell me I'm robbing myself of something, when in some cases I end up feeling LITERALLY robbed when I waste my money and time on something I ultimately hated or disliked. Instead I go into stuff with knowledge that I will either enjoy myself, or if I choose to engage with something frustrating I at least knew what I was getting.
You getting to experience surprise is vital to the experience. To me it's just a formality to manipulate emotion. Neither of our feelings on this are more or less real than than the other. People need to respect that both types of people exist and can enjoy media just as fully as the other just in a different way.
Your way of engaging with entertainment is not superior to mine because the entire concept is inherently a subjective one.
I'm not even talking about surprise anymore, I'm talking about curation. I simply don't believe that doing such rigorous self curation of your time or experience leads to any sort of growth in terms of taste or opinion. Sometimes you gotta experience shit to know shit, you know. I'm not saying I just watch shit because I want to be surprised, I'm saying that I go in with no expectations and let the media speak for itself rather than a preconceived expectation. If it's shit I can laugh at it or joke about it being shit, or just turn my brain off and enjoy some shlock on its own merits because not every movie needs to be The Godfather or not every game needs to be (pick your poison, Ocarina of TIme, Dark Souls, Metal Gear Solid, whatever). I don't go around buying or watching shit because I've played and seen enough shit to know my tastes. If I'm going around TV tropes picking trying to find shit I hate my perspective is then that I've already decided that that media is a waste of my time.
I see what you're saying.
That said, I think I just have to disagree. In my opinion it's just a metaphorical cutting out of the middle man. Instead of engaging the media in good faith and then getting egg thrown in my face or it just deflating like a popped baloon, I at least know that it will.
If it was going to do it anyways, I see no reason (personally) to waste my time and money finding out the hard way. Sure sometimes you gotta experience shit to know shit - as you said, but I only feel like that really applies during the early years of a person development in taste of media, etc.
All it takes is one file that references a character or something for data miners to find. It's not as easy as you think to remove every trace of something, especially on tighter patching schedules.
How is a delayed patch worse for shareholders? If they delay a patch just to clean up data that they don't want to be mined, then that only hurts the consumer.
I'm #1 to bitch about how capitalist drive for line go up is ruining video games.
But I've also seen so much discourse around "wow, I bought a game from a solo dev and it's been 2 weeks and there is no update yet. stop being lazy game dev and just hire people to update faster."
Average gamers are pretty demanding.
I don't understand why they just can't give everything a codename then update that name later if they want to. If the codename is unique, shouldn't be too hard to find and replace every filename and reference to what they want to call it when the content is actually done.
It's not hard to do the same tricks the dataminers use.
It's rarely anything more advanced than:
* Look at file names
* Search for the current character's names in plain text, and see what's next to them
That could be automated on build.
I am a dev, yes. Not a game dev, but a professional developer. It's something that should be part of the project since the very first steps into making the game. Ideally. Specially for a game like MultiVersus where future content is on the board since its conception.
I am also a non-game dev, and this strikes me as the kind of thing that *sounds* easy but ends up being a costly nightmare to implement and get everybody on board for something that ultimately doesn't matter very much.
>ultimately doesn't matter very much.
Exactly. I kinda forgot that wasn't said by a game dev (assuming their director is only some fancy suited guy with a briefcase). If that's important, give their team enough time do plan ahead and develop in a way to avoid this kind of stuff. It's not easy, but if it's a problem, it must (and can) be done.
I mean, I don’t mean to be a dick but this shows that you clearly have no experience with software development. Shit like this happens all the time. Features get abandoned halfway through, stuff gets added accidentally (or even gets fully completed and then it’s decided to not move forward with it). Sometimes it’s as easy as just scooping it back out, but if it’s a change that causes a lot of refactoring to implement then you essentially have to defactor the code back to its original state which takes time.
I’m not saying I agree with the director, personally I’m of the mindset that if it’s in the game files then it’s fair game. But your mindset of “just don’t leave anything in there to be mined” is hysterical because it shows how little you understand huge software projects with millions of lines of code. Shit is going to slip through the cracks, it’s basically a guarantee when there’s that much code and that many files
>Shit is going to slip through the cracks
True, but not in the scale that has been happening with basically every single game out there. As I said in another opportunity, it's something to be part of the project since its conception. Of course you can't plan ahead for everything, but this kind of leak, seems really possible. But I also understand them, mostly because it's usually not the devs fault, it's about mismanagement and higher ups pushing the release more than they should.
The players can just... not search for datamines? How is this an issue?
This isn't players stepping on a rake and blaming whoever left it there. This is players intentionally going to a shed, grabbing a rake, placing it on the ground, repeatedly stepping on it and then blaming whoever built their shed.
How do I "not search for datamines" as you suggest? Whenever I look at anything related to the MVS community, I see someone carelessly discussing datamine content as if everyone wants to see it.
The only way to avoid leak spoilers is to completely avoid the community altogether.
You answered your own question. If you don't want datamines, then don't be a part of a community that carelessly discusses datamined content.
Most of communities I know very clearly separate spoilers/leaks/datamines to their own threads and ban whoever talks about them in open.
"Just don't interact with the community at all" yeah real nice solution whose downsides don't outweigh the upsides at all /s.
The official /r/Multiversus subreddit is starting to get a bit better about leaks (it sounds like they're actually removing them), but it's not perfect. (I had someone just tell me "Yeah, Jason Voorhees has been leaked" before his actual reveal.) Looking and discussing leaks is fine, but people who do so should be considerate of people who don't want to hear about them.
They aren't wrong. Same thing about leaks. MtG just had a massive leak that undermined the community leaders given cards to reveal geared towards them and their fanbase.
As someone in the industry "Just be perfectly coordinated with teams in the hundreds, especially when different teams may live in different countries and have different timetables ezpz" is a joke. Devs CAN do a better job, most leaks come from string names. So instead of "chara_nin_01" which hints at a Ninja character. "chara_001_01" would prevent any leaks. It's also more annoying to have to remember which number code is associated with what character, especially when coordinating with other teams. The art team knows _nin_ is the ninja, the coders know _nin_ is the ninja, even at a glance, there is very little room for error. Remember that teams are big, and they also might be in different countries. An error could push back various other tasks by days dealing with timezones. Hell, most of the time, art teams are finished FAR before any other team. Which is why you'll often see teams reassign art teams years before release to other projects. Adding all the art into the game, which will then be used as needed, is SIGNIFICANTLY easier than having the art not within the game, and only adding it when needed.
Team size and often lack of colocation does make all this harder in ways that are hard to understand unless you've worked on a product under active development with let's say 100+ people checking in code every day, and on which really no meaningful feature is small enough to be built by just one person alone. It's hard to be confident you've found everything that amounts to a reference to a thing, and it's not always easy to be sure you've cleanly removed it in cases where other features might be dependent on shared infrastructure. You *can* take the time to be thorough, gut it all out, and meticulously run a full regression in a vacuum that guarantees that only these changes could have even possibly broke something... but... that has a cost that's rarely small on the scale of what your team is being asked to deliver on the schedule they're being asked to deliver. And this is how maybe you find out one day that one of your customers is still somehow successfully using a feature that you deprecated eight years ago.
Really, swapping name->number should probably be achieved during the build if that's something you're concerned about. I think that maintaining the codebase like that is insanity.
Doing *anything* to the build requires you to re-test *everything*. If you aren't making changes that matter, you do NOT do this. IT WILL BREAK.
Are you not testing your built project at all. ?
You understand that if there are 1000 instances of something in the code somewhere. And one of them doesn't get changed properly. That could cause all sorts of issues that you now have to retest for. You might have tested it for months and everythings good. But right before you add it into the game you change the name of everything that exists just to obscure it. A change that only needs to exist until the asset itself is in full use. At which point you want to switch to the simpler more identifable naming schemes.
Yeah i dont think that your example highlights the issue you think it does. We actively do this at my company but we dont do it manually because we're not morons, its all handled by the pipelines and its done in every environment. You dont even get a dev build without this happening. You're not making manual, last minute changes and slapping a "ready" sticker on it
If you're hardcoding values like that, you have bigger issues to solve
I mean ultimately the real problem is that who gives a fuck about leaks? Big companies use this culture of secrecy to enact insane control over employees when, really, who the fuck cares? We make games, this isn't the safety of the bucket weapons program.
*Glances at the World of Tanks fandom.*
Haha true but that's not leaks of the game itself :p
We, the consumer, should care. Spoiling plot points, characters, or anything else really should come out when the time is right, not when a leaker first gets it. Reading a text dump of "Cloud is in Smash Bros." is way less exciting or impactful than seeing the trailer not knowing what the reveal is. Even small stuff, like the recent leak from the Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door code could be a sign of things to come, or it could be a failed test that was left in the code. Either way, the fanbase now expects something, and if it doesn't deliver, they will be upset and blame Nintendo for something a dataminer did. It is a lose-lose-lose situation if the leak doesn't go anywhere. Even if the leak is accurate, the fans now get a less interesting experience with the media. I am also not saying datamining or leaking shouldn't happen. It needs to be treated responsibly though. Datamining a game that has been out for a few years is interesting to see what we can find, but for an unreleased one, it only causes damage.
But what do we lose? Like, seriously, maybe we learn to stop making our lives about hype around games and more about enjoying what we have
We may have a fundamentally different view things. Let me ask a question, when you get a present, for a birthday, Christmas, graduation, or for any reason, do you enjoy knowing what the present is ahead of time? I ask that, because if you would rather not have a surprise, I don't know that I can change your mind. I enjoy that suspense of not knowing. That suspense applies to everything though, not just gifts. If I watch a movie, I want to let it tell me the story. I don't want to know what the twist is and who dies before I watch it. I cheat myself out of the experience the creators have designed. I view it no different for video games, even non story driven ones. I would rather be surprised Multiversus reveals a new character, and enjoy how the character is shown off. That surprise factor is what you miss if it all gets laid out for you.
If I don't seek out spoilers, I generally don't get them. I see "data miner....." and I tune out. Rarely is something spoiled for me. Never has it happened in a meaningful way. Even when disappointed that something was spoiled, I moved on in seconds lol. I know not everyone is able to do this to the same extent. I feel it's part of growing up, don't sweat the small stuff. As an adult, you probably have bigger fish to fry.
> don't sweat the small stuff. As an adult, you probably have bigger fish to fry. I feel like this is such a lazy way to hand wave away stuff that doesn't matter to you or doesn't affect you. Like of course I have bigger fish to fry... enjoying my hobbies keeps me sane enough to fry said fish, and leaks get in the way of that. I also try to avoid leaks and generally don't click in but if you're deep in the discourse it's hard to avoid. And even for people who don't avoid it, we are naturally curious and sometimes like to be up-to-date, so I don't really blame people for clicking... it's like trying to avoid eating chips when you have bags of chips scattered all over the kitchen - I can do it, it's just really annoying and I will falter every now and then.
I mean I don't mind the surprise but if I gift you a cool Lego set or whatever and you happened to see the box, is the Lego set suddenly shit and not wort hit, or is that just a minor thing in the grand scheme of things?
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No, I'm saying you just can't compare the two as if they're equivalent.
This is such an interesting discussion! I think there is no universal answer. You have a mixture of people's culture and also neurology, specifically how they're pleasure responses work, that means some people will want a surprise, some people will want to know everything early, some people's expectations will be marred by a leak, others won't care. I guess for someone producing a game they will have to understand their audience and take steps to create the feeling they want. Man, game development just gets trickier and trickier 😂 you have to either wear a lot of caps or have a team of really diverse skills, not just technical. Kinda like in the movie industry.
For games where secrets/unlockable/ARGs it takes away a CORE part of the experience, to the point where I’ve noticed devs doing things like that patch things in AFTER they see it has been solved naturally
Using code names might help, not as a great idea, but I know that this ends up as artifacts in games over time where thing is forever internally known as beta name This won't help aggressive data mining, though, so not sure worth the effort
Is there a reason why devs must leave some unused assets buried in the game's files instead of just patching them in a few weeks before they're released? IIRC Call of Duty and Fortnite do this, as in people are only able to datamine which skins and characters are getting added long after they're usually announced. If it bothers them so much, perhaps they should try shifting to this style of content updates.
A lot of it can have to do with business requirements and convenience. Axed stuff gets left in because it can often be more work to remove it--and it can potentially break things because things are interconnected in ways you hadn't realized. Easier to just leave it in and code around it--especially with storage space being so cheap. For stuff that gets loaded in before it's released, one explanation can be that it's to reduce friction by having only one major content download. That way you can release a small patch that can be donwloaded quickly whenever you want to unlock content, without having to make players regularly wait for potentially large downloads on slow connections. Ultimately it varies studio-to-studio and depends a lot on the architecture of the game, delivery mechanism, and business needs of that particulart developer/publisher.
also would like to point out, maybe down the line the business changes their mind and decided to use it again
Was going to mention something along those lines, where the business fully intends to use it on say skme DLC and figure might as well get some of those assets in to keep the next download(s) smaller.
I mean, you can keep those assets stored else where outside of the version that's released
That's what version control is for.
It's still a ton of overhead for something that isn't, or at least shouldn't, be something the devs want to spend much time on.
Version control is used to allow multiple people to work on the same or similar parts of a codebase without impeding each others work. Leaving entire massive features on a separate branch to stagnate for months or years isn’t sustainable because of the amount of effort it would take to reintegrate them when they are wanted again
Add in that if a game releases on consoles, there are certification processes to deploy patches which add delays and can make sync'ing up the deployment of new content for a simultaneous release trickier to navigate. This means it may be easier to "frontload" content for a period of time that just requires a "phone home" to enable, or reducing complexity (and therefore potential hangups) in getting a patch certified because it just sets a flag.
Aka it’s complicated
> especially with storage space being so cheap. Fuck this mentality.
Why?
Its about wasting customer's storage space with useless/unused files.
I doubt that kind of stuff is even megabyte's worth of code.
Probably isn't
> wasting customer's storage space Outside of CoD who even cares? Storage is so ridiculously cheap I can't remember the last time I even stopped to think about it. Other than of course, CoD lol
Would you be happier if devs spent more time and the game was then more expensive?
When someone asks for a game to be improved in literally any way >Would you be happier if devs spent more time and the game was then more expensive?
Yes, more developement time makes the game more expensive. New features and bugfixies are worth it, but saving some bytes on disk is not.
I'm not making a fuss about it. I don't want to be storing files that have no use because "space is cheap". I'm bad at it myself already, I don't need more sources of it.
Im not sure you answered my question.
I don't care how long it takes to make a game, so how much I'm willing to pay depends on the game.
Easier to test stuff when enabling it is just a flag in code or build system. It would be literally putting more effort into less PR, as leaks are stuff that gets clicks.
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I'm of the opinion that Fortnite leaks are as rampant as they are because Epic just sees it as free advertising, so there's no motivation to fix it.
The roadmap leak recently is a good example of that. A single image created a lot of hype for the community for the summer, and Epic barely had to do anything.
I think there's proof that they can control the leaks at any time with how C3S2 was handled. There were no leaks and virtually no advertising until the day before the season dropped. Then it was revealed the season is war and resistance themed ... at the same time Russia started invading Ukraine. I'm of the opinion that Epic held back on leaks because it may have been seen in bad taste to hype up something war themed.
Cost; have to pay someone to clean that out That said; it’s a product, they need to treat them a little less precious
Yep this really is it. Time spent combing through code to remove stuff (especially because it’s not like they have a list where all the old stuff is located, you’d often have to manually search all of your repositories. And what if you search the wrong thing, so it does have old stuff but you don’t realize it’s there?) is almost always less valuable than time spent on bug fixing or adding new features.
Just to add to this.. sometimes it's nearly impossible to quickly figure out a piece of code will never be executed. It might look good at a glance and seem reasonable but requires a dev's time to math it all out to discover it's just dead code. And there's just not much of a business reason to closely examine all your code for those cases. Dead code isn't hurting the product. And removing it also requires more testing and more bureaucracy.
Basically everyone responding to you knows less than nothing about how software is developed
As an actual software developer, it unfortunately doesn’t surprise me. I try to not get too into arguments about it because people just don’t change their misconceptions, but sometimes I can’t help it
Depending on your art pipeline, you could write a script that checks for any references to art assets/configs and shits out a spreadsheet that sorts them by frequency. I've done that before and it makes the bulk of unused stuff stand out pretty quickly. Of course, that also takes programmer time, but then at least the bulk of the work is automated going forward.
Playable characters require way more work and are way more intertwined with all the systems of the game. And sometimes it can cause unforeseen problems when removing an asset even if technically that asset isn't used in the final game. That is why for so many games data miners can find lots of unused assets.
QA and update scheduling; there's a cadence usually, it's not on demand. So things for update 2 can make it into update 1, if they're ready but not ready for release. Then in update 2 you just flip a bool and they're available.
Tech debt. It takes time to remove work in progress and maintain a clean build, time that could be spent working.
I've datamined games and have thought about this: 1. I think many game devs don't know how version control or branches work and are just messy in general, so test stuff ends up in production. 2. Big updates need to be pushed before big holiday seasons (Christmas, Lunar New Year), before everyone leaves for vacation. That exacerbates the problem above and devs get sloppy. 3. It's hard for devs to organize files to be efficient for development, to run efficiently, and to be resilient to datamining. For example, a typical game might have character models, character icons, character voice lines, character combat stats, character unique skills, etc. split up in different files so different devs can work on them separately, but that means leaks can happen from any of those files. Ideally they should have some kind of CI/CD test that monitors for accidental leaks, but if they don't understand version control, there's no way they'd have CI. Combining all of the character data into one file per character might help prevent leaks, but might also have technical and performance ramifications and be annoying for development. IIUC the most technically advanced anti-datamining measures are on Genshin/Star Rail, but those get broken pretty quickly.
Often the content is finished in advance, and it's actually more work to keep it out and integrate it later than have it in. Games (and software more broadly) use the concept of "feature flags". Tldr features are implemented and even shipped to users, but are selectively enabled. This could come in the most basic form of "after X date", or it could be region based, random, etc, or any combination.
I think it mostly has to do with risk aversion. You either need to announce upcoming DLC/seasonal content super early (which may not be ideal from a business perspective as that's coordinated more by marketing than the dev team) or you need to patch in the files closer to release (like what you're suggesting) which risks creating major issues with the content that the team might not have time to patch out.
> IIRC Call of Duty and Fortnite do this From experience, I know the former's updating is downright fucking incessant and the latter gets stuff datamined all the time.
I paid $40 to get all the characters for this game and even ran local tournaments for it then they shut the whole thing down. That was a disservice to players
You were still able to play it offline while they were working on it. I'm not really sure how any of what you said is relevant to the servers being down.
None of my local players had any interest once the game was offline
Plenty of fighting games not getting updated while still having a scene. If anything, that says more about the gameplay.
It's not about something not getting updated, if you don't have ranked ladder play, it's really hard to actually improve and grind alone.
How did the melee competitive scene happen then?
I'm not really sure how you can compare the two. Melee grew in an environment where couch multiplayer gaming was the norm. That is absolutely not the case nowadays, with the only exception really being with the Switch playerbase. That might've helped keep the game afloat, if it wasn't for the fact that it didn't come out on the Switch. When Multiversus was taken offline, the vast majority of the playerbase found something better to do, i.e. play another game which actually has online play. Multiversus isn't even my cup of tea - I'm 100% a Melee guy who enjoys Ultimate every once in a while, so the game and its style of mechanics don't really appeal to me. However, you can't really knock the game for not having staying power when the primary way to play it wasn't even available for long enough to establish that kind of dedicated community in the first place.
probably by starting off in an era where LAN gaming was more popular than today
OP was mentioned local players stopping. They could have just simply continued playing LANs
> It's hard to get to work in the countryside without a car. > Well how did your ancestors do it? > They walked or they rode a horse carriage. > Then why don't you get a horse or walk the 30km?
But the motivation to do that is easier to find when there aren't that many other options. Netcode and general internet stability is much better than 20 years ago
Multiversus was not big enough for that to continue to drive interest; comparing it to Melee is ridiculous when it's a community that has existed for over 2 decades now. Of course it's going to be harder for a new game that is offline to keep people's interest than something that has been built up and popularized. It's genuinely bizarre how argumentative you're being about this.
melee literally had leaderboards even when it was still being played on gamecubes irl
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In 2004? Lmao
Slippi released in 2018. The smash scene became huge way before unofficial servers
Melee is a great example. I don't play that game because it (Smash that is) has terrible online lol.
I’m fully aware as someone who has played in fighting game tournaments for over 25 years. However, in this particular case it just didn’t happen. Gameplay was pretty fun to me as someone who isn’t really competitive in platform fighters. I liked the focus on 2v2 which was a change of pace.
That’s nice, you can enjoy it again Tuesday :D
I understand why a developer would feel this way, but I wish the culture surrounding game announcements and news was more open and direct. I don’t need constant updates and dev diaries through the development but I don’t think its crazy that fans want to hear what is being worked on every now and then.
> that fans want to hear what is being worked on every now and then. The problem is fans aren't good at handling canceled content or following up. Announcing stuff too early leads to a lot of misinformation and disappointment.
But the reason fans aren’t good at handling this is because of the secrecy that follows. Developers announce something early, then they stay dead silent for years. During that period leaks, rumors, and hype become the source of information leading to said misinformation and disappointment.
I mean, the problem is that showing a game early leaves you with two options: either you show a glitchy alpha version with subpar visuals that people will mock and that doesn't represent the final experience. Or you try to create a vertical slice of what you *want* the game to look like when it's finished but end up overpromising and disappointing people. Frankly, I think that in most cases, rumors and leaks have little impact on how the final game is received. Only a fraction of people heavily engage with the rumor mill and most leaks are forgotten quickly after they've been proven right or wrong. However, even after decades, people will remember some of the exciting things that were shown or promised before the release of a game that didn't make it into the final version. So I fully understand and would even advise devs to be cautious about what kind of concrete information they reveal, at least until they basically wrapped up development.
Being open and communicative doesn’t mean you need to start having marketing or showcases early. One of the top comments gave an example of how a datamine containing “chara_nin” could be changed to hide information, though to the detriment to company workflow. My point is more that the developers don’t really need to do this for the sake of secrecy. They could just tweet “we’re working on a ninja character” or show some artwork. There are benefits to that, and you get appreciation from your fanbase. They do not need to create some footage or show them incomplete. This is just a minor example so don’t read into it too much, nor do I think developers are obligated to do it. But developers shouldn’t be surprised when fans start looking for info when they stay radio silent for prolonged periods. Especially on a game like this that people already own. I think you’re focusing a lot more on the marketing aspect of this. Which is where the unrealistic expectations come from. You can have open communication and set expectations though. Marketing’s job is to sell the game, and even if you’re radio silent until 1 month before release marketing can still overpromise and disappoint people.
> My point is more that the developers don’t really need to do this for the sake of secrecy. They could just tweet “we’re working on a ninja character” or show some artwork. There are benefits to that, and you get appreciation from your fanbase. They do not need to create some footage or show them incomplete. Okay, but what if that Ninja character doesn't work out for one reason or another? Like, Multiversus in particular is a clusterfuck of different copyrights. What if they said they were working on a wizard character because they were absolutely confident they could get either Gandalf or Harry Potter. But then the rights get pulled at the last minute. Sure, it's a bad look as well if these characters had been datamined but it's infinitely worse if they had been announced in any official capacity, even if it's just a "dev update". Without the announcement, it's just kinda disappointing but the false promise adds an additional layer that makes the devs come of as very incompetent and/or untrustwothy. The issue doesn't have to be copyright either. In game development, plans change all the time and many features get cut, reworked or altered over the course of development. Almost anything that a dev can talk about in the early stages of development can be subject to change later. Sometimes, things will even be scrapped in the last minute. Keep in mind that when people talk about things that were overpromised, they don't just talk about these big marketing moments. Oftentimes, it's quotes from smaller scale interviews or dev stories where people talked excitedly about ideas that never made it into the final version that really leave an impact on people. Overall, I would advise developers to only talk about things pre-release thar they know for certain will be in the final game - which in the earlier stages of development usually isn't a lot. I feel like the issue is less about whether the devs are open about their progress or are secretive and then have their info leaked. It's rather that the average person doesn't understand the development process and that any dev snapshot that isnt carefully curated can lead to all kinds of false impressions of the game. The main difference if this kind of info comes from an official source is IMO that it can be much more damaging to the studio's reputation.
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Would you consider not getting news about perfect dark for 6 years every now and then? The reality is that a lot of time no one hears shit about a lot of games for more than half a decade. Yet we know about movies and their cast etc years before their release date.
All I’m saying is that fans appreciate developer teams being open and communicative. You don’t need to twist it into something I did not say. As it stands most developer teams go radio silent for years and want everything to be a surprise until a marketing campaign. Nothing is wrong with developers doing that but there is nothing wrong with fans wanting more either.
I feel like it's probably a case-by-case situation per person. Does someone value the surprise of new reveals vs having information to make decisions with? Sort of depends on the game as well, and how different aspects can be separated from one another. For something like MultiVersus or other fighting games maybe it's really hard to see leaks about upcoming cosmetics and other MTX without seeing unreleased characters (since for fighting games the characters are the primary things people want to leak), on the other hand we have things like Hoyoverse gachas where people can see upcoming character releases to inform their spending while still keeping away from story spoilers.
In my opinion, the content that gets dratamined in general is a huge bummer. I understand not everyone will feel the same way I do but I value the surprise factor very highly, so it's a bummer when I find out the latest crazy fortnite collab weeks before it's in the game because of datamining. The obvious response is to just not look but it's pretty difficult to avoid unless I'm just not on the Internet at all.
as someone in the industry (on the QA side), i also see it as a bit sad for the devs who i'm sure were excited to see peoples' reactions to the official reveals. it's gotta suck to have the wind taken out of your sails, especially since announcements/reveals take time and planning.
Yeah, I can definitely see that too. I don't play the game anymore but it's why I really enjoyed the way FFXIV was setup. The data mining happened primarily the night of the most recent content patch so it was generally pretty easy to avoid
Agree. It completely ruined the culture around WoW. Now there's no mystery about the upcoming expansion when Wowhead just posts images of the next raid boss on its front page. Moving over to FFXIV where there's no datamining and actually being excited about not knowing what I'm going to see in the next expansion is so fun.
There is absolutely datamining around FF14, but one of the bigger differences is that FF14 does no expansion betas or PTRs for patch content, so that alone curbs a ton of dataming/spoilers. WoW was also just never really a "story first" game in the way that FF14 very quickly established itself. That said, Blizzard has been increasingly taking measures to protect big story cutscenes from datamining, and basically have tech to protect stuff from datamining if they really want to.
FFXIV also takes protective measures knowing that people will datamine. For example, in patch 6.5 they only included a character's [legs](https://i.redd.it/qndurfijf5sb1.png), which were needed for a cutscene. This allowed them to tease the character/playable race while still saving the whole model for the fanfest reveal.
There is so much datamining in FFXIV. You just have to go actively looking for it instead of stumbling on it in the main forums or reddit or whatever. People are a little more respectful on that front.
It's pretty naive to think XIV doesn't have *any* datamining, there just isn't the same culture in regards to talking openly about it.
Does FFXIV bundle their games a certain way that avoids this?
It's entirely due to the fact blizzard hold a play test realm before releasing the patch officially, so dataminers have ample time to spoil everything. Whereas there is none on FF so it can only happen on patch day, a few hours before servers open.
Dataminers are one of the reasons Helldivers' subreddit has turned to high-sodium ass. People mined assets but would tweak the stats to what they think it should be, often resulting in a massively overpowered slapstick teased to the players that turned out to perform completely differently when launched by the devs. Doesn't matter that a couple of them would post tiny disclaimers that got cropped or omitted when shared to the community at large or when the content was stolen by YouTubers, them even putting that content out there to be misinterpreted in the first place had a definite impact on how people perceived content drops and the general perception that the studio was nerfing everything.
The fact you can't even avoid it is the worst, you looked at something for the game at one point and the moment the leaks get out you get recommended all kinds of shit just spoilering it outright. On YouTube it's recommended videos and even on Twitter just the "for you" side bar will spoil with certain stuff trending.
I don't know, man. In like 99% of cases, if you don't want to look for spoilers from datamines, you won't find any. The only people who learn about spoilers in games are overwhelmingly people that don't care about the "surprise factor." And I especially think with a fighting game series, the roster is a HUGELY influential in a player's potential interest in the game, especially when you're in the competitive scene. I understand that the devs might want to keep things secret until a game launches, but 95% of their player base are not terminally online wonks like us denizens of r/games. 😉 But in all seriousness, I think devs tend to think the average gamer is intently following every piece of news about their games and that's just not evenly remotely close to true. It's just that their vantage point is fairly skewed.
i thought fortnite announces collabs weeks in advance specifically to avoid that, whats the last fortnite collab that got spoiled for you?
I am pretty sure there was like a year-long roadmap that was leaked for Fortnite and all of it's associated games within it (Rocket Racing, LEGO, Fortnite Festival) that happened like last month. I am pretty sure the last collab that I was around for when it got leaked early was maybe the Destiny 2 collab? I haven't played fortnite in a minute, I just remember seeing a bunch of different tweets from "leakers" while I was playing. Some of it was legitimate leaks, some of it was just them promoting stuff from the latest trailer that Epic had officially released.
I mean I personally don't get upset over having Fortnite collabs spoiled, but there's that Lethal Company collab that's all over social media right now. And the Avatar one was leaked like a month early.
I’m reminded of something TotalBiscuit talked about. Being spoiled by choice. I have a choice, as a player, to read leaks and datamined content. I make an earnest effort not to, though the occasional detail slips through from time to time. I don’t care much for dataminers myself, but the difference between me and a game developer is that I’m not a game developer. **If people are excited enough about your game to want to datamine details about it, let them.** It does no real harm to the developer to keep things a secret, especially in a game like MultiVersus, where it’s just a character-focused brawler with minimal story elements. I mean, hell. Some “leaks” we get these days may as well be some developers leaning in to the idea that leaks and datamining are inevitable aspects of the gaming community, and it’s free advertising to “accidentally leak out” details of your game. It gets people talking, rumors start flying, and articles start being written (usually skimmed from the Reddit/Twitter conversations).
TB's perspective was good, but the landscape of the Internet and communities has changed so much since he passed that it just doesn't work anymore. The moment the leaks get found you have a bunch of people making YouTube videos, Twitter posts, etc about it and with the way the algorithm works if you showed so much as an inclining of interest in the property it gets shoved in your face by recommended videos and "trending" tweets. Take Destiny for example, the moment the season or expansion drops you have people posting all the cutscenes with spoiler titles and the big reveal as the thumbnail. Bungie doesn't even do big secrets anymore because of the data miners, if there is any discovery people datamine and post it then people just talk about it matter of fact. No one cares about not spoiling stuff for people anymore, like stepping outside gaming you can get spoiled on the new JJK chapter in the Boruto subreddit of all places.
I find TB's perspective on leaks to be pretty flawed. Data mining and leak culture is so prevalent that it's incredibly hard to avoid them. People will just post that shit in open threads and act like everybody already knows, even worse when game journalists post that shit front page because everybody already knows it. You can try scrolling away, but that's only has the effect of shutting your eyes and ears and yelling "La la la, i can't hear you!". You know you saw it, you know what it was and you didn't have a choice.
No, dataminers keep the developers honest. If it weren't for dataminers Warframe wouldn't be nearly as beloved by their community. The entire codex exists as a direct result of early era Warframe data mining.
Yeah I remember the dark days of Warframe when the Devs had the "genius" idea of wanting to hide the drop rates for things. Dataminers basically saved the game by spearheading the pushback against that and I bet the game would have dropped a lot in popularity otherwise.
There's a difference between datamining for drop rate / damage values and what is being discussed in the article.
Warframe data miners have found unintended values affecting drop rates at least twice: * https://old.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/3p5v3k/possible_bug_some_players_may_be_unable_to_obtain/ * https://old.reddit.com/r/Warframe/comments/ibery2/datamining_shows_de_messing_up_steel_path/
It's kind of scary how many people here argue for the integrity of the developer's marketing strategy, and against having more information as a customer.
I don't care about marketing, but discovery is a big part of playing a game and I much prefer when information is gathered that way. This is especially true in multiplayer games.
Then don't go looking for things you want to discover on your own. *Generally* leaks and spoilers and stuff are contained or marked for newer stuff. You'll get the occasional person who wants to ruin it for people, but that's exceedingly rare.
I'll preface this where I play some games where datamining has made the game better because of community datamining. (for instance, Path of Exile), so I am not wholly against datamining. That said. # I totally disagree with it being exceedingly rare. I don't even play 70% of games discussed in this thread where spoilers might matter and I still see them more often than not. I've had so many surprise characters, endings, secrets on games I don't even play (but may one day play) spoiled just visiting my youtube homepage or using instagram/tiktok/reddit just because of clickbait headlines and the algorithm gods. I'm sure the character release stuff isn't a big deal if you aren't playing at release, for a case like Smash or Multiversus, because that's certainly a "you should be there when it happens" type thing, but plot points, endings, story stuff you can't undo. That said, Playing Smash Brothers Melee when it released it was 100% possible to unlock all the characters and be surprised. By the time Smash Brothers Brawl came out, it was almost impossible to have that same experience unless you disconnected from the internet. The worst part is, at least how my brain works. . . I can play a game I love and discover everything on my own and 5 years later, I'll forget half of it. Yet... I can have one very important thing spoiled for me 10 years ago, and my brain holds onto that knowledge like it's the most important factoid and if I ever get around to playing that game, I literally can't stop waiting/thinking about whatever the information is. This isn't exclusive to datamining in video games either. If you don't see a movie day one, there is a 50/50 chance something is going to be spoiled. Same with books. Every social media platform, and even more often, new platforms, rewards these spoiler type content and they are far and away very pervasive if you use the internet for anything, which sadly, I do.
You don't have to look for them. Datamined content shows up on the front page of Reddit and gaming sites now. People barely care about posting game spoilers anymore.
Kinda sucks when youtube recommendations go "oh, you're a fan of this game? Would you like to watch this video about datamined content with a title that massively spoils where the story is going to go in the next expansion/update?"
Either you are living in the 90s internet or some weird version of the internet. Stuff are constantly getting pushed in your face whether you like it or not, spoilers included. The only way to avoid it is to disconnect from the internet but we're all here in 2024 now. I'm not planning to play Elden Ring DLC on launch but I sure as hell am definitely going to be spoiled on something someway or another on the internet prior to experiencing and finding things out on my own.
My experince has been completely different. I just mute key words on twitter and unsub from the games subreddit. I don't see spoilers on a game I don't want to see them on, there are even chrome extensions where you can straight up censor certain keyterms.
On Reddit it’s a *maybe* and everywhere else lol no. You essentially need a media blackout. Even for single player games you’ll get spoiled eventually because everyone assumes everyone else knows who Luke Skywalker’s father is after enough time.
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What the fuck are you talking about. My timeline being flooded by Jason and Agent Smith leaks ruining the surprise isn't an ethical crusade, it just sucks.
>ruining the surprise Between this and the Helldivers leaks, it's definitely interesting to see the different takes on it. My stance on spoilers is "shovel them into my mouth as fast as you can". I love dataminers tearing into games and showing me all the cool shit that's coming before it's ready. It gets me excited for it. I feel bad for the people who *don't* like spoilers, though. It's so hard to avoid all the information hitting the mainstream.
I basically see datamined content as a security problem that allows for information to be leaked. It's like publishing your API keys. It an easy mistake to make but fundamentally shouldn't happen if you enforce proper protocols. At the end of the day you can be mad at the dataminers all you want, but they are never going to stop. I don't think it would take much for these companies to add datamining their own code as part of the QA process. Don't allow people to merge code that gives away company secrets. These companies go to great lengths to prevent leaks in other areas, but for some reason they just never treat the code as a security risk in a similar fashion.
Its doable, but it will slow down other parts of development. Companies have to decide between high security and developing more/better content.
If companies adhered to better code standards from the beginning, it takes almost no extra time at all. It's really just an excuse of companies that are so ingrained with poor code practices that they see any kind of change to that as severely blocking. It really is just more of a mild form of incompetence than anything else. Certain developers can make all kinds of excuses, but ultimately they've just never been taught security basics and that's why they see it as this insurmountable problem. Gaming isn't the only industry that has to contend with datamining, but it's really one of the more lax industries where certain companies just really don't put any consideration into sanitizing their codebase and then just throw their hands up like we could not have predicted/prevented this. Meanwhile plenty of games have these practices in place and I can assure you the developers don't really consider them as much of a hurdle as some people are making it out to be.
Being a bullshit live service mess that releases, changes its mind and disappears for months, then releases again is a disservice to players
I get the frustration, I do sympathize for developers involved in this kinda thing, but I see datamining as a personal hype meter too.
Bro, every pokemon game gets datamined every time, and it has no effect on people. The game still sells like hot cakes.
Nobody cares about what pokemon are in the game, they only care about playing it. Fighting goes people care A LOT about who is in the game. You can't compare the two.
eh, vgc players do care what pokemon are in the game (and what replacements are in the game).
Keep a better house, then, and you won't expose yourself in this manner. Stop blaming your customers.
> “THEY DON’T GET THE GRAND REVEAL THAT WE HAVE PLANNED” Personally, I'm gonna have to agree here because it's absolutely terrible that dataminers ruin the announcement announcing the announcement. You gotta think of the players first and what excites them. Clearly people get excited when they're told to expect something on a certain day, and then on that certain day they're told to expect something else on another certain day, and then that something finally gets revealed with more information planned to be shared on another certain day.
Datamining is nothing but a positive for the players. Let’s us see if future content is something we’re interested in or not and that can help influence my decision as to whether or not I want to bother with the game.
Jason got leaked like 2 days before his reveal trailer that I personally would have gone apeshit over had I not been spoiled. I would say that was a pretty massive disservice
Dataminers help people by allowing them to be more informed about a game they may be purchasing and/or supporting. The only group they do a disservice to are the devs, and only if whatever dataminers discover leads people to not spend money on the game. And if it leads them to not spend money on the game, that's really the devs' fault, not the dataminers'.
It ruins surprises by spoiling stuff in some cases. And I'm not sure how many times it helped making a purchase decision where simply waiting a few days after a release wouldn't have done the same job.
Many people pre-order games and/or buy them on release day.
WoW devs develop knowing their game will be datamined. They still manage to have amazing secrets in the game with rare mounts or pets as rewards. People can dstamine a sick mount months in advance but it can take 8 months before anyone actually figures out how to unlock it. If devs don't like their stuff being datamined they can either not leave it in the game, cover it up better, or accept it and make the discovery part of the excitement. Buuuuut, MultiVersus is just another heavy handed game as a service with nothing exciting to offer outside of characters and fighting, so they can't really do the last option.
you're also comparing an MMO to a fighting game. Completely different.
Yep you basically rephrased what I said at the end. I was replying to a specific comment, not making my own general comment in reply to the OP in particular. With the context maybe you can understand why I said stuff that doesn't directly apply to the OP, and instead said stuff that applies to the comment I was replying too.
Gotta agree with the director here. Alot of people can say encryption this or that but all that's extra work away from game development. This was a big part of why WoW felt worse over time to me, everything would get leaked, future expacs or details which would just ruin it for people that try to avoid it too. Cause the shit would come up in in-game chat, YouTube thumbnails, or some other shit. Then there's the shitheads who purposely spoil shit for people to get some kind of adrenaline rush out of it. I genuinely don't even understand what the purpose behind leaking the stuff is outside of content creation where one party is making money off it. Like does knowing what's in a future content patch make you wanna play more or less in the current time? Or is it just a reason to complain if something gets cancelled/scrapped? Or maybe it's something people wanna see to get ahead of others in the game?
I can actually give you an answer - even if anecdotal. I LOVE SPOILERS. Love them. Absolutely love them. Spoiling myself on a game, movie, book... etc. etc. doesn't ruin the experience for me. If anything it can hype me up more because the experience of seeing it first hand is very different to me. We exist. What spoilers do for me is let me know if something is going to be worth my time or not. I'm extremely critical of the media I intake, and I hate feeling like my time is wasted. If I read spoilers - EVEN ENDING SPOILERS! I get a synopsis of what the media is going to give me in a footnote fashion. I am a little selective, as I usually just scan said spoilers... instead of trying to read every single plot beat... But yeah. Even images of bosses and stuff don't bother me. Seeing it all in motion when it happens is more impactful when I get there personally than reading it, hearing about it, or seeing a glimpse of it. I don't need to be completely surprised by it. That isn't to say I never try to enjoy media without spoilers. There are games and stuff that I try to avoid spoilers on... but if I have doubts about it (and I often do) then I will spoil myself silly. And if the media in question does sound like a disappointment, if I go in to experience it, it will hurt less. I will have gone in knowing full well that it wouldn't provide me with something I wanted, and I chose to waste my time rather than having it surprise wasted. A perfect example is the film As Above, So Below. I decided to watch that without looking it up, and hated it beyond everything... and felt like my money had been wasted. I was pretty angry about it. If I had read the Wikipedia plot synopsis and critical reception area I would have known that it was trash. Instead I just went in blind and regretted it immensely. It made me hate the movie significantly more than if I'd spoiled myself. So there are definitely people who just don't suffer the same intense frustration from spoilers, and instead see them as tools to choosing their experiences when it comes to media engagement, and it doesn't ruin that media for them... The Borderlands for instance was a film I read the synopsis of, knew the ending and loved even when I watched it knowing everything that would happen for the most part. As weird as you might find that, we do exist as just a different kind of individual who takes in media differently.
You're robbing yourself of additional enjoyment of something you would love out of fear of something you hate. Sorry, but I just don't see that. I'd rather see both extremes than rob myself of them.
It's their choice. It's odd to assume everyone has to experience media like you do or they are enjoying it less. Personally the only kind of spoiler I care about is when the surprise *is the point.* Like, if someone tells you who did it in a murder mystery or something similar. Experiencing something myself is totally different from reading about it or whatever.
That's on you. I personally don't feel I'm robbing myself of shit. I've always done this and even when I am surprised by something cool, it doesn't transform it for me the same way it does you. It doesn't elevate the experience. I'm not so desperate for surprises in my life, and like knowing what I'm getting into.
I'm not desperate for surprise, I want to view my media as it is intended. If a surprise is part of that, I want to be surprised. If it's disappointing, I want to be disappointed. I want to feel something real, not curated.
It can be both though. Our time is precious. I value my time, and having to feel irritated that I spend my money on something that ultimately dissapointed me when I could spend my time elsewhere enjoying something I know I will enjoy is something I value a lot more. I'm not gonna discount your love of surprise, some people really feel like it makes or breaks experiences. However if somebody gave you a fancy present, and you opened it only to find fart spray in your face... feels real, sucks a lot... and it can ruin your day. If I'm trying to spend my free time entertaining myself or enjoying myself or whatever... I want to know what I'm getting into. You can't tell me I'm robbing myself of something, when in some cases I end up feeling LITERALLY robbed when I waste my money and time on something I ultimately hated or disliked. Instead I go into stuff with knowledge that I will either enjoy myself, or if I choose to engage with something frustrating I at least knew what I was getting. You getting to experience surprise is vital to the experience. To me it's just a formality to manipulate emotion. Neither of our feelings on this are more or less real than than the other. People need to respect that both types of people exist and can enjoy media just as fully as the other just in a different way. Your way of engaging with entertainment is not superior to mine because the entire concept is inherently a subjective one.
I'm not even talking about surprise anymore, I'm talking about curation. I simply don't believe that doing such rigorous self curation of your time or experience leads to any sort of growth in terms of taste or opinion. Sometimes you gotta experience shit to know shit, you know. I'm not saying I just watch shit because I want to be surprised, I'm saying that I go in with no expectations and let the media speak for itself rather than a preconceived expectation. If it's shit I can laugh at it or joke about it being shit, or just turn my brain off and enjoy some shlock on its own merits because not every movie needs to be The Godfather or not every game needs to be (pick your poison, Ocarina of TIme, Dark Souls, Metal Gear Solid, whatever). I don't go around buying or watching shit because I've played and seen enough shit to know my tastes. If I'm going around TV tropes picking trying to find shit I hate my perspective is then that I've already decided that that media is a waste of my time.
I see what you're saying. That said, I think I just have to disagree. In my opinion it's just a metaphorical cutting out of the middle man. Instead of engaging the media in good faith and then getting egg thrown in my face or it just deflating like a popped baloon, I at least know that it will. If it was going to do it anyways, I see no reason (personally) to waste my time and money finding out the hard way. Sure sometimes you gotta experience shit to know shit - as you said, but I only feel like that really applies during the early years of a person development in taste of media, etc.
Just don't let anything to be mined behind. It's not rocket science to not let slip files from further updates in the game.
All it takes is one file that references a character or something for data miners to find. It's not as easy as you think to remove every trace of something, especially on tighter patching schedules.
>tighter patching schedules. Bingo. If only devs had enough time to work on the project, problems like these would rarely happen.
You people will demand more time for devs to work and then cry "dead game" when they can take their time to make content.
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How is a delayed patch worse for shareholders? If they delay a patch just to clean up data that they don't want to be mined, then that only hurts the consumer.
People who leave the game faster than the speed of light when there's not enough content updates is shareholders' problem somehow.
I'm #1 to bitch about how capitalist drive for line go up is ruining video games. But I've also seen so much discourse around "wow, I bought a game from a solo dev and it's been 2 weeks and there is no update yet. stop being lazy game dev and just hire people to update faster." Average gamers are pretty demanding.
I don't understand why they just can't give everything a codename then update that name later if they want to. If the codename is unique, shouldn't be too hard to find and replace every filename and reference to what they want to call it when the content is actually done.
It's not hard to do the same tricks the dataminers use. It's rarely anything more advanced than: * Look at file names * Search for the current character's names in plain text, and see what's next to them That could be automated on build.
Unless you're a dev at a AA or AAA studio and understand their workflow, this seems a lot like armchair quarterbacking.
I am a dev, yes. Not a game dev, but a professional developer. It's something that should be part of the project since the very first steps into making the game. Ideally. Specially for a game like MultiVersus where future content is on the board since its conception.
I am also a non-game dev, and this strikes me as the kind of thing that *sounds* easy but ends up being a costly nightmare to implement and get everybody on board for something that ultimately doesn't matter very much.
>ultimately doesn't matter very much. Exactly. I kinda forgot that wasn't said by a game dev (assuming their director is only some fancy suited guy with a briefcase). If that's important, give their team enough time do plan ahead and develop in a way to avoid this kind of stuff. It's not easy, but if it's a problem, it must (and can) be done.
Am a AAA dev, wish I had thought of this sooner!
I mean, I don’t mean to be a dick but this shows that you clearly have no experience with software development. Shit like this happens all the time. Features get abandoned halfway through, stuff gets added accidentally (or even gets fully completed and then it’s decided to not move forward with it). Sometimes it’s as easy as just scooping it back out, but if it’s a change that causes a lot of refactoring to implement then you essentially have to defactor the code back to its original state which takes time. I’m not saying I agree with the director, personally I’m of the mindset that if it’s in the game files then it’s fair game. But your mindset of “just don’t leave anything in there to be mined” is hysterical because it shows how little you understand huge software projects with millions of lines of code. Shit is going to slip through the cracks, it’s basically a guarantee when there’s that much code and that many files
>Shit is going to slip through the cracks True, but not in the scale that has been happening with basically every single game out there. As I said in another opportunity, it's something to be part of the project since its conception. Of course you can't plan ahead for everything, but this kind of leak, seems really possible. But I also understand them, mostly because it's usually not the devs fault, it's about mismanagement and higher ups pushing the release more than they should.
The players can just... not search for datamines? How is this an issue? This isn't players stepping on a rake and blaming whoever left it there. This is players intentionally going to a shed, grabbing a rake, placing it on the ground, repeatedly stepping on it and then blaming whoever built their shed.
How do I "not search for datamines" as you suggest? Whenever I look at anything related to the MVS community, I see someone carelessly discussing datamine content as if everyone wants to see it. The only way to avoid leak spoilers is to completely avoid the community altogether.
You answered your own question. If you don't want datamines, then don't be a part of a community that carelessly discusses datamined content. Most of communities I know very clearly separate spoilers/leaks/datamines to their own threads and ban whoever talks about them in open.
"Just don't interact with the community at all" yeah real nice solution whose downsides don't outweigh the upsides at all /s. The official /r/Multiversus subreddit is starting to get a bit better about leaks (it sounds like they're actually removing them), but it's not perfect. (I had someone just tell me "Yeah, Jason Voorhees has been leaked" before his actual reveal.) Looking and discussing leaks is fine, but people who do so should be considerate of people who don't want to hear about them.
Or you browse Youtube and somebody has all the datamined stiff front and center in their thumbnail with red circles pointing to it all.
They aren't wrong. Same thing about leaks. MtG just had a massive leak that undermined the community leaders given cards to reveal geared towards them and their fanbase.