So, you think datamining your favorite game is good for you, and that every game should legalize and actively promote datamining, right?
You’ve never been so wrong, and yet, so right.
Ever since the popularization of mobile phone apps and the open source-freedom to create them, datamine has largely been successful in breaking down their massive wall of data into digestible information. Players love it; companies (most probably) hate it.
Why so serious about this program/web/whachamacallit unraveling an apps’ codes into readable data?
Plenty of reasons why we should not give support to datamine, but also lots of reasons why we should ensure datamine stays in existence.
Why Datamine Should be Avoided like the Plague
When a game company plans what new content to bring into the game, they usually try to plan in advance for a few months. But, because things happen, anything and everything can change. That is why companies dare not announce their 12-month plan of new characters less they cannot fulfill their promise.
Datamine digs out their future plans and releases them to the public without any care as to whether the company is ready or not.
That is why players are seeing data for Red Hulk and Beast in Marvel Strike Force, getting hyped over them, and putting themselves in agony after 2+ years of waiting in vain.
Is it worth getting ourselves worked up over mere speculation?
Until the new stuffs are properly and officially released, anything can change. Codes are imperfect, bugs are more eternal than Thanos. Even if FoxNext has a full year to conduct QA tests on Black Bolt, that character will still have bugs.
Besides, why spoil what’s new by reading bland texts, or texts from unofficial sources? (Aren’t you worried about fake news!?) The game companies typically create beautiful, eye-catching, and attractive news and announcements to encourage us to purchase and/or play new content.
An introduction to Black Bolt is done with a “royal” title and a nice banner image.
People tend to share datamined info just in text form. Others may have podcasts. None are the actual developers of the game.
Imagine if datamine is not there revealing spoilers to the public. Game companies can easily upload the entire X-Men or Avengers, and release more than just 4 mere characters per month. It’s agony to wait for the entire mutant team to be released, and in 2019, players have only a mere 5 out of the entire mountain of X-Men characters (we’re talking about the good guys, yet to include the bad guys!) If datamine wasn’t there to impede the work of the developers, we might have at least had the entire cast of Xavier’s School for the Gifted in the game by now.
So much for having datamine.
Why Datamine Needs to be Supported
Information is the reason why datamining should stop, yet, information is also the reason why we need to keep datamine running.
Does this feel conflicted? Well, information that is unconfirmed and subject to changes should not be datamined, while information officially released can (and perhaps, should) be datamined.
One character can have a multitude of stats, from HP to attack to defense to spirit, etc. and etc. All of these information is a great wall of text that means reading them impossible. And some games don’t exactly show them in user-friendly displays.
Via: Reddit u/Thethunthinnang 
Via: bs.visualshower.com
Imagine having to first search for the character in your huge inventory, then tapping on various buttons to bring up the character’s stats. Sure, every stat is well-arranged, until you want to view the stats of multiple characters!
That’s where datamine comes in handy, filtering out every single line of code in the game, and sorting them out in a more digestible format.
If anything, some players have known to find errors in the values of character stats that could very well cause a great upset in the game. Why restrict yourself to your minute-sized QA team when every player out there is so eager to report any and all bugs they find? Your players are your most effective QA team!
Kudos to datamine and the people who use it!
To Datamine or Not to Datamine?
This program/web/whatchamacallit is becoming, or has already become, an integral part of mobile game players. It may not be as essential as the actual game itself, but it definitely enhances our gaming experiences.
Maybe what we should propose is to only peruse the datamine for official content, instead of digging into things that aren’t meant for us to know.
Why dig into what achievements are needed to earn the upcoming character and rushing your preparations for it, when it could become a simple campaign? But do look into its statistics after it’s officially released, so that we know its evasion rates is truly at 50% (instead of 15%) as announced.
via GIPHY
It seems like his Spidersense isn’t so effective after all…
PUBG, Fortnite, Whatever-Game fanatic. Food evangelist. Internet ninja. Friendly communicator. Twitter fan. Zombie fanatic.
