On data mining, and why it's useless. (Destiny)

by FyreWulff, Saturday, July 18, 2015, 13:01 (3450 days ago) @ Funkmon

I know a lot of people like to put a lot of faith in datamining games. I mean, that's how we found the Engineers and Juggernaut in Halo, right? Everything in the data is true!...

... but trying to predict the future of Destiny, or any vendor via data mining has been given way too much weight and too much 'truth' for an aspect of the game that's never been official. Not only do these data mines assume the game won't be patched ever again, they also ignore the fact that Bungie's standard style of deploying content updates is to ALWAYS have a fallback that the autopilot will put up, just in case something goes awry/someone can't work that week.

Reach worked the same way. They had a prebaked collection of Weekly and Daily challenges that would deploy. Sometimes when the timing of a playlist update or event lined up really well, they'd hotswap one challenge for another. When 343 took over and updated the Pistol, they changed the weekly to be Pistol-centric. They even accidentally deployed two weeklies at once... if you had datamined Reach's challenges 5 months before, you wouldn't have seen those coming. Heck, 343 even manually replaced "Link up to Bungie.net" with another daily while they were actively updating the game. It was easier to do that than mess with the pool selector, which could be more dangerous code-wise.

Same with Halo 3 and Reach playlists. Did you know every playlist ever is downloaded to your Xbox at once? And that they turn off and on by themselves? Datamining those would have shown no updates to Team SWAT, wouldn't have told you about Heavies, and gave no indication of Action Sack - they would have just told you Arena was resetting every 3 months. Heck, there were playlists in the playlist data that never even became public. Because the data deployed on the live stack is a little bit planned but a lot of it fallback - you always plan for the worst case scenario.

Dunno. The constant "but but the datamines!" has been annoying me for quite a while. It completely ignores how these types of games are run.