Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31377726-20160321063151/@comment-27701762-20160321065539

I can understand the basic sentiment, but at the end of the day I'm going to side with the dataminers against Toby. For a few reasons.

The first is perhaps the most obvious: no matter how many warnings you put in, people are going to discover the information and post it. People datamine for any number of reasons: sometimes it's just to figure out how the game works, sometimes it's to discover secrets, sometimes it's to find ways to break the game, and so on. And among dataminers, some could read that message and abide by the creator's wishes, and some will inevitably post it, either in the case of fully disclosing everything in the game, or even for the feeling of power at having messed with the creator's plans. All this being known, to ask people A) not to datamine the game, and B) if they are going to datamine, to not post specific things, is absolutely ludicrous.

The second reason has to do with this false sense of what is a "valid" way of discovering a secret. Toby obviously envisioned people stumbling upon the various little secrets in the game on their own and then sharing what has happened with others. But what makes this method better than datamining? In Toby's vision, players would have to play and replay the game hundreds of times over in order to experience everything, and try to reverse-engineer as best they could the coding of the game to figure out what variables lead to particular outcomes. In turn, information sharing becomes a serious hassle: if Player A comes along and says that he has come across something really cool, how are we meant to confirm its existence, unless we all know how the game works. Datamining gives people opportunities for both experiencing and discussing the game that would be seriously hindered otherwise.

The final reason is the "threat," whether Toby decides to make good on it or not. As I noted in the first point, some dataminers will abide by his request, and some won't, and those who won't will post the information for any number of reasons. To threaten not to create any more secrets because some dataminers will inevitably post the information is to throw the baby out with the bathwater: "good" dataminers and players are being punished by the actions of a small number. Toby can blame them all he'd like for destroying mysteries, but the response is disproportionate. Though I don't think Toby would genuinely eliminate any and all secrets from his future works because some dataminers went against his wishes.