I have noticed the sprites you are ripping from the game, and... tbh I have to say it but isn't this data mining? I can get wanting to help folks get sprites and all, but Japan AND Disney are strongly against data mining and even Toboso is against their art being leaked... It can have some serious negative effects if this gets noticed. The region block on the game could become incredibly severe, and Disney is not above suing...
i’ve been talking to some people about this, it’s sorta an ongoing discussion at the moment. my thought on it was that it would be okay because these are all things that have been in the game already (some people asked about epel’s dorm uniform, it was in jade’s ssr story). it is datamining in that i’m taking them from the game files, but it’s not a leak because it’s all already available, if that makes sense? i do not plan on posting any spoilers or files, i thought just images would be okay.
i have halted the queue for now because i genuinely don’t know what to do. if people think i should stop then i’ll stop. my intention was to share things, not to worry or upset people.
I don’t really use tumblr anymore, but this ask irritated me enough to respond so here I am lmao. This ask is just so insane for so many reasons it’s hard to know where to start?
So tl;dr: This is either concern trolling or someone with a very misguided idea about mobage datamining. Disney is not going to sue you, there will be no region block, literally no sort of ~serious negative effect~ will come of this (this would not even happen if you were actually ripping future content lmao). Also just...if you look at literally any other mobage out there, you’re going to see datamined sprites on its wiki pages. And as I saw someone else say in the responses to this, JP fandom has been spreading around clearly datamined background images from TWST on twitter. Datamining is not an evil, harmful thing that will destroy TWST and possibly your own well-being. Please don’t be discouraged by this, frankly ??? stance this anon and a section of this fandom seem to have, you’re making a lot of people (especially artists!) very happy by posting these.
As for why I’m saying all this with such confidence:
I’ve played a lot of different mobage, primarily FGO, which I’ve played since it launched in Japan, so I’ll use it as my main example here. FGO used to get datamined All The Time by dataminers outside Japan during its first year of operation, so much so that JP fandom (and presumably the devs) took note of them.
And do you know what happened to counter these datamines after that?
The devs just...increased server security to make datamining harder/impossible to do in the future.
No dataminers were sued, there was no region ban, the game didn’t suffer financially (FGO would go on to only get more and more popular/profitable after its first year), etc. And this was before they even announced the NA release of FGO, so clearly the prominence of western-based dataminers didn’t make the devs/Aniplex want to punish western players over datamines lmao.
I guarantee nothing will happen to you, non-JP players, or the game because of you datamining some sprites that are already available in-game to everyone. Honestly, I doubt anything would happen even if you did rip future content, since this is what a lot of FGO’s datamining consisted of.
This anon (and a worryingly large subset of the fandom tbh) are pushing incredibly weird, fearmongering ideas about datamining that are entirely too concerned with an imagined “harm” it’ll do to poor, vulnerable underdogs like Disney or Aniplex or mobage devs in general, when the reality is that datamining will, at worst, just cause them to increase security. That is it.
So please, don’t let asks like this get to you. I really appreciate what you’ve done so far, and you haven’t done anything wrong! (And I’ve seen some of the people who’ve talked about datamining disparagingly have hypocritical interest in seeing your sprite rips, so. lol)
