So with a recent entry in my bad habits, I decided to look into some interesting aspects of a game I play that every few weeks has some changes. I'm (unfortunately) talking about League of Legends. It's a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena),. With such games similar to MMOs, they get patches which can range from adding content, to removing content, to fixing bugs, to even teasers that eventually never make it and as such are cancelled or reused long down the line for another purpose. There's two aspects to talk about here. The Public Beta Environment (PBE) and the Live Servers (normal game stuff). The Live Servers host various regions (NA, EUW, OCE, and others), whereas the PBE is hosted solely for a handful of players to test the latest content for bugs and balance things (item stats, characters, mechanics, new features, etc). While the Live Servers have their own strange things going on, it's the PBE I wish to focus on a little bit. Anyone can install the PBE client, update the game and dump it's assets even if you personally do not have access to play on said server. Same applies to the normal client (Mac version being a weirdly different experience in this). So what now? Where am I going with this? So all stuff for this game outside of assets is hosted on Riot Game's servers, something that has ever changing content. Some things teased from the PBE have been held to both high and low regard, even to points of being outright removed solely due to negative feedback (See: SKT T1 Sivir replaced with Kalista). Some things were added then dropped due to logical reasons due to future plans with that content (Cyber Katarina/Zed, eventually PROJECT). Some things even vastly changed just for the sake of "making it better" (See: Dark Crusader Mordekaiser, eventually made into King of Clubs). Even on rare occasion some assets drop into it accidentally which are even harder to preserve especially since it's missing data. So we have -New content (buggy) -Removing content -Changing content (sometimes daily) -Teasers that change at a moment's notice -Complete overhauled content (See: Urgot 2009 vs 2017) Given the sheer quantity of data (thousands of files) that can change at any given notice and how frequently, what would be the most realistic approach to preserve all of this? While there is content that's stored on Riot's patch servers that is *essentially* everything ever pushed onto the various servers. Some of it is not there anymore as I have spoken to some folk that have more access than others (all of it is public it's just not something you can navigate easily). So an examples like Russian Knight Olaf where even after hours of searching it's nowhere to be found now, but did show up at *some* point, and unfortunately not properly preserved (dds converted to jpg and compressed to hell and back) which is now our last available version of this texture. The best we have is the wiki, where 90% of the content is logged but there's still a lot more issues at hand. Some undocumented items, changes, some missing pages in full for what should be covered already, and changing current content to always be up to date. Is there any proper way to handle this kind of thing? Most content preserved is usually a fixed date and a fixed set of data until someone else changes it along the way.
Look into how organizations are trying to be preserve MMOs, as it's the same sort of deal. It's an ongoing discussion in the academic world. But knowing a bit about Riot, they have done a good job of preserving their own data so far anyway.
I'll take a look when I get to it. After speaking with one of the people working with Surrender@20, yes they do in fact have a VERY good track record on saving data. Unfortunately some of it that IS gone is gone in a way that is a lot more understandable and is still very much accessible (to my understanding though a few do seem off). In terms of preserving what's there, I will say the mac version has some neat special data in it which is quite surprising. Consistency with Riot has been a really big headache for me but it certainly is starting to clean up (except particles, that's just a disaster).
No matter what, things are lost when it comes to these web connected services. I recommend preserving the current data now on a regular basis, including backing up how people are playing things through video highlights and the like. Then work your way back.No easy answers for this unfortunately.
